Creating Meaning by Enacting Routines

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Creating Meaning by Enacting Routines

• Claus Rerup
• University of Western Ontario
• Martha S. Feldman
• University of California-Irvine

2
What Do We Know About Organizational Aspirations?

• Organizations have multiple aspirations / goals
• (Cyert and March, 1963 Locke and Latham, 1990)
• Aspirations define success and failure
• (Levinthal and March, 1981 Lant, 1992 Greve,
  1998)
• Organization members use social comparison to
  evaluate aspirations (March, 1994 Haunschild and
  Miner, 1997)
• Aspirations change (Cyert and March, 1963 Greve,
  2003)
• Aspirations change for exogenous and endogenous
  reasons
• (Nelson and Winter, 1982 March and Olsen, 1989
  Nickerson and Zenger, 2002)
• Important ambiguities exist in the relationship
  between aspirations, actions, and outcomes
• (March and Olsen, 1976 March, 1994).

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What Kind of Aspirations?

• Qualitative aspirations
• Greatest public university
• World class program
• Happiest place on earth
• Quantification part of the process of creating
  meaning (March, 1994 Greve, 2003)
• Our focus Qualitative aspirations
• Imaginative stretch aspirations

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Learning Lab Denmark

• New research organization formed in 1999/2000
• Observed by Rerup 2000-2005
• Data 110 interviews recorded transcribed,
  internal documents, 500 emails, participation in
  30 meetings, survey
• Analysis Theory condensation and expansion
  (Feldman, 1995)
• Two defining aspirations
• Mode2 organization
• To operate in a way that feels like a Hilton
  experience

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Lofty Aspirations

• Mode 2 organization
• Combine theory and practice of learning
• Communicate quickly and professionally
• Hilton experience
• Service-oriented, flexible, non-bureaucratic, and
  professional organization
• Paradoxes in aspirations
• Dialogic ideal of emergence
• Bureaucratic ideal of predictability

6
Frustrated execution

• Examples
• Two people show up for the same job
• People working without signed contracts
• People do not get promised salaries
• Contracts cannot be approved quickly enough for
  project-oriented organization

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Research Question

• How does LLD/an organization know when it is
  achieving these/its aspirations?
• How do aspirations come to have meaning?
• What role does action have in creating the
  meaning of an aspiration?
• What role does emotion have in creating the
  meaning of an aspiration?

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Creating meaning for aspirations

• Exogenous Processes
• Imitation
• Trial and error learning (Try something the
  environment tells you it isnt working try
  something else.)
• How do we know what to try?
• How do we know what the environment is telling
  us?
• Endogenous Processes
• Artifacts
• Actions
• Abduction

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Abduction?

• The process of guessing how to explain surprises
• A semiotic process giving meaning to signs
• In contrast to deduction and induction, which are
  different ways of evaluating guesses/hypotheses

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Abductive Process
Belief/ habit
Observation
Surprise/ trigger
Acritical indubitability mindless coding
Doubt/ motor
Imagination
Belief/ habit
Surprise/ trigger
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Abduction

• A critical step in imaginative theorizing
• Not just about research
• Imaginative theorizing is something we do when we
  create anything
• Imaginative theorizing taking place in LLD

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Abductive Process in LLD
Belief/ habit
We can create a mode 2 organization.
People take actions (hire people, send mail, make
budgets, etc.). .
Questions raised Why do some actions cause
satisfaction and others cause dissatisfaction? Wha
t enables us to do something constructive with
these reactions?
Surprise/ trigger
Frustration/ dissatisfaction
Pleasure/ satisfaction
Somethings not working. How can we change?
Doubt/ motor
Repair and change in ways of doing work.
This is working, Lets do it again/do more of
it/do it better..
Belief/ habit
Reinforcement and expansion in ways of doing work.
Questions raised What enables us to turn doubt
into changed actions? What changed actions enable
us to re-establish belief?
We know more about what a mode 2 organization is.
People take actions (hire people, send mail, make
budgets, etc.).
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Interim Observations

• An organization can use an aspiration to guide
  action even as the aspiration is being build
• Maybe there is no other way of creating an
  aspiration?
• All you need is something to start on (Weick,
  1998)
• LLD used the Mode2 and Hilton experience
  aspirations to guide the actions that created it.
• The organizational members of LLD were building
  the ship as they sailed it or creating the
  destination as they sailed to it.
• Abduction as a way of understanding the process
• Implications for design, planning, innovation,
  organizational change, leadership.organizatio
  nal learning

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Comments?
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Whats the Puzzle in the Data?
How do you come to know what the aspiration
means if you dont know how to enact / realize
it?
How do you know what to do if you dont know
what the aspiration means?
How does LLD know when it is acting in
ways consistent with aspirations?
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How Are We Going to Solve the Puzzle?

• Focus on organizational routines
• Why routines?
• Similar but not completely identical actions
  indicating how LLD made sense of the aspiration
  dynamic
• Other events also create meaning (Annual Agora)
• Routines are a way of tracking what the
  organization is becoming emerging
• Routines emphasize interdependencies between
  systems multiple
• What routines?
• Hiring routine
• Mailing routine

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LLDs Design Implications for Collective Action
- Hiring and Mailing Routine
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Standard Hiring Routine Basic no frills

• Evaluating needs
• Attracting candidates
• Screening applicants
• Selecting applicants
• Extending offers

Latitude for negotiation, conflict, improvisation
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Hiring Routine _at_ LLD

• Specified
• Font size and graphics in employment adds
  (Brand)
• Type of people NOT to hire
• Flowers on desk first day at work
• Post-hiring routine

• Unspecified / taken for granted
• What should be in a contract
• Type of people TO hire
• Where to look for salary levels and criteria
• Working hours when, how much and where to work

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Learning _at_ LLD

• How did these characteristics of the hiring
  routine create problems?
• What happened in response to the problems?
• How did the responses help to build the meaning
  of the aspiration?

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Some Problems With The Hiring Routine

• Two people show up for the same job
• People working without signed contracts
• People do not get promised salaries
• Contracts cannot be approved quickly enough for
  project-oriented organization

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Responses to These Problems Creating Meaning

• Aspirations require action/instantiation to have
  meaning.
• Instantiation takes the form of networks of
  practical doings
• LLD Who is doing what in the standard hiring
  routine?
• How is it done?
• Action helps LLD to understand that hiring is
  complex
• Networks are multiple and sometimes conflicting
• LLD Hiring in multiple consortia at the same
  time
• Actors need to be in multiple systems at once
  (Mead, 1932)
• Consortia, LLD, DPU, Danish University System.
• Action and meaning are simultaneous rather than
  sequential
• What does simultaneity mean?
• Hiring a candidate for LLD must also be
  acceptable to DPU

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Creating a Multi-Layered Network of Practical
Doings

• What is in the network?
• Routines
• Ostensive and performative aspects
• (Feldman, 2000 Feldman and Pentland, 2003
  Pentland and Feldman, 2005)
• Artifacts (Bechky, 2003)
• How are the pieces of a network connected and how
  do they become disconnected?
• Intelligibility constituted in relation to
  successes, failures (errors) and
  near-failures
• Emotion, surprise, imagination, belief and doubt

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Solving the Puzzle in the Data
The Hilton aspiration and the hiring routine are
evocative, elusive, and empty they need to
be filled out (enacted) with meaning and
action to facilitate common ground and
functional deployment
Enacting the hiring routine and the Hilton
aspiration involves the development of artifacts
and requires that the members of LLD be both
temporally and relationally in multiple systems
at once each performative iteration builds
the ostensive meaning of the aspiration and the
routine.
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Aspirations Are Intriguing

• Aspirations connect past, present and future
  emerging process theory
• (Mead, 1932 Emirbayer and Mische, 1998 Tsoukas
  and Chia, 2002)
• Empty labels waiting to be filled out
  aspirations become meaningful through action,
• Evocative labels that license imaginative agency
  (or inaction), sensemaking (or ), and hope (or
  despair),
• Elusive, dynamic categories that fall apart
  aspirations are rarely achieved and they require
  ongoing repair,
• Ongoing redrafting
• Aspirations as distributed and plastic
• Templates vs. metaphors
• (Winter and Szulanski, 2001 Grant and Oswick,
  1996)

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Collective Action Is Important to Realizing
Aspirations

• Collective aspirations as negotiated order
  (Schulman, 1993)
• Connecting things that happen as if they are the
  enactment of the aspiration
• E.g., whats happening in Iraq is movement toward
  democracy reducing threat of terrorism not
  civil war
• Rosa Parks as the person who refused to sit in
  the back of the bus (Lovell, 2003)
• How do we negotiate what we see as success and
  failure?
• Aspirations can predispose people to find common
  ground by translating the intractable or
  obdurate into a form that is more amenable to
  functional deployment (Weick, Sutcliffe and
  Obstfeld, 2005 411).