Publications

Koljonen, Tomi and Chan, Curtis K. (2024). Balancing Professional Autonomy And Managerial Goals Amid Broad Technology Adoption Pressures: Intraprofessional Segmentation At A Finnish School. Academy of Management Journal. Published online: https://journals.aom.org/doi/full/10.5465/amj.2022.1093

Managers often desire to see their organization adopt new technologies but depend on autonomous professionals to use such technologies in practice. In seeking technology adoption, organizations thus must find a middle ground between professional autonomy and managerial goals. Extant scholarship has examined such middle grounds but has focused on adoptions of specific technologies. However, amid broad technology adoption pressures—expectations on organizations lacking precise prescriptions, success criteria, and sanctions—novel middle-ground approaches might emerge. Our 16-month ethnography of a Finnish school indicates that intraprofessional segmentation—specialization of work tasks within a professional community—can allow organizations to navigate technology adoption while balancing professional autonomy and managerial goals. This segmentation supported managers’ and certain teachers’ enthusiasm about new technologies at work, without undermining other teachers’ autonomy. This segmentation emerged, persisted, and intensified through two processes. First, it emerged through differentiating practices, which allowed a divergence of what teachers said and did regarding technology. Second, this segmentation persisted and intensified through reinforcing practices, which furthered differentiation by formalizing, reorganizing, and strengthening it. Our study contributes to scholarship on occupations and technology by showing how intraprofessional segmentation can help organizations align technology with professional work amid broad technology adoption pressures.

Heimstädt, Maximilian, Koljonen, Tomi and Elmholdt, Kasper Trolle. (2024). Expertise in Management Research: An Integrative Review and a Path Forward. Academy of Management Annals. 18(1): 121-156. https://journals.aom.org/doi/full/10.5465/annals.2022.0078

Management scholars and practitioners have a longstanding interest in expertise and its benefits for individuals, organizations, and markets. However, today, experts and expertise also face a significant and broad crisis of credibility, authority, and trust in society. In order to better examine, understand, and realize the potential of expertise in and around organizations, our field is overdue for a comprehensive review of recent work on the concept. With an integrative review of the past two decades of management research on expertise, we map out this fragmented field and outline three perspectives on the concept. A “realist perspective” sees expertise as a substantive ability of individuals, a “constructivist perspective” sees expertise as socially constructed quality of collective actors, and a “situationist perspective” sees expertise as a situated enactment involving human and nonhuman actors. These perspectives make different assumptions about the nature of expertise and therefore reach different conclusions about its benefits and problems. By teasing out similarities and differences across the perspectives, we work toward greater construct clarity and develop six integrative opportunities for future research. We conclude with suggestions about how each of the three perspectives can help us better understand the crisis of expertise.

Research projects

Doing diversity: A study of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) experts in UK higher education (2023-)

I am currently researching the work of equity, diversity, and inclusion experts in UK higher education. If are interested in participating in this research or simply hearing more, please get in touch with me.

Teaching with Technology: Policy Reform and Professional Labor in the Digital Age (2018-2021)

In my dissertation, I examined technological policy reform in the Finnish educational system in the 2010s to understand how professionals’ work is shaped by and shapes technology-related public policy reforms. For this research project, I undertook a 16-month ethnography at a Finnish school, collected extensive archival materials, and conducted expert interviews. Work based on this research has received Best Student Paper nominations at AOM and EGOS, and one of the manuscripts has been accepted for publication at Academy of Management Journal.