Changing Practice through Boundary Organising: a Case from Medical R&d

This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of how actors work on organising multiple boundaries in the quest for developing and stabilising new medical knowing in practice. The paper introduces the notion of boundary organising to highlight that such practices are more concerned with discovering, pushing, opening and closing several boundaries simultaneously than with coordination across stable boundaries. The research material is based on a longitudinal study of a cross-disciplinary medical R&D department. Like Orlikowski (2002), we argue that boundary practices are collective ‘ongoing accomplishments’. Our case also suggests that changing practices may be controversial since they often imply reconfigurations of boundaries, ideas, people, technologies and power structures.