Constructed as local, Marketed as Global: Reproduction, reinforcement, and modifications of technology-embedded Western notions of time during implementation of ERP technology in India
Recently, scholars of postcolonial technoscience have suggested an important research direction: understand the mutual influence of the local notions of the colonized on the technoscience of the colonizer, especially the influence of the local notions on the colonizer’s technoscience (reverse influence). Through an illustrative case study, I describe such a mutual influence, highlighting the reverse influence and the political dynamics involved in it. This not only challenge the assumption that the Western knowledge is objective, authoritative and universally applicable but also unmasks how Western knowledge achieves universality and objectivity through absorption of multi-cultural notions and exercise of power. I describe how the global discourse that Western conceptualizations about time are scientific, objective, and universally applicable is locally reproduced and reinforced at some point in time, and resisted at another point in time during the process of embedding temporal notions into a modifiable standard software--Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The context of the study is an implementation of ERP in a Western organization in India. During the implementation, ERP, with its Western origin, design, and embodiment of Western business practices encounters non-Western business practices that have different temporal assumptions and the users who enact such temporal assumptions. This cross-temporal cross-cultural encounter occasioned various modalities of exercise of power, which resulted in the reproduction of and the resistance to the global discourse and technology modification. The modification increased the applicability of the software and thereby its univerasality.
Authors: | Kandathil, George |
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Institutions: | Economics, Indian Institute of Management |
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