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Purpose – The use of organizational ethnography has grown significantly during the past decades. While language is an important component of ethnographic research, the challenges associated with language barriers are rarely discussed in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to open up a discussion on language barriers in organizational ethnography.

Design/methodology/approach – The author draws on her experience as a PhD student doing an organizational ethnography of an emergency department in a country where she initially did not speak the local language.

Findings – The paper examines the author’s research process, from access negotiation to presentation of findings, illustrating the language barriers encountered doing an ethnography in parallel to learning the local language in Sweden.

Research limitations/implications – This paper calls for awareness of the influence of the ethnographer’s language skills and shows the importance of discussing this in relation to how we teach and learn ethnography, research practice and diversity in academia.

Originality/value – The paper makes three contributions to organizational ethnography. First, it contributes to the insider/outsider debate by nuancing the ethnographer’s experience. Second, it answers calls for transparency by presenting a personal ethnographic account. Third, it contributes to developing the methodology by offering tips to deal with language barriers in doing ethnography abroad.

This thesis took its point of departure in the lack of research regarding the intricate and important relationship between roles and routines. With roles and routines providing individuals with enough discretion to accomplish work while ensuring consistency, the overall research question posed was: how do roles and routines interplay to enable flexible performances? This question was operationalized through three sub questions: (1) why are roles and routines flexible, (2) how do roles and routines interplay, and (3) what contextual aspects influence which patterns come into play? The purpose was to increase the understanding of the interplay of roles and routines in organizations.

The theoretical basis was built up in three steps. First, the foundations of roles and routines were explored separately, laying the basis for further conceptualizations. Second, overlaps of role and routine studies were explored, highlighting their contributions to current understandings. Third, through a joint discussion of the fields, commonalities between the two areas were put forth. Central to this were the ontological foundations in performances, and re-enacting the duality of structure and agency. The theoretical work resulted in a conceptual framework, which integrated roles and routines and served as the basis for unpacking and furthering an understanding of their interplay.

In order to fulfil the purpose, and in line with the view on roles and routines as patterns of action, an organizational ethnography of an emergency department at a Swedish university hospital was conducted. Due to its characteristics, this setting represented a unique opportunity to study the interplay. Primarily based on observations, a total of 25 field visits (136,5 hours), 19 interviews, and hundreds of documents, served as the empirical material, which was analysed through iterative rounds of coding. Narratives, visual mapping, and narrative networks, were analytical strategies used in progressively moving from an understanding of the context to the identification of role and routine patterns.

Furthering the developed conceptual framework, the findings showed how roles and routines interplay in, and through, performances. Depending on individual, interpersonal, and environmental aspects, scripted and unscripted patterns are situated in performances, which trigger role and routine patterning. Summarized in an integrated framework, which highlights the key findings, this thesis showed how the interplay of roles and routines provides organizations with stability and flexibility. This has implications not only for role and routine theories, but also organization theory in general. Implications, regarding the organizing of work at emergency departments, and other organizations, as well as for educators, the society and governments were also outlined.

Purpose: While previous research acknowledges the influence of roles on routine dynamics, roles are largely taken for granted. The purpose of this paper aims at examining how roles and routines interplay in accomplishing work in organizations.

Design/methodology/approach: A four-year ethnography of an emergency department (ED) at a university hospital was conducted through observations, interviews and documents.

Findings: Roles and routines are formed by scripted and unscripted patterns, which are brought into performances following a situational assessment. Performances trigger patterning processes prompting the co-construction of role and routine patterns.

Practical implications: This study highlights the importance of designing flexible structures. Managers can benefit from identifying unscripted patterns critical to work performance and making them part of scripted patterns. Managers should contemplate the influence that individuals, their relations and context have on how work is done.

Social implications: This study suggests that the existence of different patterns impacts the length of wait times in EDs, a societal issue worldwide because of the effects that waiting can have on the patient's health condition and the unnecessary costs it carries. This study can help design solutions to decrease wait times.

Originality/value: This paper contributes to research on routine dynamics by providing a more nuanced explanation of the sources of endogenous change and how these enable organizational stability and flexibility.

In this paper, we examine the unfolding process of newcomers’ learning in routine dynamics. Mainly viewed as cognitive schemas, previous research has provided evidence for the storage of routines as procedural memory. As mindful accomplishments, studies in routine dynamics have shown that learning can be an ongoing process, as individuals adapt their performances and pattern routines accordingly. Nonetheless, little is known about how learning takes place when routines are not to change but the organizational members performing them are. We address the questions of how organizational members learn to competently perform routines, and how this learning process shapes routine dynamics, through a four-year ethnographic study of an emergency room at a university hospital characterized by high rates of personnel turnover. We find that, in learning how to perform routines, newcomers draw on four learning practices (stunt performing, virtual performing, collegial learning, and self learning), which result in routine stretching. Our findings lead to a theoretical framework which outlines the learning process newcomers go through and its influence on routine dynamics. Our study contributes to research on routines by articulating the learning process organizational members undergo in becoming skillful at performing routines and how this enables new and old routine participants to align their lines of actions in reproducing routines as patterns-in-variety.

Research on coopetition has largely been based on collaborative relationships between competitors. Building on this body of knowledge and addressing recent calls for research on intra-organizational and emergent coopetition, the purpose of this paper is to further our understanding in regard to these issues. The study is based on an in-depth qualitative study at the Emergency Department of Umeå University Hospital and consists of more than 80 hours of participant observation and interviews. The paper analyses the collaborative and competitive practices that exist among medical doctors and nurses, and discusses what seems to be triggering intra-organizational coopetition and its consequences. The analysis illustrates that coopetition emerges among individuals and groups not necessarily as the result of the implementation of an intended strategy. On the contrary, triggers of emergent intra- organizational coopetition include the organizational structure, diversity of professions, division of work activities, availability of resources, uncertainty and workload levels. All this makes a distinct contribution to the understanding of intra-organizational coopetition as an emergent practice, knowledge that should be of use from both a theoretical and a practical point of view.