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Faculty Profile
Bjørn Erik Mørk
Associate Professor - Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Biography
Biografi
Bjørn Erik is an organisational sociologist, and works as an Associate Professor of innovation at BI Norwegian Business School. He is Research Center Leader for Centre for Healthcare Management, and Program Director for Healthcare Management. In addition, he is Associate Dean for the PhD specialisation in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Prior to starting at BI in May 2017 Bjørn Erik was an Associate Professor of Information Systems and Management at Department of Informatics, University of Oslo (UiO), and responsible for the Executive Master in IT and Management. Since 2012 he has been an Associate Fellow at the IKON Research Unit, Warwick Business School, and he is now a Honorary Associate Professor at WBS. In addition, he holds a part-time position as an Associate Partner in EY People Advisory Services.
Research He conducts practice-based studies of innovation processes, organising, learning, knowing and change in organisations. In particular he is interested in the development and introduction of new practices and new technologies in the health care sector. This includes topics such as cross-disciplinary collaboration, boundary work, ways of organising, power relations, and learning. Bjørn Erik was a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley in 2005 and in 2012. His work has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Annals, Human Relations, Social Science and Medicine, and Management Learning. In addition, he is a columnist for Dagens Medisin, and writes about topics related to organisation and leadership.
The annual International Conference on Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities (OLKC) is an important academic community for Bjørn Erik. In 2014 he was part of the Organising Committee when BI hosted the OLKC conference. He has organised teaching workshops, doctoral consortiums and various symposiums at OLKC, and been a member of the Executive Board for OLKC since 2015. From 2017-2019 he was Chairman of the Executive Board together with Cathrine Filstad.
Bjørn Erik is also an active member of Fulbright Alumni Association Norway (FAAN). He was member of the FAAN Board from 2014-2019, and President in FAAN from 2016-2019.
Teaching and supervision
Topics he teaches include organisational theory, innovation management, learning, entrepreneurship and qualitative methods (in particular organizational ethnography). At BI he is Director for the executive master programme for health care managers (Nasjonale lederutdanningen i primærhelsetjenesten), course responsible for a PhD course on perspectives on entrepreneurship and innovation, and responsible for the bachelor course BMP 2900 "Innovasjon og organisering av helsetjenesten".
Bjørn Erik is member of the Board of Directors and the management team for the Nordic Research School in Innovation (NORSI) for PhD students in Scandinavia.
He is supervising several master and PhD students at BI and at the University of Oslo.
This article reviews scholarship dealing with the notion of “boundary work,” defined as purposeful individual and collective effort to influence the social, symbolic, material, or temporal boundaries, demarcations; and distinctions affecting groups, occupations, and organizations. We identify and explore the implications of three conceptually distinct but interrelated forms of boundary work emerging from the literature. Competitive boundary work involves mobilizing boundaries to establish some kind of advantage over others. In contrast, collaborative boundary work is concerned with aligning boundaries to enable collaboration. Finally, configurational boundary work involves manipulating patterns of differentiation and integration among groups to ensure that certain activities are brought together, whereas others are kept apart, orienting the domains of competition and collaboration. We argue that the notion of boundary work can contribute to the development of a uniquely processual view of organizational design as open-ended, and continually becoming, an orientation with significant future potential for understanding novel forms of organizing, and for integrating agency, power dynamics, materiality, and temporality into the study of organizing.
Lindberg, Kajsa; Mørk, Bjørn Erik & Walter, Lars (2019)
Emergent coordination and situated learning in a Hybrid OR: The mixed blessing of using radiation
Mobilising knowledge and coordinating actions in order to make use of new innovations and technologies is a major challenge in the health care sector. Drawing upon a longitudinal, qualitative study of a Hybrid Operating Room in Sweden, we illustrate how the staff from a variety of medical specialties need to coordinate their tasks and competencies, and learn how to use the technology in a safe way. This study shows that learning across highly-professionalised communities is a recursive process of emergent coordination and situated learning, which includes the acknowledgement of others’ expertise, task interdependence, and the pragmatic accommodation of latitude and control. Moreover, there was continuous negotiations between the different communities about what should constitute approved practice based on the task being performed. This obstructed the development of a dominant community with the authority to independently exclude other communities. We thus conclude that emergent coordination of tasks and expertise is an important aspect of learning how to use technologies that break with conventions of established and previously separated practices.
In this paper, we interrogate the current views on medical expertise, and expertise more in general, by building upon the study of an innovative medical procedure called transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI). We find that phenomena like TAVI require that we modify our traditional views of expertise to acknowledge its social, material and distributed nature. We also find that in the case of TAVI expertise feeds upon the broad circuits of knowledge created by the combination of professional relationships, social ties and, increasingly, economic interests. Becoming and remaining an expert implies not only being socialised in a local regime of activity but increasingly also participating in, learning to navigate, and exploiting alternative and potentially competing circuits of knowledge, which may be controlled by private companies. The case of TAVI helps us to appreciate expertise as a translocal and connected phenomenon and foreground some of the implications of the emergence of proprietary circuits of knowledge.
From breakthroughs in knowledge to integration in medical practices
Škerlavaj, Miha; Černe, Matej, Dysvik, Anders & Carlsen, Arne (red.). Capitalizing on creativity at work: Fostering the implementation of creative ideas in organizations
Mørk, Bjørn Erik; Aanestad, Margunn & Hoholm, Thomas (2013)
Tverrfaglig samhandling: En praksisbasert studie av utvikling og implementering av nye praksiser i sykehus
Tjora, Aksel Hagen & Melby, Line (red.). Samhandling for helse: Kunnskap, kommunikasjon og teknologi i helsetjenesten
Sub-theme 33: Disrupting Organizing Practices in Healthcare
[Academic lecture]. 35th EGOS Colloquium.
Peavy, Keith Herbert; Hoholm, Thomas, Olsen, Per Ingvar & Mørk, Bjørn Erik (2019)
Emerging solidarities: A Collective articulation of relationally-based practices of care
[Academic lecture]. 11th International Symposium on Process Organization Studies.
Hanseth, Ole; Masovic, Jasmina & Mørk, Bjørn Erik (2018)
The dynamics of complex sociomaterial assemblages: the case of Transcatheter aortic valve implantation
Calitz, F.; Batini, C & Magni, M (red.). Organizing for the Digital World. IT for individuals, communities and societies, Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation (LNISO)
Mørk, Bjørn Erik (2018)
Når praksiser er situerte og trans-situerte - samarbeid og læring
[Academic lecture]. Kompetansedagene.
Peavy, Keith Herbert; Hoholm, Thomas, Olsen, Per Ingvar & Mørk, Bjørn Erik (2018)
Emerging solidarities and the transformation of caring practices
[Academic lecture]. The 13th Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities Conference (OLKC).
Rubach, Synnøve; Hoholm, Thomas & Mørk, Bjørn Erik (2013)
Regional innovation: On boundary organizations and the interaction between industry, science and politics
[Academic lecture]. NEON konferansen.
Mørk, Bjørn Erik; Aanestad, Margunn & Hoholm, Thomas (2013)
Praksisbaserte perspektiver på teknologisk innovasjon i helsevesenet
[Academic lecture]. NEON konferansen.
Mørk, Bjørn Erik; Aanestad, Margunn, Hoholm, Thomas & Halvorsen, Per Steinar (2013)
"Høyteknologisk innovasjon, tverrfaglighet og ekspertise"
[Academic lecture]. Oslo Innovation Week.
Mørk, Bjørn Erik (2013)
Praksisbaserte perspektiver på innovasjon i helsevesenet
[Academic lecture]. Kurs i Innovasjonsledelse.
Mørk, Bjørn Erik (2013)
Erfaringer med å være Fulbright Scholar (i seminaret hadde jeg rolle som deltager i paneldebatt og gruppelærer for scholars som skal ha opphold i California)