Lecho relleno

My study also opens some new avenues for future research. The first relates to my insight that issue selling contexts engender a specific form of boundary spanning, and its implications on boundary spanning in general, and boundary objects in particular. Thus, my study has provided an empirical example where a transformative issue was not handled though the joint work of the boundary spanning parties involved, but rather through a transactive boundary spanning mode where some parties attempted to transfer and translate knowledge to the other parties. In the process, the boundary object developed for the parties’ purposes was similarly developed by actors from one side of the boundary, instead of through all the parties’ joint work. I suggested in my study that these interactions resulted from the power-laden context that the actors were interacting in, where some parties (the issue sellers) had less power than others (the decision makers). Past research has indicated that boundary spanning can involve the (re)negotiation of power relations between groups (Levina & Vaast,

2013), and can also, in turn, be impacted by the power relations between these groups (Carlile, 2004). However, the boundary spanning literature has not, to my knowledge, explicitly focused on how such power laden boundaries – or, more specifically, hierarchical ones – are spanned. By developing in this direction, boundary spanning research could explore the contradiction uncovered in my study, namely: that although boundary objects may be most suited for spanning pragmatic boundaries, they are rendered less effective in such contexts whenever the more powerful party does not actively participate in their design or redesign. A second avenue for future research concerns my insight that different knowledge boundaries can support different strategizing modes. This relationship could be particularly useful when making sense of the differences and commonalities of distinct empirical cases of strategizing. Most empirical work in the strategy-as-practice field has been focused on one particular context in one particular case; although this has generated remarkable insights into the key micro-processes involved in doing strategy work, many of the findings are significantly tied to the idiosyncrasies of the studied case or strategizing process (Seidl & Whittington, 2014). Acknowledging this, a recent research agenda on strategy-as-practice and materiality has suggested that structured comparison could be used to generate larger claims on strategy work (Whittington, 2015). Based on my findings, I would propose that future research could do so by systematically keeping track of the different boundaries negotiated by strategizing actors in a variety of contexts.

In closing, I should acknowledge the boundary conditions of my own empirical context, namely: a strategizing process that was driven by mid-level and operational-level actors, whose inter-organizational interactions were enabled by pre-existing informal relationships and professional affiliations. These contextual factors could account for the strategizing actors’ remote strategizing and extensive reliance on textual artefacts. However, that does not undermine the underlying logic of different boundaries between strategizing parties requiring different strategizing instruments. Future research on the topic in different contexts would expand and strengthen these still rather exploratory indications. For instance, how would a bottom-up inter-organizational initiative proceed, should the partners not share a profession, or should they have conflicting goals?

Another contextual factor that should be mentioned has to do with the insurance company involved in the network’s strategizing process, and its

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Inside the black box

repeated contact person changes. It may be that this lack of boundary spanner continuity was a significant factor in the network’s strategizing difficulties. To the best of my knowledge, the impact of inconsistent contact persons has not been explicitly studied in the issue selling literature. Studies in the field generally assume such continuity when addressing successful efforts (e.g. Dutton et al. (2001); Howard-Grenville (2007)), suggesting that a lack of continuity may indeed contribute towards an unsuccessful outcome. Moreover, pas research on the forging of inter-organizational relations has shown that discontinuity among key contact persons impairs the development of trust or commitment between partners, which in turn can hinder the ultimate decision to start the collaboration in the first place (Narayandas & Rangan, 2004). Nevertheless, this does not undermine the underlying logic of my argument. As I noted in my case narrative and analysis, each new contact person on the insurance company’s side needed to be properly briefed about the network’s proposal, which suggests that the boundary objects that GynOncNet had previously prepared and shared with the insurance company were not, on their own, sufficient to span the semantic boundary between the two parties. Instead, the semantic boundary was ultimately spanned during an inter-personal strategizing interaction, during which the insurance company clarified its own dependencies and differences.

From a methodological perspective, my study’s main limitation stems from my retrospective examination of GynOncNet’s development. Having gained access to the network quite late into its development (November 2012), I was unable to observe the strategizing actors’ meetings or shadow their drafting and editing of textual artefacts. I therefore relied extensively on tracing the actors’ strategizing through some of their email conversations and the actual artefacts they drafted. However, I would argue that the wealth of artefacts made available to me, the clearly preserved comments and changes brought to these documents across several draft versions, and the availability of emails and meeting minutes referring to these artefacts and their use were more than able to mitigate this limitation. Moreover, as previous studies have shown (e.g. Fayard and Metiu (2014)), the retrospective examination of collaboration processes based on historical data is both valid and relevant. Nevertheless, a longitudinal exploration of other inter-organizational strategizing processes would be likely to strengthen and enrich this study’s insights.

Concept