The Key to Success of Technology Application: An Explanation from the Intra-Organizational Legitimacy Perspective

This paper constructs an intra-organizational legitimacy analysis framework to reveal the conditional mechanism of technology application at the organization level. The retrospection of a nine-year application process of ERP in a state-owned enterprise shows how a new technology’s performance fluctuation correlates with its intra-organizational legitimacy changes, composed of performance legitimacy, task legitimacy and value legitimacy. This research indicates that gaining sufficient legitimacy is one necessity for the success of technology application. Basically, performance legitimacy determines how far technologies can be transferred into the corporate sector. When a new technology application starts with performance uncertainty, it is the task legitimacy that ensures the organizational resource supplies, which serve to initiate and accelerate the technology application. Value legitimacy, on the other hand, ensures the informal resources input, which preserves the technology in crisis for future possible reuse and advance the application.