Integrating Discourses in an EMR Organizational Change Project

• In Event: STS and the Subject

Abstract

Organizational change projects intend to trigger profound transformations in the organization (e.g. Keen, 2001; Lynne, 2004) but, despite sophisticated management techniques, making sense for the agents of the process and objectives is not an easy task and suffer internal contradictions (e.g. Lüscher and Lewis, 2008; Fairhurst, 2018a). Nonetheless, our main argument lies in the idea that agents’ contradictions do not systematically impede the integration of new processes.
To illustrate our point, we analyze a health organization implementing an Electronic Medical Records System (EMR) as a pilot project in its area. We study our data following Fairhurst (2018b) Integrative Methodology for Organizational Oppositions by analyzing documents of the change communication plan and 48 semi-structured interviews.
We find that the collective elaboration of meaning allows actors to create a shared narrative that reflects both organizational conflict and paradoxically creates social cohesion through the development of a collective memory even if not individually shared. Despite individual contradictions and above all an explicitly shared dissatisfaction with the project, this collective representation manages to maintain the integration of the organization and drives the collective action through symbolic negotiations within and between organizational agents.
To reach our conclusions we link different theoretical perspectives with STS: we try to associate the normative practices in interactions between technology and social agents or actors (Orlikowski, 1992, 2007, 2009; Orlikowski and Scott, 2015) through a processual (Langley and Tsoukas, 2010; Farjoun et al., 2018) and communicative approach where communication constitutes the organization (Putnam and Nicotera, 2009; Putnam and Fairhurst, 2015).

Author

• Benoit Cordelier, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)