MODELOS ALTERNATIVOS: MODELOS DE DOS ZONAS PARA BAJAS RELACIONES DE ASPECTO

My study aimed to add to the current insights on strategy work and inter- organizational collaboration by examining how actors strategize across knowledge boundaries (Carlile, 2002, 2004) in the context of a bottom-up initiated cancer care network in the Netherlands (GynOncNet). I focused on two issues: first, if and how the different knowledge boundaries that actors must navigate impact their manner of strategizing; and second, how actors make use of boundary spanning mechanisms to span these knowledge boundaries. Overall, I found that knowledge boundaries impact the actors’ ability to strategize remotely, via textual artefacts; that issue selling is a type of boundary spanning with its own challenges, and thus, that the actors’ strategizing activity – articulating or issue selling – can affect the effectiveness of the boundary objects they design; and finally, that latent semantic and pragmatic issues can be major impediments to strategizing outcomes.

Thus, my findings contribute to our insights into strategy work in a number of ways. First and foremost, they revisit the strategic process in general by framing it as one carried out across different types of boundaries instead of by particular actors. Placing the focus on boundaries and boundary spanning has revealed that actors can interact through different strategizing modes depending on the knowledge boundaries between them. This, in turn, allowed me to highlight an as yet understudied mode of strategizing: one significantly more reliant on textual artefacts than previously explored examples of strategy- making (e.g. Kaplan (2011); Maitlis and Lawrence (2003); Paroutis and Pettigrew (2007)). Both of these insights contribute to the strategy-as-practice research agenda on materiality (Vaara & Whittington, 2012). My focus on knowledge boundaries also allowed me to reframe issue selling as a particular form of boundary spanning, one where pragmatic issues are more likely to be dealt with in a transactive fashion (Levina & Vaast, 2013) – that is, with the issue sellers transferring and translating knowledge to the decision makers instead of the parties coming together to jointly create new knowledge. Doing so helps me explain why issue selling efforts fail even in cases when the issue sellers’ dependencies and differences are effectively clarified (Howard-Grenville, 2007). In this respect, my study has also shown that, to effectively span the semantic

boundary between the parties, the decision makers must actively work to clarify their dependencies and differences as well, as opposed to previous indications that this responsibility lies with the issue sellers only (Howard-Grenville, 2007).

My study also brings some new insights to the knowledge boundary and boundary spanning literature. First, by applying Carlile’s (2002, 2004) knowledge boundary framework in new empirical contexts – inter-organizational as opposed to inter-departmental, and focused on strategy as opposed to product development – I further increase its robustness. More importantly, by exploring the use and design of boundary objects in an issue selling context, I contribute to the recent investigation of boundary spanning processes in the absence of consensus (Star, 2010; Swan et al., 2015). Previous works on the topic have suggested that boundary objects can enable collaboration among groups even without common interests and mutual understanding (Lainer-Vos, 2013). My study acknowledges that boundary objects can be and are being used in such contexts, but that, in order for them to be effective, all the collaborating parties still need to be involved in their design and/or redesign. Going further, my study has suggested that, in the case of boundary spanning in an issue selling context – or, in general, in contexts with an imbalance in power – pragmatic issues tend to be dealt with in a transactive rather than transformative fashion. Thus, my study goes beyond past insights into uneven resolutions of pragmatic boundaries (Carlile, 2004), to show that boundary spanning in such contexts can be its own type with its own challenges.

On the whole, my study adds to the research on inter-organizational collaborations by examining how actors jointly develop their strategy, thus providing another empirical examination of the as-yet relatively little studied inter-organizational strategizing process (Deken et al., 2016). In this context, focusing on knowledge boundaries and the ways in which they are (not always successfully) navigated showcases the difficulties of a process that encompasses different interests, professions, and degrees of power. Moreover, by studying these aspects in the context of a bottom-up initiated collaboration, as opposed to the typically examined top-down oriented cases, I expand our empirical understanding of such agreements (Rosenkopf et al., 2001)

As for the practical relevance of my findings, this lies in the light they shed on the strategy making and selling processes in (healthcare) networks. For instance, the knowledge boundary framework used in my analysis can be a useful tool for practitioners, functioning as a framing device for the potential

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Inside the black box

breaks in understanding they might experience in their collaboration. It can help them acknowledge that both the inter- and intra-organizational parties involved in their strategizing efforts can be separated by pragmatic, semantic, and/or syntactic boundaries, and prepare for their interactions accordingly. My study has also shown that parties wholly external to the partner organizations can play a crucial role in their collaboration, and that dealing with them also implies navigating knowledge boundaries through the same mechanisms as when interacting with a partner. Another aspect highlighted by my study is the importance of ensuring that decision makers also clarify their dependencies and differences in issue selling contexts, and that they do this early on, to avoid the onset of latent conflicts of interest. In this latter respect, my study draws attention to the risks of relying too much on a collaborating party’s optimistic sounding initial interest, and the importance of an effective spanning of semantic boundaries when trying to avoid surprising withdrawals of support. Last but not least, it provides suggestions for developing effective strategic documents (i.e. boundary objects) in an issue selling context, namely: involving the decision makers as much as possible – and as early as possible – in their design, actively involving them in eventual redesigns, and carrying out said (re)designs by issue sellers who have some understanding of the decision makers’ possible dependences and differences.