The Cognitive Ecology of Mail Sorting: An Explorative Study of Immergence-Driven Change in a Manual Mail Sorting Practice

The paper advances the study of organizational cognition by exploring immergence in the context of the postal sector. Specifically, it investigates a case of immergence-driven change in the context of a postal company's practice revolving around mail sorting. Its primary focus falls on the consequence (in terms of sorting quality) of the implementation of a novel routine for manual-mail sorting while, at the same time, thematizing how immergence interplays with individual information-processing and factors pertaining to the cognitive ecology. Closed-ended surveys were distributed to respondents representing both mail sorters and mail carriers. On the basis of the surveys, the study compared three types of errors (all in the form of the mail sorters' incorrect placing of mail to the mail carriers), across two overall types of routes each with, respectively, old and new sorting routines. Subsequently, the data sets were compared both with respect to distribution and by using standard tests of correlation. Our study shows that the new, immergence-driven sorting routine leads to a significantly higher number of sorting errors. We trace this to how, in the implementing the new routine, the postal company failed to incentivize sorters to double check that the mail was correctly sorted.