Elena Raviola

Bringing Technology and Meaning into Institutional Work: Making News at an Italian Business Newspaper

In this article we investigate the role of technology and meaning in the institutional work of newsmakers. By analysing ethnographic data from an Italian business newspaper undertaking a project integrating the print and online newsrooms, we show how technology makes certain actions possible – and even proposes action – for the journalists, in their enactment of the institution of business news. Drawing on Callon’s notion of agencement and Battilana and D’Aunno’s conceptualization of human agency in institutional work, our analysis shows that action is taken in the interaction between humans and non-humans, and changes in technology might trigger institutional work. The institutional work of journalists is performed by means of both old and new technologies; if new technologies trigger institutional work by proposing new actions that need to be made meaningful by the journalists, old technology functions as a ‘law book’, where the institution of business news is inscribed. The journalists then use this ‘law book’ to interpret the new actions.

EXPLORING ORGANIZATIONAL FRAMINGS

This article aims to investigate the way in which the relationship between journalism and business management has been framed in newspaper organizations over the last 20 years. Departing from the wide literature in media studies on the opposition between journalism and management in newspapers, I examine here how newspaper industry leaders construct their organizational framing of the relationship between journalism and business management. Drawing on interviews with industry association leaders and conference documents between 1986 and 1998 and between 2008 and 2009, three ways of framing this relationship are identified: business management supporting journalism, journalism supporting business management and mutual support. The article analyses the way in which each of these frames works, by leveraging on broader cultural beliefs, affording calculations for appropriate actions and producing overflows. The analysis suggests three main conclusions: firstly, different organizational framings coexist in time and space; secondly, they represent different times (i.e. past, present and future) quite consistently; thirdly, technology has an important role in understanding and narrating the interplay between their representations of different times.

Performing boundary work: The emergence of a new practice in a hybrid operating room

This paper addresses the processes of boundary work, in relation to the introduction of new technology, unfolding during the emergence of new medical practices. Inspired by Gieryns fluid and practical view of boundaries and boundary work, and by Actor-Network Theorys description of scripting processes, we study the processes of negotiating and (re-)constructing boundaries in order to reveal both the interactions between different kinds of boundary work and their situatedness in the context of the emerging practice. We conducted a longitudinal and qualitative study of a generic Hybrid Operating Room at a Swedish university hospital, where sophisticated imaging devices are combined with open surgery procedures in a single room; consequently, medical requirements regarding radiology, surgery and anesthesia, as well as the specificities of the new technology, all need to be met at the same time. The study shows how the visibility of boundaries is a result of as well as a condition for boundary work, how boundary work is a dynamic and iterative process, and how it unfolds in a recursive relationship between practice and boundaries.

Digital technologies and a changing profession: New management devices, practices and power relations in news work

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate what role particular new management devices play in the development of the news profession in an organizational setting shifting to new technologies. Design/methodology/approach This is studied through of observations of work practices in the newsroom and through documentary research and qualitative interviews with managers, editors, and other professionals. Findings It is shown that management devices such as the news table and the news concept are central to the reorganization of news work, as they realize managers’ strategies, just like they produce new practices and power relationships. It is shown that the devices produce increased collaboration among journalists and interaction between managers and output journalists, that mundane work and power is delegated to technological devices and that news products are increasingly standardized. Practical implications The wider implications of these findings seem to be a change in the journalistic profession: TV news journalism is becoming less individualistic and more collective and professionalism becomes a matter of understanding and realizing the news organization’s strategy, rather than following a more individual agenda. Originality/value The paper’s originality lies in showing that profession and management are not opposed to each other, but can be seen as a continuum on which journalistic and managerial tasks become intertwined. This is in contrast to previous research on news work. Furthermore, the paper’s focus on devices opens up for conceptualizing power in the newsroom as distributed across a network of people and things, rather executed by managers alone.

The logic of practice in the practice of logics: practicing journalism and its relationship with business in times of technological changes

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the workings of institutional logics in practice, by focusing in particular on the interplay between material, practical and linguistic dimensions of practices. In other words, drawing on Bourdieus sens pratique, the paper explores the logic of practice in the practice of logics through a six months full-time ethnographic study at Il Sole-24 Ore, the largest Italian financial newspaper, between 2007 and 2008. An original conceptual framework is developed to analyse how the logic of journalism is enacted vis-à-vis that of advertising in a setting in which an old technology for news production – print newspaper – coexists with a new one – website – and thus encounters between new and old technological possibilities make workings of institutional logics particularly visible. The findings point out different mechanisms of institutional work dealing with actions that, made possible by new technological possibilities, are potentially, but not necessarily classified as divergent from institutional logics.

Book Review: The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social MediaTurcoCatherine J.The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social MediaNew York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016. 272 pp. ISBN: 978 0 2311 7898 3.

Sometimes it feels like reading the right book just at the right time in the right place. Reading Turco’s The Conversational Firm across the years 2016 and 2017, while visiting a US university trying to deal with the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump as US president and reflect on the role of social media in a new political landscape, has felt just like this. The whole world around me passed through those pages. When, just few weeks after, social media as well as newspapers got filled with more or less popular traces of a recently and sadly disappeared Zygmunt Bauman and of his “liquidity” (Bauman, 2006), that feeling became even stronger and sharper. The Conversational Firm is about how traditional bureaucracy can be rethought in the age of social media. The book is an excellent ethnographic account of organizational life at TechCo, an American social media marketing company, willing “to rethink everything” and move to the very opposite of “the standard playbook for how you’re supposed to run a company”, as one of the executives says (p. 1). Weber (1922/1978) and his ideal type of bureaucracy becomes, thus, the main giant on whose shoulders Turco is standing. Although as university employees the practicing of a sort of social media conversational obsession seems rather like a peculiar experiment, Turco convincingly and consistently explains how TechCo was not “one unconventional firm”, but “actually representative of a broader phenomenon” (p. 184). Her ability to zoom in and out around TechCo is definitely one of the qualities that have made the local story of TechCo so telling to my reading. The storyline of Turco’s account is quite simple: social media allow firms to go beyond bureaucracy and organize work in new ways. What she called the conversational firm is characterized by organizing through open conversation. At an extreme, open conversation about pretty much everything and anything takes various forms and is important in itself, almost more than what is discussed. At TechCo, employees of any hierarchical rank can write a post on the internal wiki to openly discuss any topic of their choice, including the culture deck, the lack of organizational chart and other strategic decisions. All day long, they are “engaged in the silent din of digital conversation” on different and simultaneous chat rooms (p. 23). Most of them can come and go, eat and drink (even beer), take vacation, talk on social media as they please, under the so-called UGJ policy – Use Good Judgement – the only existing human-resource policy. Most interestingly, all this is not in the light of a democratic ideology of an anticorporate collective, but of “red-blooded” capitalism, as one of the founders warns Turco: “We do this because we think it’s good business, because we think it’s going to be more profitable in the long run” (p. 15). Turco has made openness the central dimension of her story, which describes different areas of openness and unfolds their consequences in practical organizational life. Openness becomes the 721671OSS0010.1177/0170840617721671 Organization StudiesBook review book-review2017