Abstract: Organizations face institutional complexity as they are confronted to multiple institutional logics that encourage them to adopt different behaviors and to develop practices of a different nature. We focus here on organizational practices and routines developed by organizational actors in an emerging field to deal with various institutional logics. We will base our communication on a qualitative study of an emerging field, related to telecare services for elderly people in France, where two institutional logics coexist: the health care logic embodied by doctors and actors of emergency services (firemen, Emergency Medical Services); the social care logic emphasized by public representatives and public agencies who have a social responsibility vis-a-vis the citizens and particularly the elderly. These logics both co-exist and are in confrontation. Remote care service providers in particular are facing these different logics and have to cope with this complexity. Indeed, they need to call emergency services and to solicit doctors when necessary, they have to provide a high quality overall service and ensure the profitability of their activities, finally, they must also report to the public agencies responsible for policies towards the elderly. Thus, they collaborate with actors who refer to different institutional logics. Our aim is to better understand how providers enact and combine the different logics in their work and how it contributes to the evolution of their activity. We therefore focus on the provider's activity and the organizational routines they develop. Our research completes the studies on the responses provided by organizations working in the organizational sector in which several logics coexist, focusing on a micro-level through the observation of the everyday practices. Our methodological approach combines observation and interviews. We spent 4 days observing the work being carried out at two remote care call centers belonging to different providers. We also carried out 33 semi-directive interviews, 13 with providers, 20 with other actors involved in the production of the service (state services, local authorities and bodies involved in the provision of personal services and the manufacture of equipment). As part of this observation, we identified situations that appeared to generate tensions linked to the coexistence of the two logics. Three types of situations with tension were identified: the uncertain situations for which additional information makes it possible to apply the routine; ambiguous situations, leaving more room for individual assessment of operators; and finally situations which are neither ambiguous nor uncertain but where the application of the routine is not satisfactory, which will create an evolution in organizational practices. Scholars have shown that the coexistence of different logics can create incompatibilities for organizations (Greenwood et al. 2010), but we argue that it also creates uncertainty and ambiguity in the situations managed day to day. We have shown that, in order to reduce uncertainty, organizations set different routines and practices, but that a persistant uncertainty and ambiguity can induce a change in routines. And we have identified a link between this evolution of routines and the relatively specific character of the logics to reconcile.
