Coupling Performance Measurement and Collective Activity: The Semiotic Function of Management Systems. A Case Study

Theories about management instruments often enter dualistic debates between structure and agency: do instruments determine the forms of collective activity (CA), or do actors shape instruments to their requirements, or are instruments and concrete activity decoupled, as some trends of new institutionalist theory assume? Attempts to overcome the dualistic opposition between structure and activity stem from diverse sources: actors’ networks theory, structuration theory, pragmatism, theory of activity, semiotics. Performance measurement and management systems can be defined as structural instruments engaged in CA. As such they constrain the activity, but they do not determine it. Reciprocally, they are modified by the way CA uses them and makes sense of them. The central thesis of this paper will be that it is impossible to study the role of performance measurement as a common language in organizations independently from the design of the CA in which it is engaged. There is a not deterministic coupling between structure (i.e. management technical tools) and CA (i.e. business processes). The transformation of CA entails a transformation in the meaning of the “performance” concept, in the type of measurement required and in the performance management practices. The relationship between performance measurement and CA is studied here in the production division of a large electricity utility in France. The research extended over several years and took place when two new management systems were simultaneously implemented: a new management accounting system and an integrated management information system (ERP), both in the purchasing process. The new management accounting system was designed by the purchasing department; the new management information system was designed by the operational departments. Whereas the coherence between both projects could have been given by their common subordination to the rebuilding of CA (the purchasing process), their disconnection from concrete CA opened the possibility of serious dissonances between them. Both the new performance management system and the new ERP met difficulties to provide common languages, since the dimension of CA was taken for granted and consequently partly ignored in the engineering of both systems. When CA incurs radical transformations, actors’direct discursive exchanges about it, “collective activity about collective activity”, become necessary to ensure a flexible and not deterministic coupling between CA and new management systems. This reflexive and collective analysis of the process by actors themselves requires the establishment of “communities of process”, which can jointly redesign the CA and its performance measurement system. We conclude that performance measurement can be a common language as far as there is a clear and shared understanding of how CA should concretely take place and should be assigned to the different categories of actors.Business Process; Collective Activity; Community of Process; Management Instruments; Performance Measurement; Semiotics; Theory of Activity

A model of the dynamics of organizational communication

We propose a model of the dynamics of organizational communication. Our model specifies the mechanics by which communication impact is fed back to communication inputs and closes the gap between sender and receiver of messages. We draw on language critique, a branch of language philosophy, and derive joint linguistic actions of interlocutors to explain the emergence and adaptation of communication on the group level. The model is framed by Te'eni's cognitive-affective model of organizational communication

A normative approach to multi-agent systems for intelligent buildings

Building Management Systems (BMS) are widely adopted in modern buildings around the world in order to provide high-quality building services, and reduce the running cost of the building. However, most BMS are functionality-oriented and do not consider user personalization. The aim of this research is to capture and represent building management rules using organizational semiotics methods. We implement Semantic Analysis, which determines semantic units in building management and their relationship patterns of behaviour, and Norm Analysis, which extracts and specifies the norms that establish how and when these management actions occur. Finally, we propose a multi-agent framework for norm based building management. This framework contributes to the design domain of intelligent building management system by defining a set of behaviour patterns, and the norms that govern the real-time behaviour in a building

The Instrumental Genesis of Collective Activity. The Case of an ERP Implementation in a Large Electricity Producer

Collective activity should be a focal subject to study organizational dynamics, particularly in relation with the implementation of management systems such as ERPs. Collective activity is analyzed here as an ongoing dialogical construction by actors. It is always mediated by signs and particularly by instruments. To design and adapt collective activity, a reflexive dialogical exchange between actors, a “collective activity about collective activity”, mediated by instruments, is necessary: we call it “the instrumental genesis of collective activity”. We analyze the case of an ERP implementation at EDF, a large electricity company, in the purchase and procurement area of the production division. The design and implementation of the new system was not clearly viewed as the instrumental genesis of collective activity. Difficulties appeared particularly for cross-functional cooperation and for the construction of new professional profiles of competence. In the light of this case, we suggest that key conditions for the intelligibility and the actionability of collective activity are the establishment of communities and the hybridization of professional competences.Collective Activity; Collective Sensemaking; Community; Dialogical; ERP; Instruments; Instrumental Genesis of Activity; Interpretation; Sign

Process Based Management and the Central Role of Dialogical Collective Activity in Organizational Learning. The Case of Work Safety in the Building Industry

The notion of “process”, which describes the cooperation of heterogeneous practices and competences for a given output, has gained a major position in managerial practices for the last twenty years. This paper presents three ideas about organizational dynamics and processes and tests their applicability in the case of work safety improvement in a building company. The first idea is that the success of the process notion shows the central role of “conjoint” (as opposed to “common”) collective activity in organizational learning. Conjoint collective activity is dialogical (“acts speak”) and mediated by the utilization of semiotic systems (languages and technical and managerial tools). The second idea is that organizational learning is neither based on the actors’ individual subjectivity nor on the technological and objective artefacts engaged in the processes, but rather on the reflexive understanding and ongoing redesign of processes by the process actors themselves, in the frame of a reflexive inquiry, a “collective activity about collective activity” which is triggered and kept in motion by axiological judgments (process evaluation). The third idea is that the possibilities to configure processes in a given organization are multiple. The reflexive inquiry enacts a specific social, spatial and time configuration of the process, its “chronotope” in Bakhtin’s vocabulary, which plays a major role in the way actors can make sense of their collective activity and transform it. A longitudinal case study about work safety on the building yards shows that it is difficult to “control out” risk at work once designs have been established, in the frame of the “project execution” process, but it is easier to “design out” risk, when the actors of the process collectively design and redesign their collective activity, from the very first phases of a building project to the end. Therefore a major way to improve safety consists in extending the chronotope of the collective activity under consideration, overcoming the traditional separation between “design / planning” and “execution”. The conclusion summarizes the main theoretical, epistemological and practical issues involved in this research about conjoint collective activity.Business Process; Chronotope; Collective Activity; Collective Sense Making; Dialogism; Inquiry; Process-based Management; Safety Management

A Holistic Approach for Enriching Information Security Analysis and Security Policy Formation

Past literature has indicated the need for addressing information security from both the social and technical perspective. However, previous research has lacked in providing any clear direction for how these two perspectives can be brought together in a coherent or holistic manner to analyze information security in an organization. Thus, this paper develops a conceptual framework for identifying, bringing together, and interpreting the deep-rooted social and technical issues that pertain to information systems security. The framework is grounded in semiotics and is validated by the analysis of a specific case study. Findings in this research indicate that the social and technical elements of security can be brought together in a holistic manner via six layers of abstraction where each layer addresses deep-rooted issues that pertain to information security. The output of each layer is then used to inform other layers in a collaborative manner creating a final product that contains elements for enriching security analysis and enhancing security policy formation

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Grounding Functional Requirements Classification in Organizational Semiotics

An information system has its requirements rooted in organizational policies and behaviour, the complexity of which is governed by the hierarchy and the dependencies of the activities within the organization. This complexity makes requirements analysis for an envisioned information system an intricately challenging task. The absence of well‐defined body of knowledge clearly specifying which requirements must be looked for further deepens the challenge of requirements analysis. Though requirements are broadly classified as functional and non‐functional, a special concern is required for functional requirements as the information system is expected to meet the behaviour of the organization. We explore the role of organizational semiotics in extracting and analysing functional requirements for an envisioned information system. We also report the results of supervised learning to automatically extract the functional requirements from the existing available documentation

Fictionalism of Anticipation

A promising recent approach for understanding complex phenomena is recognition of anticipatory behavior of living organisms and social organizations. The anticipatory, predictive action permits learning, novelty seeking, rich experiential existence. I argue that the established frameworks of anticipation, adaptation or learning imply overly passive roles of anticipatory agents, and that a fictionalist standpoint reflects the core of anticipatory behavior better than representational or future references. Cognizing beings enact not just their models of the world, but own make-believe existential agendas as well. Anticipators embody plausible scripts of living, and effectively assume neo-Kantian or pragmatist perspectives of cognition and action. It is instructive to see that anticipatory behavior is not without mundane or loathsome deficiencies. Appreciation of ferally fictionalist anticipation suggests an equivalence of semiosis and anticipation