Distributing intelligence and organizing diversity in new media projects

Girard, M; Stark, David

doi:10.1590/s0102-69922002000100009

Cited by 21 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 12 publications

(7 reference statements)

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“…This led us to further review the literature, seeking insight into what characterized and triggered breakdowns and settlements. We found interesting connections with research on elite settlements (Armstrong 2005;Burton and Higley 1987), provisional settlements (Girard and Stark 2002), genre stabilization (Schryer 1993;Yates and Orlikowski 2007) and practical breakdowns (Agar 1986;Suchman 1987;Winograd and Flores 1986). A third round of axial coding (Strauss and Corbin 1998) fleshed out the characteristics and enablers of these dynamics.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…Comparison of the five projects indicates that distinct, sometimes implicit, and often temporary connections among actors' temporal interpretations undergirded each strategic decision. Such provisional settlements -to use Girard and Stark's (2002) term -weave together particular interpretations of the past, present and future. They are settled because they are stabilized enough to make it possible to take concrete steps, and provisional because they are context-specific, limited in time, and open to later reinterpretation (see also, Kellogg et al 2006).…”

Section: Coping With Breakdowns and Accomplishing Provisional Settlemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Temporal work can disrupt existing understandings and produce an array of alternative interpretations. As Girard and Stark (2002) point out, efforts to achieve coordinated outcomes are never friction free. The ongoing deliberations we observed in the five projects at CommCorp were an essential part of the temporal work that helped achieve forward movement in the face of the market crash.…”

Section: [The Reason That We Are] Not So Lost Now Is That … I Forced mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Temporal Work in Strategy Making

Kaplan

Orlikowski

2013

Organization Science

397

443

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This paper reports on a field study of strategy making in one organization facing an industry crisis. In a comparison of five strategy projects, we observed that organizational participants struggled with competing interpretations of what might emerge in the future, what was currently at stake, and even what had happened in the past. We develop a model of temporal work in strategy making that articulates how actors resolved differences and linked their interpretations of the past, present, and future so as to construct a strategic account that enabled concrete strategic choice and action. We found that settling on a particular account required it to be coherent, plausible and acceptable, otherwise breakdowns resulted. Such breakdowns could impede progress, but could also be generative in provoking a search for new interpretations and possibilities for action. The more intensely actors engaged in temporal work, the more likely the strategies departed from the status quo. Our model suggests that strategy cannot be understood as the product of more or less accurate forecasting without considering the multiple interpretations of present concerns and historical trajectories that help to constitute those forecasts. Projections of the future are always entangled with views of the past and present, and temporal work is the means by which actors construct and reconstruct the connections among them. These insights into the mechanisms of strategy making help explain the practices and conditions that produce organizational inertia and change. Temporal Work in Strategy Making-1 -A fundamental challenge for managers making strategy is coping with an uncertain future. In studying strategic change, scholars have emphasized the importance of sensemaking as a collective and often conflictual interpretive process for dealing with uncertainties about the business, the market, and the environment that lead to breakdowns in understandings and require cognitive reorientations to move forward (Balogun and Johnson 2004;Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991;Gioia et al. 1994;Kaplan 2008b;Maitlis and Sonenshein 2010;Rouleau 2005). These studies suggest that linking across interpretations of the past, present and future make action possible, but have left unexplained how and why some linkages work and some fail in practice, and, for those that do work, why some lead to the status quo and others produce change.Our study of strategy making in practice offers some answers to these questions. We found that managers -through a set of practices that we call "temporal work" -come to settle on particular strategic accounts that link interpretations of the past, present and future in ways that appear coherent, plausible and Settling on a strategic account, even if provisional, allows actors to shift from disagreeing or deliberating about meanings to implementing strategic choices, thus enabling the organization to move forward in the face of uncertainty. If a settlement breaks down, further temporal work is required in order to reconstruct a new str...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Section: Coping With Breakdowns and Accomplishing Provisional Settlemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: [The Reason That We Are] Not So Lost Now Is That … I Forced mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Temporal Work in Strategy Making

Kaplan

Orlikowski

2013

Organization Science

397

443

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“…It is thus not timesheets per se, but rather their special usage that creates the described problems. In new media companies on the other hand, it seems that timesheets are used less often, although such companies have a similar structure to environmental consultancies (Girard and Stark, 2002). 18.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Undisciplined research: the proceduralisation of quality control in transdisciplinary projects

Guggenheim

2006

sci public policy

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In this paper I argue that so-called transdisciplinary research, that is problem-oriented, non-technological research outside the disciplinary structure, leads to a strengthening of organisational aspects of knowledge production and, particularly, of a change in quality standards. Quality standards are increasingly defined in intra-organisational or project-dependent and procedural instead of disciplinary terms. The paper is based on fieldwork in several environmental consulting companies that perform a broad, non-disciplinary spectrum of research and consulting. Although they perform government-funded research, neither their organisational structure nor their praxis is oriented towards disciplines. Instead their research focuses on social problems and methods that are translated into research without an intermediary disciplinary filtering. Quality has to be accomplished via non-disciplinary standards. These non-disciplinary standards are all procedural: namely quality management, timesheets and accompanying supervisory groups.

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“…In 'loose coupling', groups remain at arms' length. This is particularly useful in situations where investment in formal coordination processes is prevented by time pressures or diverging organizational goals, such as in fast-moving industries (Girard and Stark 2002;Kellogg et al 7 2006) or 'skunkworks' (Fosfuri and Rønde 2009). In such situations, coordination between groups of experts resemble exchange-like interactions, which management research has studied by drawing on Galison's (1997Galison's ( , 1999 concept of trading zone.…”

Section: Trading Zonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making incremental innovation tradable in industrial service settings

Geiger

Finch

2016

Journal of Business Research

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How do organizations develop, buy and sell incremental innovation as a service? In many knowledge-intensive business-to-business settings the locus of interaction has shifted from stable, discrete, and articulated products and services to the exchange of somewhat nebulous capacities of problem-solving, innovation and R&D services. In these exchanges, tensions and conflicts between actors can arise in seeking clarity as to what is being exchanged and how it is valuable, while at the same time attempting to keep the interaction open for future adjustments to the scope and content of the exchange. We combine a longitudinal case study of a chemical services firm with Galison's (1999) concept of a trading zone and contributions in industrial services marketing to assess how actors offer, value and exchange incremental innovation. Focusing on the contentious nature of innovation processes, our contributions to the understanding of intra-and interfirm behavior in marketing and purchasing are threefold:(1) We examine how incremental innovation is formatted as a tradable service; (2) We explain how buyers, sellers and developers exchange the service of incremental innovation even when this service remains contentious in its specification; (3) We argue that trading zones complement relational processes and contractual arrangements by allowing actors to preserve their own logics and expertise pertaining to innovation.

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Distributing intelligence and organizing diversity in new media projects

Cited by 21 publications

References 12 publications

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

Undisciplined research: the proceduralisation of quality control in transdisciplinary projects

Making incremental innovation tradable in industrial service settings

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