Multidirectional Idea Travelling Across an Organizational Field

Organizational scholars are increasingly interested in understanding how ideas travel across an organizational field. While most studies focus on how travelling ideas translate into organizational practices, we lack insights into the broader issue of how ideas translate as they move among heterogeneous actors across the field. To explore this multidirectional travelling of ideas, we build on the notion of translation ecology to capture the ongoing interactions among field members as they are involved in translation work within and outside adopting organizations. To develop our argument, we draw from a longitudinal, 20-year case study of a public sector digital transformation programme in Denmark through which ideas about mobile technology use for caregivers spread across the entire homecare field. By following the mobile technology initiative over time, we show how ideas travelled in multiple directions as adopting organizations and other influential field actors participated in and contributed to diverse practices across organizations. Based on our analyses, we identify three distinct forms of multidirectional idea travelling – reinforcing, complementing and polarizing – and describe how they together shape the morphing of ideas as they move among heterogeneous actors in a translation ecology. As a result, we advance knowledge about multidirectional idea travelling as an under-theorized and important perspective in the translation literature.