Ansattprofil

Davide Nicolini

Professor II

Institutt for strategi og entreprenørskap

E-post davide.nicolini@bi.no

Publikasjoner

Vitenskapelige publikasjoner

Andre

Viser 5 av 10 publikasjon(er)

Artikkel Pedro Monteiro, Davide Nicolini, Ingrid Erickson, Lisa E. Cohen, Gina Dokko, Greetje F. Corporaal, Arvind Karunakaran, Beth A. Bechky, Siobhan O’Mahony (2025)

Beyond the Buzz: Scholarly Approaches to the Study of Work

Journal of Management Inquiry 34(1) s. 19-40 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926241261259

The place of work in organization studies and management has waxed and waned. Yet, today, social and technological developments have raised again interest in the study of work and this curated discussion brings together experts in key approaches to this topic. Seven contributions have been selected to provide a panorama of what we know about work while pointing to some uncharted territories worthy of future exploration. The contributions outline the principles behind and value of systemic, contextualized, or holistic view of work and report insights on how changes in some work components reverberate in its broader ecology. We hope this curated discussion will make us more aware of the collective journey scholars have charted so far while posing new questions and opening or re-directing new avenues of inquiry.

Artikkel Davide Nicolini, Maja Korica (2024)

Structured shadowing as a pedagogy

Management Learning Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/13505076231221531

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

Artikkel Yanis Hamdali, Lorenzo Skade, Paula Jarzabkowski, Davide Nicolini, Juliane Reinecke, Eero Vaara, Charlene Zietsma (2023)

Practicing Impact and Impacting Practice? Creating Impact Through Practice-Based Scholarship

Journal of Management Inquiry 33(3) Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926231219621

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.

Oversiktsartikkel Davide Nicolini, Maja Korica, Ila Bharatan (2023)

How insights from the field of information behavior can enrich understanding of knowledge mobilization

Journal of Health Organisation and Management 37(2) s. 194-212 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/JHOM-03-2022-0092

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.

Artikkel Davide Nicolini, Jeanne Mengis (2023)

Towards a Practice-Theoretical View of the Situated Nature of Attention

Strategic Organization 22(1) s. 211-234 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/14761270231183731

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.

Artikkel Emmanouil Gkeredakis, Jacky Swan, Davide Nicolini, Haridimos Tsoukas (2023)

What is the right thing to do? The constitutive role of organizational ethical frameworks in collective ethical sensemaking

Human Relations Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267231205165

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.

Artikkel Davide Nicolini, Ivor Pyrko, Omid Omidvar, Agnessa Spanelli (2022)

Understanding Communities of Practice: Taking Stock and Moving Forward

The Academy of Management Annals 16(2) s. 680-718 Doi: https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2020.0330

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.

Artikkel Davide Nicolini, Maja Korica (2021)

Attentional engagement as practice: A study of the attentional infrastructure of healthcare chief executive officers

Organization science 32(5) s. 1273-1299 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.1427

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.

Artikkel Ann Langley, Kajsa Lindberg, Bjørn Erik Mørk, Davide Nicolini, Elena Raviola, Lars Walter (2019)

Boundary Work among Groups, Occupations, and Organizations: From Cartography to Process

The Academy of Management Annals 13(2) s. 704-736 Doi: https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2017.0089

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.

Kapittel Bjørn Erik Mørk, Jasmina Masovic, Gail Greig, Davide Nicolini, Ole Hanseth (2018)

Contradictions as Opportunities for Innovation in the Case of TAVI

Controversies in Healthcare Innovation. Service, Technology and Organization s. 75-106 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55780-3_4

Viser 5 av 10 publikasjon(er)

Kapittel i oppslagsverk Martin Friesl, Christoph Brielmaier, Matthew Hurst, Davide Nicolini (2026)

Attention Based View

Elgar Encyclopedia of Strategy as Practice

Bokkapittel Davide Nicolini, David Seidl, Violetta Splitter (2025)

Schatzki’s Practice Theory and Strategy as Practice (Chapter 14) - Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice

Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice s. 249-266 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009216067.016

Davide Nicolini, David Seidl and Violetta Splitter provide yet another very useful theoretical perspective. They focus on Theodore Schatzki’s work and explain how it has been employed in strategy as practice research. This approach, rooted in Schatzki’s practice theory, is characterized by ‘flat ontology’, and it has proven to be a very fruitful source of inspiration and a theoretical foundation for strategy as practice scholars. Nicolini, Seidl and Splitter explain that this perspective gives ontological priority to strategy practices rather than practitioners, that it helps us to understand the embeddedness and situatedness of strategy practices in their social, institutional and organizational contexts, and that helps us to better understand linkages between bundles of practices in strategy and strategizing. This leads them to point to specific areas of application and offer implications and guidelines for future research using this approach in strategy as practice research.

Konferanseforedrag Renate Kratochvil, Davide Nicolini (2023)

The Role of Objects in Sustaining and Disrupting Professional Jurisdictions in Health Care (http://proceedings.aom.org/content/2016/1/14108.short)

Academy of Management 2016

Konferanseforedrag Davide Nicolini, Bjørn Erik Mørk, Jasmina Masovic (2016)

Towards a Rhizomatic Understanding of Medical Expertise. Insights from the Case of TAVI (http://proceedings.aom.org/content/2016/1/14199.shortI)

Academy of Management 2016

Konferanseforedrag Bjørn Erik Mørk, Gail Greig, Jasmina Masovic, Davide Nicolini (2016)

Entering unknown territories in healthcare: How emerging controversies and contradictions may facilitate learning and advance innovation

11th Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities Conference (OLKC)

Konferanseforedrag Bjørn Erik Mørk, Gail Greig, Jasmina Masovic, Davide Nicolini (2016)

Contradictions in medical innovation processes

8th International Process Symposium (PROS)

Rapport Silvia Gherardi, Davide Nicolini (2005)

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

University of Trento e-books, Trento.

Akademisk grad
År	Akademisk institusjon	Grad
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