Subtle Redistribution of Work, Attention and Risks: Electronic Patient Records and Organisational Consequences

Based on an actor-network study of the way in which medical work in a hospital has changed after the introduction of an electronic patient record system, the paper addresses the question of organisational consequences of ICT. It describes how the introduction of electronic patient records (EPR) has occasioned redistribution of work, of organisational attention, and of risks. By comparing these findings to the public expectations of EPR and to the literature on organisational effects of EPR, it is argued that we need to shift from a theory of improvement to a theory of distribution in order to understand the way in which ICT affects work practices. The paper further argues that this shift also has implications for the theoretical understanding and practical management of design, implementation, and evaluation of ICT

Technologies of Organizational Analysis: Charting ‘Organization’ as a Practical and Epistemic Object

Historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison argue that any science “must deal with the problem of selecting and constituting ‘working objects’ as opposed to the too plentiful and too various natural objects” (2007: 19). In the paper, which is written for my inaugural lecture at Copenhagen Business School, I analyze the fate of the organization chart as a central working object in classic organization and management theory. By contrasting the way it was once used and discussed by classic authors such as Luther Gulick and Lyndon Urwick (1937) with the way organization charts were used in contingency theory and finally with their disappearance in contemporary organization studies and altered role in the selfrepresentation of modern organizations, I describe a history of changing forms of visualization in organization theory and managerial practice. I also discuss the practical and political consequences of this development

Provocative containment and the drift of social-scientific realism

International audienceThe post-World War II period gave rise to a large number of social-scientific techniques for investigating and intervening in social reality. A particular group of these, exemplified here by the experiments of Moreno, Lewin, Bion, Milgram and Zimbardo, worked by establishing suggestive micro-realities in which participants were exposed to, or experimented with, selected 'social problems'. We investigate the nature of these techniques - being simultaneously highly artificial and disturbingly realistic - and propose the notion of 'provocative containment' to understand their operation and effects. We point to five ingredients of their characteristic mode of operation - expressionism, incitement, trauma, distillation and technology - and argue that they do not serve to represent a simplified version of social reality, but rather to 'realize' particular forms of social life intrinsic to the medium of provocative containment