On Sustaining Sustainability: the Case of Implementing Decisions Based on Policies for A Sustainable Future Via Tablets in A Board of A Swedish Housing Corporation

Catering for sustainability concerns and enterprise mobility for administrations, handheld artifacts of Information and Communication Technology (e.g., tablets and smartphones) are making their way into organizational administration. Often such change is the result of decisions aimed at implementing policies for a more sustainable future, intending to support a shift from paper to digital. For this reason, a deeper understanding of tablets as the means to enable robust and efficient implementation of policies for sustainability is essential. This chapter examines how a decision made by one of the largest municipal boards in Sweden on reducing the use of paper in the municipality was implemented as an introduction of tablets in one of the municipal sub-boards, the board of one of the municipally owned housing corporations (HC), and how the decision prompted changes in the board work setup, raised issues concerning security and privacy of data while yet failing to implement most of the targeted sustainability policies. We adopt the Belief-Action-Outcome framework of Melville (MIS Q 31: 1-21, 2010) as our theoretical lens on how the actual use of the tablets emanates from the social practices of the board, and how the implementation of the sustainability policy of the municipality thus affected the alignment of the board work and the organization's policies on sustainability. The empirical material consists of interviews and observations in the board of one of the municipally owned housing corporations. The contribution includes an account as to how a decision to implement policies for sustainability via new technology serve as a catalyst to establish and reproduce new setups and practices. However, in order to adopt the new technology, it may also partly or completely reinvent well-established practices without aligning it to the intended policies. Key highlights are the importance for decision makers to consider a broader context and to see the complexity of the practices of the organization, and the role this plays for the implications of making policies on organizational changes sustainable.