Information Systems and Innovation Public Lecture

A Dialectical View of Collective Mindfulness: Creating Radical Architecture with Information Technology

Richard Boland
Professor of Information Systems Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University

Monday 3 November 2008 1100-1300

New Academic Building, Alumni Theatre, 2.14

In complex, unpredictable, and unforgiving envir`onments, organizations need to act with a collective mindfulness. We report a case study of an extremely complex building project that was successfully designed and constructed by Gehry Partners and a project team, which demonstrates that collective mindfulness is a dynamic, temporal process requiring a constant interplay between being mindful and being mindless. Our data analysis shows that their collective mindfulness was not a stable, unitary phenomenon, but was instead a dialectic process of “becoming”. Their collective mindfulness was composed of antagonistic tensions between being mindful and being mindless, which constitute two poles of a dialectical relationship. Our analysis also shows that the collective mindfulness exhibited during this project was dependent on a unique ensemble of advanced IT capabilities in combination with other organizational mechanisms that directed organizational attention so as to engender conditions of being both mindful and being mindless, thus dialectically uniting and balancing the two poles of collective mindfulness. Implications for the study of collective mindfulness and for understanding the roles of IT use and organizational mechanisms in sustaining it are developed.

Dick Boland has been Professor of Information Systems and Professor of Accountancy at Case since 1989. He was a Professor of Accountancy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and visiting Professor at UCLA and at the Gothenburg School of Economics. He is a Senior Research Associate at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. His research emphasizes interpretive studies of how individuals experience the design and use of information systems in organization

If you are a visitor from outside LSE, please send a confirmation to a.marton@lse.ac.uk. You will need to sign in at the reception desk of the New Academic Building. Please note places will be available on a first-come-first-serve basis - registration is not required for LSE students and staff.

For any further queries regarding this lecture or to request information about future events please contact Frances White. Research Coordinator.

page last updated 18 March, 2009

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