سوءاستفاده از سیاست های سازماندهی IS با سیستم های مهلک Subverting Organisational IS Policy with Feral Systems: A Case in China

1. Introduction The legitimacy of research into the dark side of Information Systems (IS) is now recognized in the literature (Zuboff, 1988; Turel et al., 2011; Tarafdar et al., 2015a, 2015b): resistance to IS is a respectable topic of study (Ignatiadis and Nandhakumar, 2009; Subramaniam et al., 2013). One specific instance of resistance to IS involves what have come to be termed as feral systems. A feral system is an information technology, system, application or solution that is developed for and by employees in order to get work done, but that is not formally approved, funded or controlled by corporate management. In a comparative sense, a normal information system is officially approved and maintained by the company. Therefore the primary difference between a feral system and a normal information system is not a technical or functional difference, but a political difference. A feral system is usually invisible to all except its immediate users (Kopper and Westner, 2016a). Feral systems are not only manifestations of resistance to corporate authority, but are also explicitly subversive as they undermine the formal authority of corporate management by ignoring the normative expectations embedded in IS governance structures and policy requirements. Feral systems are thus a form of anti-establishment practice and are rarely viewed in a positive light by corporate managers who quite correctly see them as a threat to their prerogative to establish IS policy and corporate norms (Weatherbee, 2010). Nevertheless, a spate of papers that describe various aspects of these feral systems has appeared in recent years (e.g. Haag and Eckhardt, 2014; Zimmermann et al., 2014; Mallmann and Maçada, 2016). The extent to which feral systems are now being researched suggests that these informal, ISsupported working practices are increasingly common in practice (DesAutels, 2011; Chua et al., 2014). Digital natives, highly literate with respect to the use of digital technologies, are flooding into the workforce. We should expect to see more situations in culturally conservative organizations where individual employees attempt to subvert organizational IS policies as they seek access to the applications they believe essential to their work (Chua et al., 2014; Davison and Ou, 2017; Shehadi et al., 2013).