NOMP Research Seminars Autumn 2021

Kajsa Ahlgren Ode holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management from Lund Faculty of Engineering. Her thesis focused on business models for solar energy travelling between geographical markets, and the innovation process associated with adopting already existing business model patterns. She explored this phenomenon from a translation perspective to examine the micro process of adopting a BM pattern and contextualizing it in a new setting. After defending her thesis, Kajsa received funding for a two-year postdoctoral project with the aim to develop a tool supporting the conceptualization of new business models for sustainability. The project has resulted in
a mapping tool considering both the conceptualization of a new BM and the creation of a foundation for decision-making and implementation in and beyond the
company.

This study examines the process of business model innovation (BMI) in established firms. We investigate the case of a Swedish utility company that adopted and implemented a business model (BM) pattern for solar energy coming from outside. We draw upon translation theory to understand the micro level dynamics of how the BMI process unfolds. Our findings show that BMI involves multiple loops of translation activated by the
interplay between five mechanisms:

• formulating
• engaging
• resisting
• anchoring
• energizing.

In this process, the BM is being disassembled into its different components and little by little reassembled
into a whole again. On the basis of our findings, we develop a BMI framework revealing the dynamics between human and non-human actors, and their activities, in the translation process. We thereby contribute to a better understanding of BMI as a translation process and to a micro-level perspective on
the BMI process initiated by the adoption of a BM pattern.

Mara Gorli is Associate Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at the Faculty of Economics, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy. Her main research interests are on the study of knowing, learning and change in organizations, group dynamics and reflexivity with a relational approach to the study of organizational life. With her background closely connected to the action research perspective for the intervention with organizations and groups, she conducts research and interventions in different fields, with a specific passion towards the healthcare and non- profit sector. She is also member of the Leadership and Organizational Cultures Area at CERISMAS, Centre for Research and Studies in Health Care Management, Milan.

Marta Piria is a PhD student in Psychology at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy. Her research interests lie in knowledge sharing and relational processes in multiprofessional and multidisciplinary work groups. She is particularly interested in supporting groups in identifying and dealing with critical issues and differences through co-creating common processes of understanding and learning. She collaborates with the Leadership and Organisational Cultures Area at CERISMAS, Centre for Research and Studies in Health Care Management, Milan.

CERISMAS External link.

Organisations, like societies, legitimise power dynamics. In “ordinary” conditions these forces act and maintain balance and stability: they shape flows and movements of influence that may or may not find fortune, or they can perform and exercise certain functions in the course of history. Having said that, it is in the face of crisis scenarios that these balances falter, uncovering different conditions and spaces that need to be occupied to either ensure greater balance and fairness or to better respond to the crisis itself. This paper draws from this framework to offer a telling of the story of one organisation – a major hospital in Northern Italy, entailing two temporal dimensions – the “ordinary” time and the extraordinary time, one of crisis: the pandemic SARS-CoV-2. In particular, we want to give voice to the narrative efforts that a professional community inhabiting this organisational reality embarked upon. Storytelling was used as a reflexive and collective form of creation of a sense of community as well as a sense of inclusion of many practitioners whose voices are not always heard, nurtured and valorised. Narration and storytelling are powerful approaches to achieve awareness and in- depth analysis of the state of art of a relational setting or system, and to trigger new spaces for reflections and necessary transformative actions. We dig into the potential of such approaches, as well as into the dark side, when applied to organizations. We highlight three directions in which narrations exercise their power; in fact, they impact: 1) on the individual, 2) on the relational and 3) on the organizational levels. The paper illustrates the potentialities and critical considerations at these three levels and aims to contribute to a view of organizing that is made by reciprocal, horizontal and integrated movement within the relational fabric.

Siavash Alimadadi is research fellow in Innovation Management working with the RM Phillips Chair at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), Sussex University Business School. He is also research fellow at Project X. His research focuses on the intersections between strategy and innovation, with a particular interest in the role of perceptions of the future on collective action. The main context of his research is complex organizational settings, such as large-scale projects and inter-professional collaboration. He received his PhD from Uppsala University.

Research on the strategic organization of time often assumes that collective efforts are motivated by and oriented toward achieving desirable, although not necessarily welldefined, future states. In situations surrounded by uncertainty where work has to proceed urgently to avoid an impending disaster, however, temporal work is guided by engaging with both desirable and undesirable future outcomes. Drawing on a real-time, indepth study of the inception of the Restoration and Renewal program of the Palace of Westminster, we investigate how organizational actors develop a strategy for an uncertain and highly contested future while safeguarding ongoing operations in the present and preserving the heritage of the past. Anticipation of undesirable future events played a crucial role in mobilizing collective efforts to move forward. We develop a model of future desirability in temporal work to identify how actors construct, link, and navigate interpretations of desirable and undesirable futures in their attempts to create a viable path of action. By conceptualizing temporal work based on the phenomenological quality of the future, we advance understanding of the strategic organization of time in pluralistic contexts characterized by uncertainty and urgency.

Leni Grünbaum - I am a 3rd year doctoral candidate at the Aalto University Business School in Finland, in the Department of Management Studies. After my MSc in international business and business administration, my passion for language and communication led me to work for 12 years in the translation and the publishing industries. Increasingly puzzled by the tensions inherent in organizational interaction, collaboration and leadership, I gradually solidified my knowledge and skills and started working as a professional facilitator and coach. Since 2009, I been facilitating and coaching teams, leadership teams and other organizational groups as well as coaching individual professionals and executives. I also have extensive experience in training managers, certified systemic business coaches and facilitators. I am a professional certified coach (PCC), a certified narrative coach, a certified psychodrama conductor (CP) and a certified conductor of improvisational playback theatre, which I also practice as an actress. Moreover, I have studied facilitation skills, change agency and adult pedagogy.

I am intrigued by how leadership unfolds through social interaction in organizational groups. Specifically, I am interested in the role of encounters in this process, in what makes them meaningful for members, and in the role of aesthetics and sociomateriality in such encounters. I want to contribute to an organizational life in which multiplicity and multivocality are acknowledged as central and valuable for a collective leadership that increases the space for action of group members and enhances their collaboration.

My research is grounded in interpretive, relational and process-oriented qualitative approaches. I am especially fond of participatory research designs and aesthetic methods which make use of embodied action and knowledge that draws on the senses.

My dissertation examines how meaningful encounters contribute to the collective leadership of multidisciplinary teams in children’s psychiatry at a Nordic university hospital. It views collective leadership as a continuous relational process in which all the individuals involved actively participate, and which aims at seeking direction and producing a space for co-action. Adopting a process perspective, the focus is not as much on the individuals as on what meaningful encounters do to the leadership process of the group. My study conceptualizes encounters as noteworthy aesthetic and relational events of meeting in which difference is acknowledged, explored and reconstructed. In aesthetics, it emphasizes action, such as sharing narratives based on experiences or positioning oneself in the room, and highlights felt meaning rooted in sensory perceptions and subjective, tacit knowledge. The dissertation draws on a 17 month empirical study of three organizational groups. The data collection combines action research during a facilitated group process with each group, with ethnographic observation of the work and the interaction of group members. My study elucidates what makes a group encounter meaningful for its members and how such encounters influence the group’s space for action and its seeking of direction. The findings imply that due to their emotional and affective nature, collective leadership processes are fragile and unpredictable. Thus, sociomateriality and attuning to the unpredictable are key for facilitating the emergence of new relational configurations which can enable positive meaningful encounters. In such encounters, team members can voice, acknowledge and explore their differences. In reconstructing difference, such encounters expand the group’s space for co-action and help it to seek direction, i.e. develop its collective leadership.

Astrid Huopalainen is a senior lecturer of Organization and Management at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Astrid’s research interests include feminist philosophy, posthumanist approaches, practice theories, aesthetics, embodiment, and more-than-human organizing. She also takes pleasure in writing ‘differently.’ Her research has been published in journals including Organization, Culture and Organization, Human Relations, Gender, Work and Organization and ephemera. E-mail: ahuopala@abo.fi

This chapter investigates the relationship between materiality and innovation in the context of artistic practice. Specifically, this chapter examines the relatively overlooked yet taken-for-granted role of materiality for innovation in the context of digital/new media art, and the ‘messy’ everyday processes through which AI-based art works are created. Leaning on actor network theory (ANT) and feminist new materialist approaches, which emphasize that not only human beings but also other materialities, physical objects and tools are active co-creators of knowledge and innovation, I argue for the relevance of understanding innovation in dispersed sociomaterial relations and ‘messy’ processes that are simultaneously incidental, experimental and directional. By drawing on an ongoing ethnographic study of professional artists’ work and 15 in-depth interviews with professional artists in the Finnish context, this chapter develops the current knowledge on materiality for innovation, illustrating how this meaningful relationship is continuously co- created between bodies and other materialities in spatial arrangements. Empirically, this study analyzes the ways in which Finnish or Finland-based artists who utilize different kind of AI-based methods in their artworks co-construct and negotiate their ambivalent relationship with AI, surrounding materialities and other meaningful artefacts in artistic practices. In so doing, this study offers insights into those partly ‘hidden’, taken-for-granted and fine- grained characteristics of the artist’s everyday work, including the role and significance of materiality. Finally, this chapter provides a rich and nuanced understanding of the partly ‘hidden’ role of materiality in the work practices of professional artists and opens up novel possibilities for researching innovation through material relations in organizational life.

Björn Fischer is a doctoral student in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the division of Technology in Health at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. His research focuses on the interrelation between digital technology and society, specifically in the context of technologies developed for the ageing population. In this regard, he predominantly draws on qualitative and anthropological methods to investigate the lived realities of engineers and designers, including practices of technology development, the role of imagery representation in the laboratory, and the boundaries of methods. His research has been published in well-known journals of the field such as Social Studies of Science, Design Studies and The Gerontologist.

This presentation focuses on the results of two ethnographic case studies of the practices of robot designers and engineers in their everyday work environment: robot laboratories. The findings illuminate the implicit ways by which ideas about technological futures – and images of future technological users – emerge as part of everyday design practices. The theoretical proposition is that everyday activities appear to have distinctive image-evoking capacities that make visible the interrelation between what we do, and what comes to mind. Jointly enacted in a work setting, these imageevoking activities then constitute a broad but restricted realm of ideas about potential ways of usage: a user image landscape. Because practices differ from site to site, user image landscapes are transformative, unstable and elusive. The presentation does not suggest to cast doubt on the activities of engineers from the safe harbour of a critical analyst outside these activities, but rather seeks to pose new questions for the sociological study of the boundaries of images, practices and our role within them.