Action-Structure Paradox in a Strategic Information System Change Process

Any strategic Information System (IS) change process is at risk of a failure because of its inability to evolve as rapidly as the business environment. In this Grounded Theory study, aspects of socio-cognitive inertia arose in a 15-year customer-vendor relationship involving excessive optimism and trust in decision-making about technological options, knowledge sharing, and development practices. The pre-existing collaboration model was ultimately not supportive of the targeted strategic IS change. As a result, pressures to change the mode of operating emerged at the critical phase of initial rollout. This paper contributes to the IS change literature by presenting and theorizing an action-structure paradox identified during this study of strategic IS change

Dynamic capabilities, creative action and poetics

Research on dynamic capabilities explores how businesses change enables enterprises to remain competitive. However, theory on dynamic capabilities still struggles to capture novelty, the essence of change. This study argues that a full understanding of strategic change requires us to sharpen our focus on real people and experiences; in turn, we must incorporate other faculties, which almost always operate alongside our logical ones, into our theory. We must pay more attention to the "non-rational" sides of ourselves-including, but not limited to, our imaginations, intuitions, attractions, biographies, preferences, and aesthetic faculties and capabilities. We argue that all such faculties, on the one hand, are central to our abilities to comprehend and cope with complexity and, on the other hand, foster novel understandings, potential responses, and social creativity. This study introduces the possibility of an alternative form of inquiry that highlights the role of poetic faculties in strategic behavior and change

Introducing conflict as the microfoundation of organizational ambidexterity

This article contributes to our understanding of organizational ambidexterity by introducing conflict as its microfoundation. Existing research distinguishes between three approaches to how organizations can be ambidextrous, that is, engage in both exploitation and exploration. They may sequentially shift the strategic focus of the organization over time, they may establish structural arrangements enabling the simultaneous pursuit of being both exploitative and explorative, or they may provide a supportive organizational context for ambidextrous behavior. However, we know little about how exactly ambidexterity is accomplished and managed. We argue that ambidexterity is a dynamic and conflict-laden phenomenon, and we locate conflict at the level of individuals, units, and organizations. We develop the argument that conflicts in social interaction serve as the microfoundation to organizing ambidexterity, but that their function and type vary across the different approaches toward ambidexterity. The perspective developed in this article opens up promising research avenues to examine how organizations purposefully manage ambidexterity

Management: thesis, antithesis, synthesis

Increasingly, managers live in a world of paradox. For instance, they are told that they must manage by surrendering control and that they must stay on top by continuing to learn, thus admitting that they do not fully know what they do. Paradox is becoming increasingly pervasive in and around organizations, increasing the need for an approach to management that allows both researchers and practitioners to address these paradoxes. A synthesis is required between such contradictory forces as efficiency and effectiveness, planning and action, and structure and freedom. A dialectical view of strategy and organizations, built from four identifiable principles of simultaneity, locality, minimality and generality, enables us to build the tools to achieve such synthesis. Put together, these principles offer new perspectives for researchers to look at management phenomena and provide practitioners with a means of addressing the increasingly paradoxical world that they confront.dialectics, improvisation, paradox, synthesis

An analysis of schema change intervention

Successful organizational transformation relies on being able to achieve paradigm or collective schema change, and more particularly, the ability to manage the interplay between pre-existing schemas and alternative schemas required for new environments. This conceptual paper presents an analysis and critique of collective schema change dynamics. Two schema change pathways are reflected in the literature: frame-juxtapose-transition and frame-disengage-learning. Research findings in each pathway are limited and/or contradictory. Moreover, research on schema change focuses primarily on social dynamics and less on the relationship between social schema change dynamics and individual schema change dynamics. One implication of this lack of focus on individual schema change dynamics is the masking of the high level of cognitive processing and cognitive effort required by individuals to effect schema change. The capacity to achieve organizational transformation requires that more attention is given to managing these dynamics, which, in turn, requires significant investment in developing the change leadership capabilities of managers and the organizations they manage

Making sense of strategy: A social systems perspective

strategy, social systems perspective

Co-Creation: The Public Sector Perspective

This article continues to explore the partnership between the State of Connecticut, the Connecticut Early Childhood Funder Collaborative, and the Connecticut Council for Philanthropy. These three entities have been working to coordinate their efforts toward a shared goal of establishing a statewide early childhood system, reducing the fragmented array of Connecticut's existing early childhood services and supports, and improving outcomes for young children and their families across the State.Independently and collectively, each partner continues to adopt new processes and working structures that enable the voluntary contribution of their diverse skills, expertise, and resources to create a new approach to early childhood in Connecticut. While clearly not the only constituencies working to improve outcomes for children and families throughout the state, this partnership between the public sector and the philanthropic community has resulted in important transformations within all entities involved. This paper highlights the role of the public sector within this public-private partnership, and, more specifically, the experience and perspectives of those working within state government

Toward a Process Theory of Making Sustainability Strategies Legitimate in Action

We draw on a three-year qualitative study of the processual dynamics of implementing a sustainability strategy alongside an existing mainstream competitive strategy. We show that despite the legitimacy of the sustainability strategy at the organizational level, actors experience tensions with its implementation at the action level vis-à-vis the mainstream strategy, thus creating the potential for decoupling. Our findings show that working through these tensions on specific tasks, enables actors to legitimate the sustainability strategy in action and to co-enact it with the mainstream strategy within those tasks. Cumulatively, multiple instances of such co-enactment at the action level reinforce the organizational-level legitimacy of the sustainability strategy and its integration with the mainstream strategy. We draw these findings together into a dynamic process model that contributes to the literature on integration of dual strategies at the action and organizational levels as a process of legitimacy making

Management as a Symbolizing Construction?

In this article, we outline the concept of management as a symbolizing construction. According to Niklas LUHMANN, organizations process by referring to decisions. But decisions are not simply "given" and in principle invisible. This is the reason why organizations institute formalities like protocols, signatures or other insignia of the official that symbolize the decision—without actually being a decision. These symbols allow for making decisions "process-able." And just like a protocol or a signature, management symbolizes decisions as well. Management provides an organizational practice with symbols of decision making without being the "unity" of the decisions, as decisions perpetually have to be reconstructed, redefined and rearranged in the communication of all organizational units. Therefore management symbolizes on the one hand more than it can achieve. On the other hand the importance of management as a symbolizing construction lies in allowing the reconstruction, redefining and rearrangement of decisions by making them visible and recognizable. Heroic managers, meetings, management tools and procedures are solutions to the paradox of decision making. By symbolizing decidedness they create credibilities that conceal the self-referential construction of organizational communication and the paradox of its decision praxis

Common Knowledge and Interactive Behaviors: A Survey

This paper surveys the notion of common knowledge taken from game theory and computer science. It studies and illustrates more generally the effects of interactive knowledge in economic and social problems. First of all, common knowledge is shown to be a central concept and often a necessary condition for coordination, equilibrium achievement, agreement, and consensus. We present how common knowledge can be practically generated, for example, by particular advertisements or leadership. Secondly, we prove that common knowledge can be harmful, essentially in various cooperation and negotiation problems, and more generally when there are con icts of interest. Finally, in some asymmetric relationships, common knowledge is shown to be preferable for some players, but not for all. The ambiguous welfare effects of higher-order knowledge on interactive behaviors leads us to analyze the role of decentralized communication in order to deal with dynamic or endogenous information structures.Interactive knowledge, common knowledge, information structure, communication.