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.

Demands for involvement in IT governance no longer stop at the executive suite. They now make their way all the way up to the boardroom. So what to do? In this chapter, I suggest that boards of directors faced with demands to engage in IT governance take a measured, focused approach, rather than adopt wholesale current recommendations for board level IT governance.
This measured approach includes keeping IT governance activities close to the action – close to business processes, to value creation and to profit-and-loss responsibilities. It also includes monitoring issues that matter at board level, staying well informed about the role of IT for the organization and the industry, making sure that strategic processes integrate IT issues, and ensuring that IT governance activities are designed for dialogue and sensemaking, not only for monitoring and control.
The chapter also highlights factors that influence board level involvement in IT governance and points to the key difference between non-executive boards (the norm in for example the U.K. and Sweden) and boards that include internal directors (the traditional U.S. model). This distinction is crucial given the substantial American influences on current IT governance trends.

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.