Organizational Theory

Épisodes du podcast

Professionals tend to strongly resist breaking from their professions’ core cultural tenets and it is unclear how some may voluntarily break from deeply ingrained views. Through our study of French anesthesiologists who practice hypnosis, we aim to better understand this little-explored phenomenon. Adopting hypnosis, a technique that many anesthesiologists consider subjective, contradicted a core tenet of their profession: the need to only use techniques validated by rigorous scientific-based research. Drawing on interviews and observations, we analyze how these anesthesiologists were able to change their views and reinvent their work. We find that turning inward to oneself (focusing on their own direct experiences of clients) and turning outward to clients (relying on relations with clients) played critical roles in anesthesiologists’ ability to shift their views and adopt hypnosis. Through this process, these anesthesiologists embarked on a voluntary internal transformation, or reboot, whereby they profoundly reassessed their work, onboarded people in adjacent professions to accept their own reinvention, and countered isolation from their peers.
BOURMAULT Nishani - NEOMA Business School |
The sociomaterial lens within IS research holds that agency should not be considered as a property solely of humans, or of technology, but instead arises from an emergent interaction between the two. This, emergent, account of agency deepens our understanding of unfolding IS practice, but its largely cognitive orientation remains naïve towards affectively-sensed motivations that also form part of this interaction. By implication, a sociomaterial perspective lacking an affective dimension offers an incomplete conceptualisation of information systems. In response, an affectively-informed negative ontology encourages IS researchers to extend their focus beyond the visible, to encompass how actors’ receptiveness towards material objects (discourses, technologies) is shaped by deep, affectively-derived motivations of which they are not focally aware, but which nonetheless acquire agency in contributing to a sociomaterial outcome. A central argument, and illustrative empirical vignette, demonstrate how the concepts of sociomateriality, affect, and negative ontology combine to offer researchers an enhanced understanding of relational agency. A discussion follows, exploring some initial ontological, epistemological and methodological implications of an affectively-informed negative ontology for IS research.
PIGNOT Edouard - EMLV |
Frustration is a very common negative emotional experience at work in a client environment that can occur in a variety of circumstances, usually present when our goals are blocked, and there is some degree of uncertainty about the causes of the problem, that we think this is unfair, that we can’t control it. What happens once you feel frustrated is that you can either “drop out” or persevere, and what you do in terms of actions to take may depend on personal and environmental factors.
GONZÁLEZ-GÓMEZ Hélena - NEOMA Business School |
I explore what happens when senior executives try to include non-expert, functional managers in the formulation and implementation of strategic actions marked by high levels of complexity and uncertainty. My findings will hopefully be relevant for anybody struggling to introduce new organizational practices in potentially hostile or sceptical corporate environments.
BARRON Andrew - TBS Education |
Affordances are possibilities for action offered by environment: objects, artifacts, technologies. This concept was created to complement the functional view with an emphasis on users’ actions, and help identify potential failures or negative effects which the other approaches have difficulty identifying.
NAVAZHYLAVA Kseniya - EMLV |
Boundaries are tools that demarcate entities or worlds, and they help maintain self-protection, emphasize legitimacy, and enable many other things to happen because of their capacity to separate or bring particular people, objects, and ideas into new configurations. Boundary work is activity related to creating, maintaining or configuring boundaries.
NAVAZHYLAVA Kseniya - EMLV |
Ethnography originates from joining the two words: ethnos, which is Greek for cultural group, and graph, meaning writing. John van Maanen described ethnography as “tales of the field”. Ethnography in general is devoted to describing ways of life of humankind. Organizational ethnography is a social-scientific description of group of people interacting together for a period of time within organizations, whether formal or informal.
NAVAZHYLAVA Kseniya - EMLV |