Anna Essén

How do actors overlook uncomfortable information? We add to the understanding of how potential problems can be ignored over long periods, in spite of recurrent warnings. Ignoring then becomes a dynamic process of responding to evolving ignoring ‘threats’ or triggers by combining knowledge-seeking and knowledge avoidance in ways that must be continuously legitimated, both in one’s own eyes and in those of relevant parts of the environment. Drawing on a longitudinal case study, we find that ambiguity-juggling – mutually supporting acts foregrounding and backgrounding ambiguity – constitute a key element of such ignoring work. Our study adds to the literatures on strategic or wilful ignorance and ambiguity management by providing a novel explanation for how actors dynamically mobilize motives for ignoring and thereby navigate uncomfortable information that evolves over time. As we show, sustained forms of ignoring involves interactions between shifting ignoring triggers, adaptive ignoring work, and evolving states of organized ignorance. This conceptualization contributes to the ignoring literature by extending current accounts of the ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘how much’, and ‘who’ of ignoring, as well as its outcomes.

Healthcare innovation is often portrayed as beginning with the introduction of new technologies. Yet, in many settings, substantial innovation work occurs well before any technological solution is selected or built. This study examines how early design work, prior to the adoption of digital tools, reconfigures innovation processes in a nurse-led innovation initiative within a large public hospital system. Drawing on an ongoing qualitative case study of a regional nurse-led innovation program in Sweden, the study analyzes how frontline nurses, nurse managers, and innovation leaders collectively articulate problems, stabilize ideas, and translate experiential knowledge into organizationally actionable innovation proposals. Based on interviews, observations of meetings and workshops, and project documents, preliminary data analysis shows that early design activities such as problem framing, storytelling, visualization, and cross-professional dialogue play a critical role in shaping which ideas gain legitimacy, how they travel across organizational levels, and what kinds of technological solutions later become feasible. The findings highlight three key dynamics. First, early design work enables nurses to transform situated workarounds into communicable innovation objects. Second, these practices reconfigure communication between clinical and managerial actors, shifting innovation authority without formal changes in hierarchy. Third, early design decisions constrain downstream technological choices, effectively pre-configuring innovation outcomes before tools are introduced. By foregrounding the communicative and organizational work that precedes technology adoption, this study contributes to research on innovation processes, technology-in-practice, and healthcare organizing. It invites scholars to reconsider where innovation “begins” and to pay closer attention to the pre-technological phases through which ideas are collectively shaped, stabilized, and made organizationally viable.

Grand challenges such as climate change, global health crises, inequality, and biodiversity loss are persistent societal concerns rather than problems with clear endpoints or definitive solutions. Rather than being “solved,” these challenges must be continually engaged, managed, and navigated over time, as progress unfolds through ongoing efforts to mobilize action and coordinate across organizational and institutional boundaries. This ongoing engagement often proceeds in the absence of shared problem definitions, agreed-upon metrics, or stable criteria for success. This symposium brings together recent research on how organizations and institutions engage grand challenges when authority is limited, evaluations are contested, and expectations shift. The papers highlight that engagement is shaped by the social and institutional processes through which effort is mobilized, legitimacy is constructed, and value is assigned. Across cases spanning corporate pledges, meta-organizations, global evaluation systems, and prosocial certifications, the papers show how actors sustain collective action by recalibrating commitments, coordinating effort, and constructing legitimacy under contestation. Together, the symposium advances a process view of organizing for grand challenges by showing how legitimacy and value are continuously negotiated when formal authority and stable evaluation criteria are absent.


How Social Activism Shapes Corporate Sustainability Pledges

Author: Yeon Woo Cho; The George Washington University

How Western Norms Shape the Recognition of Non-Western Efforts

Author: Ryosuke Yokoya; The George Washington University

Identity Work through Prosocial Certifications in Hybrid Organizations

Author: Hyeonjin Cha; Bucknell University

Meta-organizations Addressing Grand Challenges as Effort Integrating Systems

Author: John-Erik Bergkvist; Stockholm School of Economics

Author: Anna Essén; Stockholm University

Author: Magnus Mahring; Stockholm School of Economics

Mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIPs) are promoting the formation of 'mission arenas' (MAs) where actors collectively try to address societal 'wicked problems'. Yet, little is known about how attention — and subsequently time and effort — towards specific problems and solutions, and their geographical dimensions, unfolds within MAs. We conducted a multiple-case study of four MAs mandated and granted public funding to address self-articulated 'missions' in public health. We identify four distinct types of MA organisation with different attention-regulating properties that contribute to significant variation in MAs' flexibility and breadth of attention. We propose a model explicating how all four MA organisations regulate attention in ways that impede future attention to regional problems and solutions — a finding that serves to problematise assumptions about attention in the MOIP literature.

The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in the workplace raises critical questions on how to regulate these technologies within organizations. GenAI technologies generate excitement but also present significant ethical and legal issues, compelling organizations to self-regulate in the absence of comprehensive governmental regulations. Although the emerging field of regulation and information technology (IT) provides a foundation for exploring rulemaking in relation to new technologies, the unique trajectories of GenAI remain underexamined. Through a field study of a leading European business school, we trace how an organizational group without technological expertise assumed responsibility in this context. Our preliminary findings reveal how rulemaking around GenAI evolved through the contingent interactions between practices, rules, and technology, where rule-makers transitioned from preventing unwanted uses by “copying” existing regulations to crafting distinct, tailored rules and finally facilitating learning to promote new, wanted uses. Throughout this journey, the rule-makers grappled with the challenge of regulating an emergent technology for which they lacked initial expertise and the envisioned usages and risks were constantly shifting.

Both research and public discourse have recently drawn attention to the downsides of algorithmic decision-making (ADM), highlighting how it can produce biased and discriminatory outcomes and also pose threats to social justice. We address such threats that emanate from but also go beyond algorithms per se, extending to how public agencies and legal institutions respond or fail to respond to the consequences of ADM. Drawing on a case study of the use of an ADM system in public school administration, we explore the practices through which public institutions avoided engagement with the detrimental consequences of ADM, leading to injustice. We provide a conceptual model outlining how organizational ignoring practices can lead to social and institutional blackboxing of an ADM system, engendering both social and legal injustice. Our work paves the way for interdisciplinary research on the multilayered blackboxing of ADM. We also extend algorithmic injustice research to include a legal dimension and provide practical implications in the form of a legal framework for ADM in the public sector.

Although digital technology (DT) is often introduced with the aim of enhancing organizational knowledge transfer and learning, these aims often fail to materialize. The information systems (IS) literature attributes such unexpected outcomes to inappropriate technology design and implementation, as well as to overuse, misuse, and non-use of technology. However, we know little about how actors misuse or fail to use technology and data, thereby failing to acquire and act upon the knowledge necessary to achieve organizational learning. Leveraging the literature on strategic ignorance, we explore how actors expected to use technology for learning purposes justify their non-engagement with it. Studying an implementation of a DT with the purpose of facilitating organizational learning on basis of provided data in health care, we identify seven ignoring justifications through which the target users of the DT avoided key knowledge acquisition and knowledge-based action activities. These sensemaking behaviors accumulated to a state of collective passivity in relation to the DT. Our conceptualization contributes to and connects theories of organizational learning in the IS literature and strategic ignoring.

Digital healthcare platforms have enabled patients to receive healthcare in ways that were impossible previously-for example, by providing a "safer" way to meet, as underscored by the Covid-19 pandemic. This article investigates whether older and younger primary care users display behavioral differences on digital healthcare platforms. The article adopts a mixed-method approach in which one-way ANOVA analysis on a sample of 152 000 patient journeys was combined with qualitative interview data. The findings highlight significant differences in usage between elderly and younger patients. The elderly spends more time during use-for example, during anamnesis, onboarding, and in queues. We also outline how the key antecedent factors that are most central to platform usage, such as perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, digital maturity, and trust, play out in the elderly user context. The study contributes to the nascent literature on digital healthcare platforms and the postadoption usage of information and communication technologies by the elderly. The article also outlines research implications in the area of DHPs and mHealth for elderly users, and it discusses the practical implications for both platform owners and healthcare professionals, where platform design and information management are particularly important for elderly users.