Pick Up Your Tools: Integrating Tools into a Sociomaterial Model of Mindful Organizing

Mindful organizing has been heralded as an important way of managing unexpected events. Prior studies have mostly taken a human-centered approach to mindful organizing. To account for the relevancy of tools in organizational practice, we draw on the notions of inscriptions and sociomateriality to examine how a computer-based tool shapes mindful organizing in a German hospital. This perspective on tools brings aspects of mindful organizing to the fore—inscribing the big picture, inscribing temporality, and inscribing accountability—that have rarely been considered so far. Interestingly, some of the tool’s shortcomings also fostered mindful organizing. The contribution of our study is to “pick up” the importance of tools and integrate their role in a model of mindful organizing. This allows discussing issues of temporality that go beyond conceptualizing time as a mere resource and the impact of accountability as it is produced in everyday work.