Staff and Line Revisited: How Management Specialists Promote Change in Technical Work Settings

This paper explores the workof peripheral experts who lack formal authority to produce change operations ina bureaucratic organization. I theorize these dynamics in terms of staff-linerelations and draw on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork to map thestruggle of a team of process improvement, knowledge management, and projectmanagement specialists to influence the aircraft development work in anaeronautical company. While previous literature documents that close ties andawareness about the work context enables experts to influence operations, Ifind that these conditions may be necessary but not sufficient. Specifically, Ifind that experts drew on their ties and awareness to translate tools andservices according to the work context and paced their offer in a stepwisemanner. Yet, as line employees rejected or ignored their tools and services,they deployed stealthy ways to infiltrate operations, piggybackingopportunities to implement their ideas and trying to bait interest amongtechnical workers and managers. I build on my findings to theorize theorganizational challenges faced by experts to accomplish their professionalmandate in complex organizations and translate ideas into practice, thusrefining our understanding of expert work in organizations.