LAUSR

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to investigate the dynamic interrelation between technology embedding and its social-technical resource context. The paper starts out from the understanding of inter-organizational technical development within the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) approach. Specifically, it focuses on the organizing of four resources in the three settings involved in embedding a technology, namely, “developing”, “producing”, and “using”. This paper develops a practice-oriented understanding of resource interaction, in which technology embedding is interpreted as the on-going results of interlinked resource-interaction practices, including networking practices, engineering practices and task-coordination practices. Based on an exploratory case study of information system's iterative embedding process, I found that the supplier engaged in systematic networking, flexible engineering and scalable coordination to keep the maximum legacy of the existing resource structure and extract the minimum for improvement, thereby facilitating dynamic embedding.