
Stephen CummingsVictoria University of Wellington · School of Management
Stephen Cummings
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109
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (109)
Amidst growing demands for more democratic forms of organizing, we argue that better understanding the origins of transformational leadership theory offers a way forward. Transformational leadership theory, originally developed by American political scientist James MacGregor Burns in the late 1970s, is the best-known and most influential leadership...
Irving Janis’s concept of ‘groupthink’, the idea that a collective desire for consensus overrides the realistic appraisals of alternatives and leads to poor group decision making, is a staple of social science textbooks. Despite gaining little support in empirical studies, Janis’s eight symptoms of groupthink remains a popular framework. What has b...
Our counter-history has questioned assumed continuities and discontinuities that inform our historical understanding of Management and Sustainable Management: Taylor was not a miraculous break from the past, the adoption of his ideas was part of a broader age of conservation; Management did not evolve to support an industrial world view, but in opp...
In 2021, the Covid pandemic dominated the news cycle. But the global issue that was gaining traction before Covid struck, sustainability, is not going away. As Covid fades and we seek to redouble our efforts to promote Sustainable Management, one unrecognized obstacle we face in Management Studies is the belief that the focus on sustainability is a...
Management’s conventional historical narrative is that ‘the father’ of Management is F.W. Taylor. While efficiency has been a universal concern of all great civilizations, Taylor was the first to preach the ‘gospel of efficiency’ and develop theories that enabled managers to achieve it. This origin story reinforces the belief that the good that def...
A key element of Foucault’s counter-histories is their explicit stance against conventional histories as a means for creating space for thinking otherwise about the past, and subsequently thinking differently in the present and for the future. This chapter outlines the conventional understanding of Sustainable Management’s development as it is repr...
We might think sustainable management is a new idea, created in the 1960s by enlightened modern scientists. We might think that it puts us on a new path, beyond what management was originally about. But this is not true. Sustainable management is as old as civilization and was a foundation stone of management science as it was formed in the first d...
The past decade has seen a marked rise in research on entrepreneurial accelerators. Efforts to develop a conceptual definition of the accelerator initially lagged behind this surge, but have recently begun to emerge in published articles. We explore this conceptual evolution as a case study of how scholars respond to new entrepreneurial phenomena....
Management Learning marks its 50th anniversary in 2020. The journal has a long history of publishing critical, reflexive scholarship on organizational learning and knowledge. This Special Issue is a forum to celebrate and build on this history through critical and reflective engagement with the past, present and future of management learning, knowl...
Many claims have been made about the learning benefits of communicating strategies in multi-media picture plus text formats, rather than mono-media text-only formats. However, there is little theorization and empirical evidence to support these claims. Drawing upon Cognitive Load Theory to develop learning-related hypotheses, this manuscript report...
The paper is available from the journal website https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amle.2017.0351.
A free access video summary is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dFboMWMafo.
Abraham Maslow’s theory of motivation, the idea that human needs exist in a hierarchy that people strive progressively to satisfy, is regarded as a fundamental approac...
Strategy research has for many decades focused on how firms organize resources as environments change. Dynamic capabilities (DCs) research has recently investigated how DCs help organize or structure resources optimally given changes in the environment in which they operate. This research has explored ways of categorizing DCs in generic ways after...
When Jørgen Knudstorp took over as CEO of the LEGO group in 2004, the toy company was in a state of decline.1 A lack of innovation and loss of market position led to the group posting their first loss in 1998. LEGO had lost sight of the needs of their customers. “We were not making toys that were sufficiently interesting to children. We failed to i...
A questioning of the neoliberal consensus in the global economic order is creating turbulence in Western democracies. Long regarded as the only viable capitalist model, neoliberalism is now subjected to increasing scrutiny. Management education that has been aligned to a neoliberal worldview must now respond to this shifting landscape in order to r...
Existing narratives about how we should organize are built upon, and reinforce, a concept of 'good management' derived from what is assumed to be a fundamental need to increase efficiency. But this assumption is based on a presentist, monocultural, and generally limited view of management's past. A New History of Management disputes these foundatio...
Many claims have been made about the learning benefits of communicating strategies in multimedia picture-plus-text formats, rather than monomedia text-only formats. However, there is little theorization and empirical evidence to support these claims. Drawing upon cognitive load theory to develop learning-related hypotheses, this manuscript reports...
This animated video introduction can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vq3mSQnzfw
Strategy texts are often rather sterile products that view the reader as a consumer: “read this then replicate it.” We think that business today is too complex, too varied, and too interesting for this approach to work anymore. We wrote The Strategy Pathfinder to put strategy making into the hands of the reader, to make you a “producer” of strategi...
Although supportive of calls for business schools to learn the lessons of history to address contemporary challenges about their legitimacy and impact, we argue that our ability to learn is limited by the histories we have created. Through contrasting the contested development of the case method of teaching at Harvard Business School and the conven...
Calls for greater diversity in management research, education, and practice have increased in recent years, driven by a sense of fairness and ethical responsibility, but also because research shows that greater diversity of inputs into management processes can lead to greater innovation. But how can greater diversity of thought be encouraged when e...
YOUR STRATEGY HAS SEVEN SECONDS TO CAPTIVATE ITS AUDIENCE... So how are you going to present it? A big wordy document? A lengthy address? Slides full of bullet points? The best way to engage and involve people is through pictures. Strategy Builder shows you how to creatively combine the best strategy frameworks to orient and animate strategy discus...
Kurt Lewin’s ‘changing as three steps’ (unfreezing → changing → refreezing) is regarded by many as the classic or fundamental approach to managing change. Lewin has been criticized by scholars for over-simplifying the change process and has been defended by others against such charges. However, what has remained unquestioned is the model’s foundati...
Kurt Lewin's 'changing as three steps' (unfreezing changing refreezing) is regarded by many as the classic or fundamental approach to managing change. Lewin has been criticized by scholars for oversimplifying the change process and has been defended by others against such charges. However, what has remained unquestioned is the model's foundatio...
In this introductory chapter the rationale for and philosophy behind Images of Strategy are outlined. We argue that the conventional twentieth-century history of management and strategy leads us to unquestioningly assume that organizations are, for all people at all times, triangular hierarchies; that strategy is enacted by 'the men at the top', an...
Support for the case method reflects a conviction that business education should be a training in solving business problems. However, opponents see it as contributing to a narrow, instrumental, amoral perspective on business. We revisit the emergence of the method at Harvard to think beyond this polarization for the future.
This article proposes an alternative to a managerial "best practice" approach to creativity based on the notion of creativity as a singular concept. Our alternative draws on three fundamental ideas that are emerging in different pockets of the creativity literature in a way that
can be readily conceptualized and applied in practice. The first idea...
Calls for greater diversity in management research, education, and practice have increased in recent years, driven by a sense of fairness and ethical responsibility, but also because research shows that greater diversity of inputs into management processes can lead to greater innovation. But how can greater diversity of thought be encouraged when e...
Organisational theorists have become increasingly interested in the creative industries, where practices that are commonplace are of particular interest to organisations in other sectors as they look for new ways to enhance performance. Focusing on the music industry, this book sets up a unique dialogue between leading organisational theorists and...
This article charts the development of the strategy concept and places the key developments in the evolution of thinking about strategic management in historical context.
So how are you going to present your strategy? A big wordy document? A lengthy address? Slides full of bullet points?
Based on empirical research the best way to engage people is through pictures. Strategy Builder shows you how to creatively combine the best strategy frameworks to orient and animate strategy discussion and development in your team....
Management’s origins are conventionally traced to Frederick Winslow Taylor, a man whose single-minded obsession with efficiency led to the original management theory of note: Scientific Management, but whose mechanistic thinking has now been superseded by a greater concern for people and the environment. We rethink this conventional historical view...
This Handbook draws on current research and case studies to consider how managers can become more creative across four aspects of their business: innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership and organisation - and does so in an accessible, engaging and user-friendly format.
Kurt Lewin's 'changing as three steps' (unfreezing changing refreezing) is regarded by many as the classic or fundamental approach to managing change. Lewin has been criticized by scholars for oversimplifying the change process and has been defended by others against such charges. However, what has remained unquestioned is the model's foundatio...
Purpose
– While the benefits of open innovation (OI) and crowdsourcing (CS) for solutions to R&D problems have been widely promoted in the last ten years, their appropriateness for organisations specialising in providing R&D services has not been explicitly considered. This paper aims to examine an R&D organisation's response to increased adoption...
Open innovation and crowdsourcing are usually focused on using others external to the or- ganization to solve your problems. How then do R&D organizations, who traditionally solve the problems of others, harness the benefits of open innovation and crowdsourcing yet maintain their mission and capabilities? "Problemsourcing" may provide the answer. I...
Representations of strategy tend to either be so generalized as to have little real meaning for employees, or go into such detail that people struggle to understand what is really required. The problem is this: a strategy not understood by those charged with implementing it is as bad as, or even worse than, not having a strategy at all. In 1983, a...
Recently, open office design has witnessed a shift from formalised design models toward the promotion of fun, spontaneity and creativity through design. Using qualitative data from two case studies, we investigate how this 'new spirit' of open and pro-creative office design may afford a broader range of behaviours than originally intended. We argue...
When history is covered in business schools, its simplistic and evolutionary treatment goes largely unquestioned by instructors and students. To demonstrate, we show the representation of Max Weber in management texts to be dubious, a reflection of a peculiar perspective which is driven by a desire to justify the latest management ideas. However, b...
At forty years old, Long Range Planning is the world's longest running academic journal devoted to strategic management. It is also unique among strategy journals in its editorial policy of spanning practical and academic concerns. As such, its archive provides an excellent guide to the consistent themes, fads and trends in the field's development....
History has never figured prominently in conventional management textbooks, and when it is covered its superficial treatment largely goes unquestioned by instructors and students. To illustrate, this paper analyses the representation of Max Weber in management texts. Using a set of Foucauldian methods we find their representation of Weber over the...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the limitations of what the field of strategic management sees as its military foundations.
Design/methodology/approach
Categorizes and synthesizes the critical historical approach of Michel Foucault and uses this to interrogate assumptions made about military approaches to strategy in the strate...
Despite revolutionary claims about the changing shape of organizations and strategy, the predispositions of executives are often framed and limited by the structures assumed by strategy's foundational works of the 1960s. These works emphasize top- down planning, generic linear processes, simple either/or choices, and singular outcomes. We argue tha...
The emergence of the idea that organizations are like organisms is generally seen as having saved organization studies (OS) from its mechanistic precepts. We argue that it has not. Rather, the mechanistic underpinnings of organization merely found a new medium of expression in the organism metaphor. This is largely due to the particular legacy that...
The past decade has witnessed a number of interesting shifts in the way people think about organizations. One of the most curious is the way in which much of the 'new thinking' is antithetical to mechanistic and rationalistic theories that have historically dominated organization and management studies. This paper investigates this shift, and argue...
Suggests that a systems approach to the management of organization change is something most business schools assume to be a recent development. Presents a 2,500-year-old example of an extremely successful systemic transformation, one which provides a useful stimulus to aid thinking in this field today. Of particular interest is the ancients’ apprec...
Critical Systems Thinking (CST) has traditionally sought its philosophical underpinning in the work of German theorist Jurgen Habermas. We suggest that CST need not necessarily be informed by Habermas, and present the thought of Michel Foucault as one possible alternative. This paper traces the historical development of the relative positions of Ha...
Post-modernism, a term increasingly utilized in organization theory, has recently been divided into two `types'—epistemological postmodernism and the periodization post-modernism (distinguished by its hyphen). Both modes have, in different ways, been marginalized. While the case against epistemological postmodernism is not dwelt on, the claim that...