Dr. Emily Zechman’s description of the project follows:

Although watershed management typically utilizes large infrastructure projects to control stormwater runoff, the choices of residents and landowners at the lot-level can also impact hydrologic sustainability. A decentralized management approach could more naturally restore flow regimes and result in significant, long-term cost savings. This research develops a new stormwater footprint game that can be used for educating about the impact of personal decisions on hydrologic sustainability and increase stormwater awareness. The game utilizes a stormwater sustainability metric, the Hydrologic Footprint Residence (HFR), to communicate the impact of development decisions. Students and professors from the Departments of Civil Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Communication collaborated to develop the gaming system, to field an experiment to test the game, and to make the game available to students across campus through undergraduate and graduate courses.

Our work demonstrated that game play improved individual’s knowledge about stormwater management and changed attitudes. Game play made participants more likely to take action to support local sustainable practices. Our experiment also demonstrated that the HFR–our stormwater footprint–worked better than a more orthodox civil engineering metric for communicating the effects of stormwater.

Take the Stormwater Quiz here.

The wonderful student team, Marcio Giacomoni, Tommi Jo Scott, Alyssa Politte, Jenna Kromann, Sean Saathoff, and Sam Collard (not pictured), won an honorable mention in Washington, DC at the EPA student design competition for sustainability.

]]> http://www.macromorphic.com/2011/p3-stormwater-footprint-quiz/feed/ 1 http://www.macromorphic.com/2010/on-the-institutional-moorings-of-talk-in-health-care-organizations/ http://www.macromorphic.com/2010/on-the-institutional-moorings-of-talk-in-health-care-organizations/#comments Thu, 30 Dec 2010 19:00:31 +0000 admin http://www.macromorphic.com/?p=124 This piece came out earlier this year in Management Communication Quarterly. It focuses on the importance of conversations–in particular conversations between experts and professionals–in health care and how institutional forces shape those conversations. I like this piece, because I share some cool examples (e.g., reducing medical error, interprofessional teams), and here’s my best paragraph:

Health care professionals (and all knowledge workers to some degree) shepherd, appropriate, and suffer knowledge-intensive discourses in their conversations, and these individuals draw their legitimacy in organizing—their power to create and judge these discourses—from their attachments to institutions. By the “institutional moorings of talk” (a phrase borrowed from Taylor, 1995, p. 29), I mean to suggest that institutions have the capacity to control and constrain talk but also that actors appropriate institutions to their own ends. Institutions—“constellations of established practices guided by formalized, rational beliefs that transcend particular organizations and situations” (Lammers & Barbour, 2006, p. 364)—anchor and tether communication, but talk can float around on these moorings. Although institutions may change very slowly, actors can appropriate institutional logics in novel ways and to their own ends. (p. 450).

It’s here that I come closest to articulating the sorts of research questions that I want my work to answer:

Research efforts and interventions aimed at supporting conversations in health care should account for the institutional logics that constrain and enable them. Future research might examine (a) how interdisciplinarity complicates the development of knowledge management systems including the electronic medical record, (b) how implementers might reconcile standardizing medicine through evidence with the archetype of the autonomous professional (Timmermans & Berg, 2003), (c) how professionals’ communication with each other influences the success of the change efforts, (d) how communicators can effectively give feedback to and challenge each other despite professional status differences, or (e) how actors reproduce and resist existing institutional logics as they work in novel organizational forms (e.g., ambulatory care clinics, urgent care centers, mobile clinics).

Focus.com

The list is of course ripe with professions many of which might be labeled a sort of knowledge work. (The study excluded occupations that did not require at least a bachelor’s degree. I wonder how the list would compete against the so-called trades?) Still, the results provide a warrant for those interested in understanding communication between professionals, and in particular, professionals in health contexts (11 of the 37 on the image are in health care) and in information systems (7 of 37). All of these jobs are marked by involving professionals who must “shepherd, appropriate, and suffer knowledge-intensive discourses in their conversations, and these individuals draw their legitimacy in organizing—their power to create and judge these discourses—from their attachments to institutions”.

[via BoingBoing]

Arbesman gave examples mostly from the natural world (e.g., the number of extrasolar planets–400, the number of elements–we have 12 new ones apparently).

However, what strikes me about this concept is that organizing relies on mesofacts–ideas that organizational members treat as unchanging though they do in fact change. I thought about this at first in the context of institutional beliefs–”formalized, rational beliefs that transcend particular organizations and situations” (Lammers and Barbour, 2006, p. 364). These are beliefs about the legitimacy and efficacy of practices within particular organizations that come from outside organizations (e.g., leadership is about creating a vision, health care should be subject to market forces, leadership is about managing market forces, my profession has X ethical responsibilities…). These sorts of beliefs about the nature of organizational life have power precisely because of their perceived permanence and also their material permanence. That is, their permanence is not just perceived. Institutional beliefs become formalized within law and policy like mesofacts, which are (at least for a time) accurate.

However, mesofacts represent a category of ideas broader than institutional beliefs. The concept of mesofacts refers, it seems, to the perceived permanence around an idea, and they are significant, because although they are changing, their perceived permanence translates into action; although, in the examples offered those most knowledgeable and those taking action based on the facts seem to be the ones more likely to have updated versions. Mesofacts in organizing might capture those beliefs (institutional and otherwise) that become seen as unchanging. We might include organizational culture for example.

In the end though, the concept 0f mesofacts points us to a need to understand the sorts of organizational changes that occur very slowly and for practitioners patience in the face of organizational change efforts. Arbesman wrote, “The fact that the world changes rapidly is exciting, but everyone knows about that. There is much change that is neither fast nor momentous, but no less breathtaking.” Patience then might be especially handy when trying to change organizational mesofacts.

This study uses the institutional theory of organizational communication (ITOC) to explain physicians’ reactions to managed care. ITOC posits that enduring beliefs and practices both transcend and shape particular organiza- tions and organizing. The authors find that physicians’ institutional beliefs moderated the negative relationship between managed care medical practice and satisfaction. ITOC also posits that the negotiation of institutional, environ- mental, organizational, and individual factors occurs through communication. Controlling for these factors, communication with managed care representatives remains significantly and positively related to satisfaction. The results provide support for ITOC and macro approaches to organizational communication research and offer insights for the management of professionals in general and physicians in particular.

For many years, reviewers have argued that organizational communication research is overly concentrated on microphenomena to the neglect of macrophenomena, but macrophenomena have generally remained unspecified. An institutional theory of organizational communication is proposed to fill that gap. Drawing on institutional theory in organizational sociology and on concerns in organizational communication, we define institutions as constellations (i.e., relatively fixed arrangements) of formalized rational beliefs manifested in individuals’ organizing behaviors. Key concepts for the analysis of institutions include membership, rational myths, isomorphism, and decision hierarchies. Based on our definition and armed with these concepts, the paper formally specifies propositions of an institutional theory of organizational communication. Applying the propositions to a published case of organizational identification demonstrates how an institutional perspective offers additional explanatory power, especially concerning professional roles.

Health organizations are among the largest, most complex, technologically rich, and value-infused of any human arrangement. As such, the field of health and medical care in North America—and indeed the world over—provides a diverse and dynamic arena for communication and organizational research. The organizations we refer to as health organizations today include forms whose structures have changed little in one hundred years, such as hospitals. But health organizations also include forms that proliferate today but barely existed one hundred years ago, such as HMOs, hospice, and prepaid multi-specialty medical groups. It is therefore appropriate that we turn our attention to these changing settings.

Managed care—the dominant mode of health care organizing and financing today—may threaten physicians’ satisfaction with practicing medicine, but research has revealed that it is not dissatisfying for physicians in all organizational settings. The institutional theory of organizational communication (ITOC) offers a multileveled explanation of physicians’ reactions to managed care based on their institutional identifications and communication with managed care organizations. A multileveled analysis of data from physicians (n = 1,049) in practices (n = 492) investigates this explanation. The results suggest that institutional identifications moderate the relationship between the experience of managed care and physician satisfaction, and offer evidence for the importance of the communication between managed care representatives and physicians. The results also provide an example of the applicability of multilevel modeling for organizational and health communication research.

I changed the look of the site. Goodbye broccoli. Hello tanzaku.