Multidirectional Idea Travelling Across an Organizational Field

Abstract

Organizational scholars are increasingly interested in understanding how ideas travel across an organizational field. While most studies focus on how travelling ideas translate into organizational practices, we lack insights into the broader issue of how ideas translate as they move among heterogeneous actors across the field. To explore this multidirectional travelling of ideas, we build on the notion of translation ecology to capture the ongoing interactions among field members as they are involved in translation work within and outside adopting organizations. To develop our argument, we draw from a longitudinal, twenty year, case study of a public sector digital transformation program in Denmark through which ideas about mobile technology use for caregivers spread across the entire homecare field. By following the mobile technology initiative over time, we show how ideas travelled in multiple directions as adopting organizations and other influential field actors participated in and contributed to diverse practices across organizations. Based on our analyses, we identify three distinct forms of multidirectional idea travelling—reinforcing, complementing and polarizing—and describe how they together shape the morphing of ideas as they move among heterogeneous actors in a translation ecology. As a result, we advance knowledge about multidirectional idea travelling as an under-theorized and important perspective in the translation literature.

Organizing the Sharing Economy Through Experiments: Framing and taming as onto-epistemological work

“…The performativity of experiments provides a complementary understanding to more institutional or linguistic readings in organization studies of how ideas are translated across organizational contexts (e.g. Nielsen, Mathiassen, & Newell, 2022). It encourages us to pay particular heed to how translations may lead to proliferations, procrastinations and failures, and how these are made productive, thereby also directing attention to the political aspects of experimental configurations.…”

Translating to Maintain Existing Practices: Micro-tactics in the implementation of a new management concept

“…One stream of studies examines the impact of societal meanings such as rational myths (Zilber, 2016), fashionable ideas (Eriksson-Zetterquist & Renemark, 2016) and discourses (Gondo & Amis, 2013;Lawrence, 2017;Outila, Piekkari, Mihailova, & Angouri, 2021) that pave the way for the translation of an idea into the organization. Another stream focuses on how the institutional field impacts translation through its institutionalized practices (Nicolini et al, 2019;Ritvala & Granqvist, 2009) and its actors, who together shape the morphing of ideas (Nielsen et al, 2022) or actively survey the field to promote new models locally (Heinze et al, 2016;Wedlin & Sahlin, 2017). In general, these studies provide a strong grounding for understanding institutions as key aspects of translation.…”

“…The actors' interpretation of their institutional context is crucial to the unfolding of the translation processes. Studies explicitly examine how translation processes are impacted by societal meanings, providing the ground rules for what would be comprehensive translation outcomes (Lamb & Currie, 2012;Lawrence, 2017;Pallas, Fredriksson, & Wedlin, 2016;Waldorff, 2013), and by institutional fields shaping how actors and organizations interact in translation processes (Heinze, Soderstrom, & Heinze, 2016;Nicolini, Lippi, & Monteiro, 2019;Nielsen, Mathiassen, & Newell, 2022).…”

Jaringan Rangkaian Organisasi dalam Memperkukuh Pembangunan Industri Halal Malaysia

“…Seiring dengan perkembangan teknologi, Jaringan rangkaian organisasi perlu dijalankan bagi percambahan buah fikiran dan mendapatkan idea yang baru serta menyelesaikan sebarang masalah yang berlaku melalui alam maya (Kraus, Palmer, Kailer, Kallinger, & Spitzer, 2018;Verganti, Vendraminelli, & Iansiti, 2020;Nielsen, Mathiassen, & Newell, 2022). Program menjana idea membolehkan individu untuk mengemukakan idea-idea yang memberi tumpuan kepada peningkatan prestasi organisasi (Bougie & Sekaran, 2019;Nosratabadi, et al, 2019).…”