Technology is often used by senior management as an instrument to deliver strategy by influencing day-to-day activities within organisations. We study how local teams appropriate strategy through the use of technology, specifically in instances where it is rigid and single purposed. We show that technology has the potential to act as a carrier of strategic intent. We theorise local practices of appropriation of strategic intent by conceptualising the role of technology in ‘instantiation’, a notion adopted within the strategy-as-practice literature to explain how localised micro events directly constitute higher-level business outcomes such as those that arise from strategy. Through an in-depth case study following the use of passenger self-service kiosks in a UK airport over a period of 20 months, we review the strategic drivers at the top of the organisation and the central role of technology as the delivery mechanism of strategy. We focus on emergent strategising activity by local teams on the ground. Our main theoretical contributions are thus to extend the concept of instantiation to Information Systems studies and to conceptualise technology as a carrier of strategy, particularly in explaining how technology can embed strategic intent (structural strategising) and then influence the emergence of local practices consistent with these objectives (emergent strategising). We find and conceptualise how local practices instantiate strategic intent by decoupling, reframing and then recoupling new logics of work to achieve the aims set out in the organisation’s strategy.

高级管理层通常将技术用作通过影响组织内部日常活动来提供战略的工具。我们研究了本地团队如何通过使用技术来调整策略，特别是在技术僵化且目的明确的情况下。我们表明，技术具有充当战略意图载体的潜力。我们通过概念化技术在“实例化”中的作用来理论化战略意图挪用的本地实践，这是在战略实践文献中采用的一种概念，用于解释本地化的微观事件如何直接构成更高层次的业务成果，例如由战略。通过在20个月内在英国机场使用自助式自助服务亭后进行的深入案例研究，我们回顾了组织顶部的战略驱动因素，以及技术作为战略交付机制的核心作用。我们专注于当地团队在紧急情况下的战略制定活动。因此，我们的主要理论贡献是将实例化的概念扩展到信息系统研究，并将技术概念化为战略的载体，尤其是在解释技术如何嵌入战略意图的过程中（结构性策略），然后影响与这些目标相符的本地实践的出现（紧急策略）。我们发现并概念化本地实践如何通过将工作的新逻辑去耦，重新设计然后重新耦合以实现组织战略中设定的目标来实例化战略意图。