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not only be the resultant of coercing institutional rules on geoICT, as these differ
in each case, but also may, in particular, be the resultant of frequent professional
interaction. Through mimicking, individual staff and organizations “fit in” and
become accepted in the professional network of geoICT. The result of mimick-
ing is that many staff members have similar professional behavior and thus per-
ceive their environment in a similar way. This behavior is in line with isomorphism
theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977), which posits that
mimicking is a survival strategy, on the one hand, and provides stability on the
other. Apparently, the professional network of geoICT peers upholds a certain set
of technical preferences that steer the network members toward certain solutions.
This isomorphic behavior of geoICT practitioners tends to favor the technical solu-
tions of their peers rather than possible alternative technical solutions. Hence, the
emergence of alternative discretions, rooted outside the narrow cognitive filter of
the environment of the geoICT practitioners, is unlikely.
The scores in “personal access to resources” suggest that cooperation processes
reflect resource dependency behavior (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), whereby organiza-
tions seek to establish relationships with others to obtain the resources that they
lack. For the geoICT cases, it seems that as long as actors remain dependent on
few human geoICT resources, they are more likely to ensure the access to these
resources by complying with the rules to obtain these resources. In the realization
that dependency also implies the loss of control and freedom to pursue their daily
business, organizations endeavor to minimize their dependence or to increase the
dependence of other organizations on them. This pursuit drives organizations to
adapt their structure and behavior to optimally acquire and maintain the needed
resources. Acquiring the external resources comes by decreasing the organization's
dependence on others and/or by increasing others' dependency on it, that is, modi-
fying an organization's power with other organizations.
The emergence of discretions for reasons of personal task simplification reflects
uncertainty avoidance. The uncertainty in interorganizational relations arises if the
relation is insufficiently regulated, insufficiently enforced, or insufficiently complied
with (Williamson, 1998). The result of this insufficient regulation is that each partner
incurs a certain cost to enforce or comply with the relation. In the geoG2G cases, the
building in and having to maintain the interoperability between geoICT systems can
be regarded as an increase in the transaction cost of individual partners. By avoiding
maintaining this interoperability continuously, they incur transaction costs only when
needed. When this need is not frequent, the transaction costs remain relatively lim-
ited. They would become more inclined to invest in more interoperability if the sum of
transaction costs of all incidental conversions between systems becomes higher than the
transactions cost of converting the whole system at once.
Uncertainty avoidance also explains discretions for clients or other external
users. With a wide variety of clients, adaptation would imply having to invest
frequently in acquiring information about the client's needs. Instead, it would
then be easier, and thus having to invest less transaction cost, to adhere to certain
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