Cambridge Judge Business School article

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Guardian Public Leaders article

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Computer Weekly article

Computer Weekly article

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UK Authority article

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Computer Weekly article

There is a growing focus on achieving ‘openness’ in the design and transformation of organizations, in which the enabling role of ICTs is considered increasingly central. However, bureaucratic organizations with rigid structures continue to face significant challenges in moving towards more open forms of organizing. In this paper, we contribute to our understanding of these challenges by building on existing conceptualizations of openness as a form of boundary work that transforms by challenging both internal and external organizational boundaries. In particular, we draw on a performative view derived from actor-network theory to analyze a case study of ICT-based administrative reforms in a judicial system. Building on our case analysis, we develop a typology of the various roles that ICTs can play in both enabling and constraining ongoing boundary work within the context of their implementation. We thus present a view of ICT-enabled open organizing as a process where ICTs contribute to problematizing, shifting, and augmenting ongoing boundary work. This view highlights the inherently equivocal nature of the role of ICTs in transformations towards higher levels of openness.

The concept of “Government as a Platform” (GaaP) (O'Reilly, 2009) is coined frequently, but interpreted inconsistently: views of GaaP as being solely about technology and the building of technical components ignore GaaP's radical and disruptive embrace of a new economic and organisational model with the potential to improve the way Government operates – helping resolve the binary political debate about centralised versus localised models of public service delivery. We offer a structured approach to the application of the platforms that underpin GaaP, encompassing not only their technical architecture, but also the other essential aspects of market dynamics and organisational form. Based on a review of information systems platforms literature, we develop a Platform Appraisal Framework (PAF) incorporating the various dimensions that characterise business models based on digital platforms. We propose this PAF as a general contribution to the strategy and audit of platform initiatives and more specifically as an assessment framework to provide consistency of thinking in GaaP initiatives. We demonstrate the utility of our PAF by applying it to UK Government platform initiatives over two distinct periods, 1999–2010 and 2010 to the present day, drawing practical conclusions concerning implementation of platforms within the unique and complex environment of the public sector.

Guardian Public Leaders article

Guardian Public Leaders article

This article argues that the future of public services will be shaped increasingly by the evolution of global, Internet-enabled, digital platforms, with two distinctive technical and commercial features. First, use of open standards and architectures that separate standard business logic from supporting applications will allow government to become technology- and vendor-agnostic, freeing it from its overdependence on proprietary systems and suppliers. Second, over time, open standards and increased market choice will drive both innovation and progressive convergence on cheaper, standard "utility" public services. These two features will combine to create a powerful dynamic situation, driving disintegration of traditional "black boxed" technologies and services, traditionally organized around "systems integrators" and departmental structures, and their reaggregation around the citizen in the form of services. Such reaggregation is allowing progressively sharp distinctions between niche/innovative and commodity/standard offerings, supplied by a plural, innovative, and more cost-effective marketplace, with unprecedented implications for the way in which the state buys and deploys technology. We draw on a range of data from across public and private sectors to illustrate our argument and identify some key policy and implementation recommendations. © 2013 the Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved.

This essay seeks to draw attention to the near invisibility of subjective epistemology within organizational research, particularly within accounts of practice. The result can be an incomplete, depersonalised analysis that engages well with physical and social dimensions of organizational life, but which remains mute about this epistemological ‘missing third’: qualities such as tacit skill, personality, motivation, intention, and emotion. In response, the essay offers a detailed explanation of the objective and subjective components of practice, focusing in particular on the way in which these fuse together in the reflexive intentionality of motivated people. Building on this insight, the essay calls for a much closer integration of traditional sociological accounts of social generation that involve notions of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, with social psychological accounts of personal generation involving notions of subjective and objective, and builds an initial framework for linking the two fields of enquiry at the level of practice.

This paper argues that the ‘structurational tradition’ within interpretive information systems has revealed some useful aspects of the organizational implementation and use of ICT, but that usually this has been achieved at the expense of an intuitively convincing account of human motivation. Although Giddens’ ‘dimensions of the duality of structure’ is an important aspect of his thought, many IS studies have tended to focus almost exclusively on this model, in isolation from the broader canvas of his ideas. It is argued that such an approach offers an unbalanced and incomplete view of social interaction, which reflects neither organizational realities, nor Giddens’ wider theoretical position. In response, the paper resituates the structurational model within the broader context of Giddens’ work, offering researchers a practical framework with which to further sensitise their analyses to actors’ more biographical motivations. The explanatory power of this framework is illustrated with reference to the author’s own biographical experience as an IS consultant working for a major systems integrator in the early 1990s.

At a time when so-called theories of practice are enjoying unprecedented popularity within interpretive IS and organisational studies, this thesis argues that researchers’ use of such theories is too often hampered by a residual functionalism which restricts their ability to generate intuitively convincing analyses. It is argued that such theories – which include situated learning, activity theory, actor-network theory, and structuration - are actually ontologies of emergence, founded in various ways upon a relationship of duality between people, and the social systems of which people form a part.

The thesis argues that researchers who adopt an emergent ontology should thus demonstrate a greater commitment to ontological, epistemological and methodological clarity about concepts such as ‘knowledge’, ‘meaning’, ‘context’, ‘interpretation’, ‘motive’, ‘identity’, and organisational culture’, which are seen to comprise shared and non-shared components that combine fleetingly in the interpretive processes of individuals. Although the analyst’s ability to use theories of practice to generate insights at the institutional level remains important, it is argued that such analysis should be grounded in – and ultimately answerable to - the emergent activity upon which any practice-based ontology is built – or risk theoretical and methodological inconsistency.

The thesis is divided into three parts. Part One develops the broad foundations of the argument, combining a literature review with the development of positions on each of the concepts mentioned above, to develop an image of the individual-as-process which appears as authorial as it is reflexive. Non-organisational aspects of peoples’ narratives are seen as important motives for their behaviour within organisations, demanding a shift in focus from exclusively organisational ‘actors’ and ‘roles’, to ‘whole’, biographical individuals, working within an organisational setting.

Part Two builds upon these foundations, presenting two case studies in very different settings, using different methodologies, which demonstrate in different ways the advantages of engaging in committed fashion with the process of self. The first, a piece of action research conducted in a shanty town outside Cape Town, describes how explicit attention to the interpretive process at those points at which users interacted with a health information system allowed certain adjustments to be made which appeared to improve the level of meaning they were able to generate at point of interaction with the system. The second, an interview-based study of a community of practice within a London-based e-business unit of a major hardware and software multinational, underlines the importance of the little-explored concept of identity to achieving a full understanding of Lave and Wenger’s dynamic of situated learning.

Having demonstrated the ability of a focus on the process of self to illuminate hitherto relatively ignored aspects of organisational life, Part Three then examines the implications of this finding for the way in which activity theory, actor network theory, and structuration theory are applied within the IS and organisational fields. For each theory, a critique of existing approaches is followed by a proposed improvement to the way in which the theory might practically be applied, which both avoids the creeping structuralism to which this thesis has been sensitive and, it is argued, remains more faithful to the emergent ontology of the original concepts. Finally, a prominent study is chosen within each genre, in which the additional insights which might have been generated by the application of such a conceptual emphasis are explained.

It is argued that a key benefit of the approaches developed in this thesis may be the development of IS and organisational studies which are better able to address the role of human motive, and which appear more intuitively convincing to the reader as a result.