Frithjof Eberhard Wegener

Warwick Business School

This article examines Schön's positioning of reflective practice in relation to design. Focus is directed in particular to his presentation of the acting-thinking relationship. Questioning this we turn to the work of the philosopher John Dewey, who acted as one of Schön's key inspirational sources. Here, we consider Dewey's presentation of thought-...

Organizational actors spend a tremendous amount of time and energy trying to intentionally change their routines. We conceptualize these intentional changes as routine design—intentional efforts to change one or more aspects of a routine to create a preferred situation. We review existing routines research on intentional change by showing how diffe...

In this paper, I problematize two key assumptions underlying work on organization design in organization and management theory by drawing on pragmatist philosophy (e.g. Lorino, 2018; Simpson, 2009) to develop a pragmatist perspective on organizational designing.

Scholars seeking research impact have considered impact as entitative, one that is the outcome of a linear and predictable research journey. By not paying enough attention to impact as a process, we lose sight of the fuller picture of impact as a continuous process of becoming, which has consequences for collaborative research. Therefore, we propos...

Addressing grand challenges requires new approaches to innovation (Ferarro, Etzion & Gehman, 2016), such as responsible innovation. Systemic design practices (Jones, 2014, 2017; Van der Bijl-Brouwer & Malcolm, 2020) are suggested as being particularly adept to deal with the complex challenges of innovation processes (Bowen, Durrant, Nissen, Bowers,...

Organization design is at the core of organization studies. In this paper, we explore organizational design by examining the performativity of design theories for organizing. We build on insights from performativity to suggest that a theory of design often impels organizational actors to engage in particular types of actions that influence how orga...

In this chapter, we explore a methodology for ‘process as withness’ (Fachin and Langley 2018). The goal is to study the experience of ‘living forward’ by creating ‘narratives of prospect’ (Weick 1999). The chapter builds on the work of Shotter (2006; 2009) on a withness approach, which helps in understanding the struggles of living forward of pract...

Since its introduction, Research through Design (RtD) has taken on a wide variety of forms. Currently, there is a lack of clarity about what connects and separates different RtD approaches. Several attempts have been made to clarify these matters, often in the form of a top-down categorization. Here we start on a different path, one that is open fo...

Design processes are at the heart of design research. Current design research at the micro-and macro-level has led to profound insights about designing. However, missing are design process research approaches that are able to theorize between (meso-level) and beyond levels of analysis. This fragmentation of process research and theory across levels...

Since its introduction, Research through Design (RtD) has taken on a wide variety of forms. Currently, there is a lack of clarity about what connects and separates different RtD approaches. Several attempts have been made to clarify these matters, often in the form of a top-down categorization. Here we start on a different path, one that is open fo...

Taking a processual perspective on organizing, raises the awareness that organizing as performance occurs throughout everyday life (Helin et al. 2014), but often in such an ephemeral way that an entitive “organization” does not stabilize, but nonetheless a process of organizing has taken place. The everyday occurrence of ephemeral organizing become...

In this article, we highlight that going from service design to organisational designing means switching from complicated to complex problems. We show how designers can reframe complicated problems to uncover the deeper, complex issues that caused the problems. Solving complex problems, however, requires a different approach.

In Hong Kong of the year 2017, a new academic community convened to attend to pressing issues regarding design as source of innovation. The inaugural Academy for Design Innovation Management Conference (nee Design Management Academy) attended to a sense of urgency regarding the adoption of design capabilities within organisations as source of innov...

This paper explores the use of visual storytelling, for instance sketching, in organisational strategy practices. It contributes to an understanding of how design education has to change in order to broaden the skillset of design students, for them to be able to redesign organisations.

In this paper on designing organizational processes, we combine insight on reflection-inaction with the role of reflection and experimenting from the organizational routine dynamics literature. Illustrated through a case at a strategy consultancy, we show how a prototyped workshop can elicit reflection-inaction when designing organizational process...

We investigated how design concepts from design student teams entered a corporate setting and how these design concepts evolved in the process of adoption by the company. Our study is based on 20 longitudinal embedded case studies at a large food multinational company of which we analyzed 4 more thoroughly. We highlight the role of social interacti...