Challenging construction project management institutions: the role and agency of BIM actors

The use of building information modelling (BIM) has opened up for new roles. Previous studies on BIM roles focused on their duties, formal responsibilities and legitimacy, but few studies pay attention to how BIM actors (BIM coordinators and strategists) act to support increased BIM usage. Applying the theoretical construct of institutional work, this paper aims to create an understanding of the role and agency of BIM actors. Based on observations and semi-structured interviews with BIM actors and managers, the findings show: (1) purposive actions of BIM actors to promote and diffuse new BIM practices; (2) tensions between creating new BIM practices and maintaining existing construction management institutions; (3) BIM actor as an interface between the BIM technology and its users. Focusing on the BIM actor’s role and agency gives insights into the hard process of changing and/or disrupting traditional construction management institutions and creating new practices arising from increased digitalization

Conceptualizing historical organization studies

© 2016 Academy of Management Review. The promise of a closer union between organizational and historical research has long been recognized. However, its potential remains unfulfilled: The authenticity of theory development expected by organization studies and the authenticity of historical veracity required by historical research place exceptional conceptual and empirical demands on researchers. We elaborate the idea of historical organization studies-organizational research that draws extensively on historical data, methods, and knowledge to promote historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both disciplines. Building on prior research, we propose a typology of four differing conceptions of history in organizational research: History as evaluating, explicating, conceptualizing, and narrating. We identify five principles of historical organization studies-dual integrity, pluralistic understanding, representational truth, context sensitivity, and theoretical fluency-and illustrate our typology holistically from the perspective of institutional entrepreneurship. We explore practical avenues for a creative synthesis, drawing examples from social movement research and microhistory. Historically informed theoretical narratives whose validity derives from both historical veracity and conceptual rigor afford dual integrity that enhances scholarly legitimacy, enriching understanding of historical, contemporary, and future-directed social realities

Failure or success? Defensive strategies and piecemeal change among racial inequalities in the Brazilian banking sector

We analyze how Brazilian Black Movement organizations and banks deployed different mechanisms like cooperation, cooptation, and confrontation that generated affirmative action initiatives in the banking sector at the beginning of this century. Black movement organizations triggered an institutional change by connecting fields and exploring a constellation of strategies. However, Brazilian banks adopted defensive strategies aiming to accommodate their interests. We find that only piecemeal change occurred, as the field’s structures – resource distribution and power – remained unscratched. We conclude by noting how the success of social movement strategies can depend upon the framing and sense-giving work that social movements conduct in their continuous jockeying activity toward incumbents

The Sleep/Wake Cycle is Directly Modulated by Changes in Energy Balance.

STUDY OBJECTIVES: The rise in obesity has been paralleled by a decline in sleep duration in epidemiological studies. However, the potential mechanisms linking energy balance and the sleep/wake cycle are not well understood. We aimed to examine the effects of manipulating energy balance on the sleep/wake cycle. METHODS: Twelve healthy normal weight men were housed in a clinical research facility and studied at three time points: baseline, after energy balance was disrupted by 2 days of caloric restriction to 10% of energy requirements, and after energy balance was restored by 2 days of ad libitum/free feeding. Sleep architecture, duration of sleep stages, and sleep-associated respiratory parameters were measured by polysomnography. RESULTS: Two days of caloric restriction significantly increased the duration of deep (stage 4) sleep (16.8% to 21.7% of total sleep time; P = 0.03); an effect which was entirely reversed upon free feeding (P = 0.01). Although the apnea-hypopnea index stayed within the reference range (< 5 events per hour), it decreased significantly from caloric restriction to free feeding (P = 0.03). Caloric restriction was associated with a marked fall in leptin (P < 0.001) and insulin levels (P = 0.002). The fall in orexin levels from baseline to caloric restriction correlated positively with duration of stage 4 sleep (Spearman rho = 0.83, P = 0.01) and negatively with the number of awakenings in caloric restriction (Spearman rho = -0.79, P = 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate that changes in energy homeostasis directly and reversibly impact on the sleep/wake cycle. These findings provide a mechanistic framework for investigating the association between sleep duration and obesity risk.Wellcome Trust, National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, European Research Council, Bernard Wolfe Health Neuroscience Fund, Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant IDs: PBLAP3-145870, P3SMP3-155318), European Society of Endocrinology (Grant ID: IESP), German Research Foundation (Grant ID: TR-SFB 654, B01), NeuroFAST consortium which is funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) (Grant ID: 245009)This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, LLC via http://dx.doi.org/10.5665/sleep.609

Machina ex Deus? From Distributed to Orchestrated Agency

In this chapter, the author draws on a historical case study of the Australian wine industry to explore variations in collective agency. The inductively derived process model illustrates the emergence of a new profession of scientific win- emaking, which unfolds in three phases. Each phase is characterized by a dis- tinct form of agency: distributed agency during the earliest phase, coordinated agency during later phases, and orchestrated agency during consolidation. In addition to exploring the temporal shifts in agency, the study includes a detailed analysis of the early stages of distributed agency, examining how col- lective agency is achieved in the absence of shared intentions

Ideology and moral values in rhetorical framing:How wine was saved from the 19th Century Phylloxera Epidemic

Extant organizational research into crises has focused on the efforts of different actors to defend and legitimate their ideologies towards particular actions. Although insightful, such research has offered little knowledge about the moral reasoning underlying such action. In this paper, we explore how moral reasoning from different ideological viewpoints can lead to polarized debates and stalemate within the context of ecological crises. We apply our conceptual framework in an analysis of the 19th century French phylloxera epidemic. Drawing upon this analysis, we argue that, by adapting their moral reasoning, opposing stakeholder groups could maintain their underlying ideology, while at the same time pragmatically changing their actions towards the crisis. We discuss the theoretical implications of our analysis for historical research in organizational studies and research on organizations and the natural environment

Research strategies for organizational history:a dialogue between historical theory and organization theory

If history matters for organization theory, then we need greater reflexivity regarding the epistemological problem of representing the past; otherwise, history might be seen as merely a repository of ready-made data. To facilitate this reflexivity, we set out three epistemological dualisms derived from historical theory to explain the relationship between history and organization theory: (1) in the dualism of explanation, historians are preoccupied with narrative construction, whereas organization theorists subordinate narrative to analysis; (2) in the dualism of evidence, historians use verifiable documentary sources, whereas organization theorists prefer constructed data; and (3) in the dualism of temporality, historians construct their own periodization, whereas organization theorists treat time as constant for chronology. These three dualisms underpin our explication of four alternative research strategies for organizational history: corporate history, consisting of a holistic, objectivist narrative of a corporate entity; analytically structured history, narrating theoretically conceptualized structures and events; serial history, using replicable techniques to analyze repeatable facts; and ethnographic history, reading documentary sources "against the grain." Ultimately, we argue that our epistemological dualisms will enable organization theorists to justify their theoretical stance in relation to a range of strategies in organizational history, including narratives constructed from documentary sources found in organizational archives. Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved

Open-system orchestration as a relational source of sensing capabilities: Evidence from a venture association

Research on innovation networks has highlighted the pivotal role that actors with more prominence and power, such as hub firms, may play in orchestrating the activities of other network members along a collective innovation effort. Our study examined the undertheorized, but no less important, type of orchestration that characterizes other organizations, such as business incubators and venture associations, who seek to support the dispersed entrepreneurial efforts of network members. We refer to this type as ‘open-system’ orchestration, as opposed to the commonly studied ‘closed-system’ type performed by hub firms. Our findings reveal how the processes of open-system orchestration differ markedly from those of closed-system orchestration, and detail how these processes influence the micro-foundations of network members’ sensing capabilities. By doing so, we also offer empirical substantiation and theoretical elaboration to the idea that dynamic capabilities might not reside exclusively inside firms, but could be co-created relationally with other parties in the business ecosystem

Career Resourcing and the Process of Professional Emergence

We theorize a career resourcing process that explains how individuals can create a new profession. Using historical archives, we trace the emergence of health services research as a new research profession through the career actions of early practitioners. We find that career resourcing can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession by: 1) a process of accretion, where people pursuing fulfilling careers generate resources that contribute to institutionalization, or 2) institutional work to deliberately build the professional community and infrastructure. We contribute to research on institutional change by specifying career actions that can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession, and by developing theory that accounts for the motivations and the means of individuals to act in ways that result in the institutionalization of a new profession