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manage unexpected events and, eventually, may contradict with the OTAP to plan surgeries, monitor their progress,
the aim of high-reliability organizations. reschedule them, and so on that produced accountability.
While our findings suggest that there is a mixture of When screenshots were printed and compared with digital
inscriptions related to temporality, further research may data, additional work was invested in constructing account-
focus on controlling for different kinds of time and analyzing ability, effectively diverting attention away from processes
their relation to routine or mindful behavior. For example, of mindful organizing. Thus, our study offers a different
scholars may argue that inscriptions that refer to event-based explanation of the negative effect of “accountability rou-
and clock time induce a cognitive style where actors think tines” as the detrimental effect of materializing accountabil-
about ongoing changes as a sequence of (unexpected) events ity on mindful organizing is not necessarily depended on its
rather than being able to consider that they occur in parallel. routine-like form. Rather, the loss of attention resulted from
The effect on mindful organizing may then be detrimental the failure of the tool to produce formal accountability proce-
because actors’ attention is limited to a sequence of events dures, which were regarded as efficient by the actors. Such a
rather than having a rich awareness of discriminatory detail. potential misdirection of attention has been discussed in
Our sociomaterial account urges scholars to not only focus recent critical literature on accountability (Messner, 2009;
on human actors but to also consider the role of nonhuman Power, 2007). This literature shows that focusing too much
actors as well. For example, Howard-Grenville (2005) on creating legalistic evidence to avoid blame can have dete-
assumes that it is employees who hold different orientations riorating effects on the performance on which one is poten-
toward time in their minds, and that it is organizational mem- tially held accountable for. In our case, we termed such
bers’ orientations toward the past, present, or future that practices “behaving defensively” and “practicing micropoli-
influences the flexibility with which a routine is applied. tics,” and show their deteriorating effects on the performance
Extending such studies, our account suggests exploring how of mindful organizing on the stage of operation theaters. This
these orientations are distributed between employees and the echoes findings by Qu and Cooper (2011) who show that
inscriptions of the OTAP, and how inscriptions shape the inscriptions are used by actors to influence others and courses
cognitive effort and flexibility with which routines are of action in pursuit of their own interest. In addition, our
applied. In this regard, our findings indicate some counterin- findings suggest that pursuing interests and exercising power
tuitive relations between the OTAP and mindful organizing, in relation to a tool are also related to inscribing temporality
which help understand findings that remain ambiguous because it structures preferences. Further research may
otherwise. explicitly focus on investigating the relation between a tool’s
inscriptions, temporality, and practicing micropolitics in
greater detail. While our findings suggest a detrimental effect
Picking Up Accountability of micropolitics on mindful organizing, one may also argue

In prior studies of mindfulness, accountability has only that power is a capacity for action to keep things on track,
received passing attention. While disasters such as the and thus beneficial for swift responses to unexpected events.
Tenerife Airplane Crash (Weick, 1990) or the deaths in the In sum, we believe that exploring how tools shape pro-
Bristol Royal Infirmary (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007) focus on cesses of mindful organizing is helpful because it enhances
what led to mistakes, questions of legal and formal account- our understanding of how mindful organizing is socially,
ability have not been studied explicitly. However, account- materially, and spatially distributed and how it unfolds over
ability is a major topic for practitioners, especially in medical time. As our analysis is limited to explaining how one spe-
care, as the enormous resources used for documentation of cific tool is involved in producing ambiguous effects on
quality management or highly publicized legal cases show mindful organizing, future research may draw on the identi-
(Kurunmäki, 2004; Timmermans & Berg, 2003). These pro- fied themes of the “sociomateriality of mindful organizing,”
cedures of documentation, which enable reconstructing and analyze other tools and technologies that are crucial in
accountability after events are usually highly routinized. health care (e.g., electronic patient records or medication
Levinthal and Rerup (2006) explore the complex relation- administration records) or other high-reliability settings.
ship between routines and mindfulness, and suggest that rou- Acknowledgments
tines may both foster and hinder mindful behavior, depending
on how routines and established role structures interact. In We are deeply grateful to Tim Vogus for his feedback and sugges-
our study, we add to this a further layer. The attempts to con- tions on a previous version of this article. We are also indebted to
struct accountability were routines but not part of formalized Kathleen Sutcliffe, Georg Schreyögg, Daniel Geiger, and all mem-
bers of the track “Managing the unexpected” at the EGOS
accountability systems (cf. Timmermans & Berg, 2003). It is Colloquium in 2014, the members of the Professional Development
not only the professional roles and hierarchy that keep mem- Workshop “Researching organisational mindfulness and mindful
bers accountable to one another for their activities, as sug- organizing: Theory, method, and practice” at the Academy of
gested by Faraj and Xiao (2006); rather, the everyday work Management Annual Meeting in 2014 as well as the members of the