Can Less Be More? Minimal Structuring, Identity and Learning around It

This paper focuses on how organizational structuring can facilitate or hinder organizations’ capacity to learn when a new technology is implemented. We are concerned with a particular philosophy of structuringminimal structure. We argue that learning ultimately depends on the way communities build their sense of identity while enacting existing structure. Organizational context can facilitate or hinder the processes by which a sense of community is created. Formative context plays a very important part in these processes. Underlying this sense of community, social identity structures meanings, coordination, learning and improvisation are all defined relative to action contexts, not to self-contained and abstract structures. Identity is critical to the enactment of minimal structures. An in-depth multiple case study design of two telebanking systems implemented and used are described, and analyzed. Findings indicate that there are ways by which the structuring can block improvisational activity, this in turn hinders both the social identity and the social learning processes. Moreover, minimal structuring design philosophy gives room to improvising and to making sense of the incoming events and the development of ad hoc solutions, within the community-of-practice. Only if identity unfolds, can organizational members enact consensual guidelines and agreements that constitute minimal structures. Furthermore, we claim that the theory of organizational learning can greatly benefit from the development of a theory of organizational improvisation.