This paper argues that the concept of communities of practice can be usefully grounded in a structuration approach and used to guide investigation into the dynamics of these communities. Points of contact between structuration and communities of practice are explored; the concept of structuration informs processes of identity formation and maintenance in communities of practice, the duality of ...

In 1985 I published a paper in Accounting Organizations and Society with Bob Scapens titled Accounting Systems and Systems of Accountability; understanding accounting practices in their organisational contexts. The paper suggested the potential usefulness of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory for efforts to understand accounting in its organisational contexts. Rather than engage in a further...

to the extent that a society is to work, there exist a need for a cooperative process, including weber’s and merton’s note of common means and goals. but at the same time, there exist no societal process without involving conflict; (conflict in a dynamic and dialectical sense.) dealing with this problematic situation the emergence of “division of labor”, as a compulsive social differentiation, ...

Introduction: The health care system is in transition. Integrated cares solutions are prominent and even forced by health care policy. But how can we understand the needs of different stakeholders in this system? Why do they still not act effectively and efficiently together? A closer look, using the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens, may be helpful. Theory: The theory of structuration en...

The implementation of Information Technology (IT) is always associated with a series of complex organizational change issues. For this reason, the literature on IT-enabled organizational change is growing large and spans across management science, organizational development, and Information Systems (IS) research. Despite the handful of research in IT-enabled organizational change, the change in...

This article deals with the use of computers to carry out musicological practices which rely on scores segmentation and charting. We present a document model which allows to conduct complete multimedia (synchronization), efficient (spatial organization control, segmentation, material and logical document structuration) and semantic (annotations, hyperlinks) analysis, and propose an experimental...

In this paper we present potential insights provided by Giddens’ structuration theory to study the effects of cultural differences experienced by western companies establishing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software in their Chinese subsidiaries. We use the data from a case study of a French firm’s ERP project in its Chinese subsidiary to demonstrate the appropriateness of structuration th...