General Practitioners Are from Mars, Administrators Are from Venus: The Role of Misaligned Occupational Dispositions in Inhibiting Mandated Role Change

Wiedner, Rene; Nigam, Amit; Silva, José Bento da

doi:10.1177/0730888420918643

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…In contrast, Wiedner, Barrett and Oborn (2017) highlight the inability and unwillingness of GPs to challenge higher-status, hospital-based colleagues in their new role as purchasers of hospital services. Wiedner, Nigam and da Silva (2020) show that dispositional misalignment prevented managers from challenging and collaborating with GPs, despite an initial desire on the part of both managers and GPs to collaborate. This suggests intra-professional and inter-professional hierarchies limit people's ability to interact in in new ways that challenge those hierarchies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Duality and Social Position: Role expectations of people who combine outsider-ness and insider-ness in organizational change

Nigam

Sackett

Golden

2021

Organization Studies

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A person’s social position shapes whether and how they can influence organizational change. While prior research establishes people whose social position combines outsider-ness and insider-ness as important change agents, we know little about how they influence change. We analyse a peer coaching initiative in Canadian hospitals to explain how outsider-insiders — in this case, organizational outsiders with professional proximity—advance change. Peer coaches were able to influence change by establishing and enacting a dual outsider-insider role and associated role expectations. We advance theory by showing that role expectations emphasizing duality that are rooted in social position, but created through social interaction, are a key mechanism by which the potential of outsider-insider social positions can be activated and mobilized to influence change. We advance theory on social position generally by highlighting the potential for integrating a symbolic interactionist perspective—focused on role expectations—into Bourdieu’s theory of fields.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Duality and Social Position: Role expectations of people who combine outsider-ness and insider-ness in organizational change

Nigam

Sackett

Golden

2021

Organization Studies

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“…When new practices and ways of working conflict with core professional tenets, it can be quite challenging for professionals to accept them. Many studies show that because professionals have deeply held values and identities, they tend to strongly resist practices that clash with their professions’ key tenets (Edmondson, Bohmer, and Pisano, 2001; Hallett, 2010; Kellogg, 2019; Sandholtz, Chung, and Waisberg, 2019; Wiedner, Nigam, and da Silva, 2020). For example, a policy change in hospitals failed because doctors refused to do work, specifically asking patients about social problems that lead to health issues, that did not align with their professional norm of caring solely for medical needs (Kellogg, 2014).…”

Section: The Puzzle Of Professionals’ Individual Reinventionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unsurprisingly, because professionals have “deeply held” beliefs (Kellogg, 2014: 24), they tend to strongly resist practices that may conflict with their profession’s core tenets (Kellogg, 2019; Wiedner, Nigam, and da Silva, 2020; Anthony, 2021). Past literature has highlighted that strong external pressure is often needed—but not always sufficient—for people to accept practices that are antithetical to these core tenets.…”

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confidence: 99%

Rebooting One’s Professional Work: The Case of French Anesthesiologists Using Hypnosis

Bourmault

Anteby

2023

Administrative Science Quarterly

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Individuals deeply socialized into professional cultures tend to strongly resist breaking from their professions’ core cultural tenets. When these individuals face external pressure (e.g., via new technology or regulation), they typically turn to peers for guidance in such involuntary reinventions of their work. But it is unclear how some professionals may voluntarily break from deeply ingrained views. Through our study of French anesthesiologists who practice hypnosis, we aim to better understand this little-explored phenomenon. Adopting hypnosis, a technique that many anesthesiologists consider subjective and even magical, contradicted a core tenet of their profession: the need to only use techniques validated by rigorous scientific-based research. Drawing on interviews and observations, we analyze how these anesthesiologists were able to change their views and reinvent their work. We find that turning inward to oneself (focusing on their own direct experiences of clients) and turning outward to clients (relying on relations with clients) played critical roles in anesthesiologists’ ability to shift their views and adopt hypnosis. Through this process, these anesthesiologists embarked on a voluntary internal transformation, or reboot, whereby they profoundly reassessed their work, onboarded people in adjacent professions to accept their own reinvention, and countered isolation from their peers. Overall, we show a pathway to such reinvention that entails turning inward and outward (rather than to peers), a result that diverges significantly from prior understandings of professionals’ transformations.

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“…Most studies of occupational groups have focused on how established groups navigate changefor example, when they encounter technological shifts (Barley 1986, Nelson andIrwin 2014), regulatory change (Kellogg 2009(Kellogg , 2011aWiedner et al 2020), or peer-driven pressures (Howard-Grenville et al 2017). While questions of change within established occupations are fundamental to understanding occupational evolution, the question of how occupational groups form in the first place has received much less attention.…”

Section: Mandates and Jurisdictions In Occupational Creationmentioning

confidence: 99%

We’re Not Like Those Crazy Hippies: The Dynamics of Jurisdictional Drift in Externally Mandated Occupational Groups

Augustine

2021

Organization Science

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External actors often advocate for organizations to address a wide range of societal concerns, such as diversity, equality, and sustainability, and organizations have frequently responded by establishing new positions to oversee these demands. However, calls to address social problems can be broad and unrelated to an organization’s primary objectives, so the external mandates that underpin these new positions do not easily translate to clear task jurisdictions inside organizations. Furthermore, previous studies have found that the tasks that are pursued by occupations established through external pressure often diverge from what external groups had envisioned for these new roles. This study addresses the question of why this divergence occurs. It does so by examining the formation of the occupational group of sustainability managers in higher education. Through fieldwork, interviews, and analyses of longitudinal archival data, this paper uncovers the dynamics of jurisdictional drift and shows how jurisdictional drift unfolded first through sustainability managers’ confrontation of their jurisdictional ambiguity, and then through their efforts at performing neutrality, in particular by trading external Politics for internal politics and trading values for standards. Additionally, it uncovers how the sustainability managers attempted to partially realign their jurisdiction with their external mandate, but did so in a concealed manner. This study illuminates the process of how jurisdictions can come to drift away from mandates, highlights the importance of studying how mandates are translated into jurisdictions, and also furthers our understanding of the formation of externally mandated occupational groups.

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General Practitioners Are from Mars, Administrators Are from Venus: The Role of Misaligned Occupational Dispositions in Inhibiting Mandated Role Change

Cited by 7 publications

References 59 publications

Duality and Social Position: Role expectations of people who combine outsider-ness and insider-ness in organizational change

Duality and Social Position: Role expectations of people who combine outsider-ness and insider-ness in organizational change

Rebooting One’s Professional Work: The Case of French Anesthesiologists Using Hypnosis

We’re Not Like Those Crazy Hippies: The Dynamics of Jurisdictional Drift in Externally Mandated Occupational Groups

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