Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates

Abstract

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 new comprehension of the structure and operation of their organization. What they had perceived as purposively designed, relatively stable, and largely external is revealed to be continuously produced through social interaction. I trace how this altered comprehension of the organization’s functioning and logic changes employees' orientation to and place within the organization. Their central roles are revealed as less efficacious than imagined and, in fact, as reproducing the organization's inefficiencies. Alienated from their central operational roles, they voluntarily move to peripheral change roles from which they feel empowered to pursue organization-wide change. The paper offers two contributions. First, it identifies a new means through which central actors may become disembedded, that is, detailed comprehensive knowledge of the logic and operations of the surrounding social system. Second, the paper problematizes established insights about the relationship between social position and challenges to the status quo. Rather than a peripheral social location creating a desire to challenge the status quo, a desire to challenge the status quo may encourage central actors to choose a peripheral social location.

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Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational
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Ruthanne Huising
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ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22
http://pubsonline.informs.org/journal/orsc/ ISSN 1047-7039 (print), ISSN 1526-5455 (online)
Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations
Empowers and Alienates
Ruthanne Huising
a
a
Emlyon Business School, 69134 Ecully Cedex, France
Contact: huising@em-lyon.com,http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1286-2519 (RH)
Received: October 11, 2010
Revised: April 18, 2012; August 31, 2014;
May 1, 2016; June 7, 2017; July 9, 2018
Accepted: July 16, 2018
Published Online in Articles in Advance:
June 26, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1277
Copyright: © 2019 INFORMS
Abstract. 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 organi-
zational change teams. As employees build and scrutinize process maps of their orga-
nization, they develop a new comprehension of the structure and operation of their
organization. What they had perceived as purposively designed, relatively stable, and
largely external is revealed to be continuously produced through social interaction.
I trace how this altered comprehension of the organization’s functioning and logic
changes employees’orientation to and place within the organization. Their central roles
are revealed as less efficacious than imagined and, in fact, as reproducing the
organization's inefficiencies. Alienated from their central operational roles, they vol-
untarily move to peripheral change roles from which they feel empowered to pursue
organization-wide change. The paper offers two contributions. First, it identifies a new
means through which central actors may become disembedded, that is, detailed
comprehensive knowledge of the logic and operations of the surrounding social system.
Second, the paper problematizes established insights about the relationship between
social position and challenges to the status quo. Rather than a peripheral social location
creating a desire to challenge the status quo, a desire to challenge the status quo may en-
courage central actors to choose a peripheral social location.
Funding: Research funded by an SSHRC Canada Doctoral Fellowship and a Joseph Juran Doctoral
Fellowship.
Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1277.
Keywords: organizational change •change agents •social position •embeddedness •agency •alienation •business process redesign
Introduction
The implementation of system-level changes—
organizational or institutional—depends on central
actors who have the necessary authority and re-
sources. Paradoxically, centrally positioned actors
are less likely to initiate or support significant chal-
lenges to the status quo because their attention, in-
terpretations, and interests are conditioned by the
system in which they are embedded, and changes to the
system may threaten their position (e.g., Battilana 2011
and Battilana and Casciaro 2012). Although this pat-
tern is documented across the organizational change,
innovation, and institutional change literature, ex-
ceptions to this pattern have been identified. Central
actors may become dislodged from established ways
of thinking and acting because of external techno-
logical, economic, or regulatory shocks (Meyer et al.
1990, Greenwood et al. 2002) or provocations from
the periphery (Leblebici et al. 1991,Kraatzand
Moore 2002).
Beyond these external prompts, there is significant
interest in understanding whether central actors can
be catalyzed to work for change through local, en-
dogenous means. The focus being how the ordinary
operations of the organization or surrounding social
system might provoke central actors (Sewell 1992,
Clemens and Cook 1999). As social systems face dif-
ficult challenges, such as inequality, ethical breaches,
unchecked authority, and unsustainable resource
choices, those who study change wonder whether there
are unrecognized and unrecorded avenues through
which central actors may be mobilized to challenge the
surrounding social system. At the heart of the issue is
the identification of mechanisms that reshape the in-
terpretations and interests of central actors and that
activate them to reflect on the social systems in which
they are embedded. If central actors are to initiate
change within a system, they must experience some-
thing that alters how they comprehend and relate to
the system—an organization, a community, an in-
stitutional field—dislodging them from the system in
which they are embedded.
Two disembedding mechanisms have been hypoth-
esized and observed empirically. First, contradictions,
1

tensions, and inconsistences emerge from the opera-
tion of any system (Clemens and Cook 1999,Seoand
Creed 2002). When central actors experience these
contradictions, they are catalyzed to reflect on the tensions
and develop change plans to resolve them (Greenwood
and Suddaby 2006, Creed et al. 2010). Second, cen-
trally embedded actors may be cognitively dis-
embedded through exposure to alternative models of
organizing (Kraatz and Block 2008). Awareness and
understanding of competing models or pluralism (Jay
2013, Pache and Santos 2013,Yu2013), encourages
reflection on how other models may work locally,
possibly prompting central actors to initiate change.
These two mechanisms prompt central actors to think
about alternatives either because they are needed
(internal contradictions) or because they are possible
(multiplicity). As alternatives appear and are reflected
on, they indirectly erode the taken-for-grantedness of
the surrounding system.
In this paper, I describe another means through
which central actors may become disembedded from
the surrounding system and catalyzed to work to
change that system. This finding emerged inductively
through a study of the experiences of employees
across five or ganizat ions assigned to work on business
process redesign (BPR) change teams. During this as-
signment, some employees had the opportunity to
develop a detailed, comprehensive understanding of
their organization’s logic and operations. They see
directly how the structure and operation of the orga-
nization, which they had perceived as purposively
designed, relatively stable, and largely external, is
continuously produced and emerges through social
interaction. They observed, in an unmediated way,
how the organization is far more malleable and
changeable than they had imagined and, at the same
time, far less centrally coordinated and actively designed.
I examine how this knowledge reshapes their interpre-
tation of possibilities for change and their evaluation
of where they would be best placed to make change. The
knowledge of the organization revealed through the
mapping process alienates these employees from their
central roles, and they voluntarily move to peripheral
organizational change staff roles. Beyond the cognitive
disruption previously described, the identified mecha-
nism generates both cognitive and physical reorientation
to the system.
The paper offers two contributions. First, it iden-
tifies an alternative means through which central
actors may be disembedded. Established ideas about
the mechanisms of endogenous, agentic change rely
on the ideas of contradictions and multiplicity as indirect
means through which the surrounding system loses its
taken-for-grantedness. I show how knowledge of ac-
tual operation of the surrounding system, when de-
tailed and grounded, is a direct means through which
the organization loses its taken-for-grantedness. Sec-
ond, based on a longitudinal perspective, the findings
show that the relationship between social position and
challenges to the status quo may be more complicated
and dynamic than previously suggested. Rather than
social location creating a desire to challenge the status
quo, a desire to challenge the status quo may encourage
central actors to choose a peripheral social location.
When central actors move to peripheral roles voluntarily,
they may use the relational and informational re-
sources from their prior position to mount well-resourced
challenges to the status quo. This alternative directional
relationship indicates that there is more variation in
themotivationsandresourcesofperipheralactorsthan
currently assumed.
Social Position and Agency
Across several literatures, a relatively stable pattern
emerges concerning the relationship between an ac-
tor’s formal or informal social location and agentic
action. Examining formal social position, research at
the organizational and institutional level often (but
not always) draws on Bourdieu’s(1985)conceptsof
fields and capital to argue that, within each field of
competition (at different forms of aggregation: or-
ganization, community, profession, etc.), actors are
distributed in hierarchical relationships based on the
logic of competition and the value of their capital. The
idea that social systems are organized into a set of
relatively stable relations with actors being more or
less central to the field and that these positions within
the web of relations are tied to distinct ways of inter-
preting, understanding, and acting has influenced how
theorists think about the possibility of agentic sources of
change (Battilana 2006,2011; Battilana and D’Aunno
2009;Lockettetal.2014). Central actors embedded
in taken-for-granted arrangements will be less likely
to reflect and act on them because their interests,
awareness, and actions are conditioned by these ar-
rangements (Holm 1995, Seo and Creed 2002).
This general relationship is substantiated by studies
of change efforts showing that those on the periph-
ery are more likely to instigate change and that central
actors are more reluctant to do so (e.g., Leblebici et al.
1991, Haveman and Rao 1997, Kellogg 2009,and
Battilana 2011). Peripheral actors in organizations are
more likely to initiate a change; however, as they
move to the center of the organization, they are less
likely to initiate challenges to the status quo (Battilana
2011; Kellogg 2011,2012). Such challenges emerge
from peripherally located actors for several reasons.
First, an actor’s social position conditions the actor’s
experiences in the social system and the interpreta-
tions the actor develops. Those on the periphery are
farther from the sites of organizational decision making
and resource allocation, which makes them more likely
Huising: Moving off the Map
2Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS

to be open to and exposed to multiple, heteroge-
neous models that challenge legitimated patterns in
their organization (Battilana 2006,Nigametal.2015).
Whereas those in dominant, or central, positions are
inclined to defend orthodoxy, those in dominated
positions are inclined toward heterodoxy (Bourdieu
1993,Nigametal.2016). Second, because those on the
periphery are more loosely embedded, they experi-
ence limited pressure to adhere to norms or role ex-
pectations or to participate in prescribed ways (Coser
1965,Merton1972). They may act in unpredictable
or na¨
ıve ways to tackle problems that others either
do not notice or find intractable and solve them in
ways that centrally located actors find unconventional
(Merton and Zuckerman 1973). Third, people in mar-
ginal positions are often disadvantaged by current ar-
rangements that motivate themto introduce changes that
increase their status and resources (Ba ttilana 2011). They
may also have a more general interest in change because
they have so little at stake in status quo arrangements.
Those who study institutional change have been
concerned by this pattern as it suggests that change will
rarely be initiated by centrally located actors. Moving
beyond the effects of exogenous shocks (Greenwood
et al. 2002), a line of theory has proposed pathways
through which embedded actors might become
cognitively dislodged. This theory has been com-
plemented by empirical work identifying experiences
that facilitate consciousness of and reflection on the
surrounding system.
Awareness of institutional contradictions (Seo and
Creed 2002, Greenwood and Suddaby 2006, Creed
et al. 2010, Voronov and Yorks 2015)andexposureto
institutional pluralism (Pache and Santos 2013)may
disrupt cognitive patterns and catalyze actors to re-
flect on the taken for granted. Contradictions, ten-
sions, and inconsistences that emerge from the
operation of any system create a sense of dissonance
with the familiar, generating tensions to be resolved and
triggering reflection on the status quo (Clemens and
Cook 1999). These tensions reveal that the ways of
operating or organizing are not inevitable or stable,
dissipating the taken-for-grantedness of the system.
Seo and Creed (2002, p. 225) explain that “the on-
going experience of contradictory reality reshapes
the consciousness of [actors], and they, in some cir-
cumstances, act to fundamentally transform the pres-
ent social arrangements and themsel ves. ”For example,
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) ministers
in the Anglican Church experienced a tension between
the church’s value for human life and dignity and the
marginalization of LGBT members (Creed et al. 2010),
and employees experienced the inconsistency of work-
ing in a firm that claims to be meritocratic but consistently
passes over high-performing minorities and women
for promotions (Meyerson and Scully 1995, Meyerson
2001). The tensions resulting from such contradiction
move central actors to rally for change.
Alternatively, central actors may be cognitively and
normatively disembedded by exposure to alternative
models of organizing. “Exposure to multiple, incom-
patible institutional arrangements may also facili-
tate . . . a graduate shift in actors’consciousness”(Seo
and Creed 2002, p. 233). Extant arrangements and
ways of working lose their inevitability. Awareness
and understanding of pluralism (Jay 2013,Pacheand
Santos 2013, Besharov and Smith 2014)encourage
reflection on how other models may work locally, thus
eroding the taken-for-grantedness of local arrangements,
possibly prompting central actors to initiate change.
These documented disembedding mechanisms share
two features. First, they prompt central actors to think
about alternatives either because they are needed
(internal contradictions) or because they are possible
(pluralism). As alternatives come into view and are
reflected on, the taken-for-grantedness of the surround-
ing system disappears. Understanding of the sur-
rounding system is a secondary effect of being conscious
of and reflecting on contradictions or competing
models. Second, reflection on contradictions or alterna-
tives does not happen to just any central actors. The
actors who are observed to be disembedded interact at
interstices that allow them to consider alternative ways
of organizing the surrounding system (Furnari 2014).
Pluralism and contradiction are revealed to actors
who are centrally located in a field while simulta-
neously observing misaligned arrangements or logic
or multiple models. These interstitial interactions
facilitate insight, reflexivity, and new ambitions.
In this paper, I show that central actors can be
disembedded when the socially produced character
of the surrounding system is revealed—its taken-for-
grantedness dissolved directly. Rather than indirectly
coming to understand their assumptions about the
necessity and stability of the surrounding system,
central actors are confronted bluntly and with con-
crete detail. They become disembedded from the
system and catalyzed to work to change it. Further,
this direct disembedding mechanism goes beyond
cognitively disrupting actors to physically moving
themoutofthesystem.
Data and Method
The findings emerged from an inductive study of
managerial and professional employees’experiences
on BPR organizational change teams. The research-
design and data-collection processes were informed
by a general interest in the practice of devolving re-
sponsibility for organizational change work to rank-
and-file members, a phenomenon for which there are
abundant prescriptions (e.g., Hammer and Champy
1993 and Kotter 1996) but few analyses. I chose to study
Huising: Moving off the Map
Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS 3

BPR because it is a radical prescription for changing how
work is organized. BPR initiatives aim to transform
vertical, functionally organized structures into hori-
zontal, process-based structures. BPR proponents argue
that functional boundaries are detrimental to quality,
innovation, and cost because they interfere with the
flow of information and knowledge, prioritize func-
tional goals over organizational goals, and create an
overspecialized and sequential division of labor.
I studied the activities of five project teams tasked
with redesigning their organization’soperations(e.g.,
a product-production process, a customer-service pro-
cess, and a claims-processing process). The team mem-
bers were to create a new operational model intended
to lead to radical, visible change in their everyday
routines and those of their colleagues and reports. This
is in contrast to the more glamorous and distant work
of designing strategies for executives or implementing
information technology with distributed and often less
visible effects.
A puzzle emerged as the teams disbanded. Some
team members returned, as intended by senior man-
agement, to their prior role and career in the organi-
zation. Some chose to leave their careers, taking on
organizational change staff roles with responsibility
for organizational development Six Sigma, total quality
management (TQM), BPR, or Lean projects or assuming
temporary contract roles to manage BPR project teams
within their organization or other organizations. Given
that team members were established, successful pro-
fessionals who could have returned to their jobs or
accepted attractive lateral transfers or promotions,
these postproject role choices were surprising. Thus,
I shifted my effort to a grounded analysis of these
unexpected postproject role choices.How did employees
account for these choices, what did these choices mean
to them, and what informed and influenced these
choices? What provoked centrally located employees
to assume new peripheral organizational roles within a
space of 7 to 16 months?
Research Setting
Although the employees’experiences are my unit
of analysis, project teams were my sampling unit.
I selected teams based on three theoretical issues that
prior literature suggested influenced employees’ex-
periences. First, I sought teams that required different
time commitments (number of days per week that
employees worked on the project). On some teams,
employees worked on the project one day a week
(20%). On other teams, employees worked five days a
week (100%). These differences suggested the order of
resources that senior management provided to the
team, but I also hypothesized, given the role of en-
capsulationinconversionprocesses(Lofland 1966),
that time spent on the project would significantly
influence the team members’experiences. Second, I
sought teams that were led and staffed by employees.
I, therefore, excluded projects that involved external
consultants. I also excluded projects initiated by the
purchase of an enterprise resource planning system
from SAP or Oracle.
1
Both external consulting ser-
vices and technological systems have implications for
the participation of employees in BPR that would
have complicated the analysis. Third, although it was
not possible to select teams based on project outcomes,
I sought access to as many teams as possible to increase
the potential for project-outcome variety.
Senior management and project leaders were not
eager to embed a researcher in a nascent team working
on a difficult assignment replete with novelty, ambi-
guity, and time pressure. I approached more than 20
organizations, and I eventually negotiated access to
six teams in five organizations. Four of them, Natural
Resources, High Technology, Durable Products, and
Consumer Goods, are Fortune 500 companies. The
fifth, Insurance, is a midsize regional insurance com-
pany. To maintain confidentiality, I do not describe the
content of the projects. Table 1presents the project
team characteristics.
All teams redesigned a product or service process.
Following redesign, another team took responsibility
for implementation. The redesign phase, as prescribed
(e.g., Davenport 1993, Petrozzo and Stepper 1994,
Hammer and Stanton 1995, and Braganza 2001), in-
volves an “orientation”to BPR, “discovery”of the
current functional organization of work, and “design”of
a process-based organization. The redesign phase also
involves developing a communication and training
strategy and related materials and costing all proposed
changes.
Because the teams had considerable responsibility,
project team leaders, in consultation with a steering
committee, selected employees carefully, using three
main criteria. First, team leaders selected “the best and
the brightest.”A team leader explained, “Iwanted
people who didn’t have extra time on their hands.
I wanted the really high-value performers. . . . The [team
member’s name] of the world, who are smart as a
whip and have quite a bit of attitude.”Second, they
wanted employees with credibility and attitude: “some-
one who is a healthy skeptic, meaning that they are not
terrible but they question things until they are con-
vinced that they make sense, and usually those kinds
of people are vocal. . .. So we want one of those.”
Employees known to be observant, thoughtful, and at
times critical of their own professional practice and
the local practices were selected. Third, team leaders
selected employees who had experience and expertise
related to the work being redesigned. Securing the
participation of these employees required extensive
negotiations with their superiors.
Huising: Moving off the Map
4Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS

The selected employees were well established in
terms of hierarchical position, educational attain-
ment, and organizational tenure (see Table 2). They
were primarily white-collar workers; more than half
held managerial or director-level positions. Ninety-
eight percent had a bachelor’s degree, and 58% had a
master’s-level education. Their fields of study ranged
from education to management to engineering. Across
the teams, there were equal numbers of women and men.
Tenure rangedfrom 1 to 32 years and averaged 14.1 years
across all team members.
Data Collection
The data for this analysis are 113 in-depth interviews
with 48 team members across six teams, project leaders,
and others in the organizations; observation of the project
work of 21 team members; and project documentation
from each team.
2
I interviewed team members when a
project was launched and when it ended. In the first
interview, I asked them to explain how they came to
join the team, what they expected from the project,
what they knew about BPR, and any work they had
begun on the project. In the second interview, I asked
them to describe their activities and to reflect on their
experiences on the project, including difficult and
satisfying moments, and what they had learned,
would do again, or would avoid. I also asked them to
explain and evaluate the idea of BPR. The interviews
lasted 50 to 100 minutes. I recorded all interviews on
tape or took notes, which I typed following each in-
terview. I observed three teams, each for one week, as
they worked on their project. I wrote field notes and
typed these up each evening. I collected the PowerPoint
decks that each team created to present their recom-
mended designs and to record their work in process,
including team activities, goals, project plans, data,
and team members’reflections. These tended to be
detailed. For example, one team recorded, at several
points throughout its project, each team member’s
reactions to the project and the team’sprogress.
To generate context for the team members’expe-
riences, I interviewed the executive sponsor, mem-
bers of the steering committee, and the project leader
and the project leader’s contact in the process office,
organizational development office, or human resource
department.
3
These informants spanned multiple
levels of the organization and held different perspectives
on the circumstances surrounding the present effort
as well as on its scope and their expectations. I also
collected data on the criteria and process for selecting
team members.
I obtained access to the Natural Resources and
Durable Products teams after the redesign phase of
their project had ended. To mitigate retrospective bias
as much as possible, I relied extensively on interviews
with the project leader and sponsors and available
documentation to generate a timeline of the projects’
activities and used this information to probe the team
members about the concrete details of their experi-
ences and recollections. Table 1summarizes the data-
collection activities.
Analysis
I examined employees’postproject role choices, group-
ing them into two categories, each with several sub-
categories: return to role to continue career (former role,
lateral role, promotion) or choose organizational change
role that deviates from career (permanent organizational
change staff role, temporary organizational change
project role). Most employees returned to their role to
continue their career (25 cases). They either were pro-
moted (seven cases), moved laterally (eight cases), or
Table 1. Project Team Characteristics and Data Collection Activities
Project details
Natural resources
(NR)
High technology
(HT)
Durable products
(DP)
Consumer goods
(CG)
Insurance
(I
1
)(I
2
)
Type of process Product Product Service Service Service Service
Team size (number
of persons)
10 10 11 8 7 6
Estimated time
commitment (%)
25 100 100 40 20 20
Project duration
(months)
813161287
Project resources Travel, external
training, materials
Some travel and
materials
Extensive travel,
external training,
and materials
Some travel,
training
and materials
Limited, for
training
Limited, for
training
Status of project Shelved Shelved Cancelled Implemented Implemented Implemented
Data collection activity
Interviews 14 20 15 31 17 15
Observation No No No Yes Yes Yes
Project documentation Yes (extensive) No Yes (limited) Yes Yes Yes
Timing Retrospective In play Retrospective In play In play In play
Huising: Moving off the Map
Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS 5

Table 2. Team Member Data
Case
Preproject
role Postproject role
Individual
Characteristics Team responsibilities Team characteristics
Company Individual Level Role Level Role
Same
organization
p, t,
c
a
Postproject role Education Sex Tenure
Primary team
responsibilities
Percentage
of time
b
Size of
team
Duration,
(months)
Project
outcome
c
Panel A: Return to career
DP 2 D C1 VP nc y p Promoted B M 22 Communication &
mapping operations
80 11 16 Cancelled
HT 3 M C1 D nc y p Promoted M M 10 Communication & new
design
60 10 13 Impl inter
IN1 1 D C1 VP nc y p Promoted M F 30 Communication 20 7 8 Implement
IN1 5 M C2 D nc y p Promoted HS F 23 Training & costing 20 7 8 Implement
IN2 1 M C1 D nc y p Promoted B M 24 Training 20 6 7 Implement
IN2 4 NE C1 P nc y p Promoted HS F 14 Training 20 6 7 Implement
IN2 5 NE C2 P nc y p Promoted M F 13 Communication & new
design
20 6 7 Implement
HT 5 P C1 nc nc y p Lateral transfer B F 5.5 Training 40 10 13 Impl inter
HT 6 P C1 nc nc y p Lateral transfer B F 8.5 Training 40 10 13 Impl inter
HT 7 P C1 nc nc y p Lateral transfer B F 12 Training &
communications
60 10 13 Impl inter
HT 8 P C1 nc nc y p Lateral transfer B F 14 Training & new design 60 10 13 Impl inter
HT 9 P C1 nc nc y p Lateral transfer M F 8 Costing 60 10 13 Impl inter
IN1 3 M C2 nc nc y p Lateral transfer B M 8 Costing 20 7 8 Implement
IN1 4 M C1 nc C2 y p Lateral transfer B M 10 Communication & new
design
20 7 8 Implement
IN2 3 M C1 nc nc y p Lateral transfer M M 20 Communication 20 6 7 Implement
CG 4 P C1 nc nc y p Prior role M F 2 Training 40 8 12 Implement
CG 6 P C2 nc nc y p Prior role M F 10 Costing 40 8 12 Implement
CG 8 P C2 nc nc y p Prior role M M 14 Costing 40 8 12 Implement
HT 2 M C1 nc nc y p Prior role M M 9 Communications 60 10 13 Impl inter
HT 4 P C2 nc nc y p Prior role B F 3.5 Costing 60 10 13 Impl inter
IN1 2 M C2 nc nc y p Prior role B M 6 Training & costing 20 7 8 Implement
IN2 6 P C1 nc nc y p Prior role B M 4 Costing 20 6 7 Implement
NR 2 M C1 nc nc y p Prior role and retired HS M 32 Develop training 25 10 8 Cancelled
NR 4 M C2 nc nc y p Prior role and retired M M 28 Communication &
mapping operations
25 10 8 Cancelled
NR 5 M C2 nc nc y p Prior role and retired M M 30 Communication 25 10 8 Cancelled
Panel B: Choose organizational change roles
DP 3 D C1 nc C3 n p Organizational
development role
M M 1 Mapping operations &
new design
100 11 16 Cancelled
CG 1 D C1 nc C3 y p Organizational
development role
M M 23 Mapping operations 40 8 12 Implement
CG 2 D C2 nc C3 y p Organizational
development role
M M 25 Mapping operations 40 8 12 Implement
Huising: Moving off the Map
6Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS

Table 2. (Continued)
Case
Preproject
role Postproject role
Individual
Characteristics Team responsibilities Team characteristics
Company Individual Level Role Level Role
Same
organization
p, t,
c
a
Postproject role Education Sex Tenure
Primary team
responsibilities
Percentage
of time
b
Size of
team
Duration,
(months)
Project
outcome
c
CG 5 P C2 nc C3 y p Organizational
development role
M F 9 Mapping operations 40 8 12 Implement
IN1 7 M C1 nc C3 y p Organizational
development role
M F 12 Mapping operations 20 7 8 Implement
NR 3 M C1 nc C3 y p Lean change role M F 27 Mapping operations &
new design
40 10 8 Cancelled
NR 6 P C1 nc C3 y p Lean change role M F 14 Mapping operations &
costing
25 10 8 Cancelled
NR 8 P C2 nc C3 y p Lean change role M M 18 Mapping operations 25 10 8 Cancelled
DP 6 M C2 nc C3 y p Six Sigma change role M F 22 Mapping operatings &
communications
100 11 16 Cancelled
DP 7 M C2 nc C3 y p Six Sigma change role M M 17 Mapping operations &
design
100 11 16 Cancelled
DP 8 P C1 nc C3 y p Six Sigma change role HS F 16 Mapping operations &
costing
100 11 16 Cancelled
HT 1 D C1 nc C2 y p TQM change role B F 14 Mapping operations &
new design
100 10 13 Impl inter
HT 10 P C1 nc C2 y p TQM change role M M 15 Mapping operations &
new design
100 10 14 Impl inter
DP 1 D C2 VP C3 n t BPR initiative leader B M 5 Mapping operations &
design
100 11 16 Cancelled
DP 4 D C1 nc C3 n c BPR project manager M M 14 Mapping operations &
design
100 11 16 Cancelled
DP 5 M C2 nc C3 n c BPR project manager B M 12 Mapping operations &
design
100 11 16 Cancelled
IN1 6 M C2 nc C3 y t BPR project manager M F 6 Mapping operations &
new design
40 7 8 Implement
NR 1 M C1 nc C3 y t BPR project manager HS M 23 Mapping operations 40 10 8 Cancelled
NR 7 P C2 nc C3 y t BPR project manager M M 8 Mapping operations 40 10 8 Cancelled
CG 3 P C1 nc C3 y t BPR team member B F 14 Mapping operations 40 8 12 Implement
CG 7 P C2 nc C3 y t BPR team member M F 10 Mapping operations 40 8 12 Implement
IN2 2 M C2 nc C3 y t BPR team member M F 6 Mapping operations &
new design
45 6 7 Implement
DP 9 P C1 nc C3 n c Change consultant M F 3 Mapping operations &
training
100 11 16 Cancelled
a
p = permanent, t = temporary, c = contract role.
b
Percentage of time per week spent on project work.
c
Project cancelled, project implemented, or implementation interrupted.
Huising: Moving off the Map
Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS 7

returned to their jobs (10 cases). Twenty-three chose
organizational change roles. Some moved into perma-
nent roles located in organizational change, organi-
zational development, or human resources departments
(13 cases), and the rest found temporary or contract roles
that allowed them to continue working on restruc-
turing projects intended to radically transform bureau-
cratic organizations (10 cases).
Movement Toward the Periphery and the Core. Those
who chose change roles moved toward the periphery
of their organization. In absolute terms, they moved
from roles that were core to the organization’sop-
erations to staff roles farther from the core. Those who
returned to their careers, in contrast, remained in their
central role or shifted even closer to the organization’s
core. They moved up the hierarchy and/or into roles
that were more central to the organization’sopera-
tions. Similar to Battilana (2011), I used measures of
hierarchical position (VP, director, manager, pro-
fessional, nonexempt) and relationship of the role to
the core operations (core role, role directly supports
core operations on a regular basis, role indirectly
supports core operations or directly supports in-
frequently) to plot the social position of employees’
roles before and after their participation on the team.
I transformed job titles tobecomparableacrossor-
ganizations based on my in-depth knowledge of the
settings. I provide a complete breakdown of the
preproject and postproject roles by team member in
Table 2. The information about each employee’shi-
erarchical position indicates whether the role is C1
(most central), C2, or C3 (least central). For example, a
C1 role in a durable products company would be a
production manager. A C2 role would be a quality
control manager. A C3 role would be an organiza-
tional development manager. To preserve the ano-
nymity of the interviewees, I do not reveal their roles.
Accounts of Movement to the Periphery. In the next
stage of analysis, I strove to understand employees’
postproject role choices. I coded each team member’s
account for that person’s choice. Using an open ap-
proach, I coded any data in which they discussed their
role in the organization and their postproject role
choice found in interview transcripts, conversations
recorded in field notes, or documentation related to
each individual (e.g., when they are quoted in Power-
Point decks). I then grouped these codes into more
general conceptual categories through continuous
iteration across employees’coded accounts. This anal-
ysis led to the identification of three conceptual cate-
gories that covered employees’accounts of their
postproject choices. Those who returned to their career
described how their work on the team contributed to
their skill development, knowledge of the organization,
visibility, and network. They believed the project tobe an
aberration in their career and expected to return to their
prior path. I labeled these accounts “development.”
Those who moved to peripheral roles described the
effect that their work on the project had on how they
related to the organization. AsI analyzed and reanalyzed
these accounts, I created two conceptual categories of
experience that employees expressed—alienation and
empowerment—to account for their choices. These
team members described becoming alienated from
their former positions and becoming empowered
to continue to change organizations. They provided
an alienation account that pushed them to take on
new roles and an empowerment account that pulled
them to new roles. I wrote detailed memos that elab-
orated and explored these two conceptual categories.
I also noted that, although these concepts emerged in
employees’accounts, their salience and prominence
var ied.
Identifying the categories of development, alien-
ation, and empowerment moved me to a new stage of
grounded theorizing. I knew from my coding of the
accounts that team members identified moments and
activities in which they recognized their develop-
ment, alienation, and empowerment. I returned to the
accounts to understand what activities and interac-
tions informed, structured, and guided these experi-
ences. This analysis was done employee by employee
rather than team by team because, although employees
were configured as a team, they often worked on
smaller tasks in isolation and on larger tasks with a
subset of the team. Contrary to prescriptions and ex-
pectations, few activities, besides presentations, in-
volved all team members. Project team leaders had
to decide how to best distribute the allotted human
resources to complete a redesign proposal on time. They
distributed the work—training, costing, communica-
tion,mapping,andredesign—across team members.
A primary implication is that employees, even
those on the same team, were assigned different re-
sponsibilities and tasks and, as a result, had remarkably
different experiences. As I coded, I began to identify
and elaborate on activities that team members drew
on to explain how they came to experience development,
alienation, and ambition. In Table 3,Ishowthepat-
terned differences in activities and their relation to
postproject role choices.
I was most interested in how employees moved to the
periphery, so I focused on identifying which activities
contributed to experiences of alienation and empower-
ment but were not related to experiences of development.
The activity of process mapping, developing an “as-
is”representation of the organization’soperation,
emerged as central in employees’descriptions of how
they became alienated and empowered. In contrast,
those who experienced development and shifted toward
Huising: Moving off the Map
8Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS

the center of the organization either were not involved
in process mapping or were involved marginally and
did not identify it as a significant experience. Given this,
I focused on understanding the features and conse-
quences of this activity in my settings. I sought theo-
retical approaches to inform and deepen my analysis of
these activities, including theories of knowledge objects
(Knorr-Cetina 1997,Bechky2003) and ethnometh-
odology (Garfinkel 1967).
Although my data collection and analysis included
all team members, the focus of this paper is on those
who moved to the periphery. Nonetheless, it is im-
portant to understand how those who returned to
theircentralrolesorwhomovedclosertothecore
informed my findings. As is typical in grounded theory
building, they provided a contrast against which to see
and interpret the choices and experiences of those who
moved to the periphery. They allowed me to make
analytical categories about changes in social position.
They also allowed me to understand how the accounts
of the postproject role choices were formed, especially
how different experiences varied these accounts in
patterned ways. Although I could write about the
experiences of those who remained at the core of the
organization, I write about the experiences of those
who moved to the periphery. However, this writing
would be impossible without the full data set and the
grounded analysis of these data.
Table 3. Summary of Differences in Responsibilities, Experiences, and Postproject Role Accounts
Promoted, lateral transfer, return to prior role Move to the periphery
Primary responsibility on team Planned communication strategy, developed
materials, and communicated change process. OR
Collected data on all work involved in producing a
good or service and created an end-to-end map.
Developed training strategy and developed materials.
May have involved conducting some initial training.
OR
Developed new organizational design of process. OR
Estimated cost of changes and expected savings.
Accounts of effects of
responsibility
Developed communication, persuasion, and project skills. Developed a detailed understanding of his organization’s
operations.
“I came from a job where I had a ton of formal
authority to a job where I had no formal authority.
So I learned to manage in a situation where I had no
formal authority but had to deliver something.”
“What I find attractive is. . .looking at it holistically.
We, like a lot of companies, are very functionally
siloed, and I liked very much having a way of
approaching the business that said I don’t have to
worry about all those boundaries but just do what’s
right. And for me that was very powerful and very
attractive.”
“The huge majority of peoples’resistance, their
reluctance, is not fact based. If you get down to the
root of their reluctance, it’s not a logical issue, it’san
emotional one. In the past, I’d beat you to death with
the numbers, overanalyze things. Today I don’t
even attempt to convince people of a lot of things
from a logical standpoint.”
Felt empowered to change the organization.
“Maybe some of the concepts are fairly simple
but. . .if we can get everybody focused on that, we
can start to ignore the functional boundaries a little
bit, and that’s where it got fun, and that’s where it
got challenging.”
“It made me more savvy (politically).”
Felt alienated from the organization.
“I guess, on one hand, I was proud that in this maze
of such a mess I could actually get things done.
There was a certain amount of pride that. . .I was
getting the end result done pretty well every day.
The cost to the company . . . painful.”
Exposure and visibility to senior managers.
“I think the main professional impact has been. . .some
very senior level interactions, pretty detailed senior
level interactions and all cross-functional
interactions so I know what’s going on, I know
people inside the company an awful lot better than
I used to and have kind of a common experience
basis.”
“You get extra visibility, but it is a double-edged
sword because you also get more work.”
Learned about the business beyond functional role.
“It was an opportunity to learn a lot more about our
business and then to learn about what’s going on in
the outside world and where we may need to
improve.”
Examples of postproject role Promoted from director to VP (DP2) Shift from core function director to director of
organizational development (DP3)
Transferred between core functions (HT7) Shift from core function manager to Lean change
manager (NR3)
Remained in role (IN1) Shift from core function director to TQM director
(HT1)
Huising: Moving off the Map
Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS 9

Other Factors. During the course of the analysis, I was
conscious that individual differences could be influ-
encing my findings. It is possible that those who chose
organizational change roles were predisposed to do
so and that the BPR project facilitated their career change.
Although I cannot rule out individual differences in
predisposition (cf. Pratt 2000), the selection process
suggests that individual differences are not central
factors in what I observe. In the online appendix, I
consider how demographic, situational, and structural
factors relate to the interpretation and theorization of the
data. I find that two factors—time working on the
projects and the outcome of the projects—may have
intensified feelings of empowerment and alienation.
Further, the analysis suggests that, although it is pos-
sible that the selection criteria correspond to a potential
predisposition to work in an organizational change role,
it is difficult to imagine how. However, even if these
employees were predisposed to organizational change
roles, their accounts offer important insights into expe-
riences that informed their decisions to assume pe-
ripheral roles through which they could work to change
organizations in more or less radical ways. Further,
their accounts suggest how employees developed a
new apprehension of their organization that created
both a sense of empowerment and a sense of alienation.
Findings
Postproject Role Choices
Participating in the BPR project involved a quid pro
quo: in taking the assignment, employees could ex-
pect increased rewards and status. Project leaders
described implicit or explicit postproject arrange-
ments for team members. For example, a project
leader explained that each recruit was encouraged to
think of the experience as “an important stepping
stone”into a senior management or attractive de-
velopmental role. Another said, “This experience
flags them as high potential”and went on to describe
the upward paths possible. Such arrangements reflect
practitioner recommendations that team members be
promoted or moved into lateral roles that help them
build their career as the projects wrap up (Hammer
and Stanton 1995). Overall, team members were ex-
pected to take on postproject roles that were similar to
or better than their prior roles, enhancing their career
in the organization.
Most did this. They either remained in their central
roles or moved into more central roles by accepting
promotions or moving laterally into roles that were
core to the organization’s operations. This is illus-
trated in Figure 1. The top two grids show the preteam
and postteam roles of those who returned to their
careers. Each code corresponds to one manager (see
Table 2). The y-axis indicates the hierarchical position
of the role, moving from low (central) to high (pe-
ripheral). The x-axis indicates the role’spositioninthe
operations from core to periphery: C1 (most central),
C2, or C3 (least central). For example, DP2 was pro-
moted from the director of a function to the VP of the
function. IN24 was promoted from a nonexempt po-
sition to a supervisory role. HT5 was transferred from a
product development role into a lateral role that would
pave the way to a future promotion.
Beyond the promise of career rewards, the project
work supported employees’moves into new roles
because it exposed them to senior management and
organizational politics, and it enhanced their man-
agement skills and network. For example, a manager
explainedthatashecostedthedesignandpresented
his work to senior management, he learned “how
to handle myself on a big visible project.”Another
manager, who was responsible for internal commu-
nication, spent considerable time presenting in town
halls and management meetings. He explained, “I
thought I knew a lot about how we work. I know so
much more now,”and described how he could use
this new cross-department knowledge and these new
relationships when he returned to his job. A manager
who led her team’s communication strategy said,
“Through the project, I was given exposure to a lot of
senior people and the way they thought about things.
I think I can use this going forward.”The employees
who remained in central roles were responsible for
developing communication strategies, training plans,
new designs, or financial forecasts. Through this work,
they developed skills and resources that facilitated and
encouraged their move to more central roles.
As explained in the methods section, I do not de-
scribe this expected outcomeinmoredetail.Instead,
I focus on the unexpected outcome. Some employees
turned down promotions, lateral transfers, or their
prior central role to assume organizational change
roles working on BPR or other change projects. Some,
(e.g., HT10 and IN17) moved into permanent orga-
nizational change roles, retaining their hierarchical
status in the organization but moving from a core line
role into a peripheral staff role in TQM and organi-
zational development, respectively. Others (e.g., DP1
and NR1) took temporary BPR project jobs in their
organization or other organizations. The bottom two
grids in Figure 1show the preteam and postteam roles
of team members who chose organizational change
roles. These role choices moved them to the periphery
of the organization. Almost all who moved to new
organizations were working on contract (italicized
in Figure 1). In these roles, they reported making
the same or less money and losing pension and
Huising: Moving off the Map
10 Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS

benefit plans. These team members moved to the
periphery of both the organization and the labor
market. The move of a large minority of team members
from central line roles to peripheral organizational
change staff roles is not an expected outcome of pre-
scriptions for broad-based participation in organiza-
tional change initiatives (Hammer and Champy 1993,
Kotter 1996).
In the remainder of the paper, I unpack employees’
accounts of their decision to move to the periphery. In
particular, I focus on experiences that reshaped their
interpretation of the contributions they made and
could make from central roles and their evaluation of
peripheral roles as a possible source of change. I begin
by describing process maps and how team members
constructed them. I then present how this knowledge
changed their interpretation of central and peripheral
roles, influencing their postproject roles. I do not
argue that process mapping deterministically causes
employees to move to peripheral positions. Rather,
I show how deep engagement in representing and
understanding the operations of the organization,
occasioned by process mapping, changes the way they
understand the organization and their participation in
it. As with all social processes, this is probabilistic, and
unobservable as well as observable factors (discussed
in the methods section) influence this process.
Building a Process Map
A process map is a detailed physical portrait of the
operations being redesigned. Often a large-scale di-
agram located on the walls of a conference room, the
mapisusedtounderstandcurrentworkandco-
ordination practices and to guide redesign options
(Petrozzo and Stepper 1994). To build the map, team
members begin by collecting all information about the
operations being redesigned: What were the work
activities? Who did the work? What interactions and
hand-offs occurred? What information and tools were
used? How long did each work activity take? What
happened when errors were found? Senior employees’
high-level, often prescriptive, accounts of departmental
operations could not answer these questions. The
map, if it were to guide organizational redesign, had
to capture employees’experiences working in concrete
circumstances.
Figure 1. Positions Before and After Project Work
Huising: Moving off the Map
Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS 11

To collect this information, they traced the entire
string of activities involved in building a product,
processing a claim, or attracting and retaining a client.
They did this by watching employees work or by
speaking with them about their work. One explained,
“I walked the plant [floor] about one night a week . . .
[because] if you are going to impact people’swork,
you should know something about it.”He explained
that in walking the plant floor he saw how employees
worked and spoke with them about problems they
faced on the job. I observed these types of interactions.
For example, a team member met with seven adju-
dicators to understand how they processed insurance
claims. The purpose of the meeting, he explained, was
to answer the question, “What do we do?”As they
listed their tasks on a whiteboard, the adjudicators
described on whom they relied for inputs, who their
outputs affected, what information they drew on, the
veracity of that information, missing information, the
databases they could access or not, the workarounds
they had devised, and the people they called for help.
This information was not easily articulated, requiring
that the team member probe and question accounts,
and employees’accounts varied. Several adjudicators
agreed that the session was useful as they learned
about new workarounds and resources. The three-
hour meeting was also useful for the team member as
he collected the details needed to integrate this do-
main of work into the process map.
As team members learned about the work con-
tributing to an eventual good or service, they ordered
and recorded it on a large plane, usually a large piece
of paper attached to the wall, using colored markers,
stickers,stickynotes,andstring.Figure2illustrates
this multimedia work.
4
They located the people, in-
teractions, computer systems, machinery, forms, and
reports that contributed to an output. Roles were
written on sticky notes, and their relationships and
connections traced via string. Thick black lines identified
the functional boundaries. Reserves of information, their
sources, and their uses were drawn along the bottom of
the map. Team members plotted the connections be-
tween the roles and activities, tracking whether they
were done sequentially or simultaneously and color-
coding them based on their contribution to the end
product (value added, green string; non–value added,
yellow string). The emerging diagram became a
panorama of the web of interactions that constitute
the organization.
Despite being selected to work on the process map
because of their far-reaching knowledge of operations
and connections across the organization, the team
members were unfamiliar with the organization de-
picted on the map. One explained that “it was like the
sun rose for the firsttime....Isawthebiggerpicture.”
They had never seen the pieces (jobs, technologies,
tools,androutines)connectedinoneplace,andthey
realized that their prior view was narrow and frac-
tured. A team member acknowledged, “I only thought
of things in the context of my span of control.”The
map, as shown, distanced them from their local, deep
familiarity with a specific domain. It lifted them to
a higher, comprehensive vantage point from which
they could trace and scrutinize the surrounding pat-
terns of action. They began to reflect on rather exis-
tential issues: What constitutes this entity we call an
organization? How is the organization actually or-
dered? What principles or logic are used to structure
the organization? As they answered these questions,
they generated new knowledge about the makeup and
logic of their organization.
Observing the Lived Order. The map integrated the
daily experience of employees distributed through-
out the organization. By consolidating these narrow
but grounded observations and accounts of work, the
map revealed how locally experienced worlds con-
nected and fed back into one another in ways not
previously known or recognizable. For example, team
members from DP mapped the customer-service
process from the negotiation of the sale to the de-
livery of the final good. This process cut across six
departments and three buildings. Team members
at HT mapped a production process from the procure-
ment of raw materials to the finished goods. Although
the four departments were located in one facility, no
one had ever walked this process across them. Be-
cause the work was fragmented across departments
and sometimes locations, it was almost impossible
for an individual manager to trace the practices that
linked employees across time and space. The map made
these practices accessible for observation and reflection.
The map also revealed interactions that were typically
invisible or unacknowledged by senior management.
Figure 2. (Color online) Process Map
Huising: Moving off the Map
12 Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS

Activities and transactions made invisible by technol-
ogy were now visible. A team member explained the
following:
If you think about some traditional manufacturing you
can see the work. . . . We have people that do one thing—
move information. And one of the issues with this is
that you can’tseeit....Wegotitonthewallsanddrew
it out explicitly. . .. So we really get it out of their heads
and out of the information systems and explicitly show [it].
Other activities that were either missed or glossed
over in the official description of operations, in-
cluding preparatory work, coordination tasks, and
communication necessary to get things done, were
marked on the map. Rework, workarounds, and tools
that employees, using their own good sense, had
created to help them do their work were identified.
The adjudicators, for example, had created and shared
decision letters that, over time, became de facto tem-
plates. These templates surfaced as important tools in
the work process. Likewise, shadow databases, extra
steps used to compensate for old machinery, and
regular coordination exchanges were identified and
located on the map.
Such examples, when observed in multiples on the
map, illuminated the tangle of practices that link em-
ployees as they worked to produce a good or service.
Using evocative imagery, a team member explained
how this view was different from what most em-
ployees saw:
People are only seeing the surface. And then they see a
little bit of whitewater, the churn, and the stream is so
muddy that they really can’t see down to the bottom
and see where the rocks are piled up and see where the
tree branches have gotten snagged and where the dead
bodies are rotting that is causing all of the churn on the
top of the water. . . . They really don’t get a picture that
if you cleared out all of those rocks and stumps and
tree branches and dead bodies how fast the stream
could really flow and how clear it could be.
The map allowed them to see how the system op-
erated below the surface, integrating all the pieces to
generate a comprehensive view. They commented on
the uniqueness of this comprehensive view: “We don’t
allow people to see the end-to-end view . . . to see how
things interrelate.”One explained that the experience
“ruins [one’s] perspective in a good way.”Another de-
scribed how it gave her a “whole different way of looking
at things.”By revealing the web of roles, relations, and
routines that coalesce to make the organization, the
map made the organization’s actual operation intelligible.
This panoramic, detailed view of the lived order or
the “is-ness or quiddity”of action, “namely, the social
relations that are implicit in its organization . . .
cannot be grasped from within that experience”
(Garfinkel 1967, p. 262). Competent members of
organizations draw on everyday knowledge (Schutz
1962,BergerandLuckmann1967)astheyperform
their roles, but this knowledge does not speak to the
organization’s broader order. Despite how remark-
ably capable these employees were at “recognizing,
knowing, and ‘doing’the lived order,”the broader
order or structure is often “resistance to analytic re-
covery”from the inside (Pollner and Emerson 2001,
p. 121). Even if they would like to observe and reflect
on their organization’s detailed operating process,
they rarely have opportunities, such as building process
maps, that provide time and access.
Observing Order as Emergent and Negotiated. As these
team members began to see the web of relationships
that make up the organization, this view provoked
“ahas”of surprise and disappointment, which they
began to scrutinize. “We were overtaken by what we
learned,”explained a team member. Another said,
The wall was discovery after discovery. We do what?
And, you know, we had customers in the room, we had
suppliers in the room, we had people from every
function in the room. It was just a blast in terms of
learning how the business really operated.
They expected to observe inefficiencies and waste,
the targets of redesign, and they did. Tasks that could
be done with one or two hand-offs were taking three
or four. Data painstakingly collected for decision-
making processes were not used. Local repairs to work
processes in one unit were causing downstream prob-
lems in another. Workarounds, duplication of effort,
and poor communication and coordination were all
evident on the map.
Beyond these issues, they observed a more fun-
damental problem. A team member explained, “I’m
getting a really clear visual of what the mess is.”
Standing back from the wall, he sighed, and said, “The
problemisthatitwasnotdesignedinthefirst place.”
Instead of observing a system designed, adapted, and
coordinated to achieve stated goals, he pointed to three
examples on the map that demonstrated the exercise
ofagencyinvariousplacesandatvariouslevelsin
the organization. These change efforts lacked broader
perspective and direction as well as coordination and
integration with other efforts. The first example was a
quality initiative created by a functional manager.
Although it reduced processing times and errors for
the work done in the function, the gains had a negli-
gible overall effect because other functions had not
undertaken a similar effort. It was a valiant effort but
failed because it did not spread across functional
boundaries. The second example was the develop-
ment of a rather low-tech database that distributed
information about client files, allowing employees
from different functions to track work and improve
Huising: Moving off the Map
Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS 13

troubleshooting. Senior management did not fund or
recognize this effort despite its success, so the overall
impact was local. The third example was of a “kingdom
builder,”a resourceful manager who, in the name of a
strategic priority, gained authority over several de-
partments that were not a natural fit. He amalgam-
ated these departments, thereby creating numerous
inefficiencies. No higher authority seemed to recognize
this problem and work to rechannel this individual’s
efforts. Such examples demonstrated that there were
multiple local, loosely coordinated logics guiding the
emergent design of the organization.
The team members building the map learned that,
although the organization was once designed to serve
a purpose, the original design had been eroded, patched,
and overgrown with alternative plans. One explained,
“Everything I see around here was developed because
of specific issues that popped up, and it was all done
ad hoc and added onto each other. It certainly wasn’t
engineered.”The accretions of local decisions, changes,
and fixes had overtaken it. They were faced with a set
of jobs, work processes, and interactions that were
“the sediments of a history of voting, decree, con-
flict, agreement, compromise, bargaining, persua-
sion, coercion, and other forms of interaction”(Barley
2008, p. 501). One explained why this happened:
The functions don’t really understand . . . the inputs
and outputs. They see problems, and the general ap-
proach, the human approach, is to try and fixthem.We
are seeing this every day. Functions have tried to put
band aids on every issue that comes up. It sounds
good, but when they are layered one on top of the
other, they start to choke the organization. But they don’t
see that because they are only seeing their own thing.
Whatever the cause, the effect was that they had
difficulty tracing a purposive system that coordi-
nates action and decisions to create an efficient and
effective organization.
The lack of a higher order of design and guiding
forces for daily organizing was a realization. The
current design and logic was largely disconnected
from the way work was performed and coordinated.
In another organization, a team member explained
that she had been “assuming that somebody did this
on purpose, and it wasn’t done on purpose; it was just
aseriesofrandomeventsthatsomehowcameto-
gether.”They could not locate any one person or even
a committee of people—senior executives or senior
employees—who were designing and enforcing bu-
reaucratic plans of action. Although senior employees
make strategies and plans, the people putting together
the maps saw that the eventual sorting out of how to
actually meet these goals and targets via day-in, day-out
work occurred in less anticipated ways. There was
no central force actively evaluating, reining in, and
coordinating actions and decisions across the organiza-
tion. This explains, for example, the local efforts to im-
prove quality and the creation of local databases and
templates.
Some held out hope that one or two people at the
top knew of these design and operation issues;
however, they were often disabused of this optimism.
For example, a manager walked the CEO through the
map, presenting him with a view he had never seen
before and illustrating for him the lack of design and the
disconnect between strategy and operations. The CEO,
after being walked through the map, sat down, put his
head on the table, and said, “This is even more fucked
up than I imagined.”The CEO revealed that not only
was the operation of his organization out of his
control but that his grasp on it was imaginary.
They learned that what they had previously at-
tributed to the direction and control of centralized,
bureaucratic forces was actually the aggregation of
the work and decisions of people distributed throughout
the organization. Everyone was working on the part
of the organization that they were familiar with, as-
suming that another set of people were attending to
the larger picture, coordinating the larger system to
achieve goals and keeping the organization operating.
They found out that this was not the case.
Implications for Participation
Team members building the map observed the or-
ganization as a web of interactions, developed by
people as they tried to accomplish their work, guided
weakly, if at all, by a bureaucratic logic. This led them
to reflect on their participation in such a system. Dis-
covering how their organization was produced was
“a turning point”; some went so far as to call it an
“epiphany.”They were able to locate themselves within
the web of roles and relations while standing outside
that web to see how it made up the organization. One
explained, “I just have such a different perspective on
what is difficult and what is possible.”This new ap-
prehension of the organization fueled alternating senses
of empowerment and alienation, affecting their evaluation
of where—in which roles in the organization—they
could best improve the organization.
Empowerment. Understanding the organization to be
continuously produced with few design constraints
and limited direction gave these team members a
sense of opportunity to consciously create an efficient
structure to coordinate work. They were inspired to
try things, to intervene in routines and the organi-
zation broadly. This sense of potential focused them
on, as one explained, “inventing the board and not
just playing the game . . . [seeing] what’s really out
there and not arguing too much for the limitations
that maybe aren’tsoreal.”They expressed a desire to
Huising: Moving off the Map
14 Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS

move from participating in the system to designing a
new system, taking advantage of numerous insights
to improve the organization. One team member realized
how much his perspective had changed through an in-
teraction with colleagues about changing an established
way of doing things: “They said, ‘Well, you can’t.’
Isaid,‘Why can’t we? . . . We can do anything we want.
We made it up. We’ll make it up some more.’” Where his
colleagues saw routine as rigidity and a lack of possi-
bility, he saw a time-bound fabrication—made up in a
different era and adjusted over time—and one that they
could improve on and reinvent into whatever they wanted.
They realized that they had conceptualized the orga-
nization as prior to, external to, and independent of them.
In doing so, they had objectified the organization, talking
about and treating organizational divisions, senior man-
agement, functional boundaries, job roles, and rules as
“things”having a reality and existence of their own. One
explained that organizational boundaries had become
so familiar that they forget they had created them:
Sowhatarewedoing?Wearereallyfilling customer
orders; however, we have it broken down into smaller
pieces, and we give each one of those pieces to someone
we are calling a department manager. These structures
[departments] that we put in place sometime in the past
have become real in peoples’minds, and we think there
is a difference between someone who works in de-
partment A and someone who works in department B.
Members of the organization carry on as though these
distinctions are facts, burdening the organization’scat-
egories, practices, and boundaries with a false sense
of durability and purpose. The human decisions and
interactions—often supported by data and rationale
but rife with haste and politics—that created the or-
ganization become lost over time. And as they do, the
organization increasingly becomes discussed, imag-
ined, and treated as a naturalized, necessary structure.
The idea that organizations are an ongoing human
product was a provocative insight for these employees.
This new perspective, as one explained, “made things
seem possible.”Once they could see the “what”as a
dynamic social creation, they could begin asking better
questions about “how.”A team member explained
that the logic of organization should not be fixed and
how its rules, synthetic creations, are free to deviate:
We organize time by shifts or by hours or by day or
whatever, but that is artificial. There is such a thing as
the day, but it doesn’t necessarily have to impact how
you go about your business. So we said what happens
if we run this particular unit continuously?
When they reconsidered these features (boundaries,
roles, reporting relations, work flows) as emergent,
contingent, and mutable and, therefore, as inviting
change rather than constraining it, they found that they
could look at their organizations in unfettered ways and
imagine greater possibilities for change. Work shifts
and functional boundaries, for example, moved from
having an alien facticity (Berger and Pullberg 1966)
or an independent existence removed from human
influence to having a malleable constitution accessible
to agentic redesign. These team members shifted from
understanding the organization as a planned object,
naturalized and existing independent of their partici-
pation, to understanding it as an emergent process,
constructed and constituted through their daily actions.
Observing the organization as continuously in the making
gave employees an overwhelming sense of possibility,
sparking ambition.
A team member explained that this new perspec-
tive on his organization represented potential for
something better: “Iliveforthedaysthatpeopletell
me, ‘well, you can’tdothat.’...Ican.”Such encounters
emphasized how others granted the organization an
overstated sense of purpose and stability, foreclosing
the possibility of remaking the organization accord-
ing to other logic or configurations. For some, this
inspiration to restructure organizations was ampli-
fied by the failure to see the potential gains in their
organizations. For example, one describing his move to
another organization’sBPReffortssaid,“You can see
the value that can be, that potential energy that can be
unleashed if we can only make it to here [points to pro-
gression on project plan].”Another described regret
over the organization being so slow to find this so-
lution, combined with a newfound sense of possibility:
I keep thinking to myself if I knew then what I know
now . .. this is exactly what we needed 15 years ago . ..
so it does kind of bother me. . . . I sit here and think
“Man, we could have done so much.”So now is my
opportunitytodosomuch.
Yet another was defiant in her belief: “Every day,
I can do things to make it better.”This team member
saw this new understanding of the organization as an
opportunity. The organization that appeared inert and
resistant was actually made up of relational or transac-
tional connections representing possibilities for change.
Another pointed out, “When you do all the discovery
and diagnosis and you go do that redesign and you go,
‘geez , this could really work,’it’shardtoletgoofthat.”
In organizations that were not going to continue with
BPR, this required finding other opportunities:
When you realize that you’re probably not going to get
there [implement the project], you don’t lose the belief
in what is possible. You realize that you have got to go
make that possibility happen someplace else.
Their peripheral role choices allowed team mem-
bers to exploit this new understanding of the orga-
nization’s operations. They could work with new
assumptions about the mutability and possibility of
Huising: Moving off the Map
Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS 15

the organization and create structures and systems to
coordinate and direct the web of roles and interactions.
Their new role choices also allowed them to remain above
and outside of the organization’s daily operations.
Alienation. Beyond a sense of empowerment, choosing
a peripheral role also aligned with the team members’
emerging sense of alienation from their jobs and careers
in the organization. Their new structural knowledge
led them to question the value of their central man-
agerial roles. As they reflected on the purpose and con-
tribution of their role, they experienced alienation from
their work.
Scrutiny of the dense web of transactions and relations
revealed that only a portion of the daily effort—theirs
and that of others—was contributing to core out-
comes and that their efforts to improve operations
had not yielded the intended effect. Productive con-
nections between jobs were missing. Job outputs (data,
analysis, designs) that could have informed other jobs
were not shared. Poor follow-through and communi-
cation gaps and time delays meant duplicated efforts
or created rework. Misunderstood feedback created
morework.Further,noonewasmakingobservations
at the level of the web and attempting to remedy these
issues. A team member was distressed by numerous
indications of waste and non–value added work flow-
ing from particular jobs:
If you asked just about anybody in the organization
how much of the work they do all day is value added,
they would tell you some very, very high number. And
in actuality it is usually a very small number, and the
majority of the time they are spending in intervention
resources . . . and all of the things that you discover,
that was painful.
The distress of identifying work and jobs that did not
play a meaningful role in the system, or any role at all,
was a common theme.
Futility of effort was observed at the group and in-
dividual level. In some cases, the map showed that a
department’s work was not integrated into the larger
system. For example, a team member came to realize
that his work did not serve the purpose he assumed:
When we put everything on the wall, I could see that
the databases I had implemented were used, but they
(the division) had 10 different databases because they
didn’t trust the data that I had put out there. Those, to
me, were “aha”moments. The work we did in IT
definitely doesn’tfulfill the needs of our customers
(thedivision)because,ifitdid,theywouldn’thaveto
recreate things on their own.
In this case, he observed that, because the data his
group provided was not being used, the work of his
group was done in vain. Particular jobs were also
shown to have limited impact.
As part of the map-building process, employees
were invited to identify their role on the map and to
indicate how it was connected to other roles through
either inputs or outputs. Team members recounted
that it was difficult to observe employees “go through
a real emotional struggle when they see that what
they are doing is not really adding value or that what
they are doing is really disconnected from what they
thought they were doing.”In one case, a finance man-
ager noticed that his role was on the wall but that it
was not connected to any other role on the wall. He
had been producing financial reports and sending
them to several departments because he understood
them to be crucial for their decision-making process;
however, no one had identifiedhisworkasaninputto
theirs. This realization was, in the end,
devastating for him. He was on the verge of tears .. . at
first, he became very argumentative and was trying to
convince people that you go from this Post-it note
down here to mine. [Other employees explained] Well
no, we don’t do that. It was a two-hour conversation.
And he finally sat down, and he said, so why am
I doing this? It was devastating.
The eventual outcome of this “aha”was that the
manager was moved to another role in the depart-
ment after working four years in a position that had
served almost no purpose.
After such analyses, team members could not look
at particular roles and people in the same way. One
described how these observations evoked negative
emotions:
You really start understanding all of the waste and all
of the redundancy and all of the people who are
employed as what I call intervention resources. The
process doesn’t work, so you have to bone it up by
putting people in to intervene in the process to hold
it together. So it is like glue. So I would look around
[the company] and I would see all these walking glue
sticks, and it was just absolutely depressing and frus-
trating at the same time.
Reflecting on his job and his reasons for taking a new
path, another explained, “I was the glue that held the
broken egg together. I was the workaround guy.
Idon’twanttogobacktothat.”Team members did
not want to go back to working as an “intervention
resource.”
In their prior roles, the team members had tried to
fix some of the problems in their realm. They assumed
that these changes had translated into improvements.
However, they observed, via the process map, that
these local initiatives made no difference either to the
end product or service or to the larger system of op-
erations. They also observed instances in which their
well-planned and well-intentioned strategies actually
Huising: Moving off the Map
16 Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS

made outcomes or operations worse. One explained
the following:
I was responsible for so much of what was screwed up
on that wall. I created it. I had made my little piece of
the world better, but when I looked at it from the big
picture. . . . I had spent my entire 10 years in that part of
the business, and it was pretty ugly, and I was re-
sponsible for a whole bunch of that.
They could now see how local efforts and im-
provements may be either wasted or destructive when
the larger system is taken into account. Another
noted, “Our approach was ‘just do this part.’Well,
you can’tjustdothispartbecauseitdoesn’tmovethe
needle at the end of the day. You are suboptimizing
things to make one little gleaming light.”They ob-
served the futility of working on one part of the larger
system without taking into account side effects, de-
lays, and feedback. They also observed that some of
the issues that seemed important and potentially of
high impact were very small in relation to the overall
system. A team member explained, “We were opti-
mizing one little piece of the business. Once you put it
into the scope of all the work, you realize that it is so
small and so far down that it really doesn’t matter.”
Their new understanding of the organization’s
makeup created a sense of alienation or powerless-
ness as they realized that, in their daily role or through
intentions to change their local unit, they were not
creating significant value and impact in the organi-
zation. This new focus on the broader system and on
creating direction and coordination across units dis-
couraged small-scale changes and endorsed a more
radical approach to getting at the systemic, root causes.
Returning to their job and career meant returning to the
belly of this complex system, being one part of the whole,
being limited to local, small-scale change. For example,
I could have stayed, but there were so many things that
we discovered, I personally discovered, and the team
discovered, during our process journey that I could not
get back into the mold of status quo and small incremental
improvement and don’t rock the boat and don’tmake
waves, just plug away and check the boxes as you go.
Their knowledge of the limits of local, small-scale
change and the futility of changing parts of the or-
ganization without addressing the system as a whole,
discouraged employees from returning to their career
in the organization. They did not want to contribute to
the mess or reproduce the mess they had observed.
Team members were bittersweet about their “choice”
as many did not experience it as a choice. They were
asked to participate in building an object that re-
vealed things they had never seen before. What they
hadlearnedcouldnotbeunlearnedorignored.One
explained his choice: “If I’d have known how hard it
would have been, I would have never started; now that
I’ve started, I’d never go back.”Another, in discus-
sing his new role, explained the following:
So why do I sit here in my—my free time from 10
o’clock to midnight drawing processmapsandtrying
to figure out the processes ofsomeoftheseother
companies, I’mnotquitesure....Idon’t feel like I have
much of a choice.
He felt compelled to do this work. Others expressed
similar sentiments about the difficulty of turning back—
“you get to the point where it’shardertogobackthan
forward”—and returning to their prior careers.
Discussion
This paper builds theory about the relationship be-
tween social position and challenges to social systems.
I show how detailed, comprehensive knowledge of
how a social system operates changes one’s orientation
to and place within that system. Beyond catalyzing
central actors to work for change, detailed knowledge
of the surrounding system has the side effect of
alienating central actors from working within the
observed system. Central actors volunteer to relocate
to the periphery because they perceive it is a better
placetomakelastingchange.
In my study, employees see how the organization,
which they had perceived as purposively designed,
relatively stable, and external, is continuously pro-
duced and emerges as people interact. As they
identify fragmented systems and myriad principles
guiding and coordinating this web of interactions,
theybegintoquestiontheefficacy of their efforts to
change the organization from central roles. They re-
cast their central positions as ineffective roles that
reproduce the organization’sinefficiencies. At the
same time, they see the potential to improve the ef-
ficiency and quality of the organization’soperations
by working at a distance to create a new design and
coordinating force. Their dual sense of alienation and
empowerment inspire them to identify new roles—a
variety of organizational change positions allowing
them to instigate change—which move them toward
the periphery of the organization.
As they do their jobs and develop their careers,
employees rarely have the opportunity to observe the
habituated action that produces their organization or
to develop deeper insights about what constitutes an
organization. Bureaucratic organizations do not lend
themselves to analysis willingly. Through the division
of labor, functional boundaries, and centralized au-
thority, bureaucracies generate and perpetuate partial
and myopic views of organizing processes. Those who
inhabit organizations rarely have occasion to see the
full picture, and even if they do, there are limited op-
portunities to reflect on it.
Huising: Moving off the Map
Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS 17

Building a detailed model of how work is
accomplished—the gathering, organizing, and syn-
thesizing of multiple understandings—helps generate
structural knowledge. The resulting object allows for
observation of, reflection on, and discussion of what
makes an organization. Although not intended to
create insights that disrupt career paths, the work of
building a map facilitates this possibility by requiring
detailed investigation and representation of how
the organization operates. The information collected
is broader than a routine, unit, or department. It shows
the network of connections that turn inputs into outputs,
allowing employees to see the side effects of local forces
and changes. The full picture of connections is observed.
Knowledge of the structuring of social realms is
distinct from everyday knowledge about the roles
and rules of action used to participate in these realms.
We may be skilled participants in a realm without
being conscious of how these realms are produced
and sustained through ongoing human action and
interaction. In my study, employees develop knowledge
about how their organization is constituted and the
principles guiding this constitutive process. Devel-
oping detailed, organized insight into an organiza-
tion’soperationsalterstheirunderstandingsoftheir
capacity to disrupt it and, consequently, their place
in it. Learning that the organization is the dynamic
product of social interactions rather than the given
context that contains these interactions allows em-
ployees to understand how their actions can either
reproduce or reorder the social world. They come to
see that significantly reordering the organization re-
quires moving to its periphery.
Without this knowledge of structure, we appre-
hend social realms, such as organizations, “as existing
over and beyond the individuals who ‘happen to’em-
body them at the moment . . . as possessing a reality
of their own, a reality that confronts the individual as
an external and coercive fact”(Berger and Luckmann
1967,p.58).Thisperspectiveorcomprehensionaf-
fects how we speak and act. We speak about orga-
nizations as if they are objects that exist independent
of us, and we act as though they constrain and guide our
actions. When we objectify social systems (organizations,
communities, families, gender roles), we apprehend them
as “prearranged patterns”that impose themselves on
us, coercing particular roles and rules (Berger and
Luckmann 1967, p. 21). We free ourselves to talk about
and inhabit them as independent of us: as existing prior
to us, standing before us, outliving us, and operating
without us. Given this, we are relieved of greater re-
sponsibility for them. Our responsibility is to skill-
fully fulfill our role within these objectified realms.
The mapping experience reveals the patterns of
daily life, delineates employees’contributions to those
patterns, and problematizes their taken-for-grantedness.
For this to hap pen, “onemusteitherbeastrangertothe
‘life as usual’character of everyday sense or become
estranged from [it]”(Garfinkel 1967,p.36).Whereas,as
some sociologists “know that organizations and in-
stitutions exist only in actual people’s doings and that
these are necessarily particular, local and ephemeral”
(Smith 2001, p. 163), employees may be less likely to
know this. When they do, it problematizes their past
and future participation.
Insights that dereify surrounding structures are likely
to be decentering (Garfinkel 1967). The realization that
social worlds do not have an independent, stable
existence but instead emerge from our collective ac-
tion is “sometimes arrived at in a moment of heady
delight, but often as a horrifying realization”(Lynch
2013, p. 6). This realization is considered a “fatal in-
sight”(Pollner 1987,p.88)becauseitdestroysas-
sumptions that the current order, roles, rules, and
routines are given. Within the system of roles, rules, and
routines, there is far more room to maneuver than
previously assumed (Ewick and Silbey 1998,2003).
Rejection of objectivity puts possibility, perhaps even
responsibility, squarely in the court of subjectivity.
Contributions
Disembedding Central Actors. There has been sig-
nificant theoretical work outlining how actors deeply
situated in a social system might emerge as chal-
lengers to that system (Sewell 1992,Emirbayerand
Mische 1998, Clemens and Cook 1999, Seo and Creed
2002). Across these works, the correspondence be-
tween position in social structures and mental structures
is common, highlighting new knowledge, understand-
ings, or perceptions as the mechanisms for decentering—at
least mentally—central actors. As embedded actors
focus on foreign ideas, a plurality of models, or identi-
fied contradictions, these inquiries secondarily or in-
directly generate a new understanding about the
mutability of the surrounding system and, thus, the
opportunities and efficacy for action. Empirical work
has documented how exposure to contradiction (e.g.,
Creed et al. 2010) and pluralism (e.g., Pache and
Santos 2013) triggers a primary realization, a reflec-
tion on this new discovery, followed by a secondary
realization of mutability of social system and then
creating a sense of agentic possibility.
My findings extend this work in two main ways.
First, I show how the flexibility and mutability of
the social system can be a direct realization. In my
setting, employees come to understand opportunities
for agentic action directly through understanding
how the surrounding social system is produced. The
knowledge that the organization is a series of pat-
terned interactions that persist because members
choose, collectively and unconsciously, to reproduce
them opens new avenues for action and possibilities
Huising: Moving off the Map
18 Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS

for change. This insight can emerge directly. Be-
yond being an additional and alternative mechanism
for disembedding central actors, this mechanism
suggests a more straightforward, homegrown means
through which a range of central actors may recognize
their possibilities for action. In situations in which
actors lack exposure to multiplicity or innovation in the
broader environment or do not experience tensions
or contradictions, they may have the opportunity or
create opportunities to explore how the system works.
One side effect of this direct disembedding mech-
anism may be that, beyond empowering action, it also
alienates people from their prior central work and
location. Studies of the indirect disembedding mecha-
nisms indicate that catalyzed actors remain in their
central roles (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006, Creed
et al. 2010). One potential reason for why those di-
rectly disembedded move to the periphery is that they
develop a deep and detailed understanding of the
surrounding system. They go beyond understanding
that the organization could be structured otherwise
and see the intimate details of how interactions and
relations make the organization. These details reveal
that their central roles are less efficacious than they
had understood. It seems likely that this direct pro-
cess of disembedding has other implications that
require further study.
Second, these findings indicate that particular sets
of central actors are likely to be disembedded, and this
will have implications for the type of change that
catalyzed actors pursue. In other words, the mecha-
nisms identifiedarenotavailabledemocraticallyor
randomly across embedded actors. Those who have
disembedding experiences are located in central roles
involving interstitial interactions access to contra-
dictions, multiple competing models, or direct insight
into the system. In this paper, managers selected for
roles and then given particular assignments on or-
ganizational change teams were uniquely situated to
develop deep, detailed knowledge about the opera-
tion of their organization.Theroleandassignment
oriented their attention, realizations, and subsequent
courses of action in a particular direction. This is also
true for central actors who experience contradictions
and tensions. These experiences stem from interstitial
roles—central actors with strong normative affili-
ations—or marginalized insiders (Creed et al. 2010).
Exposure to new models and ideas or a plurality of
models occurs when embedded actors fulfill role
obligations that require temporary, periodic shuttling
to events outside the organizational core (Greenwood
and Hinings 1996). These centrally embedded actors
with cosmopolitan duties are more likely to be dis-
embedded. In such cases, the changes that actors
pursue are informed and shaped by the character of
the interstitial aspect of their central role.
Social Position and Agency. The findings contribute
to social location accounts of agency offered in the
literature on organizational change, innovation, and
institutional change by problematizing the direction
and nature of the relationship between social position
and desires to challenge the status quo (e.g., Kellogg
2009 and Battilana 2011). Moving beyond the estab-
lished finding that social location facilitates a par-
ticular desire to challenge the status quo, I show that
this desire may encourage central actors to choose a
peripheral social location. The findings complicate
established assumptions about why peripheral actors
initiate change and the resources backing changes
from the periphery. Overall, the findings have implica-
tions for how we conceptualize and study challenges
from the periphery.
The findings also suggest that provocations from
the periphery are not all similarly motivated. Prior
work suggests that actors on the periphery may be
motivated to challenge current arrangements because
they are disadvantaged by them and are likely to
benefit from changes (Bourdieu 1993, Battilana 2006,
Jeppesen and Lakhani 2010). In my setting, employees
who choose to move to the periphery are not moti-
vated by their marginality. These employees were
not working for change that would make them more
central; they were trying to escape the perceived fu-
tility of central roles and to work for change that could
make their organization more effective. This finding
suggests that those who leave the center to push for
change from the periphery are likely to have a specific
change agenda in mind and that their work on the
periphery is likely aimed at achieving a particular end.
We should not assume that challenges from the pe-
riphery are motivated by a desire to become more
central in the system or that they originate from the
individual’s experience of inhabiting a peripheral
position. Further, the findings suggest that, by identi-
fying the realizations that push actors to the periphery,
we may better understand their particular motives and
variation in motives across actors.
An important implication of the findings is that
challenges from the periphery will not be equally
resourced. Prior studies show that, although pe-
ripheral actors instigate challenges, they are not well
resourced to effect change (e.g., Sgourev 2013). As a
result, these actors require intermediaries to assist
(Cattani and Ferriani 2008) or collective action that
facilitates the movement of peripheral actors toward
the center and central actors toward the periphery
(Sgourev 2013). My findings suggest that we will
observe variation in the resources supporting change
initiatives launched from the margins. If central ac-
tors move to peripheral position to launch change
campaigns, we should see some relatively sophisti-
cated and better-resourced attempts because they have
Huising: Moving off the Map
Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS 19

insider knowledge of the system and relationships with
those in the center. Challenges from those who move
from the center may be perceived as more sophisticated
as they can draw on the dominant discourse in creating
a case for change, mobilize established ties that are
centrally located, and rely on knowledge from their
prior roles at the core of the organization. As a result,
some provocations from the periphery may be more
likely to succeed, and challenges initiated by those who
move to the periphery may be more successful than
challenges initiated by those who begin there.
Overall, the findings indicate that there is more to
be learned from studying challenges from the pe-
riphery longitudinally. Several of the assumptions
accompanying the cross-sectional observation that
change comes from the periphery require reexami-
nation in light of the findings of this study. Beyond
studying the temporal dynamics of social position,
greater emphasis on prior experiences, motivations,
and resources may generate more nuanced accounts
of challenges from peripheral actors. Although we
have compelling accounts of how peripheral actors
disrupt the status quo, we also need to understand
situations in which there is silence from the margins
or when there is variation in the quantity or quality of
challenges.
Objects and Visualization. In this study, members on
organizational change teams build a process maps as
a means of generating knowledge of the surrounding
system, the subject of focus in organizational change.
Like other objects or tools—Porter’sFiveForcesor
Balanced Score Card—they structure employees’at-
tention, interpretation, and choices (Jarzabkowski
2004,Kaplan2011, Jarzabkowski and Kaplan 2015).
They are directive, inviting their makers to focus on
the priorities and values encoded within them. Through
objectual practice (Knorr-Cetina 1997)—work with
or through objects—scientists, market analysts, and
strategy makers generate knowledge about focal
subjects. As expected, the process maps informed
managerial decisions about redesign. The maps also
had the unexpected effect of influencing employees’
interpretations of their efficacy within the system and
their choices of roles and career paths. The findings
of this study suggest that we should consider how
objects regularly used by employees reshape their
subjectivities and choices beyond the focal subject.
Finally, the work with the process maps shifted
employees from their more typical verbal and tex-
tual mode into a visual mode. It is difficult to imag-
ine how employees would come to understand the
emerging nature of their organizations without a
visual tool. Given the surge in visualization studies in
organizational contexts (Meyer et al. 2013), this study
suggests that we pay attention and conduct further
research, both observational and experimental, to
examine how visualization of social systems affects
actors’orientation to and participation in the orga-
nization. It also suggests that we need to identify and
examine other visual, interactional experiences that
give actors structural insights into various social
worlds, including, for example, social network dia-
grams (Janicik and Larrick 2005) and system mapping
(Otto and Struben 2004).
Boundary Conditions and Limitations. Studying only
BPR projects places boundary conditions on my
findings. It is reasonable to ask whether the expe-
riences identified are specific to BPR. What other objects
or activities might offer insight into the constitution
organizations? What other experiences in organizations
simultaneously empower and alienate? For example,
social network diagrams, which have become easier
to create and analyze via web-based applications, may
spark reflection on the constitution of social structure.
This raises questions about the conditions under which
such experiences might produce feelings of alienation
and empowerment or catalyze employees to change their
interaction patterns and place in the network. Although
this study identifies an important empirical pattern
and set of mechanisms, it is difficult to know how the
findings generalize to other change efforts and to
speak with certainty about the necessary conditions.
A second limitation is the relatively small number
of cases studied. The study was designed to build
theory and is, therefore, based on a manageable number
of carefully selected cases. Future research could analyze
more teams and, thus, more team members to better
understand the role, if any, of individual tenure, job
role, and education or any patterns related to peripheral
role choices. Further research might also consider the
longer-term consequences of the observed changes,
examining employees’tenure in peripheral roles, ca-
reer patterns, and perspectives on role efficacy.
Conclusion
This study continues the conversation about how
actors shift from reproducing to challenging estab-
lished patterns of action. I show how realizations
about their organization—its nature and logic—
motivated employees to move to peripheral organi-
zational change positions. The findings indicate that
as we continue to explore who challenges, we must
consider antecedent processes. Understanding how
some become challengers—successful or not—involves
examining the dynamics of social position and ex-
ploring experiences that reshape our subjectivities,
changing our relationship with and participation in
social systems.
Huising: Moving off the Map
20 Organization Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–22, © 2019 INFORMS

Endnotes
1
These systems are designed using process logic, and organiza-
tions must often adjust in some pragmatic way to the information
system. Such projects involve a complex interaction with the
imperatives of technological systems that require considerable
effort to customize.
2
For four teams—High Technology, Insurance 1, Insurance 2, and
Consumer Goods—I collected longitudinal data. Four team members
declined to be interviewed.
3
The projects were tied organizationally with one of these more
permanent offices or departments in the organization.
4
To ensure the confidentiality of the organization, I do not identify
which project team developed this process map.
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