Reconfiguring Boundary Relations: Robotic Innovations in Pharmacy Work

By Michael I. Barrett, Eivor Oborn, Wanda J. Orlikowski, JoAnne Yates. Organ. Sci., 2012

390 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Robotics is a rapidly expanding area of digital innovation with important implications for organizational practice in multioccupational settings. This paper explores the influence of robotic innovations on the boundary dynamics of three different occupational groups—pharmacists, technicians, and assistants—working in a hospital pharmacy. We extend Pickering's tuning approach [Pickering, A. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. University of Chicago Press, Chicago] to examine the temporally emergent process that entangled the mechanical elements and digital inscriptions of a dispensing robot with the everyday practices of hospital pharmacy work. We found that engagement with the robot's hybrid and dynamic materiality over time reconfigured boundary relations among the three occupational groups, with important and contradictory consequences for the pharmacy workers' skills, jurisdictions, status, and visibility.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/019478abf3b10ffc449634727285d2cb4cb9d4ae

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Citations in the corpus

Organizing for Innovation in the Digitized World (2012, background): “This increasingly requires the integration of heterogeneous knowledge resources from specialized, self-contained professions or industries (see Barrett et al. 2012).”
Distributed Tuning of Boundary Resources: The Case of Apple's iOS Service System (2015, methodology): “In doing so, we draw on Pickering’s (1993) notion of tuning, which was further developed in a digital technology context by Barrett et al. (2012).”
Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control (2020, methodology): “…used algorithms for real-time restriction of the loading requests of pharmacy assistants’ robots (for replenishment of stock in its storage) to benefit clients waiting for prescription refills, despite the fact that this intensified the work of the pharmacy assistants (Barrett et al., 2012).”
Service Innovation in the Digital Age: Key Contributions and Future Directions (2015, background): “In these and other relational views of practice in service provision (see Barrett et al. 2012; Oborn et al. 2011), theorists thus place everyday practices as the locus for the production and reproduction of relationships (Østerlund and Carlile 2005).”
Embracing Digital Innovation in Incumbent Firms: How Volvo Cars Managed Competing Concerns (2017, background): “We suggest that a sustainable design vision is at the heart of managerial intervention, whereas prior research depicts digital innovation as an emergent process wherein deliberate managerial intervention cannot help avoid unpredictable outcomes (Barrett et al. 2012).”