Magnus Mähring

In this chapter we address some of the challenges associated with thinking and researching movement, or temporal flow. We take the position that we as scholars, even as we pursue research adopting an ontology of ‘becoming’, tend to be trapped within a vocabulary developed and/or appropriated within an actor-centric ontology. This vocabulary tends to performatively enact the world as consisting of boundaries, entities, actors, and categories, risking that we lose sight of the temporal flow of material-discursive practices that we might have set out looking for. To address this, we identify some of the ways in which this slippage from the temporal back to the spatial can occur and provide an overview of concepts—building blocks of a vocabulary—that can help us remain focused on the temporality and flow of becoming. We also provide two illustrations of how these concepts can be used in ethnographic field research and what the performative consequences of the use of these concepts can be. Finally, we discuss how experimenting with vocabulary can help us decentre actors and follow the agentic flow of practices, attend to temporal conditionalities and contingencies, and ask different questions in order to find new answers. That is, to think movement.

What happens when an organization form that has emerged in one context is brought into a different context? In this paper, a longitudinal field study approach is used to explore how Hewlett-Packard (HP) molded open source software development (OSSD) into a proprietary software development approach called “Progressive Open Source” (POS). With the help of actornetwork theory, we understand this as a process of translation and find that some central characteristics of OSSD where lost in the translation into POS while other characteristics were gained.

How and when does IT contribute to the performance of the firm? Does IT provide competitive advantage? Why is IT so difficult to understand and manage? Does it have to be that way?
This chapter provides a condensed discussion of some key mechanisms in the dynamic relationship between IT, business performance and competitive advantage. It does so by employing a conceptual view that link IT resources, business processes and organizational capabilities. An underlying theme of the chapter is that managers need to have a rich understanding of how IT resources are transformed into business performance in order to adequately manage IT and integrate IT issues into strategic processes and governance activities. Knowing that IT contributes to business performance is simply not enough, because the complexity inherent in the task of transforming IT into business performance is not disappearing anytime soon. The discussion provided in this chapter is intended to contribute to a richer understanding of the transformation process.

What can an organization do when it is faced with demands to improve, but lacks the capabilities necessary to conduct improvement work? This chapter suggests that – under these circumstances – technology-related organizational change can be conducted not as an orderly and balanced process but rather as a re-balancing act. Such a re-balancing act focuses one organizational resource or capability at a time and shifts focus to the next area when visible improvements are achieved.
Based on a case study of digital radiology implementation, we also find that with such an approach, pushing organizational change by implementing technology ahead of changes in processes, structures and resources might work.
With this re-balancing approach, technology-related change becomes emergent rather than pre-planned, pragmatic rather than principled and improvisational rather than structured. The process also does become somewhat precarious; prerequisites for and consequences of this change approach are therefore discussed.