Innovation in Innovation?

The concept of “technology enactment” provides the guiding framework for Jane Fountain’s Building the Virtual State. The framework is used to analyze the implementation and impacts of information technology (IT) in public organizations. The framework highlights the importance of specifying the ways in which IT software and hardware are perceived by actors, who then attempt to shape the use of those ITs. Each instance of technology enactment is also contingent on the organizational and institutional contexts within which the process occurs. This article details how the framework’s dynamic interplay between the technology and those who adopt and adapt it seems consistent with earlier innovation theories developed by both historians of science and social scientists. It also explains why empirical analyses of IT as an innovation in organizations are particularly challenging, because IT is extremely malleable and constantly evolves in conjunction with changing organizational structures and practices.