Modernisation through ICTs: towards a network ontology of technological change

Abstract This article is concerned with modernisation as a prevalent discourse of association between technological change on the one hand and social, economic and political changes on the other. We discuss modernisation as a concept that spans several domains of change including national development, organisational change and epistemological shift. These domains are often categorised into stacked levels, namely the national, the organisational and the individual, or divided into a domain of action and an overarching context. We argue in this paper that an assumption of embeddedness underlies many of these dominant approaches and we identify three issues with this assumption, namely reductionism, unidirectional causality and marginalisation. We draw from the ontological and methodological principles of actor‐network theory to suggest a shift towards a more fluid view of the dynamics between the different domains of change. We support our discussion by a case study of the modernisation of the justice system in Morocco, including a national computerisation project of case processing in the courts.