Giovan Francesco Lanzara

Formative Contexts and Information Technology: Understanding the Dynamics of Innovation in Organizations

Most accounts of computer-based innovation in organizational settings assume a naive picture of organizational change, overlooking events, features, and behaviours that, though unexpected and puzzling, may be the sources of inventions, new knowledge, new organizational routines and arrangements. The ambivalent, untidy, and often unpredictable character of IT-based innovation and change is hardly captured, even by more recent theoretical approaches that have nevertheless provided a deeper understanding of the complex interaction between technology and organizations. Based on field observations of the failures and successes during a major systems development effort in a large European cornputer manufacturer, we tell a different story: We submit that failures at innovation, surprises, and a whole range of related phenomena can be accounted for by introducing the notion of formative context, that is, the set of institutional arrangements and cognitive imageries that inform the actors’ limited learning, irrespective of their strategies, interests, espoused theories, and methods. Still, we suggest, plenty of opportunities for innovation lie in the open, pasted-up nature of formative contexts and a new vision of design based on ‘context-making’ interventions can bring them to light.

Between transient constructs and persistent structures: designing systems in action

Abstract On-line observation and tracking of design processes reveal that design practices often display surprising features that defy our understanding, descriptions, and planning capabilities. Systems tend to be fragmented, untidy and unpredictable, often turning the designers’ setting and practice into a “swamp”. Drawing on stories of system development projects the author highlights the role of transient constructs as dynamic carriers of knowledge and effective vehicles for sensemaking. Transient constructs help resolve the dynamic tension between stability and change in design processes. On the one hand, given their unfinished and makeshift character, they allow for variability, online experimentation, and cognitive transactions; on the other hand, they may occasionally coalesce into more stable and persistent structures, which are continuously reconfigured by a never ending activity of bricolage .

Technology and The Courtroom: An Inquiry into Knowledge Making in Organizations

Recent theories of knowledge management have offered a functionalist understanding of knowledge creating dynamics in organizations. Their focus is on the role of knowledge assets as a determinant of competitive performance. However, the presupposition that knowledge can be managed or treated as an objective commodity seems to overlook the highly interactive, provisional and controversial nature of knowledge-oriented phenomena in organizations. By deviating from the mainstream, we conduct a phenomenological inquiry into knowledge making within the setting of courtroom trials. Evidence is provided by in-depth case studies carried out in six Italian courtrooms adopting videocassette recording (VCR) technology as a tool for recording and storing the proceedings of criminal trials. The behavioural responses of courtroom actors confronted by the intrusion of an alien technology in a highly institutionalized and resilient setting are particularly relevant for the study of knowledge in organizations. They reveal the highly controversial, pasted up and medium-specific features of organizational and professional knowledge systems. Rather than being the product of smooth conversion processes, knowledge in organizations is the outcome of inquiry, controversy and bricolage, resilient as a whole, but subject to local disputes, experiments and reassembling. Based on the findings of the cases, our account points towards a view of organizational knowledge as a dynamic, heterogeneous ‘assemblage’ characterized by ongoing transformations and reconfigurations.

Self-destructive processes in institution building and some modest countervailing mechanisms

Why is institution building difficult? Why does it often turn out to be self-destructive? And how does it take place in spite of its difficulties? Extending an analytical framework developed by James March (1991), this paper tries to tackle these questions by examining the dilemma between the exploration of alternative institutional arrangements and the exploitation or refinement of current ones. Institution building is viewed as a problem of adaptive intelligence and learning in the intertemporal allocation of resources. Some basic self-destructive processes and failure cycles associated with the exploration/exploitation dilemma are identified and discussed; implications are drawn for four distinct domains: competency, self-interest, identity, and trust. In the second part of the paper three basic modes of institution building are illustrated: focal points, increasing returns, and institutional bricolage. These are shown to be modest but viable mechanisms for countervailing self-destructive dynamics and for building institutions.

Building digital institutions: ICT and the rise of assemblages in government

The encounter between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and institutions generates phenomena that invite us to reframe our ways of looking at the organisational structures and at the overall institutional fabric of our society. Markets, corporate firms, public agencies and governments increasingly rely upon technology for collecting, producing, processing, and exchanging information (Benkler, 2006; Kallinikos, 2006). In many public domains, similarly to what has occurred in markets, it has become more and more difficult to do without technology in the production and delivery of services to the citizens. Public sector providers, from healthcare to education and justice, increasingly depend on large information infrastructures for their operations (Hanseth, 2000; Hanseth and Lundberg, 2001), and larger and larger components of the public sector are regulated by ICT standards and protocols. Although in the public sector we do not yet have the equivalent, for example, of the computer trading systems of the financial markets or the corporate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems of industry, ICT produces specific structural changes and arrangements in the public domain. What an institution or administration can do depends more and more on the technical and architectural choices that are made at the level of the technology. Technology is gaining a new centrality in the configuration of political and economic space at the local and global level, becoming itself a political object (Barry, 2001).

The Institutionalization of Knowledge in an Automotive Factory: Templates, Inscriptions, and the Problem of Durability

This paper focuses on the process of institutionalization of technical and organizational knowledge in the work setting. Drawing on a rich qualitative study, we apply an inscription—delegation model to the analysis of knowledge dynamics in a greenfield automotive plant. In particular, we depict knowledge institutionalization as a recursive process that involves the progressive writing, enactment and reproduction of a generative template or code within a stable medium. We first reconstruct the chain of transformations by which agency and knowledge are embedded into a variety of technical and organizational artifacts, leading to the creation of a cognitive and institutional order. We then focus on the frictions and tensions that can emerge in the transformations, and we discuss problems of vulnerability and durability that may arise in the maintenance and reproduction of such order.

Reshaping Practice Across Media: Material Mediation, Medium Specificity and Practical Knowledge in Judicial Work

Material mediation and medium specificity are constitutive dimensions of a practice, having critical implications for the constitution of practical knowledge and the forms of institutionalization. This article explores their critical importance in a bureaucratized professional setting. Based on research findings from an in-depth study of the introduction of video-recording technology in criminal courts, the article investigates what happens in a practice when practitioners migrate to a different medium to perform their work. The findings indicate that when the practice is characterized by high medium specificity, the new medium may cause disruption in the domain of expertise, affecting the familiar objects, tools, routines and representations of the practice. In their efforts to make sense of the new medium and integrate the new work tool, practitioners reshape their practice by directly engaging with the medium and questioning the grounds of their domain of expertise. The article discusses the phenomenology of disruption and redesign, draws implications for judicial work and, more broadly, contributes to an understanding of how practices and practical knowledge are entangled with material mediation.

Identity, Institutions, and New Work Roles: The Case of a Green Field Automotive Factory

In this article, the authors draw on institutional theories of organizations to account for the dynamics that shape workers’ agency and identity during the construction and the operation of a green field automotive factory. Based on a detailed field study, they try to understand the mechanisms that first led to the rise and institutionalization of a specific model of workers’ identity and then caused its subsequent, largely unexpected, collapse. In addressing the link between identity and institutions, the case emphasizes the regulative and constitutive influences of institutions, the role of sense making and cognitive processes in shaping workers’ agency and identity, and the factors leading to the erosion of established institutional practices.

Building Governance Capability in Online Social Production: Insights from Wikipedia

This article investigates a form of governance that makes online social production possible. Drawing on the concepts of capability and routine, we develop a dynamic, process-oriented view that departs from past research focused on static comparative analysis. We theorize that online social production systems develop a collective governance capability to steer the process of integrating distributed knowledge resources to the production of value. Governance mechanisms emerge from individual and collective learning that is made possible by new technology, and they evolve over time, as routines are developed to respond to new problems faced by a growing production system. Using Wikipedia as a paradigmatic example of online social production, we characterize governance as an evolving, enabling and embedded process and discuss implications for a dynamic theory of governance.

The Circulation of Agency in Judicial Proceedings: Designing for Interoperability and Complexity

The central concern of this chapter is the assessment of the technical and institutional conditions that support or hinder the circulation of legal agency, i.e. the capability for agents to produce legal and administrative effects across national borders, media, and functional domains. Dynamic and interactive complexity is acknowledged as a critical factor that hinders the circulation of agency and the effective delivery of judicial e-services across Europe. I spell out the multiple sources of complexity that arise in the design of e-services in the domain of civil justice, both at the national and the pan-European level. I set my analysis within the broader issue of the design of large-scale systems and infrastructures and argue that interoperability requirements must be complemented by the equally critical requirements of system adaptability and evolvability. Finally I propose the twin design principles of maximum feasible simplicity and maximum manageable complexity that should be followed when developing e-government services and systems.