IT-enabled rationalization of public administration in developing countries: essays on Ghana’s customs modernization

Through a series of three standalone yet related essays, this thesis theorizes effects of the government administration context in developing countries on situated IT-enabled practices. It develops arguments on the capacity of the institutional logics perspective for explaining complex interactions between the broader social context and IT-enabled practices carried out by situated actors in the public administration of developing countries. We theorize IT-enabled rationalization—a process through which inefficiencies, and dysfunctional institutionalized practices are transformed through IT—as the hybridizing outcomes from the resolutions in practice of often incompatible institutional logics of administration with those introduced by IT. Through a case study of IT modernization initiatives at Ghana’s customs organization, these arguments are developed by identifying historically formed administration logics and the consequences of their interplay with idealtypic public administration logics introduced through IT. We find that rather than forcing out dysfunctional practices and replacing them with IT-driven ones i.e., replacing old logics with new, as is often an implicit goal of IT adoption in such settings, the two sets of incompatible logics are instead comingled in practice through a process identified as blending. This suggests that IT adoption in the public administration of developing countries might enable rationalization, although not independently of countervailing broader institutional context

Subalternity in information systems in developing countries a critical analysis of Ghana's TRADENET

In the search for explanations of contradictory effects and its disappointing outcomes in developing countries, Information Systems (IS) have been critiqued as pursuing techno-economic rationalities of western modernity with no recognition of alternatives. Development has also been critiqued as a western program promoted through discourses that do not admit local conditions and histories. Through critical discourse analysis (CDA) and a case study of Ghana's trade clearance system (TRADENET), we analyse how problematizations of IS in developing countries relate with local positions and contexts. We draw on the concepts of subalternity and hegemony to evaluate TRADENET's effects vis-à-vis its problematization by powerful actors. We find that TRADENET is contradicted by historically formed behaviors, culture and traditions that were unrecognized in technical problematizations of trade, development and IS. Despite importance of unrecognized, alternative or 'subaltern' positions in shaping IS in developing countries, they remain unrecognized in dominant or 'hegemonic' problematizations. Findings suggest that uncovering subaltern positions might illuminate 'blind spots' of IS in developing countries such as peculiar contradictory effects; and hence, inform better theory and practice