Exploring users' appropriation and post-implementation managerial intervention in the context of industry IOIS

Although the literature has repeatedly shown that inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) are prone to abandonment and low levels of adoption, a great deal of research examining such unsatisfactory outcomes has focused on phenomena occurring in the early stages of the implementation, thus, leaving the post-implementation period under-explored. This paper presents a conceptual lens through which we study two interrelated post-implementation phenomena: managerial intervention and users' appropriation. Specifically, we develop a structurational model to examine IOIS management intervention to boost IOIS assimilation, the situated and emergent appropriations of the IOIS that followed and the ongoing adaptations by those intervening in these processes. Actors shape the context for others' actions by offering modalities of structuring - i.e. new meanings, new procedures, new software applications - which are then taken up in practice by adopters, giving rise to both intended and unintended outcomes. The paper contributes with a multi-level process-based study that (1) conceives IOIS assimilation as an episodic process in which there are dialectical tensions between users and IOIS management; and (2) identifies two forms of managerial intervention targeting diverse aspects of the institutional context that lead to assimilation.