Ownership and governance, scope, and empowerment: how does context affect enterprise systems implementation in organisations in the Arab World?

Hillol Bala, Mohammad Mobashar Hossain, Akshay Bhagwatwar and Xuan Feng

European Journal of Information Systems, 2021, vol. 30, issue 4, 425-451

Abstract: Research on enterprise systems (ES) implementation has focused on different aspects of implementation challenges, employee reactions, and system success. Much of this research has been conducted in developed countries and a few developing countries. This raises an obvious question about the applicability of findings to other contexts with different social and organisational cultures. We examine ES implementations in 12 organisations in Saudi Arabia, an important economic and political frontier and a unique sociocultural context in the Arab World. Using sociotechnical systems theory and institutional theory and the literature on contextualisation, we studied contextual aspects of three important factors related to ES implementations – i.e., ownership and governance, scope management, and employee empowerment. We found that the nature of ownership and governance plays a significant hindering role during implementation. Further, Saudi organisations implementing ES faced major challenges in managing the scope of implementation due to interferences from the top management and/or owners, and lack of justification by the consultants. Finally, we found that owners and top management were deeply concerned about losing their control over employees following ES implementations. We extend prior research and theories by offering contextual explanations unearthed from a context that is different from developed and many developing countries.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0960085X.2020.1803775 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tjisxx:v:30:y:2021:i:4:p:425-451

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tjis20

DOI: 10.1080/0960085X.2020.1803775

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Information Systems is currently edited by Par Agerfalk

More articles in European Journal of Information Systems from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().