Digital Institutionalization: The Case of E-Prescribing
Authors: Eriksson, Owen; Öhlund, Sten-Erik
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2024)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00845
<jats:p>Digital institutionalization processes are fundamentally changing society. They occur when rules and norms are encoded into a digital infrastructure and change practices. For institutionalization to occur, numerous actors must alter their behavior similarly, which accompanies a shift in infrastructural technology. Digital infrastructures and their design play a crucial role in institutionalization processes, as they enable and restrict social interaction in the exchange of digital institutional entities across contexts. Such entities are constitutive of digital institutional systems—medical prescriptions, money, insurance, and taxes are all institutional entities that have been digitalized. Although several studies have described the challenges of digital infrastructure design, there has been little consideration of the institutional context that legitimizes the design. To fill this research gap, we applied the critical perspective of designers, who intentionally perform and are responsible for the design and legitimacy of digital institutional systems. To address the challenge of institutional design, we developed an exchange contract within an institutional context featu…