Tag knowledge work

Entries 2 Total

On the institutional moorings of talk in health care organizations

Dec 30, ’10 12:00 PM

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).

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Professions and knowledge work

Dec 30, ’10 9:58 AM

Focus.com shared the results of their study of more than 7,000 jobs and this great image is making the rounds. Using multiple criteria including projected growth, salary, recession survival, quality of life (e.g., flexibility, stress, personal satisfaction) along with interviews with industry experts, they created a ranked list of 50 “best jobs.”

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]

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