Translating to maintain existing practices: Micro-tactics in the implementation of a new management concept

Research has demonstrated how the translation of a new management concept into organizational practices is impacted by the translators’ engagement with their local context. We expand this literature by demonstrating how a heterogenous institutional context prompts translators to create practice change but also practice maintenance. Building upon an interpretive analytical framework we offer a way forward to examine relationships between societal institutions and distributed collective work in change processes. Our longitudinal qualitative study based upon interviews and observations examines how the concept of value-based healthcare was translated at a hospital. The translators developed three micro-tactics: disregard, maintenance, and displacement, grounded in their narration of practice changes. Translators enacted institutional logics differently at the levels of meaning and practice when they framed, rationalised, and contextualised the potentialities of a new concept, and this complexity provided the possibility of various practice outcomes. We contribute to the understanding of translation by demonstrating how a heterogenous institutional context encourages translators to change selected practices but also to decouple and maintain most of the existing practices due to their enactment of institutionalised rationalities. Moreover, we discuss how translation outcomes are impacted by collaborating actors’ shared interpretations of their institutional context. Collaborating translators need to agree on whether and what practice change is valuable for the organization, and change is only possible when they interpret that they have the leverage to align a new idea with dominant institutional logics.

A Matching Study on the Influence of Advertised Information Expression and Product Type on Consumer Purchase Intention

Due to extensive product differentiation and the personalized aesthetic needs of consumers, modern enterprises need different expressions of information to attract consumers’ interest and improve their purchase intention. This study draws from the elaboration likelihood model, anchoring theory, and media richness theory to explore how the expression of advertised information can be effectively matched to the product type to enhance consumers’ purchase intention. The mediating effect of information-processing fluency and moderating effect of consumers’ personal involvement on this relationship is also explored. Data from experiments and questionnaires involving 1,292 participants were analyzed. The results show that direct expression of advertised information is more suitable for advertising search products, while metaphorical expressions of advertised information are more suitable for advertising experience products. These combinations of product type and expression of advertised information can effectively improve consumers’ purchase intention. Meanwhile, the main combined effect of the product type and expression of advertised information is mediated by consumers’ information-processing fluency, and moderated by consumers’ personal involvement positively.