The doctoral dissertation in the field of Innovation Management will be examined at the faculty of Business and Social Sciences at Kuopio.
What is the topic of your doctoral research? Why is it important to study the topic?
During this research, I focused on the practices of a cross-functional R&D team during the early stages of medical device innovation. Little is known about the practices of the cross-functional teams and teamwork in a highly engineering-saturated workplace; this nascent field is fraught with assumptions. Corporate R&D sites are closed environments, how did I get access? I studied the team as an insider; I was one of the team members and a PhD student. I followed the team members as they participated in the unfolding of work and work life, and also during co-creative work with clinicians.
I employed ethnography and examined the social practices at the site with a practice theory lens. After establishing the practices at the site and what the expectations of the organization were, I stepped back and closely examined what was really happening. I examined what was expected to happen, what the practitioners were doing, and what they thought they were doing. When these three did not match, did not align, these surprises or mismatches became a point of interest for me. In the analysis, I examined the social navigations and enactments of the workers as they negotiated work and work life. I found the keys as to why the unexpected happened; this may provide managers and employees understanding about their own organizational mismatches.
What are the key findings or observations of your doctoral research?
First, the ethnography contributed to the growing body of knowledge about practices of high-tech cross-functional teams during early-stage innovation work. During the analysis, I extracted ethnographical data and examined the cases through a novel combination of the micro and the macro themes. This pairing of micro and macro allowed for me to examine the data from multiple theoretical stances. This was done as follows: first, I determined the overarching macro themes of the workers’ organization, which in this case were knowledge, time, and dissonance. I considered the four innate practice orientations to be micro themes; these are themes of moral, subject, tactical, and political nature that we all have within us. These micro themes guided the workers during work and work life. Then, I combined the three macro themes with four innate practice orientations; this resulted in twelve uniquely paired thematic mappings to view the data with a tool I created to aid in the examination.
As a result of these conceptual groupings and the visualization that the novel mapping aid provided, I was able to follow the ways in which practitioners navigated and enacted practices at work as they “moved” within a nexus of large organizational themes and practice orientations. Through the examination of the combined concepts of micro and macro themes, I found that practitioners navigated and enacted practices through social practice trade to (re)align with a large organizational theme and/or practice orientation to legitimize their actions. In the dissertation, I write: "I found that when tensions were introduced to the workers’ professional practices of tactical knowledge work, the worker navigated through a context–specific nexus of large organizational themes and practice orientations and consequently executed reactionary outcomes to these tensions through the enactments of virtual trade of large organizational themes and/or practice orientations. I suggest that these navigational enactments were acts of social practice trade."
Social practice trade results as a solution or practice endpoint which culminates from the introduction of tensions or conflicts to the tactical knowledge worker’s work practices; these tensions or conflicts cause effectual navigation through the nexus of large organizational themes and practice orientations during the unfolding practices of work life. This new approach to combining organizational themes to innate practice orientations to examine the nexus of activities at a site provides organizational members from all levels with new understandings, vocabularies, and ways to examine practices and actions, motives, and outcomes at work and in the workplace. These findings open a venue of creating an understanding for both managers, organizational members such as HR, and the practitioners themselves of how workers navigate and enact social practice trades during their work and work life. Due to the uniqueness of the my insider status as a researcher, this research took place at one site. As each organization has organizational themes, practices, and practitioners with the four innate practice orientations, it would be interesting to see this concept applied elsewhere.
How can the results of your doctoral research be utilised in practice?
These results open a venue of understanding for both managers, organizational members such as HR, and the practitioners themselves of how workers in this setting navigated and enacted social practice trades during their work and work life. It may help in understanding factors such as organizational blocks or how legitimacy is (re)formed. The transferability of the research to other sites would provide more knowledge about this as a larger method to understand oneself and others. As each organization has organizational themes, practices, and practitioners with the four innate practice orientations, it would be interesting to see this concept applied elsewhere.
What are the key research methods and materials used in your doctoral research?
This research was undertaken as an ethnography, and data was collected from 2015–2019. I was an insider researcher, as I was employed by the case company’s innovation team during the research therefore providing an insider view to site and the practitioners. The data collection included semi-structured interviews, photographs, discussions, field diary entries, and field materials. With this form of insider ethnography, called at-home ethnography as you are in a familiar place, the voice of the researcher is also heard, and the reflexive process the researcher goes through is also an important “tool” in understanding the events under examination. I mentioned earlier that I created a new aid to map and examine the paired micro and macro themes in an abductive/hermeneutic manner.
The doctoral dissertation of Kristina Leppälä, Master of Health Care, entitled Practices in medical device innovation: navigation and enactment as social practice trade, will be examined at the faculty of Business and Social Sciences on 4.3..2022 at 12 noon online. The Opponent will be Professor Anna-Maija Lämsä, University of Jyväskylä, and the Custos will be Professor Hanna Lehtimäki, University of Eastern Finland. Language of the dissertation event is English. Public examination will be streamed live.
Dissertation (pdf)
For further information, please contact:
kristina.leppala(at)uef.fi