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CM B143 - Organizational innovation, coordination technology, and the transformation of work* "NOT ESTABLISHED"

Faculty
Kjeld Schmidt
Course Coordinator
Kjeld Schmidt
Prerequisite/progression of the course
There are no prerequisites for taking this course – it is open to all students curious about the pitfalls and prospects of transforming the organization of business processes work practices.
Course content, structure and teaching
This course develops the students’ competencies with the objective of engaging in the processes of organizational innovation and transformation of work practices centered on the development of coordination technologies such as, e.g., workflow systems, production planning and control systems (ERP, MRP), organizational calendar systems, document management systems, project management systems, electronic patient records.
Coordination technologies are often seen as a vehicle for organizational change. However, the failure rate of such interventions is often very high, perhaps close to 50%. A major cause of this is that such organizational change typically involves transformations of work practices, and in highly complex settings (e.g., professional work, distributed settings) the changes may have unanticipated repercussions and sometimes quite adverse effects.
For these and related reasons, in-depth work place studies have gained increasing prominence in organizational thinking, practical as well as academic. This is manifested in the ongoing interest in operational methods of organizational intervention such as ‘socio-technical’ experiments, ‘business process reengineering’, ‘participatory design’, and ‘user-driven innovation’, as well as in the surge of social-science studies of technology and technological change in the broad field of Organization Theory and in the emergence of new paradigms devoted to studies of work practices, such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).
A key feature of this development, the concept of ‘work practice’ has acquired an important role as a means of highlighting critical aspects of work processes that are otherwise easily forgotten or marginalized in organization theory:
  • ‘invisible work’, i.e., officially unrecognized activities that practitioners routinely perform to get the job done;
  • embodied competencies, dispositions, ‘tacit knowledge’ ‘professional perception’, ‘habitus’;
  • material artifacts, i.e., not only the ‘tools of the trade’ but also the myriad of official and unofficial artifacts that play a crucial role in coordination and integration of distributed activities: their construction, evolution, distribution, propagation;
  • rules, procedures, classification schemes, notations, conventions: their construction, evolution, distribution, propagation, material form.
In the course, students will develop a grasp of these and other analytical perspectives and concepts by working with actual cases studies reported in the literature (and/or presented in lectures) and by undertaking their own mini-projects. In the course of this work, students will acquire competencies for systematically investigating and analyzing work practices in complex settings with a view to grounded and responsible intervention in transformations of work practices.
The teaching will be based on a combination of lectures, guest and student presentations, exercises, and case discussions. The students will develop their analytical skills by applying the theoretical and methodological perspectives to these different cases studies.
The course's development of personal competences
In addition to the analytical competencies, students will have the opportunity to develop an appreciation of the —often unexceptional but typically surprisingly sophisticated — competencies of ordinary practitioners as routinely manifested in their daily work.
Learning Objectives
By the end of the course the participants should be able to: demonstrate their familiarity with key analytical concepts and theories presented and discussed in the course, compare/contrast these analytical concepts and theories, use them in analyzing specific work settings, and be able to critically assess the applicability of these concepts and theories to processes of organizational innovation and transformation of work practices centered on the development of coordination technologies.
Type of examination, exam aids and assessment
4-hour individual written exam (open book).
Recommended literature
The curriculum draws mainly on ethnographic and similar studies of work practices in complex settings The literature will be made available via an online collaborative workspace and will include the following articles or book chapters:
  • Barley, Stephen R.; and Gideon Kunda: ‘Bringing work back in’, Organization Science, vol. 12, no. 1, January-February 2001, pp. 76-95.
  • Bittner, Egon: ‘Objectivity and realism in sociology’, in G. Psathas (ed.): Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applications, John Wiley & Sons, New York, etc., 1973, pp. 109-125.
  • Garfinkel, Harold; and Egon Bittner: ‘“Good” organizational reasons for “bad” clinic records’ (1967). In H. Garfinkel: Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall, Englewood-Cliffs, New Jersey, 1967, pp. 186-207.
  • Harper, Richard H. R.; and John A. Hughes: ‘What a f—ing system! Send ’em all to the same place and then expect us to stop ’em hitting: Managing technology work in air traffic control’, in G. Button (ed.): Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology, Routledge, London and New York, 1993, pp. 127-144.
  • Heath, Christian C.; and Paul Luff: ‘Collaboration and control: Crisis management and multimedia technology in London Underground control rooms’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): An International Journal, vol. 1, no. 1-2, 1992, pp. 69-94.
  • Latour, Bruno: ‘Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands’, in H. A. Kuklick and E. Long (eds.): Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. A Research Annual, vol. 6, JAI Press, Greenwich, Conn., 1986, pp. 1-40.
  • Lynch, Michael: ‘Theorizing practice’, Human Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 1997, pp. 335-344.
  • Normark, Maria; and David W. Randall: ‘Local expertise at an emergency call centre’, in H. Gellersen, et al. (eds.): ECSCW 2005: Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 18-22 September 2005, Paris, Springer, Dordrecht, 2005, pp. 347-366.
  • Randall, David W.; Mark Rouncefield; and John A. Hughes: ‘Chalk and cheese: BPR and ethnomethodogically informed ethnography in CSCW’, in H. Marmolin, et al. (eds.): ECSCW’95: Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 10–14 September 1995, Stockholm, Sweden, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1995, pp. 325-340.
  • Randall, David W.; Richard H. R. Harper; and Mark Rouncefield: Fieldwork for Design: Theory and Practice, Springer, London, 2007.
  • Schmidt, Kjeld: ‘Remarks on the complexity of cooperative work’, Revue des sciences et technologies de l’information. Série Revue d’intelligence artificielle (RSTI-RAI), vol. 16, no. 4-5. Paris, 2002, pp. 443-483.
  • Schmidt, Kjeld; and Ina Wagner: ‘Ordering systems: Coordinative practices and artifacts in architectural design and planning’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): The Journal of Collaborative Computing, vol. 13, no. 5-6, 2004, pp. 349-408.
  • Schmidt, Kjeld; Ina Wagner; and Marianne Tolar: ‘Permutations of cooperative work practices: A study of two oncology clinics’, in T. Gross, et al. (eds.): GROUP 2007: International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 4-7 November 2007, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, ACM Press, New York, 2007, pp. 1-10.
  • Star, Susan Leigh; and Anselm L. Strauss: ‘Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): The Journal of Collaborative Computing, vol. 8, no. 1-2, March 1999, pp. 9-30.
  • Suchman, Lucy A.: ‘Technologies of accountability: On lizards and airplanes’, in G. Button (ed.): Technology in Working Order. Studies of work, Interaction, and Technology, Routledge, London and New York, 1993, pp. 113-126.

Last updated by The electives office 22/06/2010