PurposeThis paper aims to analyze the adoption process of human resource information systems (HRIS) from a supply-side perspective emphasizing the practices of HRIS vendors and consultants. It aims ...to counterbalance the existing literature on HRIS, which has overwhelmingly studied HRIS adoption from the customer organization's viewpoint, hence systematically downplaying the active role of vendors and consultants in adoption processes.Design/methodology/approachThe research has been conducted on the HRIS market of the Benelux (Belgium–The Netherlands–Luxemburg) from a constructionist and exploratory perspective. The structure and dynamics underlying the market are gradually unveiled through open interviews with HRIS vendors and consulting firms (n = 22).FindingsThe paper reveals how the social shaping of HR innovations takes place and identifies nine types of pressures exerted by HRIS vendors and consultants on customer organizations: assessing, advising, advertising, case-building, demonstrating, configuring, accompanying, sustaining and supporting. Taken together, these pressures demonstrate the systematic presence and active role of external actors throughout the adoption process of HRIS within firms.Research limitations/implicationsIt is suggested that further supply-side studies of innovation diffusion processes of HRIS should be conducted to complement the existing, demand-side literature. In this view, emphasis should be set on technology providers and their ongoing interactions with customer firms.Originality/valueThe analytical precedence given to supply-side actors allows to conceptualize HRIS adoption as the dynamic result of negotiations between three groups of actors (HRIS vendors, HRIS consultants and customer firms), hence resulting in a more comprehensive and holistic view of HRIS adoption processes.
The study aims to discover the extent to which organizations support the careers of skilled contingent workers (SCWs) by providing them with organizational career management (OCM) practices. ...Analyzing three Belgian companies from different sectors, we find that SCWs do benefit from OCM practices. Such practices cover three dimensions: formalization, individual focus, and differentiation. Subsequently, we explain the three dimensions, respectively, through three contextual variables: the legal and regulatory framework, companies’ human resource management (HRM) configurations and the value of human capital, and the roles of third-party actors. The association of the variables with such dimensions enables the development of three research propositions. This study paves the way for additional research on SCWs and their careers as well as incorporating this population in HRM strategies, including that of OCM practices.
•Skilled contingent workers are offered organizational career management practices that are informal within client companies.•3 dimensions characterize the OCM practices: the degrees of formalization, individual focus, and differentiation.•Labor market regulations, HRM configurations and the value of human capital, and third-party actors explain the 3 dimensions.
Increasingly, management techniques and trends in accounting are incorporated into software. Continuous accounting, understood as the automated processing of firms’ accounting records to deliver ...real-time financial information, can be seen as a contemporary illustration of a shared belief that newly developed software stand at the forefront of progress in accounting. While such technologies are usually pictured as promising, the dynamics underlying their diffusion among accounting firms have drawn limited scholarly interest so far. Consequently, this paper sets out to explore how management fashions diffuse when they are embedded into software from the outset and sold on intermediated markets where resellers shape the interactions between fashion setters and fashion users. While extant literature on management fashions has mostly investigated cases where innovators actively promote new management concepts and ideas towards fashion users, the paper unveils the crucial role played by market intermediaries in the selection, processing, and dissemination of innovations sold as software. A revised framework of management fashion setting in intermediated markets is developed, which simultaneously contributes to the literature on management accounting innovations embedded into software and to the management fashion theory by highlighting how market intermediaries strive to maintain control over the diffusion of innovations.
Project‐based forms of work have been steadily increasing in all sorts of organizations, which has led scholars to investigate their effects on career development and career management practices. ...However, disciplinary and conceptual divides have prevented comprehensive conceptualizations of project workers' careers to emerge to this day. Building on an integrative literature review, the paper underlines the predominance of individual‐centred research designs giving pride of place to project managers, at the expense of organizational‐centred studies accounting for the multiple stakeholders involved in project workers' careers. Five research perspectives on project work and careers are highlighted: Project work may be studied under the prism of career management, career transitions, career orientations, career advantages, and role transitions. The review is concluded with a comprehensive framework articulating project work and careers. The paper ultimately pleads for further investigation of project work and careers from a multistakeholder and organizational perspective.
Purpose
Several studies have recently documented projects of organizational transformation and modernization which, commonly clustered under the umbrella term “New Ways of Working” (NWoW), ...simultaneously entail material, technological, cultural and managerial dimensions. Academic contributions, however, have paid little attention to the mechanisms allowing such projects to progressively become legitimized in organizational discourses and practices. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the distinctive features of the legitimation process underlying the implementation of NWoW projects.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper relies on a longitudinal, three-year analysis of a large insurance company. Data were collected through qualitative methods including semi-structured interviews (48), periods of observation (3 months) and document analysis (78).
Findings
The paper develops a grounded and integrative framework of legitimation processes underlying “NWoW” change projects. The framework emphasizes four decisive operations of translation in “NWoW” design and implementation: translating material constraints into strategic opportunities; translating strategic opportunities into a quantitative business plan supported by the top management; translating compelling discourses around “NWoW” into an organizational machinery; and translating a transformation project into discourses of unequivocal success, conveyed by legitimate spokespeople within and beyond the organization.
Originality/value
Besides contributing to the understanding of a managerial fashion, which has received little academic attention so far, the paper also offers an original integrative framework to account for legitimation processes that combines two theoretical approaches – the sociology of translation and research on institutionalist work.
Purpose
Increasingly, emerging information technologies such as shared software and continuous accounting are offering alternative ways to perform accounting tasks in a supposedly more efficient ...fashion. Yet, few studies have investigated how they affect the provision of accounting services, especially in the context of small accounting firms, which provide legal and tax services to entrepreneurs and businesses. Drawing on the service perspective, the paper critically examines how technological innovation challenges and reconfigures the co-production of accounting services in these firms.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper answers calls issued in prior studies to conduct empirical research on emerging information technologies for accountants. It focuses on the specific context of small accounting firms and draws on interviews with small accounting firms' managers (
n
= 20).
Findings
The study emphasizes five significant challenges that accounting firm managers face when using information technologies to support the provision of their services (ensuring reliability, factoring in their heterogeneous client base, repricing, training clients to use new technologies and promoting advisory services). Information technologies are shown to have a structuring role in the co-production of accounting services, as they lead to reconfigurations of the relationships between accountants and their clients. A range of four configurations is developed to highlight accountants' strategies to maintain collaborative relationships with their clients while integrating new technologies into their work practices.
Originality/value
By conceptualizing accounting services as a co-production process, the paper offers new insights into the implications of emerging information technologies for small accounting firms.
As a result of growing financial pressures and changing space demands, universities are increasingly looking to modernize and rationalize their workspaces through projects of New Ways of ...Working (NWoW). So far, extant research has mostly investigated the managerial construct of NWoW and its outcomes on organizational members, leaving the design process leading NWoW to be implemented in local contexts understudied. By contrast, the present study sets out to redefine NWoW as open-ended projects of organizational change that are unavoidably ambiguous and conflictual, hence seeking to overcome the tendency to conceal tensions arising at early stages of the change process under the abstract black-box of ‘resistance to change’. It is shown that ambiguity, simultaneously understood as an organizational problem causing tensions and as a rhetorical resource enabling collective action, plays a major role in the design process of such equivocal projects. This paper further advances our understanding of ambiguity as a multifaceted concept to bridge between individual rationalities and collective decision-making in the course of complex design processes.
PurposeWhile more and more organizations commit to transformation projects with the aim of redesigning simultaneously their workspaces, work organization, and technologies, the design process ...supporting such projects remains largely understudied. This paper examines the political tensions that occur when such processes unfold as well as their implications for project management. By doing so, the paper counterbalances the prescriptive and normative literature on “New Ways of Working” which largely overlooks the political complexity of such projects.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on a qualitative study of a triple design process in a media company. Data collection mainly consists of a nine-month process of non-participant observation of weekly meetings held by the strategic group in charge of the project. Semi-structured interviews with members of the executive committee have also been conducted.FindingsThe analysis illustrates how space, organization and technology are gradually designed and structured. Four interconnected and often concealed mechanisms that support triple design processes are identified: political tensions, unexpected twists, conflicting temporalities and arbitration measures.Originality/valueThe originality of the paper lies in breaking down the concept of design in three separate objects – organization, space and technology – and examining how these objects were conjointly problematized by an organization in transformation, whereas existing studies often investigate organization design, space design or technology design in isolation.
In the last decade, the interest of managers and professionals for New Ways of Working (NWoW) has grown rapidly, as evidenced by multiple firms claiming to implement 'NWoW workspaces' in Belgium and ...in the Netherlands. NWoW is often used as a convenient umbrella term to designate a set of organizational adjustments that include open and 'flexible' workspaces, new IT tools, as well as cultural and managerial transformations believed to be 'innovative'. While the academic literature has investigated several cases of NWoW workspaces through post-occupancy studies, there is at the present time no research available on the change process leading to these transformations. The ambition of the paper is to conceptualize NWoW as projects of organizational change subject to politics and power games. Through an empirical study of a multi-site media company implementing a NWoW project, the paper illustrates three implications of a political conception of NWoW. First, the ability of local actors to bargain and to twist the strategic intentions of the deciding authorities is highlighted. Second, the study underlines the crucial role of key intermediaries in designing NWoW projects. Third, participative approaches of change are critically discussed. The paper also provides recommendations for future research on NWoW.
PDF
