Peter Sjögren, Björn Fagerström, Martin Kurdve and Magnus Callavik
The purpose of this paper is to explore how emergent changes are handled in research and development (R&D) projects. R&D projects’ business potential lies in their exploration of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how emergent changes are handled in research and development (R&D) projects. R&D projects’ business potential lies in their exploration of the unknown; conversely, this makes them uncertain endeavours, prone to emergent changes.
Design/methodology/approach
Uses a single-case-study design, based on a projects-as-practice perspective and a soft systems methodology (SSM) analysis, to map how ad hoc R&D teams handle emergent changes, specifically the solution identification and assessment phase and the implementation plan. An R&D project in the power industry, involving over 250 engineers, was analysed.
Findings
This paper shows how emergent changes are handled differently from initiated changes during the decision-making phase. The system analysis shows that the most critical factors for managing these changes are: collective reflection between project parties; and including experienced engineers in implementation-plan reviews.
Practical implications
The results are of relevance both to R&D managers aiming to improve team performance and to general project management. Informal notions of emergent changes can be formalised in the change request process. Weaknesses in the project team’s organisation are highlighted, and details of how of how to mitigate these are provided.
Originality/value
Combines engineering-design and project-management research on emergent changes, adding to the former regarding people–organisational and strategic issues. Furthers understanding of the projects-as-practice approach and emergent change (deviations) handling by ad hoc teams in a project environment. SSM has not previously been used to explore aspects of projects-as-practice, and this is a novel way of adding to the body of knowledge on project praxis and practise.
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Farhad Noruzi, Daniel Stenholm, Peter Sjögren and Dag Bergsjö
This paper aims to provide a holistic view to support the choice of appropriate strategy for conducting a knowledge transfer (KT) project in an international manufacturing network…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to provide a holistic view to support the choice of appropriate strategy for conducting a knowledge transfer (KT) project in an international manufacturing network (IMN) environment. It proposes a model that includes multiple aspects of a KT project along with guidelines on each aspect.
Design/methodology/approach
To achieve the research goals, multiple case study method was adopted. Data have been collected by conducting semi-structured interviews regarding five KT projects in three multinational corporations. Data were triangulated by means of comparisons to complementary data acquired through observations and archival documents.
Findings
The results of this paper detail the key issues of five KT projects. Furthermore, the paper proposes an aggregated model comprising the main aspects and strategies for a KT project within an IMN.
Research limitations/implications
Despite the abundant research on KT area, not many research projects provide holistic views on KT process. The focus has rather been sectional and concentrated on each specific aspect within the KT.
Practical implications
The paper guides practitioners to identify multiple aspects in KT that will eventually increase the odds for successfully performing such projects.
Originality/value
The proposed learning network model improves the performance of KT projects by providing a holistic view including several factors that the organization should emphasize to succeed with inter-plant KT.
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The purpose of the paper is to inquire into how decisions about public fiscal responsibility for pharmaceutical spending are made and justified when there is a lack of coherent…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the paper is to inquire into how decisions about public fiscal responsibility for pharmaceutical spending are made and justified when there is a lack of coherent, unambiguous and undisputed evidence about the material characteristics of pharmaceutical use.
Design/methodology/approach
This is an exploratory, single‐organisation case study of a Swedish governmental agency tasked with deciding whether prescription pharmaceuticals are included or excluded from the public pharmaceutical benefits scheme. A comparison is made of two intra‐organisational decision‐making processes based on interviews, document studies and participant observations undertaken over a period of two years.
Findings
The study shows that providing foundation for making decisions involves attempts to remove ambiguity among multiple knowledge claims about pharmaceuticals' characteristics. Three means of removing ambiguity are outlined. In addition, a fourth means of dealing with ambiguity is identified, when efforts to achieve coherence among multiple sources of knowledge fail. In this case ambiguity about pharmaceuticals' characteristics may be delegated to the individual medical professional to decide about treatment for specific patients.
Research limitations/implications
The limited empirical material provides no statistical generalisability of the findings. However, the study has theoretical implications for understanding decision‐making processes in health care institutions.
Originality/value
The paper provides a detailed empirical account of a newly created health care assessment organisation similar to those created in other countries to tackle problems of resource allocation.
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Ida Schrøder, Emilia Cederberg and Amalie M. Hauge
This paper investigates how different and sometimes conflicting approaches to performance evaluations are hybridized in the day-to-day activities of a disciplined hybrid…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper investigates how different and sometimes conflicting approaches to performance evaluations are hybridized in the day-to-day activities of a disciplined hybrid organization–i.e. a public child protection agency at the intersection between the market and the public sector.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on a one-year ethnography of how employees achieve to qualify their work as “good work” in situations with several and sometimes conflicting ideals of what “good work” is. Fieldwork material was collected by following casework activities across organizational boundaries. By combining accounting literature on hybridization with literature on practices of valuation, the paper develops a novel theoretical framework which allows for analyses of the various practices of valuation, when and where they clash and how they persist over time in everyday work.
Findings
Throughout the study, four distinct registers of valuation were identified: feeling, theorizing, formalizing and costing. To denote the meticulous efforts of pursuing good work in all four registers of valuation, the authors propose the notion of sequencing. Sequencing is an ongoing process of moving conflicting registers away from each other and bringing them back together again. Correspondingly, at the operational level of a hybrid organization, temporary compartmentalization is a means of avoiding clashes, and in doing so, making it possible for different and sometimes conflicting ways of achieving good results to continuously hybridize and persist together.
Research limitations/implications
The single-case approach allows for analytical depth, but limits the findings to theoretical, rather than empirical, generalizability. The framework the authors propose, however, is well-suited for mobilization and potential elaboration in further empirical contexts.
Originality/value
The paper provides a novel theoretical framework as well as rich empirical material from the highly political field of child protection work, which has seldomly been studied within accounting research.
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Ebba Sjögren and Karin Fernler
The paper problematizes previous research on accountingisation, where the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work is understood in relation to a…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper problematizes previous research on accountingisation, where the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work is understood in relation to a professional/economic dichotomy and a model of episodic change. The purpose of this paper is to investigate everyday professional work in established new public management (NPM) settings, and proposes a new conceptual framework to analyze the role of accounting therein. The aim is to enable future investigations into how, when and where a situated “bottom line” emerges, by conceptualizing professional work as a process of calculation.
Design/methodology/approach
Qualitative data from case studies of two tertiary level geriatric organizations using observations of 33 employees and four interviews. Data related to patient discharge, and the management of the discharge processes, were analyzed.
Findings
Few visible trade-offs between distinctly professional or economic considerations were observed. Rather, the qualification of patients’ status and evaluation of their dischargeability centered on debates over treatment time. Time therefore operated as a situated “bottom line,” to which various other concerns were emergently linked in a process of calculation. Professional practitioners seldom explicitly evoke accounting concepts and technologies, but these were implicated in the ongoing translation of each patient into something temporarily stable, calculable and thus actionable for the professionals involved in their care. The study’s findings have implications for the conceptual understanding of professional work in established NPM settings.
Research limitations/implications
Case study research is context-specific and the role of accounting in professional work will vary due to the professional groups and accounting technologies involved.
Practical implications
The study’s findings have implications for how to influence professional behavior through interventions in the existing landscape of accounting technologies. The possibility to change behavior through the introduction or removal of individual accounting technologies is questioned.
Originality/value
To date, research on the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work has assumed a professional/economic dichotomy and studied episodic change linked to accounting-oriented reforms. This paper analyses the role of accounting as an on-going process with emergent boundaries between professional and economic considerations.
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Tim Neerup Themsen, Peter Holm Jacobsen and Kjell Tryggestad
This paper aims to advance recent literature on the performativity of accounting by examining how project accounting affects a project organization’s ability to deliver a relevant…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to advance recent literature on the performativity of accounting by examining how project accounting affects a project organization’s ability to deliver a relevant project outcome, such as a product or a building, for a receiving client organization.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on a longitudinal case study of a 41.4-billion-kroner (5.5-billion-euro) Danish project of constructing 16 new public hospitals. Its objective was to reduce the average unit costs and improve the quality of patient care. Each hospital construction was managed by a separate project organization and handed over to a separate receiving hospital organization. The project organizations applied a common approach to project accounting. The paper relies on Michel Callon’s concepts of performativity and sociotechnical agencement – approaching project accounting as an arrangement of devices.
Findings
The paper shows that the project-accounting agencement simultaneously supported and undermined the project organizations’ ability to deliver hospitals relevant to the receiving hospital organizations. The agencement performed hospital designs, disciplined project actors and guided decision-making, thus supporting the overall work of the project organizations. It also, however, compelled the project organizations to compromise on hospital designs when unexpected events occurred. These compromises led to the delivery of hospitals, which largely prevented the receiving hospital organizations from achieving the project’s objective.
Originality/value
This paper advances our limited understanding of the dynamic and complex relationship between project accounting and the relevance of project outcomes. It introduces the concept of a “contronymity device” to capture the way project accounting simultaneously produces two opposing consequences, both supporting and undermining the enactment of a particular reality. The paper lastly enriches our understanding of how project-accounting devices impact hospital organizations’ operating cost structures and challenge patient care capabilities.
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Jacob Reilley and Tobias Scheytt
This study sets out to shed light on those infrastructures underlying the ubiquitous, yet contested nature of governing by numbers. Investigating the 30-year long emergence of…
Abstract
This study sets out to shed light on those infrastructures underlying the ubiquitous, yet contested nature of governing by numbers. Investigating the 30-year long emergence of Germany’s “external quality assurance system” for hospitals, the authors show how methods for quantifying quality align with broader institutional and ideational shifts to form a calculative infrastructure for governance. Our study focuses on three phases of infrastructural development wherein methods for calculating quality, institutions for coordinating data and reform ideals converge with one another. The authors argue that the succession of these phases represents a gradual layering process, whereby old ways of enacting quality governance are not replaced, but augmented by new sets of calculative practices, institutions and ideas. Thinking about infrastructures as multi-layered complexes allows us to explore how they construct possibilities for control, remain stable over time and transform the fields in which they are embedded. Rather than governance being enacted according to a singular goal or value, we see an infrastructure that is flexible enough to support multiple modalities of control, including selective intervention, quality-based competition and automatized budgeting. Infrastructural change, instead of revolving around crises in measurement, is shaped by incubation periods – times of relative calm when political actors, medical practitioners, mathematicians, and many others explore and reflect past experiences, rather than follow erratic reforms fads. Finally, analysing infrastructures as multi-layered constructs underlines how they produce multiple images of care quality, which not only shift existing power relations, but also change the ways we understand and make sense of public services.
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Hans Kjellberg, Johan Hagberg and Franck Cochoy
This chapter explores the concept of market infrastructure, which is tentatively defined as a materially heterogeneous arrangement that silently supports and structures the…
Abstract
This chapter explores the concept of market infrastructure, which is tentatively defined as a materially heterogeneous arrangement that silently supports and structures the consummation of market exchanges. Specifically, the authors investigate the enactment of market infrastructure in the US grocery retail sector by exploring how barcodes and related devices contributed to modify its market infrastructure during the period 1967–2010. Combining this empirical case with insights from previous research, the authors propose that market infrastructures are relational, available for use, modular, actively maintained, interdependent, commercial, emergent and political. The authors argue that this conception of market infrastructure provides a powerful tool for unveiling the complex agencements and engineering efforts that underpin seemingly superficial, individual and isolated market exchanges.