University of Tasmania, Australia

This project seeks to examine how power and resistance are conceptualised and understood in both the Information Systems literature and in the practice of IT projects. 

Project management in information technology projects has proved problematic especially in relation to change management issues. Important considerations in change management have included the effective use of power and the management of resistance to change. Extant models of power and resistance in Information Systems tend to assume that change agents, under the direction of senior management, direct change, while change recipients either comply with or resist the changes that are mandated.

This research project will seek to reconceptualise notions of power and resistance in order to surface and explicitly examine issues of power and to deepen the understanding of resistance, thus leader to a richer and more holistic perspective on change and change management in IT projects. In pursuing these objectives the project will draw on a number of standard interpretations of power, including the perspectives found in Giddens Structuration Theory, Foucault’s theories of discipline and power, and Clegg’s Circuits of Power model. The project will also incorporate insights from the recent social identity based theory of power by Turner and his associates. A number of case studies will form the empirical base for this project.

Members (External)

Peter Marshall, Professor of Information Systems, University of Tasmania Peter.Marshall@utas.edu.au

Judy McKay, Professor of Information Systems, Swinburne University of Technology

Nick Grainger, Senior Lecturer in Information Systems, Swinburne University of Technology

Kristy de Salas, Senior Lecturer in Information Systems, University of Tasmania

Max Travers, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Tasmania

Yaqian (Michelle) Ye, PhD student, University of Tasmania