UC Irvine

This dissertation examines how organizational paradoxes are managed in practice, over time, and under technological change. Paradox theory suggests that technology is a disruptor, intensifying tensions and rendering them salient. Less is known about technology’s role in responding to tensions or the complex and situated experience of managing paradox. I investigate these issues through an ethnography examining the implementation of a new case management system in the Family Law division of a California county court. Employing a suite of theoretical lenses – sociomateriality, microfoundations, and power – I present three studies of organizational paradoxes upended following this change.

In the first study, I explore the social and material actors involved in managing the tension between standardization and individualization in the performance of service. I find that different configurations of people, artefacts, and policies create opportunities to reframe the tension. Learning from errors allows each reframing attempt to reduce the space and time required for its performance, facilitating the gradual integration of competing demands. The second study examines how visibility into individuals’ actions is experienced in performance evaluation schemes that emphasize collective goals. I find that system features rendering individual actions visible trigger defensive behaviors focused on protecting individual interests above collective goals. Managers’ use of empowering actions and reassuring discourse reduce anxiety by anchoring individual performance standards and minimizing dissonance. In the third study, I examine shifting power dynamics in the negotiation of belonging across multiple groups. I find three ways in which the new case management system serves as a tool for circulating power among courtroom clerks, managers, and judges: collapsing the spaces of role play, creating opportunities for concessions, and (re)defining expertise and its relative influence.

Taken together, this research shows how the transformation in court services under electronic case management echoes a transformation in the meaning of service for those charged with its provision. As performing, organizing, and belonging tensions are upended and repaired under the new technology, new practices shift the focus of service from customer to case file, challenge employees’ shared sense of responsibility to case resolution, and surface new identities and sources of power.