“Omega-team is Moving to Another Premise over My Dead Body…”: Power as Discursive-material Practice in an IS Project

Using Foucault's (e.g.,1980) view on discourses and power, this Critical Discourse Analysis study examines how power circulates through material-discursive practices in IS development projects. The findings of this study indicate that one of the key power practices is IS development projects is what we call the 'guaranteeing of equality and rationality' – it sets up the the technical-rational ideal and masks the presence of power and politics in the project. However, as projects progress, often this technical-rational ideal begins to crumble with practices such as 'selective ignoring', 'forbidding', 'hiding', and 'criticizing' emerging – each with their own characteristic linguistic moves and material objects mediating the practices. Each of these practices circulates power through what can be called ‘power-resistance’ cycles – in short, the same practice may be harnessed for achieving one effect (exercising power) or it may be employed for the achievement of an alternative effect (exercising resistance to power).