Nils Braad Petersen
Project description 27-03-2015
Professional identitities in dispersed work settings– a discourse perspective on sensemaking in a global
organisation
Distributed work environments allow employees to work out of the office to be closer to clients who may
not be located near the head office. This entails a work environment where some employees are co-located
and some are dispersed. At the same time employees are often involved in several projects and teams
simultaneously using information technology to connect remote parties in virtual or partly virtual (hybrid)
teams (Daim et al., 2011; Rezgui, 2007). Spinuzzi (Spinuzzi, 2004) argues that technology not only shapes
social structures, but changes mental models. Yet few studies in the literature on virtual or dispersed teams
look beyond the team to take into account the complexity of this distributed team work context, and how
the mediation of technology shapes and changes knowledge communication.]
Another implication of this evolving work context, which I will term semi-dispersed work context
in throughout the dissertation seems to be a raised level of employee autonomy, as unified corporate
strategies may be difficult to implement in a dispersed organisational architecture. In the cases analysed in
this dissertation, employee autonomy sometimes leads to a shift in employee professional identity
emphasising a discourse of client satisfaction through time consuming development of tailored solution.
This employee strategy stands in opposition to the organisational discourse in the case company
emphasising maximisation of profit through reapplication of standardized solutions. If management level is
unaware of this reconfiguration of professional identity, it may challenge leadership in the organisation.
Therefore, organisations need to understand and listen to this shift in identity and discourse in order to
understand and lead the change.
I adopt a multi-disciplinary perspective combining theories from knowledge management,
identity, social psychology and socio-linguistics to examine knowledge communication practices from the
perspective of employees at the case company1. These theories are integrated within a sensemaking
framework based on Weick (Weick, 1995b). To analyse employee sensemaking narratives, I adopt a
discourse analysis approach which extends Austin’s speech act theory (Austin, 1962) to argue for language
as both a means for representing and constructing social reality as seen from the perspective of the
interviewees. Interviewee statements are examined using a form of discourse analysis starting at the
macro-level of the organisational context, as proposed in the socio-linguistic approach of James Gee (Gee,
2011, 2014; Gee & Handford, 2011) as well as in Bitzer’s (1968/1992) focus on the ‘rhetorical situation’. To
underpin and substantialise this context level analysis, systemic functional analysis is employed, using
semantic, syntactic and prosodic evidence2 to ground the analysis empirically (Schiffrin, Tannen, &
1
A full case description is provided in chapter 4, section XXX
Full discussion of the terms is beyond the scope of this introduction, but a dictionsary definition are: “Semantics …
the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning” (Semantics. 1998. The New Oxford Dictionary of English,
p. 1689, Oxford: Clarendon Press); “Syntax … the branch of linguistics that deals with the arrangement of words and
phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language” (Syntax. 1998. The New Oxford Dictionary of English, p. 1882,
2
1
Nils Braad Petersen
Project description 27-03-2015
Hamilton, 2008). This discourse analysis (DA) approach is employed to unpack the negotiation of
professional and organisational identities within knowledge communication communities of the case
company. This negotiation of identities and relations and their implication for knowledge communication
practices is examined from a sensemaking perspective (Weick, 1995b) in which negotiation of identity is
seen as both an individual and a social process.
Rather than study the challenges of individual virtual or semi-dispersed teams, as is commonly
done3, I examine firstly how employees make sense of their complex work environment, i.e. how they
construct a coherent sense of self across the teams and professional communities they are engaged in:
Research question 1: How do employees at the case company make sense of their semidispersed work context?
Secondly, I examine how the employees align their sensemaking interpretations of the environment with
their enactment of those interpretations in knowledge communication practices sharing practices, their
identity formations and the relations with whom they share their sensemaking perspective:
Research question 2: How can employee sensemaking about the global semi-dispersed work
explain patterns in employee constructions of knowledge communication practices at the case
company?
Despite the situated nature of these findings, the methodology employed opens up a new avenue for a
more holistic approach to studying knowledge communication within emerging semi-virtual organisational
architectures:
Research question 3: How can these situated analyses be used to inform the construction of
organisational architectures supporting knowledge communication across the intraorganisational boundaries of communities, teams and local offices?
Oxford: Clarendon Press); “Prosodic analysis … Linguistics[:] analysis of a language based on its patterns of stress and
intonation in different contexts.”
3
see for example the literature review by Martins, Gilson, and Maynard (2004) which organises the research by team
input, process and output.
2