No abstract

In this article, we explore what organization and management scholars can do to write with resonance and to facilitate an emotional, bodily, or in other ways sensory connection between the text and the reader. We propose that resonance can be relevant for organization and management scholars in two ways. First, it may facilitate a better understanding of the research we are attempting to convey in our papers, an understanding that draws on the reader’s prior experiences, and their embodied, embedded knowledge. Second, resonance may foster an inclination in the reader to engage with, contribute to, and thus bring forward the field of research in question. We propose that writing with resonance may be a way to further the impact of academic work by extending the modalities with which our readers can relate to and experience our work.

This article contributes to our understanding of how boundary work is practiced in healthcare settings. Previous studies have shown how boundaries are constantly changing, multiple, and co-existing, and can also be relatively stable cognitive and social distinctions between individuals and groups. In highly specialized, knowledge-intensive organizations such as healthcare organizations, organizational, professional, and disciplinary boundaries mark the formal structure and division of work. Collaboration and coordination across these boundaries are essential to minimizing gaps in patient care, but also may be challenging to achieve in practice. By drawing on data from an ethnographic study of two hospital wards, this article investigates practices of cross-disciplinary and professional collaboration and adds to our knowledge of how this kind of boundary work is produced in context. Moreover, it adds to existing boundary literature by exploring the fast-paced, situational, micro-interactions in which boundaries are drawn, maintained, and dissolved. These mundane, brief exchanges are essential to the practice of collaboration through boundary work. I consider the implications of these findings for boundary theory and boundaries in healthcare and other related settings.

This chapter brings together the findings of the various research experiences outlined throughout the book, and it presents ways for furthering contextual research in organization and management. It also discussed the implications this research may have on practice, and the challenges faced by academics, practitioners, and policy makers going forward. The important point is that it is wise for researchers to reflect on and explicitly state how they understand the construct of context applied in their work and whether or not “context” refers to a shared/common context or an idiosyncratic/individual context or both. For both theoretical and methodological reflections, the crucial question is not what context is, as a stable phenomenon “out there,” rather it is how we theorize, operationalize, study, and analyze context in action, and the consequences of these choices for the research we can produce.

This paper demonstrated how leadership practices are embedded in the everyday work in hospital units. Moreover, the analysis shows how configurations of leadership practices varied in four different clinical settings, thus contributing with contextual accounts of leadership as practice, and suggested "configurations of practice" as a way to carve out similarities and differences in leadership practices across settings.