Experimenting Organization: the politics of precision oncology

Drawing on an ethnographic study of French precision oncology clinical trials, this paper introduces the notion of experimenting organization to investigate recent developments in the clinical research domain but also, concurrently, in routine treatments and care. Experimenting organizations simultaneously engage in experimental activities by producing new knowledge and practices, while also experimenting with new ways of organizing the production of knowledge. We discuss a number of elements that characterize this kind of organizations, namely: a close intertwining of routine and experimental activities; the search for a balance between continuity and discontinuity and, relatedly, logistical flexibility and robustness; a micropolitics of cooperation as defined by soft organizational design and Interrelations between organizations scattered across different socio-technical spaces, including international ones and, relatedly, a micropolitics of boundaries. All these processes are further defined by their reflexive nature — both vis-à-vis organizational design and the validation of experimental results — and by the central place attributed to coordination issues. We hypothesize that the dynamics and processes characterizing experimenting organization can be found in domains other than biomedicine, such as higher education and digital organizations that claim to permanently innovate as part of their production process and are modes of innovation that can be found in many social policies.