I examine how organizations address the replication dilemma by simultaneously enacting contrasting goals while transferring routines across complex organizational settings. I address this issue by ...drawing on a qualitative case-based inquiry into the multiplicity of the routines’ ostensive and performative aspects in the context of routine transfer and exact replication. The subject of inquiry is a leading electronics organization facing the dilemma of how to deal with simultaneous competing pressures to copy exactly (replicate) and change (innovate). I find that organizational members address this dilemma (1) by harnessing artifacts and communities to establish two sets of ostensive patterns and performances, one supporting alignment (replication) and one improvement (innovation), and (2) by striving to maintain a dynamic balance between them by enacting them in different proportions. This allows offsetting competing goals and the related pressures both at specific points in time and over time. Building on these findings, I develop a theoretical framework that adds to the extant replication and routines literatures, and the Carnegie account of routine transfer and goal balancing, by capturing (1) the microlevel, performative dynamics by which organizations unravel the replication dilemma in routines transfer while addressing competing goals and the associated pressures and (2) the role of the social and material features of context in the (re)production and transfer of routines.
Drawing from advances in Organisational Studies and recent debates within Economic Sociology and the Sociology of Financial Markets, this paper proposes a theoretical framework that characterises the ...mutual adaptation between formal routines and rules, on one hand, and actual performances, on the other, as iterative cycles of framing, overflowing and reframing of knowledge inputs and actions. This framework, combined with the ethnographic observation of the ‘engineering freeze’ process at a leading automotive manufacturer, allows us to advance Routine Theory by (1) capturing the dynamics of convergence and divergence between procedures and performances; and (2) improving our understanding of the influence of artefacts and distributed agencies on routine evolution.
We address the effect of organizational theories on the organization by focusing on how modularity, a widespread and influential organizational theory, performs a modular organization. While scholars ...have offered opposing arguments for the influence of this theory—i.e. that it either succeeds or fails to “produce” modular organizations—we show just how and how far modularity is enacted and shapes the organization, and how it may be shaped in turn. Drawing on recent advances in performativity theory we thus contribute to modularity by showing how the modular organization emerges over time as the outcome of performative struggles among competing and complementary theories and how these struggles contribute to modifying the theory and “designing” organizations. We also add to performativity by theorizing the competition between multiple theories, the emergence of unexpected consequences or “errors”, and their implications for organizational practices and boundaries.
This paper addresses the seemingly implausible project of establishing a 'generic' organizational information system. This is an apparent contradiction: on the one hand, we are told of the diversity ...of specific organizational contexts and on the other, we often find the same standardized software solutions being applied across those settings. How do generic software packages work in so many different contexts? Science and Technology Studies provides contrasting accounts of how this contradiction is resolved: either stressing the unwanted organizational change that standardized systems may bring; or, alternatively, insisting these technologies can only be made to work through processes of 'localization'. We argue that the focus on specificity versus localization of application contexts draws attention away from enquiring into the origins and characteristics of generic solutions. Through comparing the design and evolution of two software packages we shift the debate from understanding how technologies are made to work within particular settings to how they are built to work across a diverse range of organizational contexts. Our question is 'How do software packages achieve the mobility that allows them to bridge the heterogeneity within organizations and between organizations in different sectors and cultures?' We describe a set of revealed strategies through which suppliers produce software that embodies characteristics common across many users; what we term generification work. One aspect of this process of generification is the configuring of users within 'managed communities', but it also includes 'smoothing' the contents of the package and, at times, reverting to 'social authority'. Our argument is that generic systems do exist but that they are brought into being through an intricately managed process, involving the broader extension of a particularized software application and, at the same time, the management of the user community attached to that solution.
Scholars have described how rankings can be consequential for the shaping of the economy. The prevailing argument is that they wield influence through encouraging ‘mechanisms of reactivity’ amongst ...market actors. We ask the question as to whether there are additional agential aspects found within rankings that extend ‘social’ accounts. We suggest that ‘sociomateriality’ is also a significant aspect of a ranking’s influence. Through developing the notion of a ‘ranking device’, we examine how the “format and furniture” of a ranking can mediate and constitute a domain. Drawing on a detailed study of a prominent graphical performance measure from within the information technology (IT) arena, we provide evidence to show that IT markets can be as much a product of the affordances and constraints of ranking devices as any other (non-material) aspects of the ranking. The article integrates literature from Accounting research and Science and Technology Studies to contribute to our understanding of how material things and the economy mutually constitute one another. It also offers one of the first empirical accounts of the sociomaterial construction of a graphical ranking.
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic generated a series of profound and unprecedented challenges for health and social care systems and those frontline clinicians responsible for delivering services ...including nurses. One consequence has been the rapid and widespread introduction of a range of digital tools, solutions, and initiatives. In the United Kingdom, this has required clinical leadership to drive implementation and adoption of digital innovations across the system, ranging from those in senior executive board level positions to those on the frontline.
Findings
This commentary presents a framework highlighting the breadth of digital transformations which emerged as a consequence of the U.K. health and social care systems’ response to the COVID-19 crisis. The framework outlines the different levels of digital transformation, ranging from what we have termed “ceremonial adoption” to isolated automation, organizational integration, and full systems integration. We reflect on the nursing leadership practices that need to be in place to support these changes.
Conclusion
Whilst acknowledging the extraordinary results achieved by the COVID-19 driven tsunami of digital transformation, we reflect on the essential steps required to translate these nascent, isolated efforts into fully integrated, long-term solutions. We also offer recommendations for clinical digital leaders and suggest steps that will be crucial to translate the temporary and/or limited interventions into effective, permanent features of our health and social care systems, while also providing a platform on which to build future digital capabilities. We will inevitably continue to see an increase in the use of technology in everyday clinical practice, and nurses are well positioned to take a lead in its widespread adoption.
We address the seemingly implausible project of moving the technical support of complex organisational technologies online. We say 'implausible' because from the point of view of micro-sociological ...analysis and the influential work of Orr (1996) there is a consensus that the diagnosis and resolution of technical failures is an intrinsically 'localised affair' (i.e., rooted within a specific place and time). Notwithstanding this view, technology producers have been pushing in the recent period to develop online forms of support. Today, and particularly in the area of organisational software, many technical failures are now repaired at a distance. How is this possible given the consensus amongst sociologists? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a major software producer we show how repair work has been recast and inserted in a new geographical and temporal regime. This has implications for how sociologists of technology conceptualise the nature and practice of technical failure but also the time and situation in which it occurs. We attempt to refocus understandings of technical problems from a preoccupation with their rootedness onto how they are lifted out of local contexts and passed around globally distributed offices in search of requisite specialist expertise. Importantly, whilst virtualisation appears a seemingly effective means to resolve failures it also has negative consequences. Whereas in more traditional types of technical support place-based social relations are seen to bear the burden of controlling and regulating support, in online forms other means have to be found. Our conceptual aim is to move away from a view of repair revolving exclusively around the situation conceived of as a 'small place'. Rather, since support work is increasingly 'stretched out' across a global network of labs connected up by technologies, it now takes place across an extended situation. We work up this notion first to highlight how aspects once seen as central to localist forms of analysis are no longer the only organising features as technical work moves online and second to demonstrate the various ways in which the locales for this work are now mediated by technology. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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