Empowerment in business process reengineering: an ethnographic study of implementation discourses

Business process reengineering (BPR) is a methodology for organizational transformation that promises employee empowerment through the adoption of IT as leverage for change. This paper argues that BPR is naive in its interpretation of the management of power relations in organizational change, particularly in regard to middle management. An ethnography of a BPR implementation using cc:Mail as IT leverage is presented to demonstrate how power relations can deny BPR through the manipulation of discourses. The paper uses Foucault’s concepts of the Panopticon and the gaze to investigate the limitations of BPR as a technology of power