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No abstract

Information and communication technologies play a key role in contemporary organizations. Supported by a longitudinal study of changes in purchasing practices, owing to the implementation of an e-business system at a large, global corporation, this article shows the interplay between the technology and the role of the users. We argue that the introduction of the e-business system increased the hierarchy and bureaucracy but also that the purchasers' professional identities and established work procedures were threatened by the technology being used. The results indicate how a technological artifact is by no means detached from the broader reformulating of managerial procedures and practices, instead reflecting and embodying some of the managerial virtues of predictability and hierarchy. Since technology is playing an increasingly key role in most industries and domains, it is also suggested that the intersection between technology and professions be examined in more detail.

No abstract

The purpose of this article is to discuss what happens when work embedded in a 'meagre' organizational context is changed by lean production-related methods. The article is based on studies of seven lean production-inspired projects in the Swedish health care sector, a sector already poor due to organizational slack. The projects were directed to develop 'health care chains', an organizational concept regarded as a way to rationalize health care organizations as well as to develop them, i.e. increase productivity, quality from a customer perspective and quality of working conditions. The article analyses the projects from an interpretative perspective and discusses how modem management models with ambitions to concurrently rationalize and develop organizations--e.g. lean production and health care chains--are used in a 'meagre' organizational field. As an outcome, a model is presented that explores what is beyond simple imitations and unique translations of ideas when a new concept is implemented in local organizations.

Through a comparative historical study of community pharmacy in the UK, Italy, Sweden and the USA, we examine what happens to institutional arrangements designed to resolve ongoing conflicts between institutional logics over extended periods of time. We find that institutional arrangements can reflect the heterogeneity of multiple logics without resulting in hybridization or dominance. Because logics remain active, similar conflicts can reappear multiple times. We find that the durability of the configurations of competing logics reflects the characteristics of the polities in which fields are embedded. The dominance of any societal institutional order leads to more stable field level arrangements. We suggest that the metaphor of institutional knots and the related image of institutional knotting are useful to capture aspects of this dynamic and to foreground the discursive and material work which allows multiple logics to co-exist in local arrangements with variable durability.

No abstract

In this article, the authors engage in, and contribute to, the discussion about the role of objects (material arrangements) in processes of organizing. The point of departure of the study was a critical incident at a hospital when a drop infusion pump failed. By following the action, that is, to apply an action net perspective, initiated by incident aiming to secure the ongoing care and treatment of patients on the ward, the authors are able to illustrate the relation between objects-in-use (such as boundary objects) and ongoing organizing practices, and how such organizing activities are dependent on, and conditioned by, material arrangements and objects. Furthermore, they also show that objects, far from being stable entities, are also being constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed-dependent on what is appropriate in a specific time and place, and as part of ongoing organizing.