Isabel Alexandra Brandenberger, Mervi Anneli Hasu and Monika Nerland
This paper aims to generate a better understanding of how challenges and opportunities for sustainable change during digitalization relate to the organizing work of change agents…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to generate a better understanding of how challenges and opportunities for sustainable change during digitalization relate to the organizing work of change agents mandated to facilitate technology adoption from within local work organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
This study examines the work of welfare technology coordinators, health-care professionals who are mandated to facilitate the use of technologies in home-based services in a Norwegian city. Data comprise ethnographic observations of meetings and work practices, interviews and documents collected over one year. A practice-based approach was applied to analyze how the welfare technology coordinators go about integrating technologies with the work practices, and the forms of negotiations this work implies in their work community.
Findings
The analysis identified four sets of practices in the coordinators’ work: exploring and integrating new technologies into work practices, legitimizing aims and values, formalizing routines and responsibilities and critically considering existing and envisioned service practices. Through these practices, emerging problems and disconnections in the service organization were attended to in a continuous manner.
Originality/value
The study contributes to the literature by examining the work of internal change agents mandated to facilitate multiple and simultaneous technology adoption and demonstrates the importance of recognizing the continuous efforts and negotiations of these agents as significant to sustainable organizing.
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Silvia Gherardi, Karen Jensen and Monika Nerland
The purpose of this paper is to conceive “organizing” as an indeterminate process taking place in the interstices of intra-acting elements, beyond visible/rational/intentional…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to conceive “organizing” as an indeterminate process taking place in the interstices of intra-acting elements, beyond visible/rational/intentional organizing. The term intra-activity refers to relationships between multiple elements (human and more-than-human) that are understood not to have clear or distinct boundaries. The paper aims at reframing organizing, as the effect of multiple intra-acting elements, by introducing the metaphor of shadow organizing. It offers examples as diverse as knowledge spillover, evidence-based medicine and improvisation, and the mafia’s organizational rules.
Design/methodology/approach
The frame of reference is metaphorical theorization, based on the metaphor of shadow organizing, and is explored through three metonymies: the forest and its sheltered spaces in penumbra; the shadow as a grey zone between canonical and non-canonical practices; and secret societies, hidden in the shadow. The shadow is the symbol of what is “betwixt and between.”
Findings
Shadow organizing focuses on the way that situated elements (people, technologies, knowledge, infrastructures, society) intra-relate and acquire agency. Whilst organizing as the effect of intentional coordination, planning, and strategizing represents a well-established theorization, shadow organizing sheds light on what happen in the interstices of intentional and structured processes. The paper identifies the dimensions of shadow organizing as performativity, liminality, and secrecy.
Originality/value
The passage from elements in interaction to intra-acting relations that form elements is a challenge both for theory and methodology. To face this challenge, metaphorical thinking proves useful since it enhances scholars’ imaginations and emotional participation.
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The aim of this invited paper is to explore how more complex epistemic environments generate opportunities and challenges for organizational learning in professional realms. Based…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this invited paper is to explore how more complex epistemic environments generate opportunities and challenges for organizational learning in professional realms. Based on these explorations, a second aim is to discuss whether there are specific conditions in Nordic working life that facilitates or restricts such learning opportunities.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper discusses conditions for organizational learning in terms of changing knowledge practices and relations. Examples from studies of knowledge work in the Norwegian education and health sectors are provided to illustrate how professionals become involved in epistemic practices as part of their work and how these practices are changing in relation to evolving knowledge cultures.
Findings
The paper conceptualises and discusses how knowledge practices are changing in relation to specific and increasingly complex epistemic environments. It is argued that features such as low power distance, high levels of higher education participation, well-developed digital infrastructures and a general trust in professionals are conducive to learning. At the same time, taking advantage of learning opportunities are increasingly depending on individuals’ agency and capacities to cope with new demands.
Originality/value
To better account for the complexity of epistemic environments, organisational learning can be seen as a matter of connecting epistemic practices in the local work organisation to wider knowledge circuits.
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Shadow organizing refers to the emergence of parallel arrangements that sit alongside and imitate mainstream or conventional ways of organizing. It can be a response to challenges…
Abstract
Purpose
Shadow organizing refers to the emergence of parallel arrangements that sit alongside and imitate mainstream or conventional ways of organizing. It can be a response to challenges that require new ways of working without abandoning what is valuable about conventional arrangements. However, the processes through which shadow organizing is accomplished are not well understood; there is a need to go beyond traditional notions of mimicry and metaphor. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper demonstrates how a Tardean approach to imitation can address this gap. It deploys imitation as an explanatory concept, based on contemporary readings of Tarde, as well as understandings of organizing as an unfolding process. Child and Family Centres in Tasmania (Australia), are used as an example of shadow organizing, delivering integrated health and education services in an emerging parallel arrangement.
Findings
The analysis highlights an imitation dynamic which is far from straightforward mimicry. Rather, it comprises repetition and generation of difference. This dynamic is conceptualized in Tardean fashion as three patterns: the imitation of ideas before expression; the selective nature of imitation; and insertion of the old alongside the new.
Originality/value
The paper moves beyond metaphors of shadow organizing, and understandings of shadow organizing as mimicry. Conceptualizing imitation in an alternative way, it contributes fresh insights into how shadow organizing is accomplished. This enriches and expands the conceptual apparatus for researchers wishing to understand the betwixt and between of shadow organizing.
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This paper aims to raise the question of how end-user product innovation is developed by exploring the underlying learning mechanisms that drive such idea realization in practice…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to raise the question of how end-user product innovation is developed by exploring the underlying learning mechanisms that drive such idea realization in practice. A trialogical learning perspective from educational science is applied as an analytical approach to enlighten the black box of learning dynamics in user innovation (UI).
Design/methodology/approach
The field study of organizational ethnography is based on in situ observations of the testing and development phase of an adapted aid, an electro-mechanical device for completely hands-free dressing/undressing for people with no arm function.
Findings
The results suggest that UI materializes through what this researcher conceptualized as “circuits of learning” around shared objects that are collaboratively mediated and shaped in interplay between three forces identified as “user requirements”, “interdisciplinary co-creation” and “object transformation”.
Research limitations/implications
This in-depth study of UI realization has only started to open the research area of such practices. Further advancement is needed on users as inventors and learners. Cross-fertilization with other fields, such as pedagogy, and particularly branches of theory derived from a socio-material stance, seems fruitful.
Practical implications
To cultivate UI through “circuits of learning”, “users as learners” should pay attention to their shifting roles as teachers, co-learners and co-creators in interdisciplinary collaborative practices to enhance efficient work processes.
Originality/value
This study shows the relevance of bringing in learning as a crucial underpinning that contributes to enhancing our understanding of how user innovators create new products. The paper contributes to the UI literature by elaborating on the concept of “circuits of learning” as a novel framework of learning mechanisms within UI.