Cecilie Torp Lohse - 1st year PhD presentation

Supervisors: Dorte Døjbak & Iben Duvald Pedersen
Discussants: Alice Grønhøj & Claus Holm

Abstract
Organizations are frequently redesigned but we know surprisingly little about how ambiguity is constituted in the design process itself. Existing organization design theory has treated ambiguity either as a variant of uncertainty requiring better information-processing arrangements (Daft & Lengel, 1986; Galbraith, 1973; Joseph & Gaba, 2015) or as a property of decision situations with unclear preferences and technology (Levinthal & Rerup, 2021; March et al., 1976). It has also largely assumed that designers possess sufficient knowledge of the interdependencies they are organizing but this is not always the case (Clement & Puranam, 2018; Raveendran et al., 2020). When designers lack sufficient knowledge, ambiguity is not merely an external condition to be managed. It is built into the design itself, embedded in role interdependencies between agents who must then work out through their interactions - with the knowledge and goals they bring - what the structure becomes (Clement & Puranam, 2018; Raveendran et al., 2020). However, this constitutive dimension of ambiguity has not been investigated within organization design theory before.

Responding to a call, this project treats ambiguity as a concept in its own right and departs from cognitive framings of ambiguity (Cappellaro et al., 2023), approaching ambiguity as a relational condition embedded in role interdependencies. That is, constituted between agents through their interactions rather than located in individual minds or structural deficits (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015). The project traces ambiguity in role interdependencies across three studies that move from the constitution of ambiguity in design, through its relational unfoldings in practice, to its dynamics over time. It is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2019) following the relocation of acute care nurses from municipal to regional governance as part of the Danish Healthcare Reform. Through observations of planning meetings and clinical work, interviews with managers, administrators, and clinical staff, and analysis of organizational documents, I follow the redesign process across organizational levels and settings from the design phase through early implementation.

Study 1 investigates how managers and administrators hypothesize role interdependencies when designing a reorganization. This includes the assumptions they make about who will coordinate with whom, where roles boundaries will sit, and what knowledge and goals each role will bring - and how ambiguity is constituted in gaps, referrals, and contested boundaries that those assumptions produce (Clement & Puranam, 2018; Raveendran et al., 2020). Study 2 examines how that built-in ambiguity takes relational shape and is worked out across role boundaries as healthcare staff begins working within the new structure. This contributes to an understanding of how agents' responses to ambiguity shape the organizational structures and coordination patterns that emerge (Joseph & Sengul, 2025; Srivastava, 2015; Valentine, 2018). Finally, study 3 uses a system dynamics model to simulate how ambiguity in role interdependencies unfolds over time. Capturing the cumulative, non-linear consequences that ethnography alone cannot observe, and theorizing the conditions under which ambiguity either stabilizes or escalates (Joseph & Sengul, 2025; Puranam et al., 2015). Together, the three studies contribute to organization design theory by advancing a relational understanding of ambiguity as a concept, and by investigating empirically and computationally its constitutive and generative role in organizational emergence during redesign. 

Everone is welcome!