Is554 Presentation 26 Feb 08

The Thing in Mid-Assembly: Reflections on Developing a Doctoral Research Project Peter Erdélyi PhD Candidate IS554 Presentation ISIG, Department of Management London School of Economics and Political Science 26 February 2008

Supervisors: Edgar Whitley and Nathalie Mitev

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My project on trial • Working title: “Organising Performance in E-Commerce Firms: A Multi-Case Study of Small Retailers in the South of England”

• Qualitative study of organising and strategising practices in e-tailing micro-enterprises • Research question: How does a small ecommerce firm organise its performances? – What is the nature and role of competences? – What is the nature and role of technology? 3

Initial framing: competence, ICTs and survival • Emergence of competence perspective – Management and organisation studies – Management practices – Political discourse and policies

• Emergence and proliferation of ICTs • Linking competence and ICTs with competitiveness – Entrepreneurship, innovation, SMEs – Growth, performance, advantage, survival 4

The competence theory of the firm • Towards a strategic theory of the firm • Ghoshal, Hahn & Moran (1999; 2002) – Organising competence • Competence to organise – Penrosian growth (coherent administrative reorganisation) – Schumpeterian integration (creative destruction)

• Routines and change (innovation) • Arrangements and rearrangements • Problems with ‘dynamic capabilities’ 5

Theory of technology • What is the role of technology in organising performance (competence) in small e-commerce firms? • How to conceptualise technology, artefacts, objects? • Heidegger: – From object to thing, from frame to fourfold

• ANT (Latour, Callon, Law): – From object to thing, from frame to relations 6

(conceptual framework) experimental apparatus • • • • •

What is the nature of scientific inquiry? Inscription device (Latour & Woolgar) Method assemblage (Law) Agencement (Callon, Law) Some key (heterogeneous) elements: – ‘organising competence’, Heidegger-ANT axis (ANTHEM), Harman Review, Strategy-asPractice, research blog, ANT IS… Wiki, SSITORF, IS554, EGOS, my supervisors etc., etc. 7

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Research design and ‘empirical object’ • Assembling an account of organising and strategising practices in small e-commerce firms in order to understand – the nature and role of organising competence and – the nature and role of ICT artefacts – …in the performance and survival of the firm

• Qualitative data collection methods: – Periodic semi-structured interviews – Periodic participant observation by following the actors around 17

Data collected so far… • Interviews with: – Owner/manager of company 1 – Owner/manager of company 2 – Owner/manager of non-governmental support organisation for small e-commerce firms

• Participant observation: – Of above organisations in operation, on site and off-site (inc. visits to suppliers, industry events) 18

Focus on… • identifying organising and strategising routines • Identifying the various actors engaged in the performance of these routines • Tracing the shape of the assemblage (arrangement) • Tracing development of ICT artefacts • Identifying and studying episodes of rearrangement (organising/strategising episodes) • Developing a rich picture and a thick description 19

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Preliminary findings and propositions • The assemblage is an epistemic assemblage (inc. physical arrangements) • Firm performed by way of network connections • Ongoing repair and maintenance of associations and attachments needed • Manager as facilitator of knowledge flows (gathering) • Organising and strategising episodes (decisions) are distributed over a heterogeneous network • Problematic routines turned into artefacts • Innovation as the break from the routine 22

Problems, questions • How many case studies? [research design] – One or two in-depth cases or – Four or more case studies?

• How to find the balance between doing the research and writing conference and journal papers? • The EGOS challenge

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