From Vision to Actuality: Translating the Organizing Vision of Mobile Technology in Home Care

Empirical evidence from a case study of the diffusion and adoption of mobile technology in a highly structured home care setting in Denmark shows how an organizational field vision of an efficient mobile technology was created and became transformed through diverse translation mechanisms as individual organizations reformulated and interpreted the technology during the process of adoption. Drawing on neo-institutional theory by using the concept of “the organizing vision” in combination with the notion of “translation,” this study offers a multilevel view on the processes of realizing the organizing vision for mobile technology in practice. Our findings show that an integration of the translation perspective not only furthers our understanding of the malleability of the organizing vision but also shows how actions at multiple levels interact to enable technology adoption and eventually institutionalization. Our study contributes to the increasing research on diffusion and adoption of mobile technologies within healthcare by challenging dominant single level analysis and factor-orientated approaches.