Search results
1 – 10 of over 10000The paper explores a management fashion within the Swedish Public Sector called intrapreneurships. Intrapreneurships became popular during a period of public debate on what forms…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper explores a management fashion within the Swedish Public Sector called intrapreneurships. Intrapreneurships became popular during a period of public debate on what forms of organizing are most suitable for the production of welfare. However, while the popularity of the model was short-lived, a few municipalities nevertheless constitute examples of where it was supported for a longer period. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the model became continuously legitimate having lost its appeal elsewhere.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper comprises a longitudinal analysis of two municipalities. Field-material was collected through qualitative methods including interviews (35 interviews, 42 interviewees) and document analysis.
Findings
The results draw attention to how management fashions become enduring. The metaphor of translation highlights how different professional actors in a local setting apply editing rules, and how they constitute work acquired for continuous translation of the model in order to make it legitimate, disseminated and supported. The study draws particular attention to the large number of actors involved in the editing process.
Originality/value
Besides an extended understanding of management concepts, to explain the anomaly of a long-standing management fashion, the paper illustrates the importance of acknowledging editing as processes and not process. A key notion in why intrapreneurships became legitimate is that professional actors edited the model differently in order to satisfy their desires and needs. This contradicts the more common case study design in translation studies, which seeks a unitary translation process, in a single local setting.
Details
Keywords
Andreas Diedrich and Gustavo Guzman
This paper aims to examine the complexities emerging in the attempts to develop a sophisticated IT-based knowledge management system (KMS) for sharing knowledge. Using…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the complexities emerging in the attempts to develop a sophisticated IT-based knowledge management system (KMS) for sharing knowledge. Using actor-network theory, the authors conceptualise this as continuous processes of translation, whereby heterogeneous human and non-human (e.g. technologies, methods and plans) elements are drawn together and mobilised to produce stable networks through associations between them.
Design/methodology/approach
The case study method was adopted using a narrative approach that studies the ways of organising work in organisations. Shadowing, field notes, diary studies and participant observation were the main data collection methods used.
Findings
The development and introduction of a KMS is a contingent and local process shaped by messy translations whereby the original idea, human and other non-human elements are reconfigured. By considering humans and non-humans symmetrically, the intended and unintended actions, and the role of unexpected events, this approach overcomes the deterministic view of human nature of the conventional KMS approaches.
Research limitations/implications
A conceptual framework is presented as a means to improve the understanding of the complex associations emerging within networks of people, objects and machines during the development and introduction of KMS.
Practical implications
The translation approach helps practitioners to consider their taken-for-granted assumptions about people, machines and the associations among them. This assists practitioners to uncover emerging conflicting issues between human and machines, among machines and among humans. Furthermore, this allows practitioners to recognise the different identities humans and non-humans take, overtime, as a result of emerging associations.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper lies in the use of alternative conceptual lenses to understand KMS development and introduction as processes of translation. Additionally, rather than exploring the success stories, it focuses on a failed attempt to introduce a KMS.
Details
Keywords
Florian Becker‐Ritterspach, Ayse Saka‐Helmhout and Jasper J. Hotho
With a few exceptions, the mainstream literature on learning in multinational enterprises (MNEs) has shown little concern for the transformational nature and the social…
Abstract
Purpose
With a few exceptions, the mainstream literature on learning in multinational enterprises (MNEs) has shown little concern for the transformational nature and the social constitution of learning. This paper aims to address this gap by drawing on Scandinavian institutionalism, social learning perspectives, and comparative institutionalism.
Design/methodology/approach
A comparative case study of two subsidiaries of the same MNE was conducted. The subsidiaries received similar practices from headquarters (HQ) but displayed contrasting learning outcomes.
Findings
It is shown that learning outcomes differed based on the varying extent to which practices were translated, which depends on the participation of local actors. The difference in participation pattern, in turn, is rooted in differences in the institutional context of the two subsidiaries.
Research limitations/implications
It is recognized that apart from institutional influences, organizational idiosyncrasies may be at work. In addition, the paper briefly considers the extent to which the notion of contrasting forms of capitalism is still useful when comparing the German and British institutional contexts.
Practical implications
The findings highlight the importance of involving employees in the translation of new practices. A challenge for MNEs is that learning of new practices can differ by institutional context. Where enabling institutional conditions are absent, conscious effort may be needed to ensure employee participation.
Originality/value
This paper highlights that MNE practice transfer rests on the translation of the practice content to the local context, and that subsidiary‐level learning processes may be institutionally embedded, thus establishing a link between subsidiary learning and the macro‐level context. As such, this paper both illustrates the value of social learning perspectives and the relevance of the work of institutionalists for understanding MNE learning processes.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this study is to explore the link between continuous improvement (CI) and dynamic actor associations through a case of lean thinking implementation in healthcare.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explore the link between continuous improvement (CI) and dynamic actor associations through a case of lean thinking implementation in healthcare.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper follows the qualitative case study strategy. Data were collected by interviewing (tape‐recording) managers and staff, analysing relevant written project material, and conducting non‐participant observations.
Findings
The findings suggest that the implementation of CI depends on the emergence of a “favouring” network from the dynamic associations between heterogeneous entities. This network aims at facilitating change leadership, establishing behaviour/culture prone to CI, and constructing a behaviour non‐resistant to CI needed for creating competencies for the continuous roll‐outs of such changes. Continuous translation is the underlying mechanism for establishing the favouring network.
Originality/value
The paper addresses the literature gap regarding the role of dynamic actor associations in shaping CI in a public sector context. It does not aim at generalising the results of the case study; it informs current theory by revealing that the success of CI deployment depends on the emergence of a CI‐favouring network, which will continuously transform opposing views into accepting CI.
Details
Keywords
Jan Pries-Heje and Richard Baskerville
The purpose of this paper is to use translation theory to develop a framework (called FTRA) that explains how companies adopt agile methods in a discourse of fragmentation and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to use translation theory to develop a framework (called FTRA) that explains how companies adopt agile methods in a discourse of fragmentation and articulation.
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative multiple case study of six firms using the Scrum agile methodology. Data were collected using mixed methods and analyzed using three progressive coding cycles and analytic induction.
Findings
In practice, people translate agile methods for local settings by choosing fragments of the method and continuously re-articulating them according to the exact needs of the time and place. The authors coded the fragments as technological rules that share relationships within a framework spanning two dimensions: static-dynamic and actor-artifact.
Research limitations/implications
For consistency, the six cases intentionally represent one instance of agile methodology (Scrum). This limits the confidence that the framework is suitable for other kinds of methodologies.
Practical implications
The FTRA framework and the technological rules are promising for use in practice as a prescriptive or even normative frame for governing methodology adaptation.
Social implications
Framing agile adaption with translation theory surfaces how the discourse between translocal (global) and local practice yields the social construction of agile methods. This result contrasts the more functionalist engineering perspective and privileges changeability over performance.
Originality/value
The use of translation theory and the FTRA framework to explain how agile adaptation (in particular Scrum) emerges continuously in a process where method fragments are articulated and re-articulated to momentarily suit the local setting. Complete agility that rapidly and elegantly changes its own environment must, as a concomitant, rapidly and elegantly change itself. This understanding also elaborates translation theory by explaining how the articulation and re-articulation of ideas embody the means by which ideas travel in practice.
Details
Keywords
This paper compares the research traditions of organizational translation studies and adaptation studies. The purpose of this paper is to identify differences and similarities in…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper compares the research traditions of organizational translation studies and adaptation studies. The purpose of this paper is to identify differences and similarities in how these traditions approach the study of change in adopted constructs, and by doing so, provide a better understanding of each and how they can inform research into the connection between collective learning and the continuous transformation of circulating constructs.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is conceptual in that it discusses, critiques and compares other authors’ work and thinking. It also has similarities with a literature review in that it draws out the main tendencies of many scholarly contributions from translation and adaptation literatures, respectively.
Findings
Although the paper identifies differences between translation and adaptation literatures concerning their basic assumptions, it also calls for better integration of the insights provided by them. It argues that both are needed to better understand the learning aspects involved in the transformation of circulating constructs.
Originality/value
This paper is the first to compare translation studies with adaptation studies and to call for better integration of these literatures to better understand the change in circulating constructs.
Details
Keywords
Constantin Bratianu, Alexeis Garcia-Perez, Francesca Dal Mas and Denise Bedford
Constantin Bratianu, Alexeis Garcia-Perez, Francesca Dal Mas and Denise Bedford
In the COVID-19 era, sign language (SL) translation has gained attention in online learning, which evaluates the physical gestures of each student and bridges the communication…
Abstract
Purpose
In the COVID-19 era, sign language (SL) translation has gained attention in online learning, which evaluates the physical gestures of each student and bridges the communication gap between dysphonia and hearing people. The purpose of this paper is to devote the alignment between SL sequence and nature language sequence with high translation performance.
Design/methodology/approach
SL can be characterized as joint/bone location information in two-dimensional space over time, forming skeleton sequences. To encode joint, bone and their motion information, we propose a multistream hierarchy network (MHN) along with a vocab prediction network (VPN) and a joint network (JN) with the recurrent neural network transducer. The JN is used to concatenate the sequences encoded by the MHN and VPN and learn their sequence alignments.
Findings
We verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach and provide experimental results on three large-scale datasets, which show that translation accuracy is 94.96, 54.52, and 92.88 per cent, and the inference time is 18 and 1.7 times faster than listen-attend-spell network (LAS) and visual hierarchy to lexical sequence network (H2SNet) , respectively.
Originality/value
In this paper, we propose a novel framework that can fuse multimodal input (i.e. joint, bone and their motion stream) and align input streams with nature language. Moreover, the provided framework is improved by the different properties of MHN, VPN and JN. Experimental results on the three datasets demonstrate that our approaches outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of translation accuracy and speed.
Details
Keywords
Evgenii Aleksandrov and Konstantin Timoshenko
The purpose of this paper is to explore how participatory budgeting (PB) as a democratic governance tool has been translated within the Russian public sector by addressing the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how participatory budgeting (PB) as a democratic governance tool has been translated within the Russian public sector by addressing the local specifics of its design and mobilization through the formation of networks.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on a case study of one pioneering municipality. Data have been gathered through triangulation of interviews, document search, video and netnographic observations. By relying on ideas from actor–network theory, the study focuses on the relational and rhetorical work of human (allies/inscriptors) and non-human (inscriptions) actors involved in the development of PB in Russia.
Findings
The findings indicate that the initial democratic values of PB underwent several stages of translation as a continuous inscription-building process and the formation of networks. The main finding is that putting democratic idea(l)s of PB into practice proved problematic, since PB depended on many “allies” which were not always democratic. Paradoxically, in order to launch democratic practices in Russia, PB relied largely on bureaucratic and even New Public Management inscriptions, which it was originally supposed to fight against. Notwithstanding, while these inscriptions can fog the democratic values of PB, they are also capable of uncovering its democratic potential over time, albeit not for a long time as the “external referee” is needed.
Originality/value
The paper juxtaposes PB development in Russia with the translation literature. Not only does the study emphasize the role of human, but non-human actors as well.
Details