Administrative, Cognitive, and Social Work in the Brazilian Correspondent Banking System.

Technology implementations offer valuable contexts for examining the recursive relationships among institutional forces, organizational structures, and individual practices. Institutional theory provides a useful lens for examining these relationships, but critics note how its most popular concepts underplay the role of agency and portray actors as passive recipients of institutional "scripts." Research on institutional entrepreneurship shows the most promise in addressing these criticisms, but focuses too narrowly on the actions of powerful leaders who have vested interests in changing institutions. In this paper, we argue that other actors also perform work that is critical to institutional change processes, but perhaps lack explicit intentions to change institutions. We provide evidence from the implementation of the Brazilian correspondent banking system, a government-led, information technology-based financial inclusion project. We demonstrates how actors at various levels of the organization ushered in new institutional forms by performing different types of institutional work--administrative, cognitive, and social. Only designers performing administrative work directly aimed to change the institution; however, unintentional institutional work done by actors at lower levels of the organization was equally important to the system's success. We discuss the implications of these findings for future studies of institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]