No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Open Strategy: Dimensions, Dilemmas, Dynamics
Abstract
Responding to increasing practitioner and academic interest in Open Strategy, this article builds on recent theoretical and empirical studies in order to advance research in the following ways. We begin by developing a definition of Open Strategy that emphasizes variation along the two dimensions of transparency and inclusion, as well as the dilemmas and dynamics inherent in its practices. We identify five dilemmas in particular: those of process, commitment, disclosure, empowerment and escalation. We continue by exploring key dynamics in Open Strategy, including both movements along the dimensions of transparency and inclusion, and movements between the two dimensions. Respecting the acute dilemmas of Open Strategy, we allow in each case for movement away from greater openness. The article concludes by proposing an agenda for future research on Open Strategy.
... Es wird zu wenig Offenheit zugelassen, der Blick von außen fehlt oft gänzlich oder ist begrenzt auf einzelne Aspekte der Strategieentwicklung (Stadler et al. 2021). Open Strategy ist ein neuer Ansatz, der durch Einbindung interner und externer Akteure (Branchenexperten, Trendforscher, Querdenker, Start-ups, Wissenschaftler usw.) mehr Offenheit in die Strategiearbeit einbringt und diese durch Impulse von außen bereichern soll (Hautz et al. 2017;Whittington et al. 2011). Umfassendere Wissenszugänge, neue Perspektiven und vor allem erhöhte Geschwindigkeit sind das Ziel . ...
... Inklusion, einerseits, bezieht sich auf die Konsultation eines breiteren Spektrums sowie einer größeren Vielfalt von an der Strategieentwicklung beteiligten Personen (Baptista et al. 2017;Whittington et al. 2011). Transparenz, andererseits, wird mit einer Offenlegung strategischer Informationen (Whittington et al. 2011;Yakis-Douglas et al. 2017), dem Teilen von Ideen und Expertise (Hautz et al. 2017) sowie dem Zugang zu sensiblen Informationen (Dobusch et al. 2019) seitens interner und/oder externer Interessengruppen in Verbindung gebracht. Für die Öffnung der Strategiearbeit steht Unternehmen ein ganzes Repertoire an Werkzeugen bereit, von denen einige in diesem Artikel näher erläutert werden. ...
... Folgt man der Literatur zu Open Strategy (Hautz et al. 2017;Stadler et al. 2021), so zeichnen sich fünf Faktoren ab, die für eine erfolgreiche Öffnung ausschlaggebend sind: ...
Zusammenfassung
Dieser Artikel untersucht, wie Unternehmen Open Strategy als transparenten und inklusiven Ansatz der Strategiearbeit nutzen können, um disruptiven Gefahren erfolgreich zu begegnen. Es werden verschiedene offene Strategieformate vorgestellt, die es Unternehmen ermöglichen, neue disruptive Geschäftslogiken zu entwickeln und zu implementieren. Anhand von Praxisbeispielen werden die Chancen und Herausforderungen für Unternehmen bei der Öffnung ihrer Strategieprozesse diskutiert und fünf Erfolgsfaktoren einer offenen Strategie identifiziert. Der Artikel schließt mit der Erkenntnis, dass Open Strategy ein effektives Instrument sein kann, um potenziell disruptive Geschäftslogiken zu realisieren.
... This stream of research has shown how the very creation of strategic issues is shaped by a diverse set of actors (e.g., Floyd & Wooldridge, 2000;Rouleau, 2005), potentially as an autonomous activity (Burgelman, 1983a, b) and oftentimes involving skilled political bargaining amongst the individuals involved (Dutton et al., 2001). These findings and insights resonate with the current trend of widening participation in strategy-making, giving rise to what has since come to be called 'Open Strategy' (Hautz et al., 2017;Whittington et al., 2011). Open forms of strategizing aim by definition to be inclusive and often involve catering to actors across the organization with an intrinsic motivation to participate (Dobusch et al., 2019). ...
... In the case of Open Strategy, Brielmaier and Friesl (2021) point to structural factors such as an organization's prevailing 'rules of the game' in order to explain when actors may be caught between their functional roles and participation in strategy work. Similarly, the growing body of work on Open Strategy emphasizes that the creation of inclusive and supportive contexts entices actors throughout the organization to participate (Hautz et al., 2017). Yet, at the same time, and despite such proclamations, we do not have a detailed understanding of how such contexts affect individual choices of participation in strategy work (Dobusch et al., 2019) This brief overview of extant strategy practice and process research shows that although it is a fundamental aspect of a number of classic strategic phenomena, self-selection in strategy work remains poorly understood. ...
... Such contexts require firms to frame issues such that they can mobilize a stable group of actors over an extended period to enact a particular strategic intent (Gilbert, 2006). Accomplishing such mobilization via selfselection promises various benefits such as higher levels of intrinsic motivation and commitment (Hautz et al., 2017) or higher organizational identification (Pandza, 2011) among a group of like-minded individual actors. ...
An increasing body of work investigates the participation of a diverse set of actors in strategy making. We argue that extant research tends to gloss over a fundamental condition underpinning such participation: whilst participation may reflect a hierarchical mandate, insofar as it relates to the actual involvement of employees, it is the result of a process of self-selection. From this perspective, forms of participative strategizing are neither fully the outcome of deliberate top-down choice, nor do they form a random pattern that is subject to the whims of individual employees. Such forms of strategizing are rather, as we argue in this paper, based on an endogenous logic of whether and how an individual self-selects, and in turn involves, her/himself into the process, or not. To conceptualize the broader phenomenon of strategy participation, we draw on practice theory to conceptualize how individuals knowingly choose to involve themselves in strategizing events and we develop in turn a process model of self-selection as an ongoing social accomplishment. This model elaborates different patterns of participation in strategy making (stabilizing and shifting trajectories) with variable emergent outcomes. We end the paper by discussing the implications of our theorizing for ongoing research on open and participatory strategizing, and for the body of work on strategy as practice.
... Inclusion refers to the strategy-making process being revealed to internal and external stakeholders to use the feedback they provide [Whittington et al., 2011;Hautz et al., 2017]. The main benefit of this approach is access to a broader range of knowledge sources [von Krogh and Geilinger, 2019]. ...
... It can relate both to the formulation process and to the outcome of the process, that is, to the strategy itself [Whittington et al., 2011]. As Hautz et al. [2017] pointed out, transparency comes in many forms, and it should be perceived as a continuum approach whereby managers can choose the desired degree. Implementing a more comprehensive range of transparency poses specific challenges, although the literature on this topic is still scarce. ...
... In the second group, we identified the factors more related to employees' reactions, like the fear of employees' questioning the strategy content, fear of their response to a disclosure of strategic failures, and inadequate scope or timing of information disclosure. Therefore, we have deepened the initial observations provided by Baptista et al. [2017], and Hautz et al. [2017], who highlighted the gradations in transparency in terms of the extent of access and the scope of topics permitted. ...
Purpose
Although the open strategizing (OS) approach can bring a wide range of benefits, there are also numerous risks identified. These risks are core sources of organizational dilemmas and challenges that appear in the decision-making process in two dimensions of OS – inclusion and transparency, both of which we further explore.
Design/methodology/approach
Following the suggestions of some scholars, we have employed the specific context of research and investigated companies from creative industries in Poland. We applied purposeful sampling with maximum sample variation to collect relevant and rich data and identify shared patterns. We conducted in-depth interviews with the owners or CEOs of the chosen creative firms.
Findings
We have recognized some recurring fears and anxieties accompanying the OS concept in general and different categories of challenges in particular. This paper suggests that a specific mindset reflected in a particular organizational climate (open climate) might undermine a company’s efforts in considering and adopting such a strategy.
Originality
By offering an initial conceptualization of an open climate as a potential further research avenue, this study contributes to the OS stream of research.
... The OS concept starts from the premise that an organization's strategic processes should involve internal and external stakeholders (Chesbrough and Appleyard 2007). This opening of the strategic processes to a broader range of stakeholders occurs through two fundamental dimensions of the OS concept-inclusiveness and transparency (Baptista et al. 2017;Hautz et al. 2017;Heracleous 2019). Inclusiveness can generally be perceived as the number and type of stakeholders involved in a company's strategic practices. ...
... However, openness should go beyond the goals as highlighted by Yakis-Douglas et al. (2017), who argued that it requires transparency and strategic Decision information sharing. It is also described by Hautz et al. (2017), who point out that either the strategy formation or the content of the strategy are the core issues that should be revealed to make them deciphered by internal and external stakeholders. Such perspective referring to the visibility of information about an organization's strategy and possibly during its formulation process is also argued by Pittz and Adler (2016). ...
... In addition, it is also essential to provide employees with regular information about the state of strategy implementation. The OSS aligns with the previous works concerning the content of information shared (Berggren and Bernshteyn 2007;Hautz et al. 2017;Yakis-Douglas et al. 2017). ...
Recent trends in strategic management and the strategy-as-practice stream of research have led to a proliferation of studies on open strategy. However, there is a general lack of research focused on valid and reliable measures of open strategy. In this paper, we developed and validated the open strategy scale to measure open strategy constructs derived from two dimensions—transparency and inclusion. We used the mixed methods composed in the multi-phase model of scale development. As a result, we have proposed a multi-item scale to measure the strategy openness. Our results demonstrate the validity and reliability of the scale proposed. The main implication of this research is that the scale may serve as both—an integrated tool for assessment of the overall level of open strategy development and an instrument for more detailed analysis of constructs to reveal the room for improvement or investigate the effect brought by managerial decisions.
... Our insights contribute to the understanding of participative strategy making particularly in the context of complex environmental challenges, adding to the reasons why intended major transformation is here often not achieved (Furumo et al., 2020;Moog et al., 2015;Ruysschaert & Salles, 2014). While prior research has highlighted certain tensions inherent in participative strategy development (Hautz et al., 2017;Heracleous et al., 2018;Luedicke et al., 2017;Van Gestel & Grotenbreg, 2021), it has to our knowledge not explored the tensions created by the ambiguous framing of the change and consequences for stakeholders' ability and willingness to change their frames and practices. Moreover, by highlighting the role of interactive spaces, we extend prior insights into methods for mitigating tensions in participative strategy development (Hautz et al., 2017;Luedicke et al., 2017). ...
... While prior research has highlighted certain tensions inherent in participative strategy development (Hautz et al., 2017;Heracleous et al., 2018;Luedicke et al., 2017;Van Gestel & Grotenbreg, 2021), it has to our knowledge not explored the tensions created by the ambiguous framing of the change and consequences for stakeholders' ability and willingness to change their frames and practices. Moreover, by highlighting the role of interactive spaces, we extend prior insights into methods for mitigating tensions in participative strategy development (Hautz et al., 2017;Luedicke et al., 2017). We now elaborate on the background of our study and our research methods. ...
... Participative strategy development has been at the center of research on collaborative governance, co-production, and co-creation in the public sector, as well as open strategy in organizations (Hautz et al., 2017;Whittington et al., 2011). We define participative strategy development broadly as strategy making that integrates contributions by actor groups (such as stakeholders) who are not the initiators of the strategy (change agents). ...
Participative strategy development serves to integrate the interests and perspectives of multiple stakeholders involved in today's complex environmental challenges, aiming at a better‐informed strategy for tackling these challenges, increased stakeholder ownership, and more democratic decision making. Prior research has observed inherent tensions between the need for participative strategy to be open to stakeholders' input and the need for closure and guidance. We extend this reasoning using a framing perspective. Our evidence from the development of the England Peat Action Plan suggests that tensions can emerge between the necessary ambiguous initial framing of intended change and the persistence of stakeholders' different framings of this change as well as perceptions of lacking knowledge, guidance, and control. We argue that strategy openness can thereby impede stakeholders' willingness and ability to change and counteract the strategy's aim for major transformation. Interactive spaces help mitigate the tensions and facilitate stakeholders' willingness and ability for change.
Related Articles
Brant, Hanna K., Nathan Myers, and Katherine L. Runge. 2017. “Promotion, Protection, and Entrepreneurship: Stakeholder Participation and Policy Change in the 21st Century Cures Initiative.” Politics & Policy 45(3): 372–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12201 .
Bryson, John R., Michael Taylor, and Peter W. Daniels. 2008. “Commercializing ‘Creative’ Expertise: Business and Professional Services and Regional Economic Development in the West Midlands, United Kingdom.” Politics & Policy 36(2): 306–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2008.00107.x .
Falkenström, Erica, and Stefan Svallfors. 2022. “The Knowledge–Management Complex: From Quality Registries to National Knowledge‐Driven Management in Swedish Health Care Governance.” Politics & Policy 50(5): 1053–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12497 .
... Dessa maneira, o comprometimento permite O debate sobre os elementos que envolvem o conceito de estratégia aberta e suas implicações vem ganhando posição destacada nos últimos anos, tanto no âmbito acadêmico, quanto nas organizações (Cai & Canales, 2021). Esse conceito envolve, em sua essência, as práticas de inclusão das pessoas e transparência da informação nos processos de formulação e implementação estratégica (Hautz, Seidl & Whittington, 2017;Whittington, Cailluet & Yakis-Douglas, 2011). A transparência pode ser entendida como a promoção da acessibilidade, ...
... Contudo, os modos habituais de pensar e agir de atores organizacionais, bem como expectativas não atendidas, podem fazer com que estes criem sentidos compartilhados não esperados a respeito da estratégia aberta (Adobor, 2020). Dessa forma, os sujeitos podem, em suas interações diárias, criar entendimentos desfavoráveis a este movimento, como a associação a um instrumento de controle, ou mesmo a uma sobrecarga de trabalho, ou ainda à percepção de um tipo de envolvimento limitado, levando à frustração sobre a promessa de envolvimento (Hautz et al., 2017). Existem, então, dilemas associados aos sentidos criados pelas pessoas ao longo desse processo, os quais podem minar o comprometimento com a estratégia. ...
... Contudo, parece haver um dilema neste movimento de abrir a estratégia para a inclusão de uma quantidade maior de atores, acarretando, em certos casos, em queda no comprometimento (Hautz et al., 2017). Mesmo quando a alta administração, de maneira bemintencionada, busca promover o empoderamento, as pessoas podem apresentar esquemas mentais divergentes (Floyd & Wooldridge, 1992) e interpretações antagônicas, acarretando queda no comprometimento associado a incertezas, disputas e resistência (Labianca, Gray, & Brass, 2000;Kaplan, 2008;Splitter, Jarzabkowski, & Seidl, 2021 (Eisenhardt, 1989), adequada para investigar um fenômeno atual dentro do seu contexto de realidade (Yin, 2010). ...
Objetivo do estudo: compreender como as dinâmicas de sensemaking e sensegiving influenciam o comprometimento das pessoas em um processo de abertura da estratégia.
Metodologia/abordagem: o estudo é de natureza qualitativa com abordagem descritiva. Realizamos um estudo de caso único em uma empresa de engenharia consultiva que, pela primeira vez em sua história, implantou um processo de gestão estratégica pautado por maior inclusão e transparência. Foram utilizados três instrumentos de coleta de dados: entrevista semiestruturada, observação participante e análise de documentação. Os dados foram analisados por meio da técnica de análise de conteúdo.
Principais resultados: os resultados sugerem que gerentes e funcionários criam sentidos ambíguos de inclusão e exclusão ao longo do processo, com efeitos díspares sobre o comprometimento. Somente a partir do maior envolvimento de pessoas situadas em diferentes níveis hierárquicos, tais dinâmicas desencadeiam um padrão positivo de comprometimento e de interpretações compartilhadas
... Recently, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses to transform their operations and contributed to an increased use of digital ICT for all sorts of business processes (Vargo et al., 2021). Scholars have argued that new digital technologies blur temporal and spatial boundaries and enable firms to open up processes for a wide range of internal and external stakeholders (Birkinshaw, 2017) across hierarchical levels (Hautz et al., 2017) and geographical areas (Gawin and Marcinkowski, 2019). One subset of digital ICT is digital communication technologies that enable users to interact, connect and organize with others (Kiely et al., 2021). ...
... Therefore, unlike media synchronicity, which has more of a temporal component, interactivity is focused more on the extent of control that an individual can have on the content and communication conveyed through a particular medium. Media interactivity, then, becomes relevant for decision-making in IB settings, where information and knowledge may be distributed across different locations and levels and where the strategy process relies on input and insights from distributed actors rather than from a centrally controlled hub (Garrison et al., 2008;Hautz et al., 2017). ...
Purpose
Digital communication technologies have become ubiquitous for various firm processes related to international business (IB) and global strategy. However, IB and strategy scholars lack an encompassing and theory-based typology of these technologies that facilitates analysis and discussion of their uses and effects. Likewise, managers have a large choice of technologies at their disposal making it difficult to determine what technology to use in different IB areas. This paper aims to develop a typology of digital communication technologies based on the synchronicity and interactivity of these technologies and capture their fundamental social and temporal dimensions. This results in four ideal types: broadcasting, corresponding, aggregating and collaborating technologies.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a conceptual paper incorporating theoretical perspectives to theorize about four ideal types of digital communication technologies. A subsequent empirical test of this typology has been provided in the appendix.
Findings
The authors discuss how the typology might be applied in IB decisions and some of the contingencies that impact this choice. Building on that, the authors develop directions for future research to increase their understanding of the use of digital communication technologies to help improve IB functions. Overall, the authors suggest future research explores contingencies about where and when different types of digital communication technologies should be used. Finally, the authors provide implication of having a unified typology for both academics and managers.
Originality/value
The authors offer a robust framework for thinking about and capturing different types of digital communication technologies that can be applied by researchers and used by managers when making decisions related to IB. The authors also provide some initial testing of the typology with a three-country study design helping to determine its validity.
... Open Strategy (OS) research explores boundaries in strategy, Information Systems (IS), and the function of technology in strategy work. OS is established when organizations include internal and external stakeholders in strategizing, gaining access to new insights which inform strategic direction and company transformation (Whittington et al., 2011;Hautz et al., 2017;Mount et al., 2020). When studying OS, it is important to take into consideration the IT-enabled practices and therefore the digital work of top managers in OS (Mortona et al., 2020). ...
... About IS Tavakoli et al. (2017) contributed to the theoretical development of OS by explicating that IT is essential to complementing or replacing analog strategy work, and in enabling openness occurrence (Mortona et al.,2020). This highlights the powerful combination of OS and IT and its capacity to impact strategy development and organizational transformation (Hautz et al., 2017). ...
... Denna forskning har visat att dessa personer, trots sin position nära makten, ofta känner tvivel och maktlöshet. För individer utanför ledningsnivån kan strategiarbetet upplevas utmanande och inte som en självklar del av deras arbete och identitet men på det stora hela vet vi relativt lite om dessa individers vardag (Hautz et al., 2017). Strategens arbetsvardag har till och med beskrivits som en black box' som vi behöver veta mer om (Anderson, 2020). ...
... Strategiskt arbete ställs ofta som en motsats till operativt arbete, där strategiskt arbete oftast innehar en högre status (Andersson, 2021). Men samtidigt som operativ personal kan 'lockas' till att arbeta strategiskt har forskning visat att de ibland tvekar då de då förlorar sin tidigare expertroll och går in i en mer odefinierad roll som kräver att individen innehar en trygghet och säkerhet i sig själv (Hautz, 2017). ...
... Despite this impressive body of work and several recent review articles [4], [10]- [15], research on how firms exploit OI relationships remains at the developmental stage [16], [17]. Further, research recognizes the knowledge-intensive nature of IO processes and relations [18], which has strategic implications for the range of firm-level open strategies and operational deployments [19]. In particular, there is a need to understand the tradeoffs of particular OI projects. ...
... Our study offers a means to integrate the competitive dynamics and organizational structure literature to better predict OI adoption, governance, and subsequent performance [1], [19], [45]. In particular, competitive dynamics research has begun to acknowledge and appreciate the cooperation-competition continuum, as firms manage increasing stakeholder power in a globalized economy [47], [58], [61]. ...
This research examines the interactions between open innovation (OI) strategies and competitive behavior in global automotive assemblers and suppliers. We show that these firms behave differently when engaging external networks to limit downside risks when dealing with competitors (and rivals). Specifically, we find that firms cross external firm boundaries for incremental, but not radical technology projects using nominal external links. Our results are aligned with emerging innovation trends in the auto industry where the locus of innovation has evolved upstream in the digital age, from final assemblers to suppliers. This study provides support for a theory to explain inter-firm competitive dynamics within OI contexts. In particular, it provides an explanation for boundary selection criteria when engaged in OI projects. We conclude with implications for theory and practice and provide guidance for potential future research.
... Second, digital technologies provide ample opportunities to reinvent involvement CMIs. Many organizations have started to use social media technologies to open their change and strategy processes (Hautz et al., 2017). Change leaders can use social media to interact and consult with employees on change-related obstacles in real-time. ...
... In recent years, open innovation studies have been conducted on large firms (Mortara & Minshall, 2014;Rohrbeck et al., 2009), small firms (Brunswicker & Vanhaverbeke, 2015;Marullo et al., 2020) and their mutual collaborations (Richter et al., 2018;Weiblen & Chesbrough, 2015). The scope of open innovation research has furthermore been broadened to cover interrelated areas such as business models (Tucci et al., 2016;Van der Meer, 2007), strategy (Appleyard & Chesbrough, 2017;Hautz et al., 2017), human resources management (Hong et al., 2019;Wikhamn et al., 2022), digitalization (Del Vecchio et al., 2018;Urbinati et al., 2020), sustainability (Bogers et al., 2020;Kennedy et al., 2017), public policy (Bogers et al., 2018;De Marco et al., 2020) and innovation ecosystems (Chesbrough, Kim, & Agogino, 2014;Randhawa et al., 2021). ...
This paper sets out to analyse how game developers create entertaining digital games and, more precisely, what forms of innovation approaches they adopt and why. Based on an empirical study of Swedish game development studios, we conceptualize two different approaches to innovation: a more inward‐oriented and developer‐centric (i.e., closed) approach and a more outward‐oriented and user‐centric (i.e., open) approach. Given that the firms in this study are acting under similar contingencies while adopting very different innovation approaches, we introduce innovation logics as a theoretical concept to understand how founders and managers justify their choice of approach (i.e., open vs. closed). Inspired by the ‘orders of worth’ framework by Boltanski and Thévenot, we highlight two distinctive innovation logics—that is, a creative logic versus an iterative logic—that the interviewees draw on. This paper contributes to the open innovation literature by highlighting two forms of innovation approaches and explaining how and why they differ in terms of ‘openness’ in relation to the surrounding ecosystem.
... Non-executives and the role played by academic managers and professors as strategic agents are typically left out in both SAP research and conventional strategy research (Clegg et al., 2011, p. 133;Meyer et al., 2018). However, there is increasing recognition of the importance of involving other employees outside of managerial positions in strategy processes, in line with the emerging concept of 'open strategy' (Hautz et al., 2017;Seidl et al., 2021). This study contributes to the emerging discussion on the concept of 'open strategy' by focusing on faculty staff members in non-managerial positions and their role as strategic agents within an academic unit. ...
... The word strategy is derived from the Greek word Strategos, and Strategos means army. By tracing the concept of strategy in ancient Greece, it seems that success in planning (War) goals were due to this concept (Hautz et al., 2017). ...
In terms of the basic practical purpose, in terms of nature, survey research, and in terms of paradigm, combined-exploratory research, sampling in the qualitative part of the research was done in a purposeful way and in the quantitative part in a stratified random manner. In this regard, the project’s first step was to conduct library studies and collect information. In this regard, it was investigated with a review of the theoretical foundations and internal and external research related to the use of crowdsourcing in the development of open strategy. In this research, due to the lack of research based on the use of crowdsourcing in developing an open strategy and the need to know how to explain the phenomenon in a real context, it is inevitable to follow a qualitative paradigm. On the other hand, the need to purify the factors, explain the model, as well as examine the state of the model and its components and relationships descriptively requires the use of quantitative methods, so a mixed approach that includes qualitative and quantitative methods will be used. First is the organization’s semi-structured interview, which includes crowdsourcing in developing an open strategy and how to rank the factors. The research method was carried out purposefully in the qualitative part of the research and stratified randomly in the quantitative part. They are in the qualitative phase of interviews with managers and vice presidents of Cable manufacturing companies in the United States, interviews will continue until theoretical saturation is reached. The research tool in the qualitative part will be determined by using the exploratory method of using the components of crowdsourcing in developing an open strategy and the factors affecting it, the sampling method in the qualitative part is purposeful. The research tool in the qualitative part of the exploratory interview is semi-structured, and in the qualitative part, the analysis of the interviews was done using the foundational data analysis method. And finally, the final model has been presented and fitted.
... 23 This stream of work has done much to unpack and guide understanding about how managers demonstrate inclusion and transparency in strategy making. 24 Organizations' openness in their approach to strategy can have various manifestations and conditions for use. 25 A 2011 interview as part of the "Rethinking Leadership" series for Forbes highlighted that rising levels of participation in strategy making were becoming increasingly prominent and necessary due to notable driving forces. ...
Although agility is often associated with rapid speed and flexibility, having processes for “deep reflection” is also crucial. This includes the need for collective dialogs across and outside organizations to build greater awareness of, and attention to, strategic issues. How do managers involve a wider range of stakeholder voices in strategy as they pursue agility? This article identifies three practices that synergistically contribute to agility and conceptualizes them in a framework for managers called the “Strategy Making as Polyphony Wheel.” The work outlines several implications for managerial practice and research.
... This resonates with the literature on open strategy, where Hautz, Seidl, and Whittington (2017) identify commitment as one out of five dilemmas. They argue that opening up the process contributes to more organisational commitment. ...
Management innovations are an important source of competitive advantage, but we lack knowledge on the implementation process, not least in small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs). Recognising that psychological ownership (PO) represents a crucial aspect of the implementation process, we address micro-foundational characteristics of the implementation process. PO and critical incident theory (CIT) provide a lens enabling this micro analysis. The empirical setting is the implementation of Hoshin Kanri, a strategic management system in eight small companies. From the analysis of the eight cases, we operationalise four dimensions that characterise how PO evolves in the implementation process: types of PO incidents, frequency of PO incidents, incidents indicating an increase or decrease in PO, and incidents addressing individual or collective PO. Looking at how PO is developed both among CEOs and managers in SMEs, we use the four dimensions to characterise the evolvement of PO within the focal organisations. In doing so, our article elaborates on PO as a driver and, if insufficiently developed, an impediment to effectively implementing management innovations.
... Nevertheless, there are still ignored aspects to be elaborated, especially for blue and gray collar workers' role and importance in strategy making process. Although the recent literature leaves ample room for the role of employees from every organizational level (Hautz, Seidl, & Whittington, 2017;Tavakoli et al., 2017), it does not substantiate the roles that blue and gray collar employees play in different phases of strategy making process. The literature approaches the issue from a highly abstract and general perspective. ...
... In this way, the middle managers in our study are co-creators, not the passive implementers portrayed elsewhere. Thus, our empirical findings suggest that in addition to the transparency and inclusion benefits from widened participation (Dobusch, Dobusch, & Müller-Seitz, 2019;Hautz, Seidl, & Whittington, 2017), the unfolding of future-making cycles across organizational spaces fosters consistency between visions and actions. ...
This paper draws on a longitudinal, qualitative study to develop an empirically grounded model of strategic change as a future-making process. We provide an alternative to linear models of strategic change and illustrate how, through iterative future-making cycles, an abstract vision for the future transforms into action. Our study exposes how shifts in the locus of situated actions and movement of people and ideas between organizational spaces widens participation and transforms an imagined future into the everyday ways of working across an organization. We highlight the inclusionary affordances of bounded spaces as sites for interactions where movement of ideas and participants designing a desired future ‘give form’ and ‘make’ the future in the present.
... Here we consider the four new practices we observed, their implications, and future research to understand the dynamics of open organizing in contexts with VUCA attributes. Puranam et al. 2014;Hautz et al. 2017), and work design (e.g., Puranam et al. 2014). These practices focus on organizations in stable contexts-situations where the work can be predefined with modular tasks (Brusoni and Prencipe 2006). ...
Open organizations are structures in which members of the public engage in work for the organization. Examples include open-source software, Amnesty International, Wikipedia, and Lego communities. Much research focuses on structural design characteristics of open organizations, such as pre-specified task divisions and integration teams. These practices require the organization to a priori structure in response to its mission. Increasingly, however, open organizations like CrowdDoing and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) require public involvement across volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA) contexts. These open organizations must respond to changing political, competitive, and socio-economic events. Structural clarity is more difficult, and contributors may participate in the creative development of new technologies, new policies, and new sources of funding. Working from practices supporting participant engagement in more stable environments, we qualitatively observe HyperloopTT to understand internal practices for open organizing in more VUCA contexts. We observe four practices allowing for the flexibility, versatility, and accommodations needed for open organizing in such settings. The HyperloopTT practices allow more porosity and self-determination—not simply in how people divide and integrate tasks, but also in the exploration and experimentation of the work itself. More than task workers, we see a new class of open organizing participants: creative work designers.
... Considering these challenges, future research might study the effectiveness of normative controls throughout highly distributed organizations, the extent to which ethical culture varies across very decentralized structures, and the ways in which democratizing data while enabling dispersed decision-making impacts ethical behaviors within an organization. For example, future research could build on emergent theorizing about the impact of deliberative governance (Scherer & Palazzo, 2011;Scherer & Voegtlin, 2020), that is, greater participation and reflexivity in decision-making, and "open strategy" (Hautz, Seidl, & Whittington, 2017;Seidl, von Krogh, & Whittington, 2019), that is, stakeholder inclusion and transparency, on control systems within powerful, large, contemporary organizations (Whittington & Yakis-Douglas, 2020). On the basis of these theoretical constructs, it is argued that emergent, global professional networks, together with openness (both managed and unmanaged), will drive norms that are likely to influence corporate control (Whittington & Yakis-Douglas, 2020), and this by implication will influence ethical culture within these new organizational forms. ...
We review and synthesize over two decades of research on ethical culture in organizations, examining eighty-nine relevant scholarly works. Our article discusses the conceptualization of ethical culture in a cross-disciplinary space and its critical role in ethical decision-making. With a view to advancing future research, we analyze the antecedents, outcomes, and mediator and moderator roles of ethical culture. To do so, we identify measures and theories used in past studies and make recommendations. We propose, inter alia, the use of validated measures, application of a wider range of theories, adoption of longitudinal studies, and study of group-level data in organizations. We explore research possibilities in new and emergent forms of organizations, ways of organizing work, and technology in ethical decision-making, such as the role of artificial intelligence. We also recommend the study of a broad range of leadership styles and their influence in shaping ethical cultures in organizations.
... However, we argue that the manifestation of open principles differs across projects. We refer to openness as a concept that includes the accessibility of information and resources, inclusive and often collaborative participation, transparency of resources and actions, and the democratization of work [24,35,49]. ...
This study theorizes the role of social signals in overcoming the motivation, coordination, and integration challenges in a hybrid peer production community, WikiTribune. WikiTribune was a collaborative journalism project that combined elements of firm-based production with that of commons-based peer production. Empirical data (article metrics, project documentation, and user communications) was used to examine the first 18-months of building and developing the collaborative journalism platform and community. The study’s primary contribution is a social signaling model that extends the theory of commons-based peer production and presents three constructs that inform the socially productive behavior in these communities. These constructs (1) system signals, (2) normative signals, and (3) behavioral signals are theorized to shape user engagement through the different levels of project participation. The alignment/misalignment of these signals with project strategy produce positive or negative outcomes. The social signaling model seeks to explain how challenges are overcome and advantages leveraged in commons-based peer production, in both pure and hybrid forms.
... Thus, startups in a province with high GDP are more likely to search broadly. Second, as a method of impression management, resource sharing can reduce the perceived uncertainty of external knowledge sources regarding the startup and thus increase their willingness to collaborate (Hautz, Seidl, and Whittington 2017). Third, future growth potential is an essential reference for external knowledge sources in their assessment (Belderbos, Tong, and Wu 2019). ...
Open search is crucial to business model design. In recent years, the digital revolution has significantly reshaped the open search environment and the business model landscape. The traditional ‘either/or’ paradigm that separately tests the effects of open search breadth and depth on business model design is no longer applicable. By introducing the ‘both/and’ paradigm, this study explores how open search breadth and depth, both jointly and in an orderly manner, impact hybrid business model design. Using a sample of digital startups during the opportunity window of China’s digital entrepreneurship, we find that open search breadth positively relates to the balance between technology- and consumer-oriented business models. Furthermore, under the premise of high breadth, open search depth shows a U-shaped relationship with this balance. This study not only enriches our knowledge of the antecedents of business model design but also provides a comprehensive understanding of the role of open search.
... A clear illustration of this interest is reflected in Big Tech, Big Pharma, policymakers, and health institutions leaning together toward big data analytics to respond to the COVID-19 global pandemic and anticipate the next unforeseen 'black swan' event (Sheng et al., 2021;Ienca and Vayena, 2020;Wang et al., 2016). Another example of its centrality can be found in many studies showing how big data analytics has become indivisible from strategic decision-making (e.g., Fitzgerald et al., 2014;Hanelt et al., 2020;Rogers, 2016), or in research going as far as enthroning it as sustenance for addressing emerging digital trends and new rules of value creation and capture (e.g., Constantinides et al., 2018;George et al., 2016;Hautz et al., 2017;Jacobides et al., 2018). ...
Research on big data analytics has been burgeoning in recent decades, yet its relationship with strategy continues to be overlooked. This paper reviews how big data analytics and strategy are portrayed across 228 articles, identifying two dominant discourses: an input-output discourse that views big data analytics as a computational capability supplementing prospective strategy formulation and an entanglement discourse that theorizes big data analytics as a socially constructed agent that (re)shapes the emergent character of strategy formation. We deconstruct the inherent dichotomies of the input-output/entanglement divide and reveal how both discourses adopt disjointed positions vis-à-vis relational causality and agency. We elaborate a semiotic view of big data analytics and strategy that transcends this standoff and provides a novel theoretical account for conjoined relationality between big data analytics and strategy.
The goal of this study was to understand how the interrelation among middle manager, strategy formation and open strategizing practices occurs. We adopted a qualitative approach, with a case study as method. Data collection was through semi-structured interviews, document survey and direct observation. The data analysis was based through narrative analysis and theoretical-empirical comparison. The results pointed out that the middle manager's attributions and the articulating way he interacts with employees and organizational sectors characterized him as protagonist of the integrative strategic practices in open strategizing processes.
Strategists intentionally use artifacts to promote their perception of a prudent strategic choice. Separating artifacts and strategists’ intentionality blurs our understanding of how strategy-making unfolds. Our study addresses the dynamics of strategists’ intentionality and their use of artifacts in strategy-making. The study provides empirical evidence that artifacts act as stand-ins for the strategists’ intentionality, used to guide or misused to curb the strategy-making. The implications of our study contribute to the understanding that (1) we can neither assume that the individuals’ intentionality is predictable nor that the involved strategists achieve a common understanding, (2) strategist–artifact relationships are pivotal to align or misalign different strategists’ interests, (3) the mediating role of artifacts is mutable entailing strategists materializing artifacts and adding text and symbols to intentionally manage the strategy-making, and (4) strategists deliberately use many artifacts to reach the intended strategy, not necessarily implementing the optimal strategy choice.
JEL CLASSIFICATION: L190
Purpose
This paper investigates the ways managing directors (MDs) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involve employees in strategic conversations. The paper examines how managers interact with employees in strategic conversations, and why the managers do so (or do not), to generate empirically grounded knowledge about the nature of internal openness in SMEs.
Design/methodology/approach
This study employs a general inductive approach and is based on in-depth interviews with 60 Swedish MDs with development and growth ambitions.
Findings
The paper develops a model of employee involvement in strategic conversations based on the nature and intensity of the MD–employee interaction. A key finding is that SMEs exhibit wide variation in terms of employee involvement, from virtually no employee involvement to, in some cases, far-reaching company democracy. The reasons for this variation are complex, but personal preferences and company size are shown to have an impact, as does, to some degree, ownership structure. In contrast to existing research, the limitations and drawbacks of involving employees in strategic conversations are outlined.
Originality/value
The study provides important insight into MDs' views and practices of internal openness in strategic conversations in SMEs. A model of employee involvement in strategic processes is outlined, and potential limitations of internal openness are highlighted.
Although we have seen a growing interest in participatory strategy-making, there is a paucity of knowledge about the role of polyphony and how it may be orchestrated. Our longitudinal analysis of a revealing case reveals how narrative strategy-making unfolded in four temporally overlapping phases: First, a top-down effort to lead participatory strategy-making resulted in polyphony, which was nevertheless largely controlled from the top. Second, this was followed by autonomous narrative strategy-making in units, leading to polyphony that was less but still partly controlled from the top. Third, this triggered an emergence of counternarratives offering alternatives to the overall narrative, thus generating “genuine” polyphony not controlled from the top. Fourth, partly as a response, top decision-makers launched an update, again seizing more control in polyphony. Thus, our study advances prior research by elucidating how orchestration of participatory strategy-making both generates and reduces polyphony. By so doing, our analysis helps us to move from a dichotomous view of participation and openness towards a more nuanced appreciation of alternative voices and how they may or may not emerge or be controlled in strategy-making.
Strategic success is usually associated with having deliberate intentions, prior stated goals and a comprehensively formulated plan for effective execution. This way of thinking is driven by a means-ends logic and underpinned by the cognitivist assumption that conscious thought and consequential reasoning drive effective action: such privileging of thought over action is endemic in strategic theorizing. Our purpose in this paper is to demonstrate the plausibility of other, pre-cognitive logics of strategic action and 'intention' as alternative explanatory bases for strategic success. We identify three such logics and their associated forms of intentionality. A 'logic of practices' views collectively shared habitus rather than conscious cognition/deliberate intention as the basis of effective strategic action. A 'logic of situation' emphasizes how situational momentum, tendencies and affordances themselves contain pre-cognitive 'in-tensional' impulses that actively elicit appropriate strategic responses. Finally, a 'logic of potential' associated with what Friedrich Nietzsche termed 'will to power'. It is with this fourth logic, we suggest, that strategic intention becomes most effective. In will to power, strategy entails the relentless expanding of degrees of freedom from environmental constraints without presuming cognitive separation from it.
Higher education is a key pillar in constructing new knowledge economies for the 21 st century, and digitalization of higher education is a central focus area for national authorities. In Norway, the strategy from the authorities holds the premise that the decision-making authority for digitalization should be at a strategic level. Digitalization is driven by key features of modern technology but may also lead to transformation of traditional educational methods as well as educational practices. Since the university contains several disciplines, different strategies can be used when products or processes within the discipline are digitalized. In what ways do different disciplines proceed to digitalize their educational practices? Based on these interests, our research questions are, what are the challenges IT addresses in digitalization of higher education, and what strategies are pursued to solve these challenges? Our empirical evidence is two cases from respectively medicine and law, and our contribution is an investigation into the strategies pursued in the digitalization approaches, and the contextual differences that may explain the chosen strategies. We provide three process models to explain these differences, and consequently a way of understanding strategies within digital infrastructures in higher education.
This study investigates how combining different forms of formal collaboration (i.e., developed vs. emerging economy collaborations) and informal search (i.e., search breadth vs. depth) affects the innovation performance of emerging economy firms. The open innovation literature has primarily focused on the effect of individual open innovation practices, generating conflicting results. We argue that outcomes depend on specific combinations of open innovation practices. Drawing on the notion of external absorptive capacity routines, we argue that combining forms of openness that rely on the same absorptive capacity routine positively affects innovation performance. We specifically ask whether broad or deep search, which rely on different routines, is more appropriate for emerging economy firms who are collaborating with developed or other emerging economy partners. We test our hypotheses using responses from 659 manufacturing and service firms to two waves of the Turkish Innovation Survey. Using Tobit regression analysis, we generate findings consistent with our expectations. We find that deep search is appropriate when collaborating with developed economy partners, whereas broad search is appropriate when collaborating with other emerging economy partners. These confirm the importance of combining forms of openness with matching routines. Overall, we illustrate the importance of finding the right combination of different forms of openness.
I apply an institutional lens to explore how strategists in a pharmaceuticals firm successfully include managers in the formulation and implementation of corporate political activity (CPA). I depict these strategists as institutional carriers who face mindset-, skills-, and commitment-related barriers when importing new industry norms favoring inclusive CPA processes into an organizational setting where exclusive strategic practices prevail. They reduce barriers resulting from this confrontation of institutional logics by enacting specific instances of institutional work. Strategists' ability to perform cultural and technical work aimed at shifting managers’ perceptions about CPA and empowering them to design and conduct new forms of political action is facilitated by their expertise and social capital. In the absence of hierarchical authority, they draw on personality traits – chiefly, their perseverance – to enact more challenging political work aimed at reconfiguring organizational rules and increasing commitment to CPA. I stretch understandings of open strategy by exploring the inclusion of managers in a complex and uncertain strategic activity previously overlooked, and providing new insights into how strategists manage individual-level constraints to open strategizing. I build on CPA literature by opening up the black box of corporate political strategizing and exposing political strategists as internal lobbyists who drive strategic change in firms.
The broad and continued success of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) has helped to spread its ideology to many other domains, including Open Government Data (OGD), which has recently gained prominence due to its potential for feeding algorithms. Despite the anti-market and anti-corporation values around free sharing, citizen participation, and unrestricted transparency propagated in particular by a highly idealized academic discourse on OGD, our case study of the development of Switzerland’s national OGD portal suggests that the altruistic and philanthropic notion that is often associated with OGD needs to be reconsidered. We show that low use, on one side, and the practical necessity towards cost-recovery behaviors, on the other side, have led to a compromise of the altruistic ideological beginnings of OGD and paved the way for a pragmatic shift towards a more utilitarian, partly even protectionist, view on liberating and sharing data.
The salmon farming industry has since its infancy witnessed immense growth due to innovations increasing productivity. A significant part of the innovations causing the productivity growth has by many observers been attributed to collaborative and open R&D-efforts. Salmon farming in Norway is very research intensive, with a large share of R&D being publicly financed, and with results widely shared and innovations widely adopted. However, in recent years there has been a shift toward an increasing share of R&D becoming privately financed, leading to more closed innovation processes. This paper explores the importance of open innovation in salmon farming and the possible consequences of more closed innovation. The paper shows that openness of the innovations depends on the type of challenge and stakeholder. Innovation is at its most open when common challenges are addressed, like finding solutions for parasites and diseases. Innovation in salmon farming tends to become more closed as the industry consolidates, the larger the firm is and the closer to the market innovation takes place.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13657305.2023.2193161
L’administration publique contemporaine doit faire face à des phénomènes de plus en plus complexes et interdépendants. Dans ce contexte, le modèle conçu par l’Institut de hautes études en administration publique (modèle IDHEAP) permet de comprendre l’action des organisations publiques. Il offre également des solutions et des conseils pour concevoir l’administration publique dans une perspective systémique, dynamique et englobante. Les composantes essentielles du système de l’administration publique et de son environnement sont abordées sous un angle pratique, étayé par les dernières connaissances théoriques et empiriques (valeurs, droit, gestion des ressources humaines, transformation digitale…). Enfin, plusieurs études de cas montrent comment utiliser le modèle pour concevoir et développer concrètement l’action publique. Cet ouvrage est le fruit de l’expérience acquise par les membres de l’Institut en accompagnant et en analysant la transformation des organisations publiques.
The circular economy has attracted the interest of business leaders, policy makers and academics alike for its potential to contribute to a more resilient, prosperous and resource‐efficient economy. The transition towards a circular economy requires new business models that challenge the linear logic of value creation that is still endemic across most industries. In turn, the transition from linear to circular business models involves the rethinking of strategic decision‐making processes and the development of new organisational capabilities. This paper addresses these important strategic implications of the emergence and implementation of circular business models. Coupling business models with open strategy and dynamic capabilities, we develop a “three‐pronged” strategy framework that advances the emerging field of circular business model research. Our contribution is crystallised into a series of propositions and future research questions for scholars working at the intersection of the circular economy and the strategy literature.
The use of digital technology has enabled consumers to play an essential role in the success of startups. Priem et al. proposed a demand-value creation-performance framework, which argues that firms can create value for the consumer by exploring consumer demand, and this type of value-creation activity can help firms gain better performance. However, empirical evidence supporting this framework remains scarce. To address this challenge, this study empirically tests Priem et al.’s framework in the context of entrepreneurship. A unique on-site survey dataset of 323 digital startups in the digital environment was employed to explore how consumer demand drives startups to value creation activities and gain better performance. The study results show that consumer demands, in terms of demand heterogeneity, demand uncertainty, and demand interactivity, are positively related to value creation, as reflected by opportunity recognition and consumer innovation. Furthermore, both opportunity recognition and consumer innovation are positively related to the performance of startups. These findings support the demand-side perspective by providing empirical evidence for its key arguments from an entrepreneurial view and extend the demand-side perspective by contextualizing it in the increasingly digital environment.
Arvind Malhotra is the H. Allen Andrew Professor of Entrepreneurial Education and Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at the Kenan–Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research projects include studying how successful brands leverage social media for creating a loyal customer base, successful open-innovation organizational and extra-organizational structures; adoption of innovative technology-based services, such as wireless, by consumers and organizations; and management of knowledge in extra-organizational contexts. He has received research grants from the Society for Information Managers Advanced Practices Council, Dell, Carnegie Bosch Institute, National Science Foundation, RosettaNet consortium, UNC-Small Grants Program and the Marketing Sciences Institute.
Innovation has become more open in recent years. Yet the decision to become more open and the challenge of sustaining that openness are not well understood. This is the concern of the “content” branch of Open Strategy, defined as the branch that addresses an organization's open innovation strategy. We examine the initial motivations to adopt an open strategy, and then consider when organizations choose to maintain that open strategy or revert to a more proprietary approach. Similarly, we examine motivations to open up a previously proprietary strategy. We find that these dynamics depend on the organization's desire to either foster greater growth (which favors a more open strategy) or secure greater control and profit directly from the innovation (which favors a more proprietary strategy). Crucially, these choices can shift over the life cycle of a market and are dependent on the competencies amassed by the organization. In early phases, when there are relatively few legacy customers and many new arrivals, open strategies attract customers at a faster rate. In later phases, as the market matures and new arrivals have slowed, there are few new customers to attract with an open strategy and reversion to a more proprietary strategy becomes quite attractive. This suggests that the longevity of open initiatives might be curtailed as organizations opt for value capture over cooperative value creation.
Whereas prior research has investigated cases of partially open strategizing, this article explores the practices and outcomes of radically open strategizing. We draw on a case study of the German Premium Cola collective to explore how it translates its principles of radically open agenda setting, participation, and governance into strategizing practices. Our analysis reveals that this collective performs radically open strategizing practices of distributed agenda setting, substantial participation, and consensual decision-making, but also performs counterbalancing practices of centralized agenda setting, selective participation, and authoritative decision-making in order to cope with practical barriers posed by information and power asymmetries between members as well as information overload. We find that these practices enable the collective to legitimize its strategic decisions, develop a collective identity, and maintain member motivation over time. Based on these findings, we conclude that radically open strategizing is a feasible practice, with limitations arising from participants making selective use of open strategizing opportunities, rather than being excluded from them.
[Strategy] is the art of creating power. Freedman (2013: xii) Introduction This chapter provides a systematic reflection on how power can be used as an analytical framework to study strategy. Such an endeavour faces the difficulty of having to deal with two rather large bookshelves: one collects those authors who share a concern with power, albeit that they might not use the term ‘strategy’; on the other shelves, the writers on strategy often tend to have a more implicit than explicit interest in theories of power. To make things even more difficult, the two bookshelves are usually placed in different parts of libraries. Philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, organization theorists and others may well be interested in power but business school professors study strategy in overwhelmingly economic terms with competition conceived as warfare by other means. It is ironical that, for all the forceful imagery of strategy writing, often drawing on military metaphors, there is a dearth of explicit accounts of power relations and strategy. The irony attaches to the fact that strategy is so consciously aimed at changing power relations – in the market, in the organization, or vis-à-vis government regulators; it speaks of ‘forces’ and (value) ‘chains’, of competition and advantages, but, strangely, it neglects issues of power. We find Lawrence Freedman’s introductory quote one of the most apt definitions of strategy, as it alludes to the important fact that power is dynamically created in specific contexts, and that it is power that makes it possible to accomplish an objective. For Freedman (2013), strategy is the ‘central political art’, as it is concerned with getting more out of a situation than the balance of power would initially suggest. It is in this sense that strategy is concerned with the creation of power. Perhaps it is telling that Freedman is a professor of war studies (and thus his books are located on yet another shelf in the libraries).
Research in corporate governance has predominantly focused on the moral hazard problem and governance mechanisms that mitigate it. In this paper, we instead focus on adverse selection as an alternative agency problem, emphasizing well-intentioned managers making strategic choices they believe will increase firm value, but facing difficulty informing capital market participants about the value of these choices. We suggest that more valuable strategies are more difficult for market participants to evaluate, and that pressures on managers to adopt easy-to-evaluate strategies can generate this adverse selection or ‘lemons’ problem. We argue that governance mechanisms designed to mitigate moral hazard operate differently here, in some cases exacerbating rather than solving the adverse selection problem. We further propose that firms with unique and complex strategies may migrate to private equity as a partial remedy.
Scholars in the fields of institutional theory and strategy-as-practice have recently begun to reach out to each other to broaden and nuance their theorizing of current puzzles. This chapter identifies natural points of connection between the two literatures, reviews existing literature drawing on insights from both camps and outlines a research agenda for future studies at the intersection of institutional theory and strategy-as-practice.
This paper challenges the recent focus on practices as stand-alone phenomena, as exemplified by the so-called “Practice-Based View of Strategy (PBV)” by Bromiley and Rau (2014). While the goal of “PBV” points to the potential of standard practices to generate performance differentials (in contrast to the Resource Based View), it marginalizes well-known insights from practice theory more widely. In particular, by limiting its focus to practices, i.e. “what” practices are used, it underplays the implications of “who” is engaged in the practices and “how” the practices are carried out. In examining practices in isolation, the “PBV” carries the serious risk of misattributing performance differentials. In this paper, we offer an integrative practice perspective on strategy and performance that should aid scholars in generating more precise and contextually-sensitive theories about the enactment and impact of practices as well as about critical factors shaping differences in practice outcomes. Forthcoming in Strategic Organisation. Access a copy here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2643856
Taking perspectives from papers published previously in Organization Studies, we argue for progress in strategy-as-practice research through more effective linking of local' strategizing activity with larger' social phenomena. We introduce a range of theoretical approaches capable of incorporating larger-scale phenomena and countering what we term micro-isolationism', the tendency to explain local activities in their own terms. Organizing the theories according to how far they lean towards either tall or flat ontologies, we outline their respective strengths and weaknesses. Against this background, we develop three broad guidelines that can help protect against empirical micro-isolationism and thereby extend the scope of strategy-as-practice research.
While open innovation is an established field, open strategy is on the verge of recognition as a newly emerging empirical research phenomenon. Taking a communication perspective, we introduce a framework that distinguishes between two different dimensions of openness: sharing information with external participants and audiences, and receiving a broader range of topics and perspectives. Based on these two dimensions we map existing research in both fields, which allows us to identify different forms of openness in open innovation and open strategy processes. As sharing and receiving serve different purposes and are thus independent of each other in the context of open innovation, the dimensions of sharing and receiving are directly linked in the case of open strategy. Based on our study, we put forward three propositions to provide a foundation for future empirical research on both open innovation and open strategy phenomena.
The IBM Innovation Jam was the largest-ever event to promote networked idea generation. More than 150,000 IBM employees, stakeholders and vendors participated in two three-day online events to foster innovation and help IBM bring products to market faster. Using Web sites, wikis, forums and other online tools, Jam participants generated literally hundreds of thousands of new business ideas. From those ideas, IBM focused on several major topics for the second part of the Jam and invited its employees to build on the ideas within those topics. As a result of this process, 10 distinct businesses were funded. However, it wasn't these successes that make the Jam interesting, argue the authors; it was the difficulties that IBM faced in implementing the Jam. Given unique access to the Jam, the authors discuss the complications inherent in collaborating with so many people. In particular, it was hard to sustain individual "conversations" in the collaborative process. Rather than building on each other's ideas, many participants because of excitement about their own ideas - would "hijack" a thread or take it in an unintended direction. Some great ideas were left to wither on the vine. The authors discuss other attempts at large-scale collaboration, including some by Dell and Star-bucks. These include the use of promotion tools to ensure that "good" ideas are seen and captured by as many eyes as possible. The pros and cons of these methods are discussed as well, and the authors provide a framework for thinking about how an organization can collaborate with its stakeholders.
In fast changing environments, middle managers regularly have to participate in interorganizational sensemaking work in order to deal with issues of industry-wide significance. The research is grounded on an empirical study of a cross-sector study group, bringing together middle managers from five large French public works and civil engineering firms who are examining issues related to the adoption of a shared digital mock-up that will reconfigure the sector. The article identifies four translation spaces in which these middle managers make sense of this design technology through a set of editing practices. The article ends by discussing the dynamic of these translation spaces and the need to better understand middle managers' editing practices when they are making sense of change across organizational boundaries.
Scholars have recently highlighted the promise of open innovation. In this paper, we treat open innovation—in it's different forms and manifestations—as well as internal or closed innovation, as unique governance forms with different benefits and costs. We discuss how each governance form, whether open or closed, is composed of a set of instruments that access (a) different types of communication channels for knowledge sharing, (b) different types of incentives, and (c) different types of property rights for appropriating value from innovation. We focus on the innovation “problem” as the central unit of analysis, arguing for a match between problem types and governance forms, which vary from open to closed and which support alternative forms of solution search. In all, the goal of this paper is to provide a comparative framework for managing innovation, where we delineate and discuss four categories of open innovation governance forms (markets, partnerships, contests and tournaments and user or community innovation) and compare them with each other and with two internal or closed forms of innovation governance (authority and consensus-based hierarchy).
This article argues that participation and inclusion are independent dimensions of public engagement and elaborates the relationships of inclusion with deliberation and diversity. Inclusion continuously creates a community involved in defining and addressing public issues; participation emphasizes public input on the content of programs and policies. Features of inclusive processes are coproducing the process and content of decision making, engaging multiple ways of knowing, and sustaining temporal openness. Using a community of practice lens, we compare the consequences of participatory and inclusive practices in four processes, finding that inclusion supports an ongoing community with capacity to address a stream of issues.
Language and power are central to an understanding of control. This paper uses the work of Pierre Bourdieu to argue that an enriched view of power, in the form of symbolic violence, is central. We examine the pedagogical function business plans played in the provincial museums and cultural heritage sites of Alberta, Canada. The struggle to name and legitimate practices occurs in the business planning process, excluding some knowledges and practices and teaching and utilizing other knowledges and ways of viewing the organization. We show that control involves both redirecting work and changing the identity of producers, in particular, how they understand their work through the construction of markets, consumers, and products. This process works by changing the capital, in its multiple forms-symbolic, cultural, political and economic-in an organizational and institutional field.
Current models of competitive advantage emphasize economic factors as explanations for a firm’s success but ignore sociocognitive factors. This paper integrates economic and cognitive perspectives, and shows how firms and constituents jointly construct the environments in which firms compete. We argue that competitive advantage is a systemic outcome that develops as firms and constituents participate in six processes that entail, not only use and exchange of resources, but also communication about and interpretations of those exchanges. The interpretations that firms and constituents make of competitive interactions affect decisions about how to exchange and use resources. As interpretations and evaluations of a given firm fluctuate, so do the resources the firm has access to and its competitive advantage in the marketplace. The actions and interpretations of constituents and rivals produce the shifting terrain on which competition unfolds. We illustrate these dynamics with a discussion of IBM’s changing competitive advantage in the computer industry in the 1980s. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Research Summary: Despite the recognition that knowledge sharing among employees is necessary to enact knowledge strategy, little is known about how to enable such sharing. Recent research suggests that social media may promote knowledge sharing because they allow social lubrication and the formation of trust. Our longitudinal and comparative analysis of social media usage at two large firms indicates that users who participate in nonwork interactions on social media catalyze a cycle of curiosity and passable trust that enables them to connect and share knowledge. Paradoxically, the very nonwork‐related content that attracts users to social media and shapes passable trust can become a source of tension, thwarting a firm's ability to encapsulate knowledge in the form of routines and to use it to enact its strategy.
Managerial Summary: Integrating knowledge from across a firm is a critical source of competitive advantage. Firms are increasingly implementing internal social media sites to promote knowledge sharing among their employees. Our analysis indicates that employees’ curiosity about nonwork‐related and work‐related interactions motivate them to use the sites. The integration of nonwork and work content allows employees to identify people with valuable knowledge, and gauge the passable trust that they need to share knowledge on the sites or offline. Paradoxically, the nonwork‐related content that attracts users to the sites can become a source of tension, thwarting the production of knowledge to enact firms’ knowledge‐based strategies. To foster work‐related knowledge sharing, managers should accommodate nonwork‐related interactions on social media.
Research in corporate governance has predominantly focused on the moral hazard problem and governance mechanisms that mitigate it. In this paper, we instead focus on adverse selection as an alternative agency problem, emphasizing well-intentioned managers making strategic choices they believe will increase firm value, but facing difficulty informing capital market participants about the value of these choices. We suggest that more valuable strategies are more difficult for market participants to evaluate, and that pressures on managers to adopt easy-to-evaluate strategies can generate this adverse selection or “lemons” problem. We argue that governance mechanisms designed to mitigate moral hazard operate differently here, in some cases exacerbating rather than solving the adverse selection problem. We further propose that firms with unique and complex strategies may migrate to private equity as a partial remedy.
As the process of strategy-making in companies becomes more inclusive and transparent, new theoretical perspectives are needed to make sense of these changes. In this short paper, I put forward a simple framework covering four aspects of the Open Strategy phenomenon – commons-based production, crowd-based inputs to decision making, collective buy-in and action, and collective sense-making in the capital markets. I describe each of these in turn, using examples from the papers in this special issue of LRP.
Despite the benefits of opening the strategy process, greater inclusiveness and transparency stand in sharp contrast to the conventional emphasis on elitism and opacity in strategy making, especially in centralized organizations where decision making is driven by top management. We suggest that centralized organizations can manage this tension by combining participatory and inclusive practices. Whereas participation is about increasing stakeholders’ input for decisions, inclusion is about creating and sustaining a community of interacting stakeholders engaged in an ongoing stream of issues in the strategy process. We show that the distinction between participatory and inclusive practices helps to explain why and how centralized and decentralized organizations engage with stakeholders differently over the two phases of alternatives generation and idea selection in the strategy process. We illustrate our arguments using vignettes of the strategizing process at two public companies.
While previous open strategy studies have acknowledged open strategy's function as an impression management instrument, their focus has mostly been on short episodes. The impression management literature, meanwhile, pays openness scant attention. By studying how new ventures engage in open strategy-making, we track how open strategy-making and respective impression management benefits evolve over time. Specifically, we draw on a comparative case study of two firms' blog communication on strategy-related issues and corresponding audience responses over a four-year period. We identify three distinct modes of how organizations engage in open strategy-making with external audiences and show how each mode is related to a specific set of impression management effects. Having established the impression management functions of these modes, we then demonstrate how open strategy-making contributes to new ventures' quests for legitimacy as they evolve. In the launch phase, dialoguing with blog audiences helps a venture attract endorsements for its organization and products. As the venture grows, concentrating on broadcasting relevant strategic information may attract media audiences' additional support for pursuing openness as a desirable organizational practice.
Drawing on community research, we advance our understanding on open strategy (OS) by examining the forms of participation behaviors and their effects on organizational and virtual senses of community. Using data from a Siemen's company-wide online initiative, we find that mere participation in open strategizing does not directly engender organizational sense of community (OSOC) - an employee's perceived belongingness to the organization - but indirectly drives OSOC via a sense of virtual community (SOVC) - a feeling of virtual belongingness to other participants of the open strategy platform. Our findings further show that different forms of participation (submitting ideas, commenting, and evaluating ideas) generate divergent effects. For instance, while "commenting" and "evaluating" show a positive effect on SOVC, "submission of ideas" alone produces a negative effect on SOVC. Thus, submission of ideas may just be a way to dump one's thoughts without necessarily being interested in the strategy or getting a better understanding of it; whereas, commenting and evaluating behaviors clearly contribute to a sense of virtual community and intellectual engagement. Furthermore, our findings indicate that a certain threshold of perceived ease of use (EoU) of the OS platform is an absolute basic requirement for participants, leading to frustration if not fulfilled. Overall, our study demonstrates that OS indeed may add to the development of better strategies, a better understanding and implementation of those strategies and enhanced organizational learning due to employees' increased sense of community and stronger organizational commitment. However, literature has to be aware of the different effects of participation so that managers can control for them.
João Baptista is Associate Professor at Warwick Business School in the UK, where he has been since 2006. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics in Information Systems. His recent research conceptualizes digital work and workplace technologies as new forms of organising and explores new practices and ways of working in modern organisations. His work has been published widely in information systems field and won best paper of year 2010 from Association of Information Systems and the Journal of Strategic Information Systems. He is Director of MSc Business Consulting, and Coordinates IS stream of PhD program at WBS. He was visiting Professor at LUISS University in Rome in 2014. He consults for large organisations on digital strategies and new modern working practices. Prior to his academic career Joao was Director of New Technologies for the Conservative Party in the UK, and in technology leadership roles for a large Bank and at the World Expo 98 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Our study theorises and tests why organisations engage in more external transparency as an open strategy practice and the share-price related outcomes associated with these practices. Drawing from literature on information asymmetry, we suggest that organisations that depart from their existing strategy or deviate from industry norms are more likely to open up their strategy in order to escape negative evaluations by analysts and scrutiny by investors. We further investigate how the stock market responds to more openness in strategy. In a dataset comprising of a sample of 472 M&A deals and 886 associated corporate voluntary communications over a five-year period, we find that the likelihood of organisations engaging in open strategy practices that contribute to external transparency is associated with the degree to which an organisation's strategy differs from industry norms, but is not associated with how much it varies from its existing one. Regarding organisational outcomes of increased openness in strategy, we illustrate that increasing the transparency of M&A strategy to investors through voluntary communications can bring share-price related benefits. Our research contributes to literature on open strategy, information asymmetry, and managing M&A.
Disruptive environmental trends are forcing organizations to be more innovative in their approaches to organizational strategy generation. Rather than using a traditional top-down approach, some organizations are turning to open strategizing, which involves a large number of stakeholders who communicate in transparent, virtual environments. This study used a case analysis to explore one organization’s use of crowdsourcing technology in a move from a traditional to an open strategizing approach. Drawing on technology affordance and communicative-as-constitutive perspectives, we identified individual and collective crowdsourcing technology affordances for strategizing. Subsequently, we explored how the technology affordances influenced organizational strategizing. Results showed that crowdsourced strategy was constituted as multivoice, divergent, egalitarian, and inclusive.
An agency perspective has emerged as a prominent view of the path to increased firm value in strategy research. In this view, increasing firm value requires resolving a ‘fundamental agency problem’ between shareholders and managers, specifically a ‘moral hazard’ or shirking problem that reflects managers’ weak incentives to increase the value of the firm. Correspondingly, research has focused on governance mechanisms that mitigate this agency problem. We focus on an alternative agency problem—an explanation for poor strategy choices that emphasizes well-intentioned managers making strategic choices that they believe will increase firm value, but facing difficulty in informing capital market participants about the value of these choices. We propose that the most valuable strategies are likely to be the most difficult for market participants and intermediaries to evaluate, and that pressures on managers to adopt strategies that are more easily assessed can lead to an adverse selection or ‘lemons’ problem. We examine the implications of governance mechanisms designed to mitigate moral hazard problems in the context of adverse selection. We further propose that firms with more valuable strategies may migrate to private equity, such that many of the strategies in private equity markets will be more valuable.
‘Openness’ has become an important paradigm for organizations over the past decade in multiple fields. Recently also the strategy process has been changing. While strategizing was traditionally perceived as exclusive and secret process limited to a small group within organizations, a shift towards greater openness through inclusion of a larger number and variety of actors is emerging. In this paper we adopt a social network perspective to develop a theoretical framework on how this openness has a varying impact in the different phases of the strategy process from generating new strategic ideas (variation), to selecting the most appropriate ones through evaluation and legitimization processes (selection), to the integration of new approaches into the existing set of routines for execution (retention). We suggest that the strategy process is a social process, shaped through interactions between individuals. Specifically we conceptualize how introducing openness affects individuals’ structural and relational network characteristics (network size, cohesion, density, tie strength), which impact - facilitate or hinder - strategic activities throughout the strategy process. Our proposed framework suggests that benefits and risks of increased openness balance differently in the strategy process phases. While substantial benefits may be realized in the idea generation phase, costs may outweigh the benefits in the selection and retention phase. We argue that it is essential to understand the differentiated impact of openness on structural and relational characteristics and their consequences in different phases of the strategy process to be able to profit from openness in strategizing
Despite efforts to develop innovative and new research methods for studying strategizing, most strategy-as-practice research has been based on longitudinal case studies drawing on interviews, observations and documents (Vaara and Whittington 2012). While these methods provide a complex set of historical and contextual data that are obviously necessary for understanding practices, they tend to concentrate on the organizational level, thus leaving unclear the way managers and others draw on their explicit and tacit knowledge when they are strategizing. Nonetheless, the essence of strategist agency cannot be separated from strategists’ life experience and their social, professional and/or managerial identity (Tengblad 2012). Therefore, there is a need to develop interest in methods offering the possibility to better understand who strategists are and how they define themselves, how they make sense of the strategy and how they position themselves within their organization and external networks. Biographical methods constitute a set of pertinent narrative methods of inquiry for carrying out in-depth studies of strategizing practices (Fenton and Langley 2011). With the aim of understanding the subjective essence of a person’s life or part of that life, biographical research focuses on individuals, who are asked to narrate their experiences and provide their own accounts of the significant change they have gone through over time (Goodley et al. 2004). To better understand the practices and skills individuals use when they are strategizing, biographical methods constitute a relevant methodological option offering multiple variants (biography, life story, autobiography, life history and so on) that can be used in complementary ways with ethnographic, participative and visual qualitative methods of inquiry (Merrill and West 2009). This chapter proposes to study strategizing by collecting data through a specific kind of biographical method, namely narratives of practices. Narratives of practices are specific life stories that focus on work experience and professional trajectories (Bertaux 1981). As with any biographical method, narratives of practices, or work life stories, allow the researcher to dig into the ‘life-world’ of strategists, whether they are managers or not, in order to capture the taken-for-granted streams of routines, events, interactions and knowledge that constitute their practices (Küpers, Mantere and Statler 2013). For example, Gerstrøm (2013) draws on a variant of this method in her doctoral thesis to study how managers defend, protect and adapt their identity when dealing with financial crisis.
Introduction This chapter is about why and how historical methods are suitable for studies of strategy as practice with its focus on activities that characterize strategy and strategizing, for which the umbrella term ‘strategy-making’ is often used (Vaara and Whittington 2012). The ambition is to bring clarity to how we can approach strategy-as-practice research from a historical perspective. By introducing and elaborating different categories of historical methods, the chapter offers specific insights into how to use such methods. Strategy-as-practice research contributes by providing important insights into practice, praxis, and the role and identity of practitioners, using a variety of methods (Jarzabkowski and Spee 2009: Vaara and Whittington 2012). Although some studies do incorporate the notion of history, the interest in historical method is limited. Kaplan and Orlikowski’s (2013) study of a dynamic set of strategy-making practices reveals, through the development of chronologies, that managers negotiate and resolve differences in interpretations of the past, present and future. The influence of history on present strategic activity is also apparent in studies of sociocultural codes (Rouleau 2005), the sedimentation of social praxis into practices of replicating routines (Campbell-Hunt 2007) and with regard to an organization’s predisposition to act path-dependently (Jarzabkowski 2004). Drawing on Bourdieu (1990), scholars direct attention to practice in relation to habitus – that is, the agent’s predisposition to act in a certain way in a field, which denotes a social world, such as an industry or a market. History is mentioned in connection with habitus and field. The construction of habitus and field implies long-lasting processes, conditioned by environment, experience and history (Gomez 2010; Gomez and Bouty 2011). Without explicitly referring to history or a historical method, Whittington, Cailluet and Yakis-Douglas (2011) provide a long view of strategy professionals, in-house strategic planners and external strategy consultants. The long view is based on an analysis of advertisements for these professionals in The New York Times between 1960 and 2000. It should also be acknowledged that studies implicitly account for history through a focus on the emergent character of strategy practice (for example, Balogun and Johnson 2004; Dougherty 2004; Giraudeau 2008; Hendry, Kiel and Nicholson 2010; Jørgensen and Messner 2010; Stensaker and Falkenberg 2007). With a concern for language and discourse, SAP scholars further indicate that history does play a role (Clarke, Kwon and Wodak 2012). Through a narrative act, the researcher captures a sociohistorical dimension (Rouleau 2010).
The studies of work [Garfinkel] inspires […] [examine] the detailed and specifiable process of producing orders based on shared methods, trust, competence and attention. Rawls (2008: 702) Introduction Harold Garfinkel originally coined the term ‘ethnomethodology’ in the 1950s to capture his central interest in (for us, organizational) members’ ‘folk’ or everyday taken-for-granted methods (also called practices) or practical reasoning procedures for accomplishing a social order that constitutes sense. Garfinkel (1974: 16) later commented that ‘ethno’ referred, ‘somehow or other, to the availability to a member of common-sense knowledge of his society as common-sense knowledge of the whatever’. While Garfinkel’s ‘daunting prose’ (Silverman 2000: 138) may deter us from reading him first-hand, others, such as Heritage (1984), have offered accessible summaries of his work. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological stance was also subsequently taken up in a unique way by Harvey Sacks (see Jefferson 1992; see also Silverman 1998) and colleagues in the late 1960s, establishing conversation analysis. Under the auspices of the ‘missing what’, both Garfinkel and Sacks argued that social scientists were missing out the observable and reportable ‘work’ – in other words, the everyday ordinary activities of members whereby they make accountable and visible those entities we call, for example, ‘welfare agencies’, hospitals, factories, courtrooms, families and various other kinds of organizations/bureaucracies. In quite diffuse ways, ethnomethodological thinking and ideas have seeped into the management and organization studies field through the work of Weick (1995: 11) and Giddens (1984; see Boden 1991). More recently the social theorist and philosopher Theodore Schatzki (2005: 479) – when detailing the parameters of a practice turn in social theory – has also contended that his ‘site ontology’ is ‘clearly allied with a variety of micro-oriented approaches to social life, for example, ethnomethodology’. When turning to the more general substantive ‘topic’ in this chapter – strategy work – ethnomethodology has also been briefly referred to by Knights and Morgan (1991) in their Foucauldian-based appraisal/critique of corporate strategy and the inherent constitution of subjectivity and other ‘power effects’.
Which SUVs are most likely to rollover? What cities have the unhealthiest drinking water? Which factories are the most dangerous polluters? What cereals are the most nutritious? In recent decades, governments have sought to provide answers to such critical questions through public disclosure to force manufacturers, water authorities, and others to improve their products and practices. Corporate financial disclosure, nutritional labels, and school report cards are examples of such targeted transparency policies. At best, they create a light-handed approach to governance that improves markets, enriches public discourse, and empowers citizens. But such policies are frequently ineffective or counterproductive. Based on an analysis of eighteen U.S. and international policies, Full Disclosure shows that information is often incomplete, incomprehensible, or irrelevant to consumers, investors, workers, and community residents. To be successful, transparency policies must be accurate, keep ahead of disclosers' efforts to find loopholes, and, above all, focus on the needs of ordinary citizens. © Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Research summary: We develop and test a set of hypotheses on investors' reactions to a specific form of impression management, public presentations of overall strategy by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). Contrary to expectations from a “cheap talk” perspective, we suggest that such strategy presentations convey valuable information to investors, especially in conditions of heightened information asymmetry associated with varying types of new CEOs. Broad empirical support for our theoretical arguments is shown in a sample of strategy presentations carried out by NYSE and NASDAQ listed organizations over 10 years. Our research contributes to literature on new CEOs and impression management. We draw out implications both for management and for further research. Managerial summary: We examine the impact of public presentations on company strategy by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) on company stock prices. Adjusting for market movements in general, on average stock prices rose by 1.6 percent following these strategy presentations. Strategy presentations received larger reactions the more the CEO was unfamiliar to investors. Thus, stock price gains for new CEOs in general were 5.3 percent; for external, within-industry new CEOs, they were 9.3 percent; and for external, outside-of-industry new CEOs, they were 12.4 percent. Given that only 40 percent of new CEOs present on strategy in their first 200 days post-appointment, we suggest that new CEOs pay more attention to this potential means of communicating, especially if they are unfamiliar to investors. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Research has found that compared with larger groups, small ones had fewer difficulties with retaining their participatory-democratic practices and values. However, the endurance and expansion of Burning Man, from 20 friends and family in 1986 to a temporary arts community of more than 66,000 persons in 2014, suggests that collectivities can maintain and augment participatory practices over increasing scale. Using an ethnographic study of organizing activities spanning 1998 to 2001 and follow-up research through 2012, I focus on how the Burning Man organization has sustained its participatory-democratic principles over dramatic growth. Specifically, I show how the Burning Man organization promoted and sustained authentic voice and engagement by (1) decentralizing agency, (2) contextualizing norms and practices via storytelling and discussion, and (3) “communifying” labor.
Many formal organizational structures arise as reflections of rationalized institutional rules. The elaboration of such rules in modern states and societies accounts in part for the expansion and increased complexity of formal organizational structures. Institutional rules function as myths which organizations incorporate, gaining legitimacy, resources, stability, and enhanced survival prospects. Organizations whose structures become isomorphic with the myths of the institutional environment-in contrast with those primarily structured by the demands of technical production and exchange-decrease internal coordination and control in order to maintain legitimacy. Structures are decoupled from each other and from ongoing activities. In place of coordination, inspection, and evaluation, a logic of confidence and good faith is employed.
In the literature on different forms of online collaboration, a growing variety of empirical phenomena is subsumed under labels such as “crowdsourcing” or “community”. Defining online collaboration as a form of organizing self-selected actors leading to a joint outcome, we try to clarify these concepts in form of a three-dimensional continuum. On one end, the crowd model is characterized by low task interdependence, central control and automatization as well as by a low level of interaction among its members. On the other end, the community model allows for high task interdependence, decentralized control and a high level of interaction among its members. We then locate ten cases discussed in the literature within this continuum and assess the implications of conceptually differentiating between crowds and communities for open innovation processes. We conclude that the innovation potential of the community model is greater than that of the crowd model, while being associated with a greater loss of control.
In this paper we examine the role of different material artefacts in the exploration of novel strategic topics. We conceptualize strategic topics as epistemic objects that become instantiated in multiple material artefacts, i.e. partial objects, which not only represent the epistemic object but also energize and direct the exploration process. Based on a longitudinal case study of a company that (in collaboration with other companies) explored the strategic topic of ‘flexible production’, we develop a new typology of material artefacts in terms of their relation to the strategic topic. We describe the layered nature of materiality, differentiating between different types of objectual and non-objectual material artefacts, and show how their interplay shapes the dynamics of the strategizing process. In particular, we explain how the constellation of material artefacts can lead to a shift of the strategic topic itself. We offer a conceptual model that captures the mechanisms in the dynamic interplay of different types of material artefacts and their effect on the process of exploration.
The increasing adoption of more open approaches to innovation fits uneasily with current theories of business strategy. Traditional business strategy has guided firms to develop defensible positions against the forces of competition and power in the value chain, implying the importance of constructing barriers rather than promoting value creation through openness. Recently, however, firms and even whole industries, such as the software industry, are experimenting with novel business models based on harnessing collective creativity through open innovation. The apparent success of some of these experiments challenges prevailing views of strategy. At the same time, many of these experimenters now are grappling with issues related to value capture and sustainability of their business models, as well as issues of corporate influence and the potential co-option of open initiatives. These issues bring us back to traditional business strategy, which can offer important insights. To make strategic sense of innovation communities, ecosystems, networks, and their implications for competitive advantage, a new approach to strategy—open strategy—is needed. Open strategy balances the tenets of traditional business strategy with the promise of open innovation.
This article proposes a framework to address a central conundrum in strategic management: How can firms transcend the trade-off between the momentum that results from the strong strategic commitments needed to gain industry leadership with the need for strategic agility in the face of strategic discontinuities? The article develops an analysis of the meta-capabilities underlying strategic agility, which is clustered around strategic sensitivity (both the sharpness of perception and the intensity of awareness and attention), resource fluidity (the internal capability to reconfigure business systems and redeploy resources rapidly), and leadership unity (the ability of the top team to make bold decisions fast, without getting bogged down in "win-lose" politics at the top). Based on an in-depth study of Nokia's evolution over the past twenty years, this article shows how these three meta-capabilities interact over time and proposes a framework to enable a firm to maintain and regain strategic agility as it matures.
Research on strategizing focuses primarily on intra-organizational settings at the expense of external contributors. Against this background that this exploratory case study elucidates how strategy is practiced in the case of the Wikimedia organization in a collaborative fashion by literally inviting thousands of globally dispersed volunteers to contribute to strategy making. Hereby we complement existing strategy-as-practice approaches by reaching beyond organizational boundaries, including organized publics. We identify a sequence of practices enabling a genuinely collaborative strategy process. Finally, we call for recognizing the socio-materiality of practices for strategizing as is evidenced by the importance of technology for organizing organized publics.
In this article, based on data collected through interviews and a workshop, the benefits and adoption barriers for open data have been derived. The results suggest that a conceptually simplistic view is often adopted with regard to open data, which automatically correlates the publicizing of data with use and benefits. Also, five “myths” concerning open data are presented, which place the expectations within a realistic perspective. Further, the recommendation is provided that such projects should take a user's view.
Strategy-as-practice and neo-institutionalism offer alternative approaches to studying organizations. In this essay, we examine the foundational assumptions and methods of these perspectives, unveiling different ways in which they could complement each other. In particular, we elaborate three areas of overlap: a focus on what actors actually do, their shared cognitions, and the role of language in creating shared meanings. We show how the two perspectives can inform each other and offer significant learning to organization studies more broadly.
Argues that the formal structure of many organizations in post-industrial society dramatically reflect the myths of their institutional environment instead of the demands of their work activities. The authors review prevailing theories of the origins of formal structures and the main problem which those theories confront -- namely, that their assumption that successful coordination and control of activity are responsible for the rise of modern formal organization is not substantiated by empirical evidence. Rather, there is a great gap between the formal structure and the informal practices that govern actual work activities. The authors present an alternative source for formal structures by suggesting that myths embedded in the institutional environment help to explain the adoption of formal structures. Earlier sources understood bureaucratization as emanating from the rationalization of the workplace. Nevertheless, the observation that some formal practices are not followed in favor of other unofficial ones indicates that not all formal structures advance efficiency as a rationalized system would require. Therefore another source of legitimacy is required. This is found in conforming the organization's structure to that of the powerful myths that institutionalized products, services, techniques, policies, and programs become. (CAR)
In the wake of progressive globalization and accelerating speed of change, corporations are increasingly faced with so-called meta-problems, whose complexity tends to outstrip the sensemaking capacities of individual organizations. As a response to that, organizations are increasingly engaging in inter-organizational sensemaking activities in order to develop a collective understanding of these meta-problems to inform their intra-organizational attempts at dealing with them. In this paper, we propose to conceptualize such inter-organizational strategizing processes as scaffolding of sensemaking capacities. Based on a longitudinal case study of a multi-sector industry initiative concerned with the meta-problem of water as an environmental resource constraint, we explore the different practices and patterns in which individual organizations extend their respective sensemaking capacities. We identify three categories of extension practices (scaffolding practices, conduct practices, transfer practices) and three patterns of extension (extension for triggering sensemaking, complementary extension, selective extension). Overall, we contribute to the literature on strategy-as-practice, the wider sensemaking literature and the literature on inter-organizational strategy.
Social software challenges strategic thinking in important ways: empowering creative, independent individuals implies indeterminate and uncertain reactions and creations in support of, or in opposition to, management's original thinking. We build a framework that organizes research on social software, taking perspectives from both inside and outside companies. We use this framework to introduce the contributions to this special issue in terms of strategy, technology, and community and to ask a series of questions for strategy research that pays particular attention to value creation and appropriation, the role of technology both as tool and mediator between managers and users, and the role that management can play in communities, both as leaders and in shaping boundaries.
This paper adopts a view of organizations as complex adaptive systems and makes a case for making organizations more complex internally through the use of a fairly simple managerial rule - using participative decision making. Participation in decision making enhances connectivity in organizations, which in turn, gives the organization the opportunity to self-organize and co-evolve in more effective ways than when there is minimal connectivity (i.e., autocracy). The paper uses a specific body of research to support the arguments about why participation can benefit the practice of management in modern organizations.
Prior academic research attests to both positive and negative effects of involvement on the process of developing strategy. On the one hand, it has been argued that involvement strengthens shared vision, increases rationality and improves adaptiveness in strategy-making. On the other hand, involvement is said to lead to intense political behaviour, increased cultural inertia and more constraints in the strategy process. The purpose of this study i