Narratives of Success and Failure in Systems Development
从叙事视角探讨计算机系统开发中的成功与失败，认为这些叙事是组织成员用于说服和合法化行动的工具，并通过金融服务业的两项案例研究揭示了成功与失败作为互动主题而非离散状态。
This paper explores a narrative perspective on ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in computer systems development. Organizational narratives can be seen as sense‐making devices and as having a purposive aspect in the ways in which they evolve and change and influence behaviour. Narratives like success and failure in particular can be seen as persuasive rhetorics used in legitimizing particular courses of action. The narrative approach challenges more accepted notions, particularly rationalist views that see computer success/failure as outcomes brought about by simple causation. It also reveals the limitations of process models of IT success/failure, though these stress a more complex form of decision making around IT. In the paper, these issues are explored in contrasting projects in financial services firms. In two case studies, computer success and failure emerge not as discrete conditions, but as interacting themes employed by organizational members in response to the circumstances they confront. The corporate capacity to build success out of failure, and to distance the new from the old, discriminated between successful and unsuccessful projects.