Organization Studies

This paper analyses how people’s subjectively construed identities are disciplined by, and appropriated from, their talk about organizational routines. Identity work, we argue, is not just an expression of agency but also of power. Based on a study of a UK regional law firm, our research counter-balances understandings of professional lawyers as autonomous knowledge-workers, and emphasizes instead the extent of their subjection to disciplinary processes. It shows that power is intrinsic to discursive constructions of routine processes of organizing. We examine lawyers’ accounts of their time-keeping and billing routine, and how these both fabricated their identities, and how individuals said that they confronted, shifted and perverted organizationally sanctioned systems of meaning. The research contribution of this paper is to examine empirically and to theorize how discourse about routines both disciplines and is a resource for identity work.

This paper critically examines the claim made by previous research that companies exercise corporate social responsibility (CSR) by responding to stakeholder interests. It is based on a field study of the events following the announcement of collective redundancies at a Swedish high-tech company. Although more than 10,000 workers were dismissed, the company was accepted as being socially responsible. The study reveals that this outcome was the result of a process whereby corporate representatives managed to enrol and mobilize a network of actors into being faithful to, and defending, their definition of social responsibility. This indicates that a company can assume an active role in the construction of the same network of actors that it is asked to respond to and impose upon other actors its own definition of what it means to be socially responsible. As a result, the translation of CSR within the network of actors may reinforce the powerful position of the company, rather than curb it.

How do influential practices initially emerge? Bourdieu’s work offers an approach to answering this question and connecting local micro and field-level macro phenomena. We empirically build on this framework to analyse how the practice of using vegetables as gastronomic ingredients emerged in the field of haute cuisine at three-star chef Alain Passard’s Arpège restaurant. Based on multilevel and longitudinal data, we describe the practice and account for its emergence based on Passard’s habitus and his position in the field of haute cuisine. Our research contributes to the practice-based literature by highlighting the complicity between the agent and the field, and it contributes to institutional theory-based studies by accounting for the genesis of a new influential practice initiated by an individual insider.

While the subject of interruptions has received considerable attention among organizational researchers, the pervasive presence of information and communication technologies has not been adequately conceptualized. Here we consider the way knowledge workers interact with these technologies. We present fine-grained data that reveal the crucial role of mediated communication in the fragmentation of the working day. These mediated interactions, which are both frequent and short, have been commonly viewed as interruptions — as if the issue is the frequency of these single, isolated events. In contrast, we argue that knowledge workers inhabit an environment where communication technologies are ubiquitous, presenting simultaneous, multiple and ever-present calls on their attention. Such a framing employs a sociomaterial approach which reveals how contemporary knowledge work is itself a complex entanglement of social practices and the materiality of technical artefacts. Our findings show that employees engage in new work strategies as they negotiate the constant connectivity of communication media.

Research dealing with governmental and managerial ideals and tools for transparency has observed how these tools co-create new types of blindness. It has documented the existence of three different types of blindness: blindness caused by power games, by cognitive limitations and blindness as a side effect of the categories applied. This paper puts forward a fourth type of organizational blindness in addition to the already documented ones, namely self-imposed blindness to potentially destructive information. This paper studies how relevant - but problematic - information is actively ignored and kept out of sight in the decision processes by looking at a specific case study involving the construction of a model intended to control, and render transparent, the quality of health services in Denmark. This paper outlines the forms of inattentiveness which make communication blind to information that could question the quality model. Five forms of inattentiveness are identified that function as answers to the question of how communication avoids actualizing relevant but also potentially destructive information. This study documents a considerable amount of blindness to potentially relevant themes and it points to activities that produce this blindness as they reduce the probability that potentially destructive subjects are actualized. Information is not only something organizations need, but may also be something they protect themselves against. In that case, the forms of inattentiveness may be a function that forms organizational processes.