| 1. |
- Abdelnour, Samer, et al.
(författare)
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Agency and Instituions in Organization Studies
- 2017
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Ingår i: Organization Studies. - London : Sage Publications. - 0170-8406 .- 1741-3044. ; 38:12, s. 1775-1792
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agency and institutions are essential concepts within institutional theory. In this Perspectives issue, we draw on a select group of Organization Studies articles to provide an overview of the topic of agency and institutions. We first consider different ways of defining agency and institutions and examine their implications for institutional theory. We then analyse the relationship of actors and institutions through four lenses – the wilful actor, collective intentionality, patchwork institutions and modular individuals. Our analysis leads us to dissociate agency from individuals and view it as a capacity or quality that stems from resources, rights and obligations tied to the roles and social positions actors occupy. Roles and social positions are institutionally engineered. It is social actors qua occupants of roles and positions (not individuals) that enter the social ‘stage’ and exercise agency.
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| 2. |
- Caesarius, Leon Michael, 1971-
(författare)
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In search of known unknowns : an empirical investigation of the peripety of a knowledge management system
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In their quest to secure their level of competitiveness, organizations have turned their attention to a specific type of information technology (IT) solution referred to as knowledge management systems (KMS). Research recurrently views and defines such system as IT-tools that mainly enable the collection, storing and diffusion of knowledge within the boundaries of the organization. Consequently the focus of KMS is believed to be on intra-organizational ‘knowledge’ re-use of ‘known knowns’. However, despite this definition and despite the inherent claim in the very name of such systems research continues to report failures rather than successes. Yet, the occurrence of the phenomenon of IT–based knowledge management (KM) endeavours in organizations continuous to rise. What really is the nature of this phenomenon and what is it a manifestation of? The purpose of this investigation is to explore the nature of IT–based knowledge management endeavours and their outcomes, and to explicate thereby the intricacies that surround them. How can KMS be described? How are they developed? Why are they deployed and what, if any, are the outcomes for the organization using them are the four research questions driving the investigation. Furthermore, it the investigation rests on a theoretical framework influenced by a constructionist perspective on knowledge and builds empirically on a longitudinal case study of a large international pharmaceutical firm’s IT-based KM effort. The empirical findings suggest that the case organization bridged the boundaries with the outside world by using the KMS as a way to establish knowledge exchange relationships with key target audiences. Getting the audiences to use the system meant transforming them to de facto information producers. To enable the continuity in the use of the system, the case organization designed it to provide the audiences continuous knowledge intensive services in return for getting informated. The services centred on supporting the practices of the target audiences by drawing on the automating and informating ability of IT. Granted an interimistic at least continuity in the use of the system by the target audiences meant a possibility for knowledge creation through experimentation for the organization and a possibility for knowledge creation through the enactment of embodied practice for the target audiences. A number of intricacies however, limited as expected the lifespan of the system. The main conclusion drawn from the case study is that the phenomenon has become inter-organizational and instead of simply focusing on knowledge re-use it also focuses, and in the specific case predominantly so, on knowledge creation. This is an indication that the phenomenon can be understood as a manifestation of an attempt to search for ‘known unknowns’ by means of IT. This in turn suggests an expansion from only exploitative to both exploitative and explorative use of IT; an expansion from using IT not only for efficiency-enhancing purposes but for effectiveness-enhancing purposes as well.
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| 3. |
- Hasselbladh, Hans, 1961-, et al.
(författare)
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The project of rationalization : a critique and reappraisal of neo-institutionalism in organization studies
- 2000
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Ingår i: Organization Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 0170-8406 .- 1741-3044. ; 21:4, s. 697-720
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article critically approaches various neo-institutional accounts of the process of formal organizing. While acknowledging the importance of the overall orientation marked by neo-institutional studies, the article identifies several crucial aspects that have escaped the attention of neo-institutional research. In particular, it criticizes the inability of neo-institutionalism to provide an account of the means linking situated forms of organizing with wider instrumental beliefs and practices, in terms other than adaptivist, diffusionist. Such a limitation is partly a consequence of unwillingness of neo-institutionalism to focus on and analyze the very architecture of the rationalized patterns and relationships which neo-institutionalists claim to be diffusing across organizational populations and fields. Drawing on several sources, the article develops a framework that seeks to outline the conceptual means for decomposing the carriers of rationalized patterns, models and techniques and showing the distinctive ways in which they implicate the building blocks of formal organizing.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Hasselbladh, Hans, 1961-, et al.
(författare)
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Work, Control and Computation : Rethinking the Legacy of neo-Institutionalism
- 2009
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Ingår i: Research in the Sociology of Organizations. - : Emerald Group Publishing Limited. - 0733-558X. ; 27, s. 257-282
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter claims technology to be a principal mode of regulation in formal organizations alongside social structure and culture. Such a claim breaks with the conventional neo-institutional outlook that considers technology outside the object of institutional analysis of organizations. The distinctive regulative logic of computational technology is manifested in the increasing entanglement of domain-specific practices and their underlying cognitive and normative order with the decontextualized principles and methods that have traditionally been deployed in the management and control of work operations. Such entanglement and the effects it generates reflect the reshuffling of the regulative reach of technology, social structure and culture under the pressures exercised by the dynamics of current technological change and the impressive involvement of computational systems and artefacts in human affairs.
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| 6. |
- Hjort, Daniel
(författare)
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Rewriting Entrepreneurship : Enterprise discourse and entrepreneurship in the case of re-organising ES
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- People at the formal organisation of ES were written as they tried to write a new script describing how the organising of their operations should become conducted. A project of re-organising the operations was initiated in a way rather typical for the 1990s: services were bought from a consulting agency, and the agency brought their tools for making ES into a proper company. ES was supposed to become more managerial and more entrepreneurial at the same time. Control and efficiency, together with the creation of new customers, products, and new markets were the assumed outputs of this re-organising. This thesis writes this re-organising as a discursive event. Focusing on enterprise discourse as a governmental rationality reproducing managerialism, the purpose is firstly to describe how enterprise discourse became effective in producing this event. From a poststructuralist approach in use, reflections on how students of re-organising are written as 'analysts' of such events make it necessary to trace the genesis of enterprise discourse. This is done in conversation with the stories of the field. Moving from text to writing, the purpose secondly includes an ambition to participate as writer of this event - to tell its other/silent story. This helps me to rewrite entrepreneurship. With homo ludens (playing human) rather than homo oeconomicus (economic human) as concept for subjects of entrepreneurship, I attempt to create openings toward other ways of writing entrepreneurship.
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| 9. |
- Kallinikos, Jannis, et al.
(författare)
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Governing social practice : technology and institutional change
- 2013
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Ingår i: Theory and society. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0304-2421 .- 1573-7853. ; 42:4, s. 395-421
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this article, we extend the concept of technology beyond the conventional understanding of systems and artifacts as embodiments of particular functionalities that are variously enacted in local settings. Technological artifacts or systems epitomize operational couplings that extend beyond the human-technology interface. Such couplings entail multiple, unobtrusive, back-staged links that evade human interpretation yet are critically involved in the reproduction and control of social relations. Cast in this light, technologies emerge as complex rationalized embodiments for structuring social relationships and, in this quality, complement and occasionally compete with institutional modes of governance. We explore these ideas in the empirical context of cultural memory organizations (e.g., libraries, archives, museums). As the outcome of the technological developments that have marked the field over the last two decades, the operations of memory institutions increasingly mingle with those of information aggregators and search engines. These developments reframe longstanding professional practices of memory organizations and, in this process, challenge their institutional mandate.
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| 10. |
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| 11. |
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| 12. |
- Kallinikos, Jannis
(författare)
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Techniques of notation and behaviour : remarks on elementary forms of organization
- 1990
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The paper accords signification or representation a decisive role in the context ofinstrumental action. It is argued that the diverse practices subsumed under thenotion of organizing are but varied manifestations of the basic operative schemaof representation: something for something else. Representation is therebyposited as “consubstantial” with the mundane notion of organization. Bothrepresentation and organization imply the institution of diverse systems ofnotation whose mobile, stable and combinable elements enable the making, andby the same token, also the unmaking and remaking of the world. The vicariousand rehearsable character of the representing elements renders the worldmanipulable in the sense of imposing on the sheer flow of experience itscontrived schemata of temporality and distance and its encoded versions ofobjects, states and processes. It establishes the proto-conditions of socialdifferentiation, and hierarchy as it appears in its modern version, by creating in abipolar fashion differences in perspective and knowledge between a centre, i.e.those that encode, accumulate and control combinations of these encodedversions of the world, and a periphery, i.e. local sources of knowledge that arebeing encoded or controlled. However, these ways of worldmaking obey, at leastpartly, the logic enfolded in the forms by means of which a representing universeorganizes and structures its elements. An attempt is made to reveal this logic bydistinguishing different organizing principles falling within the categories ofnumerical, verbal and pictorial representation, and to connect these principles withthe bureaucratic ideal of accountable and calculable behaviour.
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| 13. |
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