Renata Kaminska

• Professor (Full) at SKEMA Business School

Abstract Despite substantial advancements in ensuring safety, high-risk and highly regulated organizations have not been immune to major life-threatening accidents. Growing evidence indicates that these accidents are not solely attributable to the limitations of technical barriers, but rather to the complex interactions among technical, human, and...

Les « systèmes presque totalement sûrs » se veulent reposer sur une sûreté réglée visant à prévoir tout ce qui est possible, et une sûreté gérée prévue pour faire face à l’imprévu. Mais l’accumulation des règles ou leur mauvaise application peut fragiliser l’édifice. Identifier les limites de l’action managériale est nécessaire pour accroître la fi...

Our analysis of the 25 CSR and non-CSR attributes evidenced that, compared to global data, students located in France appear to be less CSR-oriented when asked to choose among prospective employers. It appears that the dimension of socio-ecological responsibility of prospective employers is the least important for these students. Also, female stude...

Theories of technological change fail to account for innovation stemming from affordances of previously developed artefacts. The literature has highlighted that novelty can originate from market needs, from inferences made from scientific theories or be the object of deliberate technology projects in technology-push models. More recently, scholars...

In knowledge intensive organizations—such as Information Technology (IT) companies or consultancy firms—knowledge sharing processes and collaboration represent key success factors for competing in a dynamic business environment. In small firms knowledge sharing and collaboration are facilitated by the physical proximity of the R&D or business devel...

Purpose To gain a better understanding of the challenges to the emergence of a learning organization (LO) posed by a context of generational diversity and an enterprise social networking system (ESNS). Design/methodology/approach This study employs a qualitative methodology based on an analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews in a high-tech org...

Over the past decade, theoretical and empirical research on the various aspects of human resources (HR) within the healthcare (HC) sector has grown extensively due to its′ strategic importance in the sector. There is a visible tendency among researchers to pursue an effective human resource management (HRM) strategies, methods, and tools. Countries...

Schumpeter (1942) wrote about the destruction that follows the diffusion of radical innovation. However, the opposite phenomenon - the creative power of destruction - seems to have been less studied. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of the Subsea Technology Cluster, we show how the collapse of the century-old sector of shipbuilding and heavy en...

Creativity is one of the most important and prevalent of human activities (Simonton, 2000) but paradoxically it is also one which is still relatively little understood. The capacity to generate new ideas and think creatively is increasingly recognized as critical for the long-term survival of individuals, teams and organizations. Focused on the dif...

The capacity to innovate impacts organizational performance and is crucial for competitive advantage. However, as structural inertia sets in, large organizations tend to lose their ability to sustain continuous knowledge creation dynamics. Moreover, created knowledge is not always efficiently integrated into new marketable product offerings. As a c...

Exaptation, the cooption of existing technologies for emergent functions is an important mechanism for innovation. Exaptation may enable an existing technology to (a) construct a new technological niche, (b) enter into a preexisting niche, or (c) transform an internal component of an existing product by increasing its efficiency or extending its ra...

This paper focuses on the relationship between exaptation and modular systems. Drawing from philosophy of design, evolutionary biology and technology studies we develop a description of exaptation which takes into account the agency inherent in the technological sphere and the modularity of technological systems. It is a multilevel description of e...

In the face of a complex, hypercompetitive environment (D’Aveni 1994), it is particularly important to understand the factors allowing organizations to simultaneously innovate and generate profits (March 1991; Tushman & O'Reilly 1996; Bradach 1997; Sutcliffe et al. 2000; Tushman & Smith 2002; Warglien 2002). Much of the literature on organizational...

Ambidexterity refers to the capacity to manage multiple and contradictory organizational architectures in order to simultaneously exploit and explore. The problem is this: how best to manage opposing objectives of exploitation versus exploration? We can extend the theory bearing on ambidextrous organizations by focusing on the dynamics of organizat...

Drawing on a longitudinal case study of Alpha Chemicals, we use four complexity theory constructs – adaptive tension, enabling leadership, enhanced cooperation, and boundary spanning – to explain the continuous knowledge creation dynamics in Communities of practice (CoPs). Our findings show that the virtual cycle of knowledge creation results from...

Summary This study presents a meta-synthesis (1904-2010) of seminal voices on the 'relevance gap', the abyss between management science and management practice, and on remedies proposed. We then discuss dominant paradigms about truth and meaning and demonstrate how they can lead to irrelevance. We discuss relevance and its implications. We revisit...

Purpose To provide managers, researchers, and consultants with practical insights on using Communities of Practice to support innovation in organizations. Design/methodology/approach The research design is based on a four‐year longitudinal case study of five Communities of Practice (CoPs) within a Specialty Chemicals division of a multinational co...

Purpose Management practice is progressing at unprecedented pace and often academia is lagging behind, if not totally irrelevant, both in management research and in education. This paper strives to show how principles of pragmatism and action research are likely to increase the relevance of management research and education. Design/methodology/app...

Purpose This paper illustrates, on the basis of a case study of a multinational corporation, the positive impact of intra‐organizational networking on the capacity to sustain competitive advantage in a highly volatile environment. It aims to provide researchers, consultants and managers with insights on how to design an organization leveraging inte...

Many theoreticians search for balance or optimal mix so as to cope with the many 'either-or' dilemmas in organizations. This paper offers some early evidence that a more useful response may lie in oscillation between the opposing poles of dilemmas and that these oscillatory patterns are more effi-caciously adaptive if they are irregular. It also ar...

Research on multinational corporations (MNCs) shows that they have tried various structural solutions to solve the dilemma of trying to “balance” global control and efficiency with local country-specific sensitivity, autonomy, and innovation, with the Transnational form preferred. Failings of the strategy-structure sequence lend credence to the eme...

We wish to thank Wladimir Sachs and many conference participants for many helpful comments. All remaining errors are our responsibility.

This paper takes up the challenge of analysing the process of strategy formation of Polish ex-socialist firms in the context of the emerging market economy. The study of strategy formation of three industrial firms during the first decade of the economic transition (1989-1999) has highlighted interactions between the firms' strategic development an...

Management, an undergraduate business program jointly operated by Reims Management School and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. Previously he was on the Faculty of Wharton School and of Rotterdam School of Management, as well as high-tech entrepreneur, manager and management consultant to companies and other organizations in the United States...

Organization design allows for an ad hoc pragmatic integration of disparate theories of organization science and can be made more scientific by rendering the process more controlled. Science plays an important role in the design process, providing assumptions about the environment of artifacts being designed, allowing to evaluate the analytical and...

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, 2001.