Rebecka Arman

The mutual constitution of legal environments and practices

Purpose – Institutional theorists treat law and regulations as external factors that is part of the organization’s environment. While institutional theory has been criticized for its inability to recognize the role of agents and to theorize agency, the growing literature on institutional work and institutional entrepreneurship, partially informed by and co-produced with practice theory, advances a more dynamic view of processes of institutionalization. In order to cope with legal and regulatory frameworks, constituting the legal environment of the organization, there are evidence of organizational responses in the form of bargaining, political negotiations, and decoupling of organizational units and processes. The purpose of this paper is to report how legal and regulatory frameworks both shape clinical practices while at the same time they are also informed by the activities and interests of professional communities and commercial clinics. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reports an empirical stu...

The sacred and the profane in life science work: The case of assisted reproduction laboratories

ABSTRACT Reproductive medicine and assisted reproduction therapies have been developed over the last decades resulting in over five million babies. The handling of human reproductive materials and patients is based on the ability to combine health care work and techno-scientific expertise in both the clinic and the laboratory setting. This study of Swedish assisted reproductive technology clinics demonstrates that the active day-to-day manipulation of human reproductive materials enact both the ‘profane’, through treating the embryos as raw materials in standardized procedures enabling economies of scale, and the ‘sacred’ through enacting a separation, the potential to human life, the patients ordeals, and seriousness. The enactment of the profane and the sacred is mostly balanced but at certain points in the work procedures, their intersecting becomes particularly salient. Such points provide opportunities for the study of the sense making of professionals in organizational grey zones, during techno-scientific activities.

Inspecting life: professional vision in assisted reproduction technology

A growing scholarship in organization studies has examined how visual practices are informed by and situated within organizational settings and routines. Using the concept of professional vision, this is a study of the visual work of embryologists selecting human embryos in the field of assisted reproductive technologies. The term professional vision accentuates how embryologists cope with a number of tensions to accomplish disciplinary objectivity in their work. The study shows how visual practices are simultaneously individual and collective. While there are internationally enacted standard protocols guiding the routine-based work, these are continuously modified as novel clinical data is reported. Therefore, the embryologists’ inspection of life needs to actively accommodate both standard cases and deviations therefrom. This ultimately renders the professional vision of embryology something other than an “exact science” but rather a fluid, partly improvised, subjective, and at the same time highly specialized, routinized aesthetic practice. The study contributes to the emerging scholarship on visuality and professional vision in organizations, specifically to how standards are used in such practices. In addition, the study adds to the organizational research on assisted reproduction technology.

Increasing commitment after downsizing: the role of involvement and voluntary redundancies

ABSTRACT Workforce reduction is often found to have a negative impact on the remaining workers. This study examines a case where organizational commitment increased among the remaining workers after a workforce reduction programme. Following the process in which the workforce reduction programme was implemented, the paper identifies several elements in the way the workforce reduction was implemented that may have contributed to the increasing commitment among the remaining workers. More specifically, the involvement of workers’ representatives, the way the workforce reduction was communicated, how the future of the workplace was framed and how workers were offered a choice to leave voluntarily, were identified as important for the remaining workers’ reactions. The paper thus contributes to previous research by adding to our understanding of how involvement and the nature of voluntary redundancies can affect the remaining workers, and can therefore also provide more specific recommendations to change managers of how to manage redundancies in a way that does not reduce the capability of the company in the future.