Understanding the dynamics of learning across social worlds: A case study from implementing IS in the Ethiopian public health care system

This paper adopts a novel learning perspective on information systems development. Building on the works of Anselm Strauss we conceptualize development processes as “negotiated orders” where members from different “social worlds” encounter and negotiate differences and tensions. We argue that processes of inquiry and action are interwoven, and this is what facilitates and stimulates learning. Based on a case study where different versions of open source software were customized, further developed and implemented in the Ethiopian public health care system, this paper explores the interplay between participation, politics and learning in IS implementation and use. We consider learning to be an integral part of the social practice, and it occurs mainly through encounters and negotiations between actors from different social worlds who might have competing interests and values. The paper also analyzed how the software in question functioned as a boundary object, not just in the traditional sense by facilitating cooperation among these actors. An even more significant role of the boundary object was in bringing the existing differences to the foreground and thus stimulating negotiations and learning. As such, this paper contributes to three discourses: organizational learning, boundary objects and health information systems in developing countries in particular and more specifically to IS implementation in settings with scarce resources, heterogeneous stakeholders, and diverse interests.     

Corporate culture,absorptive capacity and IT success

This study examines absorptive capacity’s role in IT implementation success. Absorptive capacity is the organization’s ability to recognize the value of new information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends [Cohen, W. M., & Levinthal, D. A. (1990). Absorptive capacity: A new perspective on learning and innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(March), 128–152]. Based on previous research, this study proposes a measure of absorptive capacity that includes managerial IT knowledge and communication channels and tests its relationship to the application of new technology in the form of expert systems implementation.Related to claims about the importance of absorptive capacity are claims that a “learning culture” or “knowledge-friendly culture” is necessary in order for knowledge to be gained and effectively used within the organization. This study examines the type of corporate culture that influences absorptive capacity. The results provide support for absorptive capacity’s proposed dimensions and its antecedent of corporate culture that act to influence the implementation of new technologies.     

Participants' values and incentive plans

Incentive plans are designed to motivate participants to pursue what is valued by an organization. This article discusses how values may influence the design of incentive plans and the success of their implementation. In situations where the incentive plan fits participants' values, the authors predict a process of mutual reinforcement. When values and incentives collide, they propose two possible yet conflicting outcomes: the “carrot effect” and the “snubbed carrot effect.” They conclude by addressing the implications of fit and misfit for research and practice. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Infusing the organisation with customer knowledge

The article explores the experiences of a company that learned to become more customer oriented. How did the company succeed in generating learning opportunities and learning, which could have a sustainable impact on its operations? The company’s use of a customer study appeared to create a situation of “unfreeze”. It also provided directive information that was used constructively in a participative search. Inductive and dialectical qualities appeared to have been created, and these helped to develop practical knowledge. The process of joint construction, together with feedback which showed the new ideas to be working, were important factors in putting the knowledge to use. Further development of the feedback systems was integrated into normal operations, which served to stabilise the reorientation. The nature of the continuous learning process which the company’s accomplishment represents is also examined.     

Machine learning in M4: What makes a good unstructured model?

The Makridakis Competitions seek to identify the most accurate forecasting methods for different types of predictions. The M4 competition was the first in which a model of the type commonly described as “machine learning” has outperformed the more traditional statistical approaches, winning the competition. However, many approaches that were self-labeled as “machine learning” failed to produce accurate results, which generated discussion about the respective benefits and drawbacks of “statistical” and “machine learning” approaches. Both terms have remained ill-defined in the context of forecasting. This paper introduces the terms “structured” and “unstructured” models to better define what is intended by the use of the terms “statistical” and “machine learning” in the context of forecasting based on the model’s data generating process. The mechanisms that underlie specific challenges to unstructured modeling are examined in the context of forecasting, along with common solutions. Finally, the innovations in the winning model that allowed it to overcome these challenges and produce highly accurate results are highlighted.     

Outstanding fundraising practice: how do nonprofits substantively increase their income?

• In this paper, we examine the characteristics of charities that have generated substantive increases in their fundraising income. We interviewed 25 fundraising directors and team members, from organizations experiencing rapid growth, adopting a “decoding the discipline” approach to identify how each organization had overcome key barriers to its success. We identify that fundraising leaders in these exceptional nonprofits focus particularly on matters connected to their team, organizational structures that support that team, and the development of an organization‐wide learning culture. We also find that these teams were successful because of the “systems” way in which they understood and coped with the complexities of decision making. They were exceptional in isolating the right problems and exceptional too in the processes they adopted to solve them.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An evolutionary complex systems perspective on urban health

Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of urban health and wellbeing sustainably have often been implicitly biased by ideas such as being ‘human-scale’ or ‘people-centered.’ With increasing urban populations and increasing urban system interconnectivity, many cities have transformed into city regions or clusters, and the external effects of urban growth are carried mainly by the marginalized and the environment putting urban health increasingly at risk. Here we address the question of why human societies have not been better at collectively adapting to the challenges of urbanization and global environmental change? We build a theoretical framework of multi-level selection, complex systems evolution, and governance, following which we then present ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-centered’ ideas of urban development as expressions of two types of socio-political organization with different degrees of self-organization. We found several reasons for which the maladies of current urban development emerged and the seeming inability to resolve them. First, urban systems became increasingly interconnected and evolved into ultrasocial superorganisms, displaying preference to sustain themselves as a whole rather than their subordinates. Second, the difference in scaling effects between the biological and the social network contributed to the mismatch between rapid urban growth and slow adaptation. Furthermore, institutions of decreased variety reinforce themselves and become dominant, creating a positive feedback mechanism and promoting invasive and exploitative exponential growth, but they also reduce the creativity and resilience of urban systems. We also found that both the “human-scale” and the “people-centered” approaches acknowledge the exponential growth and decreasing variety in urban systems, and advocate for correcting the mismatches. To incorporate people's needs and values for long-term, truly sustainable urban health governance, we recommend combining the self-organizing, evolutionary feature of “human-scale” and the coordinative, political feature of “people-centeredness.”     

Artifacts that organize: Delegation in the distributed organization

A great deal of research on geographically distributed organizing focuses on communication among members; however, in the face of increasingly large, complex and interdependent infrastructure, scholars must also examine instances of technology-supported coordination that function by replacing rather than enhancing human communication among organizational members. Central to this are complex processes of delegation — in which organizational work and agency are passed back and forth across the shifting line between “social” and “technical” elements. Building on work in the sociology of science, this paper extends the concept of delegation and applies it to thorny questions around the work of sustaining organization over time. We explore two examples from the Open Science Grid (OSG), an initiative that distributes computational resources to geographically dispersed and otherwise loosely coordinated research teams. Our first case is one of successful delegation, as automated access to resources is extended to a new group of distributed scientists. We then turn our attention to a case where the process of delegation breaks down, revealing the usually invisible work needed to sustain “seamless” integration. As these cases show, delegation is complex, fragile, and central to the nature of contemporary organizing. Specifically, delegation: 1) reconfigures the organization of work; 2) transforms how outcomes are accomplished; 3) redistributes responsibility for organizational decision-making; and 4) shifts the visibility and invisibility of both actors and their work.     

Future business and the role of purchasing and supply management: Opportunities for ‘business-not-as-usual’ PSM research

The raison d'être for this article is simple: traditional ways of researching, theorizing, and practicing purchasing and supply management (PSM) are no longer sufficient to ‘meet the moment’. Scholars need to advance a “business-not-as-usual” footing approach to their work, if they are to make a meaningful contribution to addressing the current and future emergencies, as highlighted by recent extreme weather and the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, what can this, or should this, mean for a field rooted in traditional business thinking? This article builds on the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management's (JPSM) 25th Anniversary Special Issue editorial (2019); members of the JPSM's editorial team advance their unique perspectives on what “business-not-as-usual” means for PSM. Specifically, we advocate both thinking much more widely, in scope and ambition, than we currently do, and simultaneously building our ability to comprehend supply chains in a more nuanced and granular way. We explore whether the bias toward positivist work has omitted potentially interesting findings, and viewpoints. This leads to a call to re-think how we approach our work: should the key criteria always be to focus on theory development or testing? Should academics “think bigger”? Turning to specific research themes, illustrations of how our current thinking can be challenged or broadened by addressing the circular economy, and role of purchasing and innovation. Specifically, the focus on the PSM function as an intrapreneur within the larger organization, and the role of innovation and technology in PSM work. Taken together, we hope the ideas and arguments presented here will inform and inspire ambitious and novel approaches to PSM research with significant and enduring impact on the transformation of business.     

A Holistic View on Learning in Project‐Based Organizations

Although researchers have over the years highlighted the importance of managing and supporting learning in project‐based settings, it still seems to be problematic. New project management capabilities are needed, such as systems thinking, which will allow project‐based organizations to better cope with learning in the organizations. This article explores how Swedish project‐based organizations within an engineering and construction context manage and support learning activities today and discusses, with the support of process management literature, how an “organizational‐wide project learning process” could improve the prerequisites for learning in project‐based organizations. Our findings from three project‐based organizations indicate a lack of a holistic perspective on project learning. A conceptual model is proposed, with the aim of validating and promoting process thinking by introducing, for example, new roles responsible for intra‐ and inter‐project learning, respectively.     

INTEGRATED SYSTEM, AUTONOMOUS DEPARTMENTS: ORGANIZATIONAL INVALIDITY AND SYSTEM CHANGE IN A UNIVERSITY*

Research on the relationship between computers and organization structure has mainly focused on the probable impact of technology on features of structure, while the effects of structure on technology have been relatively little considered apart from the way ‘organizationally invalid’ systems cause conflict and resistance. In recent processual perspectives, the relationship between technology and organization is seen not as deterministic but as one of mutual influence, with the outcome both for the organization and the technology emerging from interaction among various stakeholders during system development and implementation. This article, using a longitudinal case study, shows how organization structures can impact on the development process so as to alter computer-based systems to a design which is unintended but more consistent with existing organizational arrangements. It also discusses how systems specialists and managers can assess organizational invalidity, and offers a contingent framework for the courses of action to be taken if invalidity occurs.     

Measuring to understand intangible performance drivers

The present qualitative study explores what eleven Swedish organizations have systematically worked at to increase the understanding of the importance of intangibles as performance drivers. The present analysis is accomplished using a combination of evolutionary theory, knowledge-based theory and organizational learning. The results indicate that assets in an accounting sense seem to be of less interest than perceptions of activities that enable future performance. These “enablers” are often customer and employee perceptions of individual, organizational and relational competence. The way for the firms to ascertain a continuous organizational learning process with respect to the value creation chain is to measure intangibles as well as to maintain organizational routines that ensure the transformation of measurement results into action.     

The conceptions about managing coordination in Iranian governmental machinery: a Q methodology study

Alignment among governmental organizations is one of the major national concerns in all political systems. The origin of this concern is the weakness of “horizontal management” which refers to horizontal coordination among all organization that exercise national governance. One of the important influences on horizontal management is the attitudes and perceptions of governing elites. This paper focuses on perceptions of barriers to coordination in government among public administrators, programming elites, politicians and academics involved in the government system. The authors use the inductive research technique Q-methodology, which is a research method used to study people’s “subjectivity”, to investigate the views of of 50 members of the governing elite about barriers to coordination of the Iranian government web. The results show that these elite members have seven distinct conceptions about managing coordination in government which are based on how they perceive these barriers. The authors labeled these conceptions as: goal-orientation, unification-orientation, policy-orientation, reality-orientation, equilibrium-orientation, performance-orientation and architecture-orientation. The seven conceptions are examined in more details and are interpreted based on existing theories in the final section of this paper.     

Career development and participation at work: Time for mating?

Both career development and participation at work activities have emphasized a “prospecting” approach to inquiry. Although jointly inspired by the humanistic ethic, the two ventures have grown as separate streams of inquiry through their distinct responses to economic, hierarchical, technological, reductionist, and systems imperatives about work. A contrasting “mating” approach to inquiry is proposed, with the various imperatives becoming redefined as shared objects for further study. The proposal is supported by a set of diagnostic questions, and illustrated by a comparison between separate “Knowledge for Pay” and “Pay for Knowledge” human resource management initiatives. The possibility of broader application of the mating principle to other human resource management efforts is briefly considered.     

Getting the timing right: Kairos as the rhetorical framing of time

As organizational actors invoke and create the past, present and future of their organizational contexts in support of proposed decisions, the rhetorical framing of time is central to decision-making. To explain how such rhetorical framing occurs, this paper explores kairos as a conceptualization of the duality of encountering and enabling “the decisive moment.” Following a process of advocating a new IT strategy in a financial firm, we find that kairos appears when the rhetorical framing of time is consistent with dominant interpretations of the interrelations between the past, present and future of the organization. Thus, the paper conceptualizes kairos as constitutive for decision-making; only when the timing is right, will persuasive efforts prevail.     

Organization as process: Drawing a line between endogenous and exogenous views

This paper offers a classification of process views in organization studies. We start by assuming that distinctions may be drawn between ways that stability of entities is conceptualized in organizational analysis. From this point of departure we explore four different process views, namely: process as flows, process as programmes, process as recursive reproduction and process as connectivity. The first two views—process as flows and process as programmes—tend to build on the assumption that processes take place within relatively stable contexts, such as the organization or the institutional environment. This we refer to as an “exogenous” view. A second type of views of process is what we refer to as “endogenous” views, which are based on the assumption that stabilization of entities resides in the process itself.     

Studying organizations as temporary

This article reflects upon the methodological pessimism that sometimes plagues students of organizations. In particular pessimism seems to strike us when we try to get to grips with the incessant transformations of organizations—transformations that seem to occur at such great speed. Our immediate reaction to Heraclitus’ statement that: “You cannot step twice into the same river” is that it has considerable methodological relevance. However, we contend that his metaphor in its orthodox version leads to too narrow a view. An elaboration of the metaphor could perhaps reduce the pessimism regarding organizational studies by promoting a focus on contextual aspects. Moreover, changes and transformations in themselves do not necessarily represent a stumbling block for the researcher. Rather studying crucial projects provides a means for studying the mechanisms at work in the host organization. The resulting approach—contextualization in a broad sense—relieves researchers of some of their pessimism, maybe even inspires optimism, by raising new questions: not only “what can be said?” (about the organization), but also “in what contexts?” and “about what manifestations in those contexts?” The article concludes with some remarks on the scarcity of the contextualization approach for studying organizations as temporary phenomena.     

Communicative power: A linguistic approach to the study of the microdynamics of organizations

This article addresses the question of how communicative power is exercised in an organizational setting which is characterized according to its members as a “feminine” culture type (Hofstede, 1980, Organizational Dynamics, 9(1), 42–63). The purpose is threefold: firstly, to operationalize the concepts of “dominance” and “control” in an organizational setting by using a linguistic approach; secondly, to investigate the contribution of a linguistic approach to organizational research in exploring social interaction and, thirdly, to discuss some practical and theoretical implications for managerial work. The linguistic approach, involving a microanalysis, provided an analytical basis for understanding the fine web of interaction in the organization. In this way it served as an instrument for rendering visible the various steps in the interpretation, and the links between them. Against our theoretically grounded expectations, the empirical results suggest that the distribution of power cannot alone explain the extent to which institutional and cultural resources can be mobilized and organizations changed.     

Management “flavours of the month”: their role in managers' lives

Existing analyses and critiques of the succession of management fads and fashions entering managerial discourse and activities are complemented and developed by drawing on participant observation research carried out in an organization utilizing a variety of “packaged innovations”. It is shown that what are sometimes mocked as “flavours of the month” (FOMs) play a role in the double-controlproblem faced by all managers: the problem of managing their personal identities, careers and understandings at the same time as contributing to the overall control of the organization in which they are managers. Managers in the organization studied are shown generally to be critical of the “flavour of the month effect” but there is nevertheless an equivocality about how such ideas and practices can function.     

Collective Acceptance, Social Institutions, and Social Reality

ABSTRACT . The paper presents an account of social institutions on the basis of collective acceptance. Basically, collective acceptance by some members of a group involves the members’ collectively coming to hold and holding a relevant social attitude (a “we‐attitude”), viz. either one in the intention family of concepts or one in the belief family. In standard cases the collective acceptance must be in the “we‐mode,” viz. performed as a group member, and involve that it be meant for the group. The participants must be collectively committed to what they have accepted. Social institutions are taken to be norm‐governed social practices introducing a new social and conceptual status on the practices or some elements involved in those practices. This requires that some of the involved norms be constitutive norms as opposed to merely “accidentally” regulating ones. A classification of social institutions is presented. The account is broader in scope than is Searle’s.