Ruthanne Huising

emlyon business school | EMLYON

Digital representations are ubiquitous in the workplace. Screen displays, forecasts, simulations, indicators, multi-dimensional models, figures, and images are increasingly central to work of all kinds. Representations are simultaneously transparent and opaque. They contain and reveal information about the organization. At the same time, they conce...

This volume brings together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise. It is motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today, insofar as science and experts are integral to the checks and balances on which liberal democr...

Professions continue to be the primary means through which societies institutionalize expertise. Recent analyses and narratives predict that artificial intelligence (AI) will make meaningful inroads into non-routine reasoning about complex cases, threatening the authority of professions. These predictions, we argue, draw on substantialist understan...

We trace the pragmatic turn in regulatory governance from the level of the state and civil society to the coalface of the regulated organization. Since the 1980s, an array of new regulatory models has emerged. These models, while distinct, are unified in two related tendencies. First, they support the devolution of responsibility for standard setti...

New technologies including digital health and robotics are driving the evolution of healthcare. At the same time, healthcare systems are transitioning from a multiprofessional model approach of healthcare delivery to an interprofessional model. The concurrence of these two trends may represent an opportunity for leaders in healthcare because both r...

This volume brings together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise. It is motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today, insofar as science and experts are integral to the checks and balances on which liberal democr...

This paper examines how employees become simultaneously empowered and alienated by detailed, holistic knowledge of the actual operations of their organization, drawing on an inductive analysis of the experiences of employees working on organizational change teams. As employees build and scrutinize process maps of their organization, they develop a...

This paper examines the tensions involved in regulating innovative, flexible organizations in the interest of public health and security. Drawing on a longitudinal case of regulatory design, I trace how a government agency used an approach that: 1) took into account situated practice and multiplicity of experience, 2) that worked through inquiry an...

The range of organizational responses to regulatory requirements is often explained by describing the organization as a monolithic actor interacting with external agents. We look inside regulated organizations, recognizing them as a web of transactions and norms, to examine how formal and informal organizational practices transform regulatory requi...

Organizations that adopt new practices employ managers to make decisions about how to materialize these practices. I examine how these managers move between the meanings and resources found in extra-local and local realms. I find that managers' practices shift over time from adapting BPR practices to inhabiting BPR as an idea. Managers' approaches...

We examine how organizations select some routines to be changed, but not others, during organizational search. Selection is a critical step that links an exogenous trigger for change, change in individual routines, and larger processes of organizational adaptation. Drawing on participant observation of an initiative to improve perioperative efficie...

This chapter explores the confrontation between the authority of law and the authority of science by looking directly in the heart of science: the laboratory. We review the literature on how scientists respond to regulation of their laboratory practices, suggesting ways in which contemporary laboratory practices are shaped, or not, by law. Law does...

Scientists with childcare responsibilities are evaluated by their colleagues as less competent and committed. The flexibility stigma has been extensively documented; however, the processes and mechanisms through which the use of flexible work arrangements lead to the flexibility stigma has received less attention. In this theory development paper,...

Although early classics in ethnographic sociology were produced through research teams, contemporary ethnography is more often described as a personal endeavor, with ethnographers generally entering the field alone and producing single authored texts. The deeply personal nature of the method is viewed paradoxically both as a source of novel insight...

Organizations depend on experts to oversee and execute complex tasks. When faced with pressures to reduce their dependence on experts, managers encounter a control paradox: they require experts to explicate the very knowledge and discretionary approaches that are the basis of their control for the purpose of undercutting this control. Experts rarel...

This paper examines how professionals working in bureaucratic organizations, despite having formal authority, struggle to enact authority over the clients they advise, transforming their right to command into deference to commands. Drawing on a comparative ethnographic study of two professional groups overseeing compliance in university laboratorie...

Improving hospital efficiency is a critical goal for managers and policy makers. We draw on participant observation of the perioperative coaching program in seven Ontario hospitals to develop knowledge of the process by which the content of change initiatives to increase hospital efficiency is defined. The coaching program was a change initiative i...

We examine academic research laboratories as examples of intractable governance sites. These spaces often elude regulatory warnings and rules because of the professional status of faculty members, the opacity of scientific work to outsiders, and loose coupling of policy and practice in organizations. We describe one university’s efforts to create a...

In this article we examine the marketing representations of the Toyota Prius, the first ‘green’ mass-produced automobile. Drawing on an interpretive analysis of Prius print advertisements in Canadian publications between 2006–2011 and a matched sample of other automobile advertisements, we observe how the Prius advertisements invoke imagination and...

Abstract Designed to close the ubiquitous gap between law on the books and law in action, management systems locate the standard setting and implementation of regulation within the regulated organization itself. Despite efforts to more closely couple aspirations and performance, the gap re-emerges because the exigencies of practical action exceed t...

In this paper we describe three examples of what we call "the sociological citizen", environmental health and safety workers, law enforcement officers, and firm managers who see their work and themselves as links in a complex web of interactions and processes rather than as offices of delimited responsibilities and interests. Instead of focusing cl...

This dissertation addresses two questions: How do employees become mobilized to initiate and drive change in organizations? How do managers draw on external and internal resources in introducing and sustaining change projects? I answer these questions using business process redesign (BPR) as a case of organizational change. To answer the first ques...