Discovery as abductive mechanism for reorienting habits within organizational change

Process studies of organizational and strategic change have drawn attention to the dynamics that generate such change, but we still know little about how discovery unfolds within change. A field study of efforts to create a new system for delivering inpatient medical care revealed that surprises and discoveries, and constructively oriented responses to them, occurred continuously throughout organizational change, not merely at the outset. Seeking to understand this empirical puzzle, I drew on the concept of abduction from pragmatism and organizational studies. This study makes two contributions to theory about the relation between discovery and change. First, I develop a framework that explicates the central role of discovery as an abductive mechanism that enables participants to reorient prevailing habits. Analyses reveal discovery to operate through what I call abduction sequences, or loosely connected and overlapping episodes of creative social activity. Three key motors and their attendant feelings drive discovery via abduction sequences: surprise, doubt and inquiry. Second, I provide a methodology for use in future research on discovery. Specifically, I propose abduction sequences as a useful analytic means for examining discovery within change and other inquiry processes, such as innovation and learning that generate fundamentally new ways of working.Published versio

Crafting organization

The recent shift in attention away from organization studies as science has allowed for consideration of new ways of thinking about both organization and organizing and has led to several recent attempts to \u27bring down\u27 organizational theorizing. In this paper, we extend calls for organization to be represented as a creative process by considering organization as craft. Organizational craft, we argue, is attractive, accessible, malleable, reproducible, and marketable. It is also a tangible way of considering organization studies with irreverence. We draw on the hierarchy of distinctions among fine art, decorative art, and craft to suggest that understanding the organization of craft assists in complicating our understanding of marginality. We illustrate our argument by drawing on the case of a contemporary Australian craftworks and marketplace known initially as the Meat Market Craft Centre (\u27MMCC\u27) and then, until its recent closure, as Metro! &Dagger; Stella Minahan was a board member and then the Chief Executive Officer of the Metro! Craft Centre.<br /

Composing qualitative research

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Central Questions of Anonymization: A Case Study of Secondary Use of Qualitative Data

Anonymization—the removal of identifying information from data—is one way of preparing data for secondary use. This process has not received much attention from scholars, but close examination shows that it is full of methodological, ethical and theoretical tensions. Qualitative research focuses on how people live and act in very particular, situated contexts. Removing identifying information also, inevitably, removes contextual information that has potential value to the researcher. We propose to present a case study of working with anonymized data on the research project, Knowledge Utilization and Policy Implementation, a five-year program funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. This project involves the secondary use of qualitative data sets from multiple separate research projects across Canada. Based on this case study, we provide useful recommendations that address some of the central questions of anonymization and consider the strengths and weaknesses of the anonymization process. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs050129