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1 – 10 of 491Leman Isik, Christina Nilsson, Johan Magnusson and Dina Koutsikouri
While digital transformation holds immense promise, organizations often fail to realize its benefits. This study aims to address how policies for digital transformation benefits…
Abstract
Purpose
While digital transformation holds immense promise, organizations often fail to realize its benefits. This study aims to address how policies for digital transformation benefits realization are translated into practice.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors apply a qualitative, comparative case study of two large, public-sector health care organizations in Sweden. Through document and interview data, the authors analyze the process of translation.
Findings
The study finds that practice variation is primarily caused by two types of decoupling: policy-practice and means-ends. Contrary to previous studies, coercion in policy compliance is not found to decrease practice variation.
Research limitations/implications
The limitations primarily stem from the empirical selection of two large public health-care organizations in Sweden, affecting the study’s generalizability. Reducing practice variation is more effectively achieved through goal alignment than coercion, leading to implications for the design of governance and control.
Practical implications
Policymakers should, instead of focusing on control-related compliance, work to align organizational objectives and policies to decrease practice variation for successful benefits realization.
Social implications
The study contributes to better benefits realization of digital transformation initiatives in health care. As such, the authors contribute to a better functioning and more transformative health care in times of increased demand and decreased supply of health-care services.
Originality/value
The study challenges conventional wisdom by identifying that coercion is less effective than goal alignment in reducing practice variation, thereby enhancing the understanding of policy implementation dynamics in health-care settings.
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Hannelore Ottilie Van den Abeele
This paper argues that Bruno Latour’s work on translation provides an alternative to dominant anthropocentric, individualistic and managerial approaches in career studies by…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper argues that Bruno Latour’s work on translation provides an alternative to dominant anthropocentric, individualistic and managerial approaches in career studies by considering careers as precarious effects of networks instead of the implicit assumption of individual strategic career actors in extant career research paradigms.
Design/methodology/approach
The article first compares the three main current approaches to studying careers – structural functionalist, interpretivist and critical – illustrated by three exemplary empirical studies. Subsequently, three concepts from the sociology of translation that are relevant for the study of careers are introduced: career making as translating interests, careers as effects of networks and career action as dislocated and overtaken. Taken together, these three concepts allow us to conceive of careers as practices performed by human and nonhuman actors. Finally, an example from an ethnographic case study in the field of contemporary art illustrates how a Latourian approach can be used.
Findings
Latour’s work on translation provides conceptual and methodological tools to investigate career processes and practices in an era of unpredictability.
Originality/value
The paper introduces Bruno Latour’s work on translation to the study of careers.
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Elin K. Funck, Kirsi-Mari Kallio and Tomi J. Kallio
This paper aims to investigate the process by which performative technologies (PTs), in this case accreditation work in a business school, take form and how humans engage in…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the process by which performative technologies (PTs), in this case accreditation work in a business school, take form and how humans engage in making up such practices. It studies how academics come to accept and even identify with the quantitative representations of themselves in a translation process.
Design/methodology/approach
The research involved a longitudinal, self-ethnographic case study that followed the accreditation process of one Nordic business school from 2015 to 2021.
Findings
The findings show how the PT pushed for different engagements in various phases of the translation process. Early in the translation process, the PT promoted engagement because of self-realization and the ability for academics to proactively influence the prospective competitive milieu. However, as academic qualities became fabricated into numbers, the PT was able to request compliance, but also to induce self-reflection and self-discipline by forcing academics to compare themselves to set qualities and measures.
Originality/value
The paper advances the field by linking five phases of the translation process, problematization, fabrication, materialization, commensuration and stabilization, to a discussion of why academics come to accept and identify with the quantitative representations of themselves. The results highlight that the materialization phase appears to be the critical point at which calculative practices become persuasive and start influencing academics’ thoughts and actions.
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Nur Azliani Haniza Che Pak, Suhaiza Ismail and Norhayati Mohd Alwi
The purpose of this paper is to help better understand the translation process of the management control system (MCS) of privatised solid waste management (SWM) towards creating a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to help better understand the translation process of the management control system (MCS) of privatised solid waste management (SWM) towards creating a stable network.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on the actor network theory (ANT), the case of a privatised SWM was studied. Data were collected from all entities involved in the privatisation process of SWM, which include Department A, Corporation X and the private sector concessionaire. Six documents were reviewed, 20 interviews were conducted and two observations were carried out.
Findings
The findings reveal that the control mechanism of SWM is complex, involving the interaction between human and non-human actors. Non-human actors include the key performance indicators (KPIs) and the concessionaire agreement (CA), which are the main control mechanisms towards creating a stable SWM network. Essentially, stability is achieved when the KPIs and CA can influence the activities of both intra- and inter-organisational relationships.
Originality/value
This paper provides a better understanding of the translation process of the MCS that adds to the stability of the network of a privatised SWM from the lens of the ANT.
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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.
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Pilar Rodríguez-Arancón, María Bobadilla-Pérez and Alberto Fernández-Costales
This study aims to delve into the interplay between didactic audiovisual translation (DAT) and computer-assisted language learning (CALL), exploring their combined impact on the…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to delve into the interplay between didactic audiovisual translation (DAT) and computer-assisted language learning (CALL), exploring their combined impact on the development of intercultural competence (IC) among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL).
Design/methodology/approach
Using a quasi-experimental approach with a quantitative research design, the study analyses the outcomes of a questionnaire answered by 147 students across 15 language centres in Spanish Universities. These participants actively engaged in completing the lesson plans of the Traducción audiovisual como recurso didáctico en el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras project, a Spanish-Government funded research initiative aimed at assessing the effects of DAT on language learning.
Findings
The current study confirms the reliability of the instrument developed to measure students’ perceived improvement. Beyond validating the research tool, the findings of the current study confirm the significant improvement in intercultural learning achieved through DAT, effectively enhancing students’ motivation to engage in language learning.
Research limitations/implications
The current research solely examines students enrolled in higher education language centres. This paper closes with a CALL for additional research, including participants from other educational stages, such as primary or secondary education. In the broader context of CALL research, this study serves as a valuable contribution by exploring the potential of DAT in fostering IC in EFL settings.
Originality/value
This research confirms the potential of DAT and CALL to promote students’ learning process, as the combination of these approaches not only yields linguistic benefits but also intercultural learning.
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Lise Justesen and Ursula Plesner
The purpose of this paper is to inspire a different way of thinking about digitalization and organizational change by theorizing simultaneity as an alternative to the otherwise…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to inspire a different way of thinking about digitalization and organizational change by theorizing simultaneity as an alternative to the otherwise dominant root metaphor of sequence in the literature on digitalization and organizational change.
Design/methodology/approach
The theoretical argument is based on a reading of central contributions to the literature on digital technology and organizational change, and particularly inspired by the work positing a constitutive entanglement of technology and organization. We argue for an extension of this line of thinking with a reading of Latour’s notion tonalities. The relevance of the theoretical argument is demonstrated through an illustrative empirical example of the phenomenon digital-ready legislation.
Findings
The paper identifies sequence as a root metaphor in the organization and digital change literature. It develops a simultaneity view and illustrates its relevance through the example of digital-ready legislation, pinpointing how technological, organizational and legal elements are attuned to one another at the same time rather than in sequence.
Practical implications
The sequentiality view has dominated the change management research, which has travelled from research into practice. The simultaneity view has the potential to offer a new approach to planning change, with a focus on the simultaneous alignment of, e.g. legal, organizational and technological elements.
Originality/value
The paper offers an alternative to dominant views on digitalization and organizational change, drawing on an overlooked notion in Latour’s scholarship, namely tonalities. This has potential to qualify the entanglement thesis and develop simultaneity as a new metaphor for understanding digital change.
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Stein Rokkan (1921–1979) gave this lecture in Paris, 4th December 1976. Comparative Social Research here publishes the first English language translation of Rokkan's manuscript…
Abstract
Stein Rokkan (1921–1979) gave this lecture in Paris, 4th December 1976. Comparative Social Research here publishes the first English language translation of Rokkan's manuscript for the lecture, which was given in French. The lecture was earlier only available in German (published 1980) and Norwegian (published 1921) translations. The lecture presents the sequence of models that Rokkan developed for his Europe-project aiming to explain the variations between 16 Western European democracies with reference to rights, party systems and systems alternatives. It is the only extensive intellectual autobiography that Rokkan ever wrote.
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Manoj Krishnan and Satish Krishnan
The study aims to drive conceptual clarity around resistance to information technology projects, integrating multiple facets of the phenomenon from earlier studies.
Abstract
Purpose
The study aims to drive conceptual clarity around resistance to information technology projects, integrating multiple facets of the phenomenon from earlier studies.
Design/methodology/approach
The study conducts a meta-synthesis of qualitative studies on resistance to technology projects; it analyzes those studies at a case-specific level, compares and contrasts emergent concepts against each other, and “translates” those to the rest of the studies. The study uses the seven-step meta-ethnography method by Noblit and Hare to reciprocally translate emergent concepts to construct the conceptual model.
Findings
Through meta-synthesis, the study derives a new conceptual model for resistance to information technology projects, exemplifying how the identified antecedents create user resistance and how the phenomenon progresses within organizations.
Research limitations/implications
This study enriches the observations and conclusions of past individual studies while explicating various facets of the mechanisms that generate and progress technology resistance within organizations. It offers fresh insights into the equivocal nature of the phenomenon and the distinctive ways it progresses from individual to group level.
Practical implications
Many ambitious and costly digital transformation efforts do not succeed due to user resistance. Understanding the mechanisms that create user resistance can help organizations manage technology projects better, thereby reducing the technology assimilation gap and protecting returns on related investments.
Originality/value
There have been extensive studies on technology acceptance (enablers) within organizations, while those relating to technology inhibitors are somewhat limited. However, the symmetry of understanding between enablers and inhibitors is vital for organizations to assimilate promising technologies and transform their business models. This model uses a new lens of sensemaking theory to explain how the antecedents trigger perceived threats and resistance behavior; it highlights the nuances around the development of resistance within individuals and its progression to groups. The resultant model offers better generalizability in organizational contexts.
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Welington Norberto Carneiro, Jose Carlos Tiomatsu Oyadomari, Paulo Afonso, Ronaldo Gomes Dultra-de-Lima and Octavio Ribeiro de Mendonça Neto
This paper seeks to understand kaizen in practice as it travels through time and space in the organisational setting.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to understand kaizen in practice as it travels through time and space in the organisational setting.
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative case study was carried out at a multinational company using mainly interviews for the data collection that were analysed from an actor-network theory (ANT) perspective.
Findings
This paper finds that the company deals with a series of paradoxes while managing the kaizen process. Efficiency and quality paradoxes are the basis for starting kaizen projects. Furthermore, intrinsic, and extrinsic motivation, emerge in these processes, and paradoxes relate to how spontaneous ideas emerge in a deliberated context of cost-saving objectives. The supply chain finance team coordinates kaizen projects with the collaboration of plant managers, promoting the paradox of autonomy and control. In addition, as kaizen mobilises and enrols the actors, some trials of strength emerge, showing actors who oppose the kaizen network and create competing networks that mutually exist in the firm.
Practical implications
This study presents valuable insights for professionals to successfully implement kaizen methodologies that take advantage of developing a network for problem-solving in organizations.
Originality/value
This study highlights the supply chain finance team's role in enrolling the actors within a network built by practitioners engaged in kaizen projects. Usually, engineers, quality, or manufacturing teams lead kaizen projects, and only occasionally, accounting and financial teams participate, including multidisciplinary teams.
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