The Evaluation Of Information Systems As A Social And Political Process. An Actor Network Study.

Current practice of I.S. evaluation draws from a variety of reference disciplines including, the quantitative approaches of corporate finance and economic evaluation, qualitative approaches such as organisational development and transformation, approaches that embrace human and sociological values such as intuition, perceived imperative and sponsor directive, and contingency views that hold that the evaluation method is informed by the investment setting. This research focuses on I.S. evaluation as a social and political process. Central to this is the notion of micro power (Foucault, 1977) and the analytical toolkit of Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1987). Specifically this paper seeks to throw light on the role played in the evaluation process by the threads of ‘micro power’ that manifested themselves on the journey between the summative evaluations of the ex ante and ex post I.S. business cases in an organisation. Further confirmation that perceived imperative and sponsor directive play a role in some I.S. Evaluations was elicited and it was demonstrated that these notions can be underpinned by the consideration of actor micro powers in the I.S. Evaluation setting