Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti

Results
Table 14 shows how case Center clearly indicates the smallest amount of
boundary activities. While the data set in case Center was the largest (25
interviews), the number of boundary activities was the smallest of the three
cases. Case Center demonstrated only 103 of the 606 quotes referring to
boundary activities, averaging only as 4.1 quotes of boundary activities
mentioned per interview. The other two cases, Bureau and Chain, indicated
a significantly higher amount of boundary activity. In Bureau, 137
quotations referring to boundary activities were identified in 11 interviews,
with 12.5 boundary activities mentioned on average in an interview. Case
Chain manifested the largest amount of boundary activities, altogether 366
quotes referring to boundary activities. The amount of boundary activity in
Chain was also the largest in proportion to the number of interviews, 16.6
quotes per interview.
As described, each of the quotes referring to boundary activities was
connected with one or two of the boundary activity types. In total, the
identified 606 quotes represented 858 instances of boundary activity types.
Table 14 includes case-specific counts of these instances of boundary
activity types. The average number of associated boundary activity types
per one quotation of boundary activity was also calculated for each case.
The results of this calculation indicated a subtle trend, where case Center
again had the lowest result and case Chain the highest result. In Center,
each quote was connected with 1.3 boundary activity types, while in Bureau
the corresponding figure was 1.4, and in Chain 1.5. This indicates that in
Chain, the boundary activities more often had several intentions behind
them. For example, informing activities in Chain were frequently also about
enclosing: careful measures were taken to pave the way for the changes by
providing information about them, simultaneously ensuring that
confidential plans about the personnel effects were not revealed too early.
Whereas the overall amount of boundary activity seemed to differ
significantly across the cases, activities representing all four categories of
boundary activities were found in all three cases. The distribution of
boundary activities in terms of the categories was very similar across the
three cases. Table 14 shows a clear trend in the distribution, where in all
three cases around 30% of the boundary activities is about defining and
shaping the boundary (ranging from 27 to 31%), a bit more than 20% is
about crossing the boundary inwards (22–25%), around 40% is about
crossing the boundary outwards (40–43%), and less than 10% is about
blocking the boundary from inward and outward flows (4–8%).
While there seems to be a visible trend in the categorization of the
boundary activities based on their direction, many differences were
identified in the distribution of the boundary activities within the four
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