In this article, we introduce and discuss the potential benefits of structured shadowing, a distinct pedagogy in which the action-proximity of traditional unstructured job shadowing is supplemented by carefully designed pre-, intra- and post-shadowing pedagogical support. We suggest that structured shadowing is a promising yet under-utilized and overlooked pedagogy to enrich management learning and education. Drawing on an interview-based evaluation study of several cohorts of final-year undergraduates in a UK business school, we find that structured shadowing helps students to establish meaningful connections between theory and managerial practices, better appreciate management’s complexities and dispel existing myths and preconceptions. It also allows them to reflect on the types of managers they imagine or aspire to be and helps to model management as a reflective activity. Based on our teaching experience and our results, we argue that structured shadowing offers valuable lessons for our field. It helps to address the challenges of substance, contextual understanding and reflection, which we identify as central to current management education debates. We also acknowledge that while structured shadowing is a powerful resource, it demands significant investment and potential trade-offs, and may reflect certain professional privileges
Nicolini, Davide; Korica, Maja & Bharatan, Ila (2023)
How insights from the field of information behavior can enrich understanding of knowledge mobilization
Purpose
The authors review the literature on information behavior, an autonomous body of work developed mainly in library studies and compare it with work on knowledge mobilization. The aim is to explore how information behavior can contribute to understanding knowledge mobilization in healthcare management.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a narrative review using an exploratory, nonkeyword “double-sided systematic snowball” method. This is especially useful in the situation when the two traditions targeted are broad and relies on distinct vocabulary.
Findings
The authors find that the two bodies of work have followed similar trajectories and arrived at similar conclusions, with a linear view supplemented first by a social approach and then by a sensitivity to practice. Lessons from the field of information behavior can be used to avoid duplication of effort, repeating the same errors and reinventing the wheel among knowledge translation scholars. This includes, for example, focusing on sources of information or ignoring the mundane activities in which managers and policymakers are involved.
Originality/value
The study is the first known attempt to build bridges between the field of information behavior and the study of knowledge mobilization. The study, moreover, foregrounds the need to address knowledge mobilization in context-sensitive and social rather than technical terms, focusing on the mundane work performed by a variety of human and nonhuman agents.
This curated debate provides a discussion on impact and its relation to practice-based scholarship, i.e., scholarship grounded in the social theories of practice. Five experienced senior scholars reflect on conceptualizations of impact, how it can be created and disseminated, and on the role of practice-based scholarship in this process. The authors discuss the role of researchers as members of the academic system, their activities related to generating, developing, and challenging new theory, and their reflexive relation to the research context when explaining their research to stakeholders to create knowledge and thus, for impacting practice. To suggest ways of practicing impact, their contributions also conceptualize impactful theory and reflect on the relationship between the production and usage of knowledge. These insights are an important contribution to the debate on scholarly impact and provide critical guidance for impactful scholarly work beyond conventional concepts.
Nicolini, Davide & Mengis, Jeanne (2023)
Towards a Practice-Theoretical View of the Situated Nature of Attention
In this paper, we examine how a practice-theoretical perspective may complement and expand the central tenet of the attention-based view (ABV) that attention is contextually situated. We put forward three main arguments. First, the components that make a practice possible and that locate it in history and context (practice architecture) also prefigure a situated horizon of relevance and possibilities (pragmatic field of attention). Attention thus often befalls organizational members outside the realm of discursive consciousness as a consequence of being engaged in socio-material practices. Second, attention is situated at the crossroads of multiple practices, each with its practice architecture and local pragmatic field of attention. Organizational attention implies tensions, conflict, and contradictions and emerges from the interaction and negotiation of multiple individual and group pragmatic fields of attention. Finally, attention is situated in the temporal dynamics of sustaining and turning attention. This allows us to distinguish between inattention, dysfunctional distraction, and potentially productive attention turning. We argue that by focusing on the ordinary and routinized nature of attention, a theoretical practice view complements and enriches the ABV by offering a less voluntarist and top-down view and proposing a richer view of situatedness. A practice-theoretical approach also distributes attention among a broader set of elements, offering resources to theorize how these elements are connected. The approach also establishes a link between paying attention and caring, thus bringing emotions back into the study of organizational attention. In turn, the ABV helps the practice-theoretical perspective to recognize the central role of attention in organizational matters and the importance of engaging in full with the organizational unit of analysis when dealing with attention-related issues.
In the complex realm of ethical decision making, organizations are increasingly developing comprehensive ethical frameworks as guides. These frameworks prescribe ethical principles and decision-making processes to steer organizational actors toward addressing the elusive question of “what is the right thing to do?” in specific situations. However, the interplay between these prescriptive frameworks and collective processes of ethical sensemaking remains underexplored. Based on an extensive qualitative study within publicly funded healthcare organizations, we examine how organizational actors, confronted with the challenge of making exceptional funding decisions, enact an organizational ethical framework. Our findings reveal the manifold ways through which such a framework both streamlines ethical sensemaking and induces new and unexpected interpretive challenges. These challenges generate ethical equivocality, which decision makers seek to reduce through particular sensegiving interventions, and, on occasion, through problematizing the abstract principles prescribed by the framework, based on what is intuitively felt right in situ. We contribute to the literature by developing a conceptual model of three distinct modes in which organizational actors enact the prescriptions of an ethical framework. Our article sheds new light on the unintended consequences of using organizational ethical frameworks in real-world ethical deliberations.
This paper provides a comprehensive, integrative conceptual review of work on communities of practice (CoPs), defined broadly as groups of people bound together by a common activity, shared expertise, a passion for a joint enterprise, and a desire to learn or improve their practice. We identify three divergent views on the intended purposes and expected effects of CoPs: as mechanisms for fostering learning and knowledge-sharing, as sources of innovation, and as mechanisms to defend interests and perpetuate control over expertise domains. We use these different lenses to make sense of the ways CoPs are conceptualized and to review scholarly work on this topic. We argue that current debate on the future of work and new methodological developments are challenging the received wisdom on CoPs and offer research opportunities and new conceptual combinations. We argue also that the interaction between the lenses and between CoP theory and adjacent literatures might result in new theory and conceptualizations.
Nicolini, Davide & Korica, Maja (2021)
Attentional engagement as practice: A study of the attentional infrastructure of healthcare chief executive officers
In this paper, we investigate the attentional engagement of chief executive officers (CEOs) of large healthcare organizations in England. We study attention ethnographically as something managers do—at different times, in context, and in relation to others. We find that CEOs match the challenges of volume, fragmentation, and variety of attentional demands with a bundle of practices to activate attention, regulate the quantity and quality of information, stay focused over time, and prioritize attention. We call this bundle of practices the CEO’s attentional infrastructure. The practices that compose the attentional infrastructure work together to ensure that CEOs balance paying too much with paying too little attention, sustain attention on multiple issues over time, and allocate attention to the issues that matter, while avoiding becoming swamped by too many other concerns. The attentional infrastructure and its component practices are constantly revised and adapted to match the changes in the environment and ensure that managers remain on top of the things that matter to them. The idea of a practice-based attentional infrastructure advances theory by expanding and articulating the concept of attentional engagement, a central element in the attention-based view of the firm. We also demonstrate the benefits of studying attention as practice, rather than as an exclusively mental phenomenon. Finally, we contribute to managerial practice by introducing a set of categories that managers can use to interrogate their existing attentional practices and address attentional traps and difficulties.
Langley, Ann; Lindberg, Kajsa, Mørk, Bjørn Erik, Nicolini, Davide, Raviola, Elena & Walter, Lars (2019)
Boundary Work among Groups, Occupations, and Organizations: From Cartography to Process
This article reviews scholarship dealing with the notion of “boundary work,” defined as purposeful individual and collective effort to influence the social, symbolic, material, or temporal boundaries, demarcations; and distinctions affecting groups, occupations, and organizations. We identify and explore the implications of three conceptually distinct but interrelated forms of boundary work emerging from the literature. Competitive boundary work involves mobilizing boundaries to establish some kind of advantage over others. In contrast, collaborative boundary work is concerned with aligning boundaries to enable collaboration. Finally, configurational boundary work involves manipulating patterns of differentiation and integration among groups to ensure that certain activities are brought together, whereas others are kept apart, orienting the domains of competition and collaboration. We argue that the notion of boundary work can contribute to the development of a uniquely processual view of organizational design as open-ended, and continually becoming, an orientation with significant future potential for understanding novel forms of organizing, and for integrating agency, power dynamics, materiality, and temporality into the study of organizing.
Extended abstract, in S. Gherardi & D. Nicolini, eds, The Passion for Learning and Knowing. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Organizational Learning and Knowledge (2 vols.) University of Trento e-books, Trento
