Institutional Contradictions and Loose Coupling: Postimplementation of NASA's Enterprise Information System

Abstract

Through a grounded analysis of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA's) enterprise information system (IS) implementation in the months immediately following the go-live, we show how NASA can be characterized as an institutionally plural organization, rife with diverse institutional logics, some consistent and some contradictory to each other. The enterprise system is introduced in accordance with the logic of managerial rationalism, but some of the institutional logics that organizational actors draw upon and reproduce contradict the logic of managerial rationalism in certain situations. In these situations, organizational actors loosely couple elements of their practices from the practices implied by the enterprise system, thus satisfying the demands associated with both institutional fields. We identify four generalizable forms of loose coupling that result from these institutional contradictions: temporal, material, procedural, and interpretive, and discuss their effects on both the system implementation and local practices. Further, we show how, through the use of institutional logics, researchers can identify fundamental institutional contradictions that explain regularities in the situated responses to enterprise system implementations—regularities that are consistently identified in the literature across a variety of organizational contexts.