The pursuit of organizational change : becoming and being an agent for change

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2008."June 2008."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-148).This dissertation addresses two questions: How do employees become mobilized to initiate and drive change in organizations? How do managers draw on external and internal resources in introducing and sustaining change projects? I answer these questions using business process redesign (BPR) as a case of organizational change. To answer the first question I analyze the experiences of 57 employees selected to participate on one of seven change teams. I identify the amalgam of experiences through which employees, although not necessarily successful in changing their own organization, develop a commitment to working for change across organizations. In answering the second question, I consider how managers use the resources provided by promoters of BPR and the resources and circumstances of the firm. Drawing on data from the introduction of organizational change projects in five organizations and career interviews with 30 managers who began working on organizational change projects in the early 1990s, I find that the actors' relationships to the larger industry of BPR practitioners change with experience. Actors decouple themselves from the prescriptions, language, and tools provided by the BPR community and increasingly draw on their own experiences and local resources. There is one important exception. Organizational actors continue at relationship with the BPR community that allows them to sustain their ideological commitment to the principles of BPR. In answering the questions set out above, I reconnect isolated cases of organizational change with environmental forces and actors. I move between the experiences and struggles of organizational actors and the supports and possibilities offered up by actors in the economy-wide BPR industry. In creating this connection between organizational change and the environment, I reconceptualize change projects as more than a means of changing an organization.(cont.) They are sites of cultural production and reproduction. Whether or not organizations change, BPR projects have the potential to change people and produce actors who continue to reproduce BPR across organizations.by Ruthanne Huising.Ph.D

Constructing Consequences for Noncompliance: The Case of Academic Laboratories

We examine academic research laboratories as examples of intractable governance sites. These spaces often elude regulatory warnings and rules because of the professional status of faculty members, the opacity of scientific work to outsiders, and loose coupling of policy and practice in organizations. We describe one university’s efforts to create a system for managing laboratory health, safety, and environmental hazards, thereby constraining conventional faculty habit to ignore administrative and legal procedures. We demonstrate the specific struggles safety managers face in creating system responsiveness, that is, feedback to re-channel noncompliant laboratory practices. We show how faculty members are buffered from the consequences of their activities, thus impeding the goals of responsibility and accountability. We conclude by asking where such pockets of intractability reside in other organizations and whether the surrounding buffer, if there is one, may nonetheless paradoxically create an effective margin of safety.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0216815)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0518118)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0535870

The Erosion of Expert Control Through Censure Episodes

International audienceOrganizations depend on experts to oversee and execute complex tasks. When faced with pressures to reduce their dependence on experts, managers encounter a control paradox: they require experts to explicate the very knowledge and discretionary approaches that are the basis of their control for the purpose of undercutting this control. Experts rarely consent to such a situation; therefore, attempts to reduce dependence on experts and control their work are more often aspirational than actual. Drawing on an ethnography of an organization that was required by a government agency to transfer the work responsibilities of experts to employees throughout the organization, this paper describes how a network of actors developed a discursive, political process to renegotiate control of expert work practices. Through censure episodes, long-standing and largely successful expert practices were examined one by one and relabeled as problematic in relation to established goals. The constructed breaches opened expert practices to evaluation, questioning, and eventual delegitimation within the organization. This process depended on the introduction of new roles that revised dependencies and generated new resources. This paper contributes to the understanding of control in organizations by theorizing how the emergent, symbolic work of censure episodes are a means of gradually subverting expert control. Further, these struggles are reconceptualized as multiple-role negotiations rather than bilateral manager–expert struggles.<br/

To Hive or to Hold? : Professional Authority through Scut Work

International audienceThis paper examines how professionals working in bureaucratic organizations, despite having formal authority, struggle to enact authority over the clients they advise, transforming their right to command into deference to commands. Drawing on a comparative ethnographic study of two professional groups overseeing compliance in university laboratories, I identify how choices about their task jurisdiction influence each profession’s ability to enact authority over and gain voluntary compliance from the same group of clients. One group constructs its work domain to include not only high-skilled tasks that emphasize members’ expertise but also scut work—menial work with contaminated materials—through which they gain regular entry into clients’ workspaces, developing knowledge about and relationships with clients. Using these resources to accommodate, discipline, and understand clients, they produce relational authority—the capacity to elicit voluntary compliance with commands. The other group outsources everyday scut work and interacts with lab researchers mostly during annual inspections and training, which leads to complaints by researchers to management and eventual loss of jurisdiction. The findings show the importance of producing relational authority in contemporary professional–client interactions in bureaucratic settings and challenge the relevance of expertise and professional identity in generating relational authority. I show how holding on to, not hiving off, scut work allows professionals to enact authority over clients.<br/

The Erosion of Expert Control Through Censure Episodes

International audienceOrganizations depend on experts to oversee and execute complex tasks. When faced with pressures to reduce their dependence on experts, managers encounter a control paradox: they require experts to explicate the very knowledge and discretionary approaches that are the basis of their control for the purpose of undercutting this control. Experts rarely consent to such a situation; therefore, attempts to reduce dependence on experts and control their work are more often aspirational than actual. Drawing on an ethnography of an organization that was required by a government agency to transfer the work responsibilities of experts to employees throughout the organization, this paper describes how a network of actors developed a discursive, political process to renegotiate control of expert work practices. Through censure episodes, long-standing and largely successful expert practices were examined one by one and relabeled as problematic in relation to established goals. The constructed breaches opened expert practices to evaluation, questioning, and eventual delegitimation within the organization. This process depended on the introduction of new roles that revised dependencies and generated new resources. This paper contributes to the understanding of control in organizations by theorizing how the emergent, symbolic work of censure episodes are a means of gradually subverting expert control. Further, these struggles are reconceptualized as multiple-role negotiations rather than bilateral manager–expert struggles.<br/

Moving off the Map : How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates

International audienceThis paper examines how employees become simultaneously empowered and alienated by detailed, holistic knowledge of the actual operations of their organization, drawing on an inductive analysis of the experiences of employees working on organizational change teams. As employees build and scrutinize process maps of their organization, they develop a new comprehension of the structure and operation of their organization. What they had perceived as purposively designed, relatively stable, and largely external is revealed to be continuously produced through social interaction. I trace how this altered comprehension of the organization’s functioning and logic changes employees' orientation to and place within the organization. Their central roles are revealed as less efficacious than imagined and, in fact, as reproducing the organization's inefficiencies. Alienated from their central operational roles, they voluntarily move to peripheral change roles from which they feel empowered to pursue organization-wide change. The paper offers two contributions. First, it identifies a new means through which central actors may become disembedded, that is, detailed comprehensive knowledge of the logic and operations of the surrounding social system. Second, the paper problematizes established insights about the relationship between social position and challenges to the status quo. Rather than a peripheral social location creating a desire to challenge the status quo, a desire to challenge the status quo may encourage central actors to choose a peripheral social location.<br/

Moving off the Map : How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates

International audienceThis paper examines how employees become simultaneously empowered and alienated by detailed, holistic knowledge of the actual operations of their organization, drawing on an inductive analysis of the experiences of employees working on organizational change teams. As employees build and scrutinize process maps of their organization, they develop a new comprehension of the structure and operation of their organization. What they had perceived as purposively designed, relatively stable, and largely external is revealed to be continuously produced through social interaction. I trace how this altered comprehension of the organization’s functioning and logic changes employees' orientation to and place within the organization. Their central roles are revealed as less efficacious than imagined and, in fact, as reproducing the organization's inefficiencies. Alienated from their central operational roles, they voluntarily move to peripheral change roles from which they feel empowered to pursue organization-wide change. The paper offers two contributions. First, it identifies a new means through which central actors may become disembedded, that is, detailed comprehensive knowledge of the logic and operations of the surrounding social system. Second, the paper problematizes established insights about the relationship between social position and challenges to the status quo. Rather than a peripheral social location creating a desire to challenge the status quo, a desire to challenge the status quo may encourage central actors to choose a peripheral social location.<br/

Implications of Childcare Responsibilities for Workplace Performances & Interactions

International audienceScientists with childcare responsibilities are evaluated by their colleagues as less competent and committed. The flexibility stigma has been extensively documented; however, the processes and mechanisms through which the use of flexible work arrangements lead to the flexibility stigma has received less attention. In this theory development paper, we identify mechanisms, grounded in workplace observation, that explain why faculty members who adapt their schedules to care for children may experience stigma in the workplace. We analyze and compare the time control approaches of female and male professors in the physical and formal sciences with and without childcare responsibilities. We show the implications time control and allocation strategies have for social exchange – specifically performances and interactions – in the workplace. Women with childcare responsibilities allocate most workplace interactions and performances to "service science" in which they are seen contributing - teaching and serving – to their department. They perform their research activities primarily in private and outside the office. Men without childcare responsibilities allocate most workplace interactions and performances to "public science" in which they publicly interact with peers on topics of science. Men with childcare responsibilities combine service science and public science. In performing service science, women with childcare responsibilities experience isolation from peers and develop reputations around service and teaching work. This may in turn lead colleagues to view them as less committed and competent. We discuss potential implications for scientific productivity, connecting our findings to recent studies of gendered productivity, patenting, and scientific advisory board participation findings.<br/

Implications of Childcare Responsibilities for Workplace Performances & Interactions

International audienceScientists with childcare responsibilities are evaluated by their colleagues as less competent and committed. The flexibility stigma has been extensively documented; however, the processes and mechanisms through which the use of flexible work arrangements lead to the flexibility stigma has received less attention. In this theory development paper, we identify mechanisms, grounded in workplace observation, that explain why faculty members who adapt their schedules to care for children may experience stigma in the workplace. We analyze and compare the time control approaches of female and male professors in the physical and formal sciences with and without childcare responsibilities. We show the implications time control and allocation strategies have for social exchange – specifically performances and interactions – in the workplace. Women with childcare responsibilities allocate most workplace interactions and performances to "service science" in which they are seen contributing - teaching and serving – to their department. They perform their research activities primarily in private and outside the office. Men without childcare responsibilities allocate most workplace interactions and performances to "public science" in which they publicly interact with peers on topics of science. Men with childcare responsibilities combine service science and public science. In performing service science, women with childcare responsibilities experience isolation from peers and develop reputations around service and teaching work. This may in turn lead colleagues to view them as less committed and competent. We discuss potential implications for scientific productivity, connecting our findings to recent studies of gendered productivity, patenting, and scientific advisory board participation findings.<br/

Vicarious coding : breaching computational opacity in the digital era

Digital representations are ubiquitous in the workplace. Screen displays, forecasts, simulations, indicators, multi-dimensional models, figures, and images are increasingly central to work of all kinds. Representations are simultaneously transparent and opaque. They contain and reveal information about the organization. At the same time, they conceal the computational work used to convert data about the physical world into abstract depictions. Computational opacity is consequential when representations become misaligned with the physical world they depict. We examine how computational opacity can be breached, allowing non-programmers to repair misalignments between representations and the physical world. Drawing on an ethnography of a machine-shop floor, we show how operators develop practical computational literacy skills—the capacity to visualize and talk about physical objects and processes independent of them; to translate this noncomputational thinking and talking into computational symbols, syntax, structure, and assumptions; and to create computational solutions. We show how operators develop this skill vicariously, observing programmers as they solve problems. We contribute to understanding how, in an increasingly digitized workplace, those without programming capacities may decrease their dependence on programmers and increase their capacity to create and alter representations of the physical world