Brown Bag: Prof. Brian Pentland

Dear all,

The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation of Prof. Georg von Krogh invites you to a brownbag seminar with:

Professor Brian Pentland
Michigan State University


Date: Wednesday 11th December 2019: 12:00-12:30 lunch, 12:30-14:00 presentation
Location: LEE E 101, Leonhardstrasse 21, 8092 Zürich

Analyzing context and process with digital trace data
Abstract: In this talk, I plan to discuss two papers from a project on Antecedents of Complexity in Healthcare Routines (NSF SES-1734237). Both papers use data from electronic medical records (EMR) to analyze organizational routines as narrative networks. The first paper uses one day in one clinic to demonstrate a novel way to incorporate context into processual analysis. The second paper uses two years in four clinics to analyze routine dynamics to demonstrate a novel approach to diachronic analysis. Both of these appoaches depend on conceptualizing routines as networks of sequentially related actions. We motivate the first paper by noting that context is usually conceptualized as “external” to a process and treated as something to be controlled or eliminated in empirical research. We depart from this tradition and conceptualize context as permeating processual phenomena. We introduce a novel method for including fine-grained contextual information from digital trace data in the description of process (e.g., who, what, when, where, why…). Adding contextual information can result in a very large number of fine grained categories of events, which is usually considered undesirable. However, we argue that larger numbers of categories can make process data more informative for theorizing. Including contextual detail enriches our understanding of processes as they unfold. We demonstrate this using ThreadNet, an open source software application developed for the qualitative visualization and analysis of process data. In the second paper, we use the narrative network to conceptualize routine dynamics as network dynamics. We use a time series of narrative networks (one network per day) to measure and visualize how clinical routines change over two years.



About the speaker
Brian T. Pentland is the Main Street Capital Partners Endowed Professor in the Department of Accounting and Information Systems at Michigan State University. His research is focused on the analysis of repetitive patterns of action, such as organizational routines. He has used this perspective to study software support, auditing, invoice processing, customer service and most recently, electronic medical record keeping. With support from the National Science Foundation and an amazing set of co-authors, he has helped build the field of routine dynamics by introducing concepts and tools for analyzing and visualizing action patterns. His work has appeared in Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Administrative Science Quarterly, JAIS, Journal of Management Studies, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Organization Science, Organization Studies, YouTube, Soundcloud, and elsewhere.



We look forward to welcoming you!

Kind regards,
The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation




Upcoming SMI Brownbag Seminars
26 February 2020, Mary Tripsas
29 April 2020, Devi Gnyawali
10 June 2020, Lars Frederiksen
17 June 2020, Corrine Post