Moritz Kleinaltenkamp: Accounting Infrastructure and Temporal Coordination in German Public Health

Addressing pressing societal challenges––such as the move toward pandemic-resilient health systems––rarely depends on any single organization. It requires coordinating the plans and actions of many interdependent actors across an entire organizational field. Maturity models are one mechanism that makes field coordination possible. As accounting infrastructures, they lay out staged paths toward a desired future and measure organizations’ progress along them.

We still know little about how such accounting infrastructures come to coordinate field-level change, especially when no actor holds formal authority over the others. This kind of coordination rests on the temporal nature of accounting infrastructures: their capacity to establish a shared sense of where a field is heading and what steps should be taken when. Yet how a new accounting infrastructure gains this temporal authority, and what frictions may be involved, remains poorly understood.

Our research project examines this question by studying the digital transformation of Germany's public health field, where a federal ministry with little authority over 375 municipal health agencies used a digital "maturity model" to align them on a shared vision after COVID-19 exposed the field's vulnerability. Drawing on interviews, observations, and documents, we show how the maturity model became naturalized as the field's "temporal landscape," a taken-for-granted sense of progress and timing. This naturalization happened through practices that wove the model into the field's rhythms of resource exchange, knowledge production, and social legitimation. The new temporal landscape of the maturity model fostered coordination, but it also generated conflict, as municipal agencies had to juggle the field's timing alongside local rhythms. We show how some engaged in performative practices that sought to portray alignment with the model while at the same time decoupling from it. In doing so, our study reveals how accounting infrastructures can both enable and fragment coordination across organizational fields.

The talk will be held in English.

About Moritz Kleinaltenkamp

Moritz Kleinaltenkamp is Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at NEOMA Business School in Reims, France. In his research, he addresses the conjoined processes of technological, organizational, and societal change. He particularly focuses on emerging technologies, future visions, and the transformation of organizational fields.

Registration

The lectures take place in person at the Weizenbaum Institute. There is no registration needed. Online participation via Zoom is also possible. Please send us a short e-mail in advance for more details: kolloquium.rvw[at]weizenbaum-institut.de

About the Colloquium

The colloquium series discusses current topics related to the impact of digitalization on collective knowledge practices and bodies of knowledge from an interdisciplinary perspective. We regularly invite experts who research these questions through various interesting approaches. The colloquium series is both open to researchers from the Weizenbaum Institute as well as anyone interested.

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