Invisible Social Infrastructures to Facilitate Time-pressed Distributed Organizing

How do complex societal demands and time constraints posed by distributed temporary organizing affect organizational communication? Extending Bowker and Star’s (2002) work on infrastructures, we introduce two context-specific ‘invisible’, social infrastructures: organizational and relational. We empirically assess their role in an international, multi-site ERP-software implementation. We investigated how these infrastructures shaped organizational activities, aligned discourses, created order, and prevented divergent behaviours. We found that mutually interdependent organizational and relational infrastructures strengthened social relationships and saved time by facilitating non-routine collaboration and organizational communication under geographic and temporal constraints. We argue that the conceptualization of (infra)structural and process dynamics will help researchers and practitioners understand and handle organizational communication in distributed temporary organizations

Shots fired! Why is switching between organisational practices so difficult?

Jan-Kees Schakel, Paul C. van Fenema and Samer Faraj study a covert operation by the Dutch polic

Infusing with ERP Systems: A Longitudinal Investigation of the Impact of Control and Empowerment

Organizations have made significant investments in ERP systems with the strategic expectation that employees will utilize this technology to enhance organizational performance. However, research indicates that ERP systems are under-utilized. In order to entangle the challenge of under-utilization, this paper addresses the impact of control and empowerment on infusion – the deep and comprehensive usage of an information system. We apply a longitudinal design with two measurements to research whether the level of infusion of ERP users changes over time, and if so to what extent. Moreover we hypothesize that ‘soft’ characteristics like the organizational position, organization commitment and trust influence the relation between control, empowerment and the level of infusion of the ERP user. A survey was conducted in a large public organization which has been using an ERP system for several years. A sample of 178 matched pairs (For T1 and T2) of ERP system users and their supervisors has been collected. In this research in progress we present the theoretical mechanisms and methodological framework we employed for the data collection

Towards Alliance Performance Management in Service Logistics

This study explores the management of stakeholder values for alliance success. A multiple-case study method is used to analyze – within six organizations attempting to form alliances – how the management of inter-organizational dimensions of stakeholder value adds to the success of an alliance business strategy. Our study focuses on the establishment of vertical service alliances within the Dutch maritime sector, including private-private as well as public-private initiatives. The findings point toward the usefulness of developing an inter-organizational success map. Because of its comprehensive multi-stakeholder orientation, a success map can be used by alliance managers to understand management’s considerations, including the trade-offs among an alliance’s various performance drivers. This new conceptual thinking can enhance research and best practices on inter-organizational design

Latent organizing for responding to emergencies: Foundations for research

Time and again, many organizations and their staff members must respond to unexpected catastrophes like hurricanes (e.g., Katrina), virus pandemics (e.g., COVID-19), or other major emergencies. As a result, some organizations allow their employees to respond to external emergencies by engaging in response actions for a limited time, like in the case of emergency response teams. The latter teams consist of employees that act as emergency response officers who can respond to floods, train crashes, or other emergencies. Emergency response teams constitute an example of so-called latent organizing (LO) in the preparation for and response to any (unpredictable) future emergency. While latent organizing is ubiquitous in a societal and professional sense, it has hardly been studied in the organization design literature. In this paper, we develop a research agenda for studying LO. LO serves to prepare for and respond to emergencies, but otherwise remains largely dormant and inactive. When it is inactive, host organizations use the LO’s human and other resources for their own gainful purposes. Resources for LO are thus organized in a quasi-permanent fashion, one that is rather latent until activated by an emergency. We further develop the construct of latency to explore how effective LO can be designed and facilitated. In addition, we develop a research agenda for future work in this area