Ann Langley
Biographic Data
| ID | 1317404 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ann Langley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ann |
| FAMILY NAME | Langley |
| SIGNATURE | LANGLEY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | HEC Montréal |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3666-328X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 289 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Chapter 8 The power of the mundane: Small stories as ambivalent carriers of legacy
What Makes a Process Theoretical Contribution?
In recent years, there have been many calls for scholars to innovate in their styles of conceptual work, and in particular to develop process theoretical contributions that consider the dynamic unfolding of phenomena over time. Yet, while there are templates for constructing conceptual contributions structured in the form variance theories, approaches to developing process models, especially in the absence of formal empirical data, have received …
Bridging competing demands through co-leadership? Potential and limitations
Collective leadership arrangements in which two people jointly occupy a shared leadership role space are often thought to enable the bridging of competing demands and sources of expertise and legitimacy in pluralistic settings where multiple institutional logics coexist. This research investigates 20 co-leadership dyads in health care organizations to examine whether, when, and how co-leadership arrangements can enable the bridging of institution…
Introduction: Institutions and Organizations: A Process View
Institutions—the taken-for-granted structures, practices, and meanings that define what people and organizations within their jurisdiction think, do, and aspire to—are all about process, even though this may not always have been evident in some of the institutional theory literature. In this introduction, the editors call for a strong process approach to institutional dynamics, one that highlights institutions as emergent, generative, political, …
Boundary Work among Groups, Occupations, and Organizations: From Cartography to Process
This article reviews scholarship dealing with the notion of “boundary work,” defined as purposeful individual and collective effort to influence the social, symbolic, material, or temporal boundaries, demarcations; and distinctions affecting groups, occupations, and organizations. We identify and explore the implications of three conceptually distinct but interrelated forms of boundary work emerging from the literature. Competitive boundary work …
Institutions and Organizations: A Process View
Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox
Finding Theory–Method Fit: A Comparison of Three Qualitative Approaches to Theory Building
This article, together with a companion video, provides a synthesized summary of a Showcase Symposium held at the 2016 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in which prominent scholars—Denny Gioia, Kathy Eisenhardt, Ann Langley, and Kevin Corley—discussed different approaches to theory building with qualitative research. Our goal for the symposium was to increase management scholars’ sensitivity to the importance of theory–method “fit” in qualitat…
The Paradoxical Mystery of the Missing Differences between Academics and Practitioners
Most discussions of academic–practitioner relationships highlight differences, especially with regard to their relative emphases on rigor or relevance. While not disagreeing with such differences, the authors show: 1) several ways academics and practitioners may be similar in their theorizing and practices; and 2) how these similarities have been almost entirely missed in prior scholarship. They suggest the importance of viewing academic–practiti…
Beyond Managerial Dilemmas
This chapter makes the case that institutional and paradox theorists should consider problems stretching beyond managerial concerns and corporate performance to focus attention on the paradoxes that characterize the most deep-rooted and contentious social issues facing societies and economies, suggesting a switch from organizational to institutional paradoxes. To illustrate, two vignettes are described—one focused on the legacy of the University …
“I Am … I Said”
In reviewing identity and identity work literature, two overarching themes emerge that highlight the theoretical potency of viewing individual identity through the lens of paradox. First, while paradox is variously implicit/explicit in extant work, four primary paradoxes of identity usefully emerge that conceptually map the tensional processes of identity work: (1) paradoxes of entity, (2) paradoxes of conformity, (3) paradoxes of temporality, an…
The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox
Organisations are rife with paradoxes, evident in persistent and interwoven tensions for example between stability and change, flexibility and control, diversity and inclusion, long term and short term, social and financial, learning and performing. This handbook investigates paradoxes across various organisational phenomena and levels of analysis.
Negotiating the Moral Aspects of Purpose in Single and Cross-Sectoral Collaborations
The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies
The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies provides a comprehensive and timely overview of the field. This volume offers a compendium of perspectives on process thinking, process organizational theory, process research methodology and empirical applications. The emphasis is on a combination of pedagogical contributions and in-depth reviews of current thinking and research in each of the selected areas, combined with the development of agen…
Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies
Organizational Routines: How They Are Created, Maintained, and Changed
This volume seeks to explore how process theorizing can advance understanding of organizational routines. It reviews the main approaches to routines, and presents new thinking and research
Agency at the Managerial Interface: Public Sector Reform as Institutional Work
This article draws on recent developments in institutional theory to better understand the managerial efforts implicated in the implementation of government-led reforms in public sector services. Based on a longitudinal study of a massive reform effort aimed at transforming the province of Quebec’s publicly-funded healthcare system, the article applies the notion of institutional work to understand how managers responsible for newly formed health…
Distributing leadership across people and objects in a collaborative research project
This paper examines how distributed leadership involving actor–object couplings may contribute to coordinated action across disparate thought worlds. We draw on ideas from French pragmatist sociology and on a case study of a successful collaborative research project involving participants from academia, government and practice settings to show how various kinds of objects (including material artifacts, more abstract concepts and human-material as…
The Logic of Institutional Logics: Insights From French Pragmatist Sociology
Research on institutional logics has exploded in the last decade. Much of this work has taken its inspiration from Friedland and Alford’s call to “bring society back in” to organizational analysis. Interestingly, when Friedland and Alford published their seminal piece, another body of work with similar focus emerged in France under the banner of French Pragmatist Sociology. In this article, we discuss how French Pragmatist Sociology complements i…
Process Studies of Change in Organization and Management: Unveiling Temporality, Activity, and Flow
Process studies focus attention on how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time. We identify various ontological assumptions underlying process research, explore its methods and challenges, and draw out some of its substantive contributions revealed in this Special Research Forum on Process Studies of Change in Organization and Management. Process studies take time seriously, illuminate the role of tensions and contradictions …
Leadership as boundary work in healthcare teams
This paper proposes that boundary work is inherent to leadership practices in healthcare settings, and explores this phenomenon in interprofessional healthcare teams. Specifically, the study focuses on leading through and across boundaries in four interprofessional healthcare teams operating in the area of mental health services. We give special consideration to the specific contexts of these teams, and address the boundaries that are constructed…
How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies
Leadership in the Plural
This paper reviews the literature on forms of leadership that in one way or other imply plurality: that is, the combined influence of multiple leaders in specific organizational situations. We identify four streams of scholarship on plural leadership, each focusing on somewhat different phenomena and adopting different epistemological and methodological assumptions. Specifically, these streams focus on sharing leadership in teams, on pooling lead…
Predicting the Impact of the U.S. Housing Crisis and "Great Recession" on Central City Revenues
Using data from 1983 to 2009 on revenues, housing prices, and incomes, we forecast the impact of the U.S. housing crisis and “Great Recession” on the revenues of the nation’s largest central cities for 2009–2013. We develop the concept of constructed cities, to allow valid comparisons across cities in light of varying expenditure responsibilities of city governments. We predict that general revenue per capita in the average central city will decl…
Introducing “Perspectives on Process Organization Studies”
Perspectives on Process Organization Studies is a new book series dedicated to the development of an understanding of organizations and organizing as processes in the making. This opening chapter of the first volume introduces the foundations of and inspiration for process organization studies, exploring its connections to process rather than substance metaphysics, to process rather than variance theorizing, and to narrative rather than logico‐pa…
Institutions and Organizations: A Process View
Strategizing in pluralistic contexts: Rethinking theoretical frames
Pluralistic organizations characterized by multiple objectives, diffuse power and knowledge-based work processes present a complex challenge both for strategy theorists and for strategy practitioners because the very nature of strategy as usually understood (an explicit and unified direction for the organization) appears to contradict the natural dynamics of these organizations. Yet pluralism is to some extent always present in organizations and …
Agency at the Managerial Interface: Public Sector Reform as Institutional Work
This article draws on recent developments in institutional theory to better understand the managerial efforts implicated in the implementation of government-led reforms in public sector services. Based on a longitudinal study of a massive reform effort aimed at transforming the province of Quebec’s publicly-funded healthcare system, the article applies the notion of institutional work to understand how managers responsible for newly formed health…
Governance, Power, and Mandated Collaboration in an Interorganizational Network
This article explores the challenges of mandated collaboration among public health care organizations. This in-depth longitudinal multiple case study examines the interests and values of various organizational actors in three collaborative initiatives, focusing on the mobilization of power within the governance frameworks available to them. The authors elaborate on three alternate readings of the processes examined: The managerialist views poor i…
The Corruption of Managerial Techniques by Organizations
Public sector organizations are under pressure to adopt private sector tools to sustain legitimacy despite uncertainty about the compatibility of the techniques with this context. We explore the consequences of the misfit between the theories underlying two widely adopted managerial techniques (strategic planning and quality management) and the pluralistic power structure and values of public hospitals. We identify four scenarios of adaptation an…
The Practice of Leadership in the Messy World of Organizations
This article examines the practice of leadership in organizations characterized by ambiguous authority relationships. Drawing on three empirical case studies illustrative of a long-term research program on change in health care organizations, we examine leadership as a practical activity focusing particularly on its dynamic, collective, situated, and dialectical nature. We invite researchers on leadership to look carefully at the embeddedness of …
The reciprocal dynamics of organizing and sense‐making in the implementation of major public‐sector reforms
Drawing on a longitudinal study from the early years of implementation of health‐care networks in Quebec, this article describes how public‐sector managers deal with complex challenges when both organizational structures and organizational strategies are radically transformed simultaneously. The new organizations studied had to completely re‐shuffle roles and responsibilities of their management teams while making sense of their new mandate of de…
Bridging competing demands through co-leadership? Potential and limitations
Collective leadership arrangements in which two people jointly occupy a shared leadership role space are often thought to enable the bridging of competing demands and sources of expertise and legitimacy in pluralistic settings where multiple institutional logics coexist. This research investigates 20 co-leadership dyads in health care organizations to examine whether, when, and how co-leadership arrangements can enable the bridging of institution…
Leadership as boundary work in healthcare teams
This paper proposes that boundary work is inherent to leadership practices in healthcare settings, and explores this phenomenon in interprofessional healthcare teams. Specifically, the study focuses on leading through and across boundaries in four interprofessional healthcare teams operating in the area of mental health services. We give special consideration to the specific contexts of these teams, and address the boundaries that are constructed…
Defining the ‘public’ in a public healthcare system
Using data from a larger study on public participation in the Quebec healthcare system, we draw on the sociological theory of Bourdieu to analyze speakers’ in-use definition of ‘the public’ in some 100 interview and observation notes. We found that the definition of ‘the public’ is the subject of a vigorous struggle at the symbolic level. Many actors share a common, but often conflicting, interest in the elaboration and objectification of a given…
Governance Structures and Political Processes in a Public System: Lessons from Quebec
Debates about the form and nature of changes in the management of public systems have for some time now been articulated under the theme of governance. All definitions of governance are related to the problems of securing convergence among a diversity of actors and organizations, of redistributing power in an organizational or social field characterized by a high level of heterogeneity and of gaining sufficient legitimacy to act in the name of th…
The struggle to implement teaching‐hospital mergers
This paper presents some initial results from a longitudinal study of two major hospital mergers (involving three large institutions each). After examining the context of the two mergers and the cultures that must be integrated, we describe the processes of pre‐merger negotiation, leadership development, strategic framing and operationalization. Despite very different processes that seem on the surface smoother in one organization than in the oth…
Distributing leadership across people and objects in a collaborative research project
This paper examines how distributed leadership involving actor–object couplings may contribute to coordinated action across disparate thought worlds. We draw on ideas from French pragmatist sociology and on a case study of a successful collaborative research project involving participants from academia, government and practice settings to show how various kinds of objects (including material artifacts, more abstract concepts and human-material as…
Process research in healthcare: Towards Three-Dimensional Learning
English This article argues that process research provides a way of adding depth and perspective to our understanding of organisational change in healthcare and in other fields. We present a three-dimensional model of the research process and argue for the importance of all three dimensions in building useful process knowledge that will have relevance beyond specific settings. We use the model to illustrate our own research process, providing exa…
Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data
The struggle to implement teaching‐hospital mergers
This paper presents some initial results from a longitudinal study of two major hospital mergers (involving three large institutions each). After examining the context of the two mergers and the cultures that must be integrated, we describe the processes of pre‐merger negotiation, leadership development, strategic framing and operationalization. Despite very different processes that seem on the surface smoother in one organization than in the oth…
The Dynamics of Collective Leadership and Strategic Change in Pluralistic Organizations.
La diffusion d'une innovation portant les germes de son plafonnement: La réutilisation des hémodialyseurs au Québec
Sommaire: L'objectif de cette recherche est d'identifier les facteurs de diffusion d'une innovation ‐ la réutilisation des hémodialyseurs (rh) ‐ ainsi que de son plafonncment marqué par la controverse, à travers les motivations et stratégies des groupes d'acteurs clés. Plus particulièrement, cette étude vise à situer le rôle de la “ médecine fondée sur des données probantes ”dans la dynamique de la diffusion de cette innovation. Nous partons du c…
The Corruption of Managerial Techniques by Organizations
Public sector organizations are under pressure to adopt private sector tools to sustain legitimacy despite uncertainty about the compatibility of the techniques with this context. We explore the consequences of the misfit between the theories underlying two widely adopted managerial techniques (strategic planning and quality management) and the pluralistic power structure and values of public hospitals. We identify four scenarios of adaptation an…
Managing Across Boundaries in Health Care: The Forces for Change and Inertia
The problem of managing across boundaries is nowhere more urgent or more complex than in the health care field. On the one hand, there is wide recognition that aging populations, economic pressures, and new technologies are stimulating the need for coordination among diverse health care organizations and professionals in order to provide integrated care (Shortell et al. 1996). On the other hand, the professionals that inhabit the health care fiel…
Process research in healthcare: Towards Three-Dimensional Learning
English This article argues that process research provides a way of adding depth and perspective to our understanding of organisational change in healthcare and in other fields. We present a three-dimensional model of the research process and argue for the importance of all three dimensions in building useful process knowledge that will have relevance beyond specific settings. We use the model to illustrate our own research process, providing exa…
Governance Structures and Political Processes in a Public System: Lessons from Quebec
Debates about the form and nature of changes in the management of public systems have for some time now been articulated under the theme of governance. All definitions of governance are related to the problems of securing convergence among a diversity of actors and organizations, of redistributing power in an organizational or social field characterized by a high level of heterogeneity and of gaining sufficient legitimacy to act in the name of th…
Defining the ‘public’ in a public healthcare system
Using data from a larger study on public participation in the Quebec healthcare system, we draw on the sociological theory of Bourdieu to analyze speakers’ in-use definition of ‘the public’ in some 100 interview and observation notes. We found that the definition of ‘the public’ is the subject of a vigorous struggle at the symbolic level. Many actors share a common, but often conflicting, interest in the elaboration and objectification of a given…
Longitudinal textual analysis: An innovative method for analysing how realised strategies evolve
Purpose This paper aims to present an innovative methodological framework developed out of primary research that will lead to new understanding about patterns in the strategic actions realised by firms within an industry. The framework is to be applied to increase understanding of how realised strategies evolved in the pharmaceutical industry and overcomes some of the limitations of other methods. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative approac…
Governance, Power, and Mandated Collaboration in an Interorganizational Network
This article explores the challenges of mandated collaboration among public health care organizations. This in-depth longitudinal multiple case study examines the interests and values of various organizational actors in three collaborative initiatives, focusing on the mobilization of power within the governance frameworks available to them. The authors elaborate on three alternate readings of the processes examined: The managerialist views poor i…
Strategizing in pluralistic contexts: Rethinking theoretical frames
Pluralistic organizations characterized by multiple objectives, diffuse power and knowledge-based work processes present a complex challenge both for strategy theorists and for strategy practitioners because the very nature of strategy as usually understood (an explicit and unified direction for the organization) appears to contradict the natural dynamics of these organizations. Yet pluralism is to some extent always present in organizations and …
The reciprocal dynamics of organizing and sense‐making in the implementation of major public‐sector reforms
Drawing on a longitudinal study from the early years of implementation of health‐care networks in Quebec, this article describes how public‐sector managers deal with complex challenges when both organizational structures and organizational strategies are radically transformed simultaneously. The new organizations studied had to completely re‐shuffle roles and responsibilities of their management teams while making sense of their new mandate of de…
Introducing “Perspectives on Process Organization Studies”
Perspectives on Process Organization Studies is a new book series dedicated to the development of an understanding of organizations and organizing as processes in the making. This opening chapter of the first volume introduces the foundations of and inspiration for process organization studies, exploring its connections to process rather than substance metaphysics, to process rather than variance theorizing, and to narrative rather than logico‐pa…
The Practice of Leadership in the Messy World of Organizations
This article examines the practice of leadership in organizations characterized by ambiguous authority relationships. Drawing on three empirical case studies illustrative of a long-term research program on change in health care organizations, we examine leadership as a practical activity focusing particularly on its dynamic, collective, situated, and dialectical nature. We invite researchers on leadership to look carefully at the embeddedness of …
Organization Studies: The Sixth Organization Studies Summer Workshop “Bringing Public Organization and Organizing Back In” 25—28 May 2011, Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, Paris, France
Leadership in the Plural
This paper reviews the literature on forms of leadership that in one way or other imply plurality: that is, the combined influence of multiple leaders in specific organizational situations. We identify four streams of scholarship on plural leadership, each focusing on somewhat different phenomena and adopting different epistemological and methodological assumptions. Specifically, these streams focus on sharing leadership in teams, on pooling lead…
Predicting the Impact of the U.S. Housing Crisis and "Great Recession" on Central City Revenues
Using data from 1983 to 2009 on revenues, housing prices, and incomes, we forecast the impact of the U.S. housing crisis and “Great Recession” on the revenues of the nation’s largest central cities for 2009–2013. We develop the concept of constructed cities, to allow valid comparisons across cities in light of varying expenditure responsibilities of city governments. We predict that general revenue per capita in the average central city will decl…
The Logic of Institutional Logics: Insights From French Pragmatist Sociology
Research on institutional logics has exploded in the last decade. Much of this work has taken its inspiration from Friedland and Alford’s call to “bring society back in” to organizational analysis. Interestingly, when Friedland and Alford published their seminal piece, another body of work with similar focus emerged in France under the banner of French Pragmatist Sociology. In this article, we discuss how French Pragmatist Sociology complements i…
Process Studies of Change in Organization and Management: Unveiling Temporality, Activity, and Flow
Process studies focus attention on how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time. We identify various ontological assumptions underlying process research, explore its methods and challenges, and draw out some of its substantive contributions revealed in this Special Research Forum on Process Studies of Change in Organization and Management. Process studies take time seriously, illuminate the role of tensions and contradictions …
Leadership as boundary work in healthcare teams
This paper proposes that boundary work is inherent to leadership practices in healthcare settings, and explores this phenomenon in interprofessional healthcare teams. Specifically, the study focuses on leading through and across boundaries in four interprofessional healthcare teams operating in the area of mental health services. We give special consideration to the specific contexts of these teams, and address the boundaries that are constructed…
How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies
Distributing leadership across people and objects in a collaborative research project
This paper examines how distributed leadership involving actor–object couplings may contribute to coordinated action across disparate thought worlds. We draw on ideas from French pragmatist sociology and on a case study of a successful collaborative research project involving participants from academia, government and practice settings to show how various kinds of objects (including material artifacts, more abstract concepts and human-material as…
The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies
The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies provides a comprehensive and timely overview of the field. This volume offers a compendium of perspectives on process thinking, process organizational theory, process research methodology and empirical applications. The emphasis is on a combination of pedagogical contributions and in-depth reviews of current thinking and research in each of the selected areas, combined with the development of agen…
Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies
Sociology (33 works) · Political science (27 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (23 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Public relations (16 works) · Social science (13 works) · Economics (11 works) · Engineering (11 works) · Psychology (11 works)