The interplay between work practices and prescription: a key issue for organizational resilience

The paper deals with the interplay between work practices, which mainly assure the flexibility of a socio-technical system, and prescriptions, through which management tries to achieve robustness. To explore the interplay between prescriptions and work practices and its consequences on the organization’s resilience, a conceptual model of work practice evolution is proposed. The model is conceived as an intermediary between models of individual human cognition and action at work, and models of organizational behaviour. It considers work practices as the product of acting in context developed through repetition, regular contextual distinction, and subsequent reflections on action. This triple process ensures adaptability and evolution, sustaining the local ecology of work. The discussion on the interplay between practice and official formalizations presents a number of typical mechanisms leading either to the decline of practice evolution and development –and the consequent organizational arteriosclerosis–, or the unreflective evolution –and the consequent erosion of organizational robustness. In the conclusion, we advocate that the dialectic between practice and official formalizations is not only inevitable but also vital for organizational resilience.