My academic work investigates through qualitative methods organizations’ challenges to develop, translate, and integrate expertise in technically or socially complex settings. Specifically, my research program falls into two streams.
The first focuses on the organization of expert work, exploring organizationally how experts effectively specialize, match their skills to tasks, and collaborate. I have a particular interest in how peripheral experts translate new technical and prosocial ideas (e.g., DEI, sustainability, safety, etc.) into practice and the work of experts in cybersecurity operations.
The second stream, more conceptual, focuses on the bureaucratic organization, and I am particularly interested in how academic and lay understandings of such a concept develop, diffuse, and shape our experience of dysfunctional organizations. I am also fascinated by the design of formalizations to support more participatory and enabling work experiences.
The first focuses on the organization of expert work, exploring organizationally how experts effectively specialize, match their skills to tasks, and collaborate. I have a particular interest in how peripheral experts translate new technical and prosocial ideas (e.g., DEI, sustainability, safety, etc.) into practice and the work of experts in cybersecurity operations.
The second stream, more conceptual, focuses on the bureaucratic organization, and I am particularly interested in how academic and lay understandings of such a concept develop, diffuse, and shape our experience of dysfunctional organizations. I am also fascinated by the design of formalizations to support more participatory and enabling work experiences.
Monteiro, P., Nicolini, D., Erickson, I. Cohen, L., Dokko, G., Corporaal, G., Karunakaran, A., Bechky, B., O’Mahony, S. (2024). “Beyond the Buzz: Scholarly Approaches to the Study of Work.” Journal of Management Inquiry.
The place of work in organization studies and management has waxed and waned. Yet, today, social and technological developments have raised again interest in the study of work and this curated discussion brings together experts in key approaches to this topic. Seven contributions have been selected to provide a panorama of what we know about work while pointing to some uncharted territories worthy of future exploration. The contributions outline the principles behind and value of systemic, contextualized, or holistic view of work and report insights on how changes in some work components reverberate in its broader ecology. We hope this curated discussion will make us more aware of the collective journey scholars have charted so far while posing new questions and opening or re-directing new avenues of inquiry.
- SAGE Business and Management Summary
The place of work in organization studies and management has waxed and waned. Yet, today, social and technological developments have raised again interest in the study of work and this curated discussion brings together experts in key approaches to this topic. Seven contributions have been selected to provide a panorama of what we know about work while pointing to some uncharted territories worthy of future exploration. The contributions outline the principles behind and value of systemic, contextualized, or holistic view of work and report insights on how changes in some work components reverberate in its broader ecology. We hope this curated discussion will make us more aware of the collective journey scholars have charted so far while posing new questions and opening or re-directing new avenues of inquiry.
Monteiro, P. (2025). Generating, Grading, and Ghosting: How Organizing Experts Shapes Expertise. Journal of Management Studies.
Experts increasingly refine their expertise into specialties as they labour in and around organizations. Yet, previous research assumes that experts are organized in the workplace in ways that passively accommodate or mirror pre-existing specialties and focuses on organizational structures that codify the content of experts’ knowledge as an encroachment. Drawing on a qualitative field study in an aeronautical organization's engineering unit, this paper examines the organizational structures that chart the area of experts’ knowledge, i.e., their specialties. The findings show that organizational structures are generative, defining the contours of existing expertise and catalysing the formation of new ones (generating). However, organizational structures also encode criteria that implicitly rank some forms of expertise over others, thereby reinforcing status hierarchies (grading), and misalignment across organizational structures renders some forms of expertise invisible (ghosting). By showing the active role of organizational structures in shaping expertise rather than simply housing it, this paper contributes to our understanding of expertise development as well as status dynamics and access to resources among experts. Further, the paper reveals how misalignments across multiple organizational structures may impact the management of knowledge and human capital.
- Management Insights Summary
Experts increasingly refine their expertise into specialties as they labour in and around organizations. Yet, previous research assumes that experts are organized in the workplace in ways that passively accommodate or mirror pre-existing specialties and focuses on organizational structures that codify the content of experts’ knowledge as an encroachment. Drawing on a qualitative field study in an aeronautical organization's engineering unit, this paper examines the organizational structures that chart the area of experts’ knowledge, i.e., their specialties. The findings show that organizational structures are generative, defining the contours of existing expertise and catalysing the formation of new ones (generating). However, organizational structures also encode criteria that implicitly rank some forms of expertise over others, thereby reinforcing status hierarchies (grading), and misalignment across organizational structures renders some forms of expertise invisible (ghosting). By showing the active role of organizational structures in shaping expertise rather than simply housing it, this paper contributes to our understanding of expertise development as well as status dynamics and access to resources among experts. Further, the paper reveals how misalignments across multiple organizational structures may impact the management of knowledge and human capital.
Monteiro, P. (2024). “How Not to Organize In-House Experts: Lessons From Boeing.” MIT Sloan Management Review.
In the race to recruit and deploy talent, organizations often focus on attracting highly skilled experts and then optimizing internal knowledge flow. But translating expertise into better business decisions and superior outcomes hinges on how well in-house experts are organized. Balancing specialization with collaboration, matching experts with the right tasks, promoting a broad spectrum of expertise, and embedding domain expertise into leadership are all factors that matter. The disasters involving Boeing’s 737 Max 8 airliner, which claimed hundreds of lives, and the company’s ongoing business struggles offer a stark lesson: Poor organization of expertise can have severe consequences. Only by thoughtfully placing and valuing experts can managers unlock their workforce’s full potential.
- Media citation in the Financial Times
In the race to recruit and deploy talent, organizations often focus on attracting highly skilled experts and then optimizing internal knowledge flow. But translating expertise into better business decisions and superior outcomes hinges on how well in-house experts are organized. Balancing specialization with collaboration, matching experts with the right tasks, promoting a broad spectrum of expertise, and embedding domain expertise into leadership are all factors that matter. The disasters involving Boeing’s 737 Max 8 airliner, which claimed hundreds of lives, and the company’s ongoing business struggles offer a stark lesson: Poor organization of expertise can have severe consequences. Only by thoughtfully placing and valuing experts can managers unlock their workforce’s full potential.
Monteiro, P., & Adler, P. S. (2022). “Bureaucracy For The 21st Century: Clarifying and Expanding our View of Bureaucratic Organization.” Academy of Management Annals, 16(2), 427-475.
This review aims to redress the growing gap between the receding discourse on bureaucracy and bureaucracy’s persistence as an organizational form in our era. Reviewing organizational research on bureaucracy, we find three main perspectives, which developed in succession but persist in parallel: bureaucracy as an organizing principle, as a paradigmatic form of organization, and as one type of structure among others. We argue that these three perspectives should be expanded and brought into closer dialogue to overcome the de-contextualized, reified, and narrow ways bureaucracy is often viewed. We offer three pathways for future research and discuss how we can make better sense of the various guises in which bureaucracy appears today.
- AOM Insights Summary
- Media citation in the Financial Times
This review aims to redress the growing gap between the receding discourse on bureaucracy and bureaucracy’s persistence as an organizational form in our era. Reviewing organizational research on bureaucracy, we find three main perspectives, which developed in succession but persist in parallel: bureaucracy as an organizing principle, as a paradigmatic form of organization, and as one type of structure among others. We argue that these three perspectives should be expanded and brought into closer dialogue to overcome the de-contextualized, reified, and narrow ways bureaucracy is often viewed. We offer three pathways for future research and discuss how we can make better sense of the various guises in which bureaucracy appears today.
Nicolini, D., Lippi, A., & Monteiro, P. (2019). “Systematic Heterogeneity in the Adaptation Process of Management Innovations: Insights from the Italian Public Sector.” In Reay, T., Zilber, T., Langley, A., & Tsoukas, H. (Eds.). Institutions and Organizations: A Process View. Oxford University Press.
In this chapter, the authors investigate how the best practices approach “diffused” in the Italian public sector. They show that despite the lack of a clear original model or a strong brokering agency—and the considerable changes this management innovation went through in its arrival in Italy—the result was not complete idiosyncrasy. Rather, clear adaptation patterns and systematic heterogeneity emerged. They argue that the bottom-up emergence of such patterns can be explained by paying attention to the very nature of the public-sector field. They use these findings to develop a framework that accounts for the convergence/divergence of adaptation patterns in the “diffusion” of management innovations based on power relations between innovation brokers and adopters.
In this chapter, the authors investigate how the best practices approach “diffused” in the Italian public sector. They show that despite the lack of a clear original model or a strong brokering agency—and the considerable changes this management innovation went through in its arrival in Italy—the result was not complete idiosyncrasy. Rather, clear adaptation patterns and systematic heterogeneity emerged. They argue that the bottom-up emergence of such patterns can be explained by paying attention to the very nature of the public-sector field. They use these findings to develop a framework that accounts for the convergence/divergence of adaptation patterns in the “diffusion” of management innovations based on power relations between innovation brokers and adopters.
Nicolini, D. and Monteiro, P. (2017). "The Practice Approach: For a Praxeology of Organization and Management Studies." In Tsoukas, H. and Langley, A. The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies.
Practice theory, practice-based studies, practice approach, or practice lens denote a family of orientations that take orderly materially mediated doing and sayings (‘practices') and their aggregations as central for the understanding of organisational and social phenomena. Authors who embrace this orientation suggest that matters such as social order, knowledge, institutions, identity, power, inequalities, or change result from and transpire through practices and their aggregations. Examples of social practices include driving, taking pictures, cooking, consuming, teaching a class, online trading, strategising in corporate meetings, and performing heart surgery. Practice approaches are a primary way to study organisation processually. This is because all coherent practice approaches subscribe to the view that social and organisational life stem from and transpire through the real-time accomplishments of ordinary activities.
Practice theory, practice-based studies, practice approach, or practice lens denote a family of orientations that take orderly materially mediated doing and sayings (‘practices') and their aggregations as central for the understanding of organisational and social phenomena. Authors who embrace this orientation suggest that matters such as social order, knowledge, institutions, identity, power, inequalities, or change result from and transpire through practices and their aggregations. Examples of social practices include driving, taking pictures, cooking, consuming, teaching a class, online trading, strategising in corporate meetings, and performing heart surgery. Practice approaches are a primary way to study organisation processually. This is because all coherent practice approaches subscribe to the view that social and organisational life stem from and transpire through the real-time accomplishments of ordinary activities.
Reay, T., Zafar, A., Monteiro, P., and Vern, G. (2019). "Presenting Findings from Qualitative Research: One Size Does not Fit All." In: Zilber, T.B., Amis, J.M. and Mair. J. (Eds.). The Production of Managerial Knowledge and Organizational Theory: New Approaches to Writing, Producing and Consuming Theory. Research in the Sociology of Organizations.
In this chapter, the authors explore the state of our field in terms of ways to present qualitative findings. The authors analyze all articles based on qualitative research methods published in the Academy of Management Journal from 2010 to 2017 and supplement this by informally surveying colleagues about their “favorite” qualitative authors. As a result, the authors identify five ways of presenting qualitative findings in research articles. The authors suggest that each approach has advantages as well as limitations, and that the type of data and theorizing is an important consideration in determining the most appropriate approach for the presentation of findings. The authors hope that by identifying these approaches, they enrich the way authors, reviewers, and editors approach the presentation of qualitative findings.
In this chapter, the authors explore the state of our field in terms of ways to present qualitative findings. The authors analyze all articles based on qualitative research methods published in the Academy of Management Journal from 2010 to 2017 and supplement this by informally surveying colleagues about their “favorite” qualitative authors. As a result, the authors identify five ways of presenting qualitative findings in research articles. The authors suggest that each approach has advantages as well as limitations, and that the type of data and theorizing is an important consideration in determining the most appropriate approach for the presentation of findings. The authors hope that by identifying these approaches, they enrich the way authors, reviewers, and editors approach the presentation of qualitative findings.