Negotiating Task Jurisdiction: The Effects of Imposing a Formal Logic of Action on Situated Practice

Abstract

Interdependence of occupational groups working side by side is a fundamental reality of contemporary workplaces; negotiating task jurisdiction is crucial to inter-occupational coordination. However, while much research examines how occupations vie for task jurisdiction at the macro level, much less work examines task jurisdiction as situated practice or how emerging IT workflow systems designed to direct lines of work impact local negotiations of authority and discretion. This research provides a new lens for understanding how people across occupations engage micro negotiations of task jurisdiction in the duree of everyday work, and how these negotiations are impacted by implementation of an enterprise workflow system inscribed with a formal legal logic of task jurisdiction. Through 16 months of ethnographic research surrounding implementation of an EHR in a hospital obstetric unit, we find that the new workflow technology exposed and upended local, largely tacit logics related to negotiation and re-negot...