Page 58 - Journal of Management Inquiry, July 2018

272 Journal of Management Inquiry 27(3)

step, we shadowed (Czarniawska, 2014) the manager of the distilled the second-order themes into aggregate dimensions
operation theaters for two days. Each author shadowed the by discussing relationships among the themes. This process
manager for an entire working day, including visits to the was facilitated by referring to our sociomaterial theorizing
operation theaters themselves and related work sites (e.g., about mindful organizing and tools, which provided theoreti-
the sterilization unit, the anesthetic recovery room). We cal categories (Locke, 2001). The results were the dimen-
observed his interactions with the tool, how other organiza- sions of what we termed the “sociomateriality of mindful
tional members used the tool, and we talked to several staff organizing”; that is, these aggregated notions are helpful in
members. Additional observations were made during and explaining how tools shape mindful organizing. To increase
after our interviews. We kept handwritten field notes of our the reliability of our overall interpretation, we shared provi-
observations and interpretations. In addition, we collected sional interpretations with our key informant and research
and analyzed a number of internal documents (e.g., a hand- colleagues for feedback. This led to several adjustments
book and a manual with rules that form the basis of the throughout the research process.
OTAP, checklists, Balanced Scorecard-documents, statistics
about emergencies) as sources of data. After our field obser- Findings
vations, we conducted additional seven interviews (Phase 2),
to make further sense of our observations and confirm initial Figure 4 shows a model that integrates the themes and con-
interpretations. In this second phase, we engaged with expe- cepts we found by adopting a sociomaterial lens to study
rienced surgeons of various departments (4), the administra- mindful organizing. We find that the way the OTAP is used
tor responsible of the OTAP and the hospital information (i.e., sociomaterial practices) influences processes of mind-
system (1), and organizational support staff (1). In a third ful organizing that generate collective mindfulness (i.e., a
phase, we conducted another five interviews with anesthe- rich awareness of discriminatory detail while maintaining
tists (2) and nurses (3) to refine previous versions of our the big picture). Our model is a visual representation of the
analysis and theorizing. ways in which a specific tool influenced processes of mind-
Data analysis progressed in several stages and was ful organizing, and how direct and indirect influences relate
adopted from Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton (2013), and the to each other. It does not, however, make general claims
resulting data structure is presented in Figure 3. First, we about deterministic causalities. Such an understanding would
engaged in open coding of interviews; that is, we were run counter to our account. We present our findings along
searching for passages that referred to how and why the tool this model, and start with describing how the OTAP shapes
was used. We added codes that were informed by what we the processes of mindful organizing by “inscribing the big
had observed during the job shadowing and the document picture.”
analysis. Following multiple rereadings to identify similari-
ties and differences between codes, we gradually combined Inscribing the Big Picture
codes into first-order conceptual categories. The categories
delineate components of practices, that is, human and nonhu- Three practices describe how the OTAP inscribes the big pic-
man actors whose patterns of interaction are characterized by ture. The first two practices—“representing operations accu-
a certain mode or quality and where the tool’s inscriptions rately” and “creating a distributed picture”—describe how
are sometimes foregrounded and sometimes moved to the the visual and material design of the OTAP’s inscriptions
background. At the end of this stage, we resolved discrepan- shapes mindful organizing. The third practice—“improvising
cies through discussions and occasional recoding. In a fur- bounded and triggered by the tool”—captures how formal
ther round, we tentatively combined first-order categories and informal tool-related rules ensure an enhancement of the
into second-order themes that should answer the question speed, range, and quality of actions taken.
“What’s going on here?” (Gioia et al., 2013, p. 20); that is,
they describe ways in which the tool shapes mindful organiz- Representing operations accurately. The status of each surgery
ing. For analyzing relations, we referred to practices that is indicated by the box on the monitor representing the sur-
prior research used as proxies to identify the five processes geries, including a color coding by department, signal lights
of mindful organizing (Sutcliffe, 2011; Vogus & Sutcliffe, that display the status of a surgery, and a red line that indi-
2007a, 2007b), and asked how the OTAP contributes to cates the elapsed time. For the manager of the operation the-
these. For example, practices of perspective taking and syn- aters, one of the first tasks in the morning was to have a quick
thesizing the resulting awareness into a shared understanding glance at the last screenshot he made the day before and then
were used as indicators of preoccupation with failure and a look at the current OTAP to compare for differences. This
sensitivity to operations. Throughout this exercise, we were comparison allowed him to directly recognize changes made
double checking interpretations with our observations, field during the night and to set expectations about the first surger-
notes, and documents. The findings showed that the OTAP ies. It took him parts of a second to “read” and understand the
affects mindful organizing in different ways. Thus, we finally changes that have been made: “I immediately see if there