Organisations,identities and technologies in innovation management: The rise and fall of Bi-Media in the BBC East Midlands

This article proposes to develop an organisational analysis based on a combination of Medium Theory [18,25,27] and Actor Network Theory [23]. It uses the case study of a failed innovation to turn a regional BBC newsroom in Nottingham into a ‘Bi-Media’ newsroom, to explore the particular nature of media organizations. More specifically, it is used to argue that this innovation failed because its management misconceptualised three crucial aspects of ‘media practices': its technology, its actual organisation and the identifications that enable people to become ‘members’ of organisations. This misconceptualization is a particular form of ‘reification'. We show that organisations take a life of their own – not because of managerial discursive practices – but because they are technologically mediated. Such a mediated reification which in terms of management is understood as ‘the organisation’ is thus not simply a social construction or the consequence of managerial practices (such as organisational models, flow charts, or mission statements), but becomes actualised in the technological embodiments of organisational work, indissoluble from the ordering-practices that we commonly refer to as ‘management'. These technological embodiments manifest themselves as specific identities. This realisation enables us to explain why innovation management will not be effective if it relies solely on a change in social or technical flows, but that it requires a cultural reengineering of the technological embodiments that make up the lived experiences of organisational members and onto which they base their identities.