Hannele Kerosuo, Ph.D, Researcher

Email: hannele.kerosuo@helsinki.fi
Tel.: +358 9 191 44275
Fax: +358 9 191 44579

Postal address:
Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research
P.O. Box 26
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland

Personal home page:
www.edu.helsinki.fi/activ...

Current Activities

Project: Boundary Crossing and Knotworking in Innovative Work Organizations

The study focuses on boundary crossing and knotworking in companies operating under challenging organizational and business environments. For the purpose organization design for innovation and innovation activity are researched in 2 Finnish companies. The concept of activity is used as an analytical unit to depict the emergent innovation activity in practice.

Research questions of the study are (1) How do companies design organization for promoting innovation, competitiveness and growth in practice? (2) How do companies carry out innovations in boundary crossing and knotworking in practice? (3) How are conditions for innovations and growth created through boundary crossing and knotworking in innovation networks?

The method of the study draws on activity theoretical perspectives and anthropological methods in the examination of boundary crossing and knotworking. The data gathered includes recorded interviews and observations, fieldnotes and documents.

The proposed research will provide companies knowledge on organization design for promoting innovation, competitiveness, and growth in challenging organizational and business environments. It will also provide companies knowledge on actual innovating processes in networks of innovation activity, and give an opportunity for companies to reflect on the results of the study during the research process thus enabling the experimentation of new ideas. The research is carried out in close collaboration with Chemnitz University of Technology. The project is funded by Tekes as part of WORK-IN.-NET –program.

Web Links

Dissertation

Kerosuo, H. (2006). Boundaries in Action

Recent Publications

Toiviainen, H., Kerosuo, H. & Syrjälä, T. (2009). “Development Radar”: The co-configuration of a tool in a learning network. Journal of Workplace Learning, 21, 7, 509 - 524.

The paper aims to argue that new tools are needed for operating, developing and learning in work-life networks where academic and practice knowledge are intertwined in multiple levels of and in boundary-crossing across activities. At best, tools for learning are designed in a process of co-configuration, as the analysis of one tool, Development Radar, aims to demonstrate.

Keywords: Artifacts (artefaktit), Co-configuration, Learning (oppiminen)

Toiviainen, H. & Kerosuo, H. (2009). Cultivating and enriching a tool in use - Case 'Development Radar'. In L. Norros, H. Koskinen, L. Salo & P. Savioja (Eds), Proceedings of ECCE 2009 European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, VTT Symposium 258, p. 281-288.

This study is a continuation to the analysis, in which we looked into the co-configurative ways of designing the learning tool. After the successful implementation, how did the in-house developers perceive and modify the tool; did they manage to integrate it to their work and development practices by cultivating and enriching the tool in use?
In the activity-theoretical terms, by cultivation and enrichment a new tool creates new mediation of the work activity. Mediation, however, has multiple dimensions and meanings.
The analysis is based on the longitudinal study of the regional learning network and the discursive data gathered in its networkshops, which offers possibility to focus both on the collective and the individual actions of cultivating and enriching the radar tool.

Keywords: Developmental work research (KTT), mediation, work life learning

Kerosuo, H. (2008). Putting the patient in the middle: managing chronic illness across organisational boundaries. In R. Sorensen and R. Iedema (Eds.) Managing Clinical Processes in the Health Services. Sydney: Elsevier.

Managing the boundaries in chronic illness is an urgent task. As advanced medical technology, pharmacology and treatment help people live longer, they require care for longer periods of time. How, then, can we improve the organisation of health care that requires clinicians with different clinical and professional orientations to collaborate, particularly where care relationships are characterised by individual clinicians delivering episodic care to individual patients? This chapter considers the impact of organisational, professional and practice boundaries on patient care, specifically the care of patients with multiple and chronic illnesses.Ameliorating the effect of boundaries means reinterpreting the outcomes of care, the role of the patient and the responsibility of treating clinicians that in turn mean creating new ways to conceptualise and deliver care within the context of organisation and organisations.

Keywords: Activity theory, Boudaries in health care, Boundaries, examining boundaries, boundary crossing

Kerosuo, H. (2007). Renegotiating disjunctions in interorganizationally provided care. In R. Iedema (Ed.) The Discourse of Hospital Communication—Tracing Complexities in Contemporary Health Care Organization, 138-161. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The increasing complexity of work and organization raises new challenges for service production in traditional organizations. The conventional and familiar practices of working and organizing work are becoming re-designed. However, many institutions such as health care are still trapped inside old metaphors of organizing according to which work and organizations can be thoroughly planned, broken down into units, and optimized. Organizational interfaces explore the dynamics related to complexities in health care practice. Organizational interfaces uncover how discrepancies of organizational interests, values, power, and division of labor are mediated at critical points of linkage in patients’ care provision. Interfaces typically occur at points where different, and often conflicting, life worlds or organizational fields intersect revealing the ‘gaps’ in the care provision. In these situations, interactions between participants become oriented towards problems of bridging, accommodating, segregating, or contesting the everyday care practices.
In this paper, I will explore challenges related to organizational interfaces in the interaction between patients and providers when they are improving the patients’ care provision. The data of the study was gathered in an intervention project in which new tools and a new care practice were implemented and enhanced in the care of patients with multiple illnesses. Altogether, the care of the twenty-six patients was analysed with the patients actively participating the project. However, the organizational interfaces appeared most distinctively in intervention meetings called ‘change laboratories’. At a change laboratory, a patient and professionals engaged with problems in a patient’s care provision. While the encounters at the change laboratories promoted learning and development of the care practice under study, they also uncovered lacks and tensions in the care provision. In this study, these occurrences are analysed in the data that contains videotaped interviews with the patients and care providers, as well as the videotaped change laboratory meetings. The concepts of the gap, the collision, and the bridge guide the analysis of organizational interfaces. Gaps are types of ruptures emerging in inter-subjective interaction. Collisions involve asymmetry of power and dominance between professional and lay knowledge. Bridge building refers to negotiation, crossing over a rupture and working out the gaps in the care provision.

Keywords: Boundaries, examining boundaries, boundary crossin, Discourse analysis (diskurssianalyysi), Object of activity (toiminnan kohde)

Kerosuo, H. (2007). Following my traces: Exploring the emotional engagement with the research subject through the researcher’s artwork. Culture and Organization, 1,55-72.

The article explores the researcher’s emotional engagement in fieldwork through the researcher’s artwork. Revisiting the emotional engagement is important in order to make sense of the research subject of the study in complex research sites. The care of twenty-six patients was followed during a change project that involved relationships between various clinics and providers. The organizational complexity became obvious when each patient case created its own field of study in the health care organization. In the study, it is suggested that we can gain access to emotional engagement through art and aesthetics in organizational ethnographies. Emotional engagement with the research subject is an important part of constituting the research subject in complex organizations. In future projects, it will be important to discuss aesthetic experiences raised by the fieldwork with the participants. Discussing such experiences is part of the co-constitution of the sense and meaning of the activity that is under change.

Keywords: Boundaries, examining boundaries, boundary crossin, Ethnography (etnografia), Fieldwork

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