Toward a relational concept of uncertainty: about knowing too little, knowing too differently, and accepting not to know

Uncertainty of late has become an increasingly important and controversial topic in water resource management, and natural resources management in general. Diverse managing goals, changing environmental conditions, conflicting interests, and lack of predictability are some of the characteristics that decision makers have to face. This has resulted in the application and development of strategies such as adaptive management, which proposes flexibility and capability to adapt to unknown conditions as a way of dealing with uncertainties. However, this shift in ideas about managing has not always been accompanied by a general shift in the way uncertainties are understood and handled. To improve this situation, we believe it is necessary to recontextualize uncertainty in a broader way¿relative to its role, meaning, and relationship with participants in decision making¿because it is from this understanding that problems and solutions emerge. Under this view, solutions do not exclusively consist of eliminating or reducing uncertainty, but of reframing the problems as such so that they convey a different meaning. To this end, we propose a relational approach to uncertainty analysis. Here, we elaborate on this new conceptualization of uncertainty, and indicate some implications of this view for strategies for dealing with uncertainty in water management. We present an example as an illustration of these concepts. Key words: adaptive management; ambiguity; frames; framing; knowledge relationship; multiple knowledge frames; natural resource management; negotiation; participation; social learning; uncertainty; water managemen

Active Learning: Effects of Core Training Design Elements on Self-Regulatory Processes, Learning, and Adaptability

This research describes a comprehensive examination of the cognitive, motivational, and emotional processes underlying active learning approaches, their effects on learning and transfer, and the core training design elements (exploration, training frame, emotion-control) and individual differences (cognitive ability, trait goal orientation, trait anxiety) that shape these processes. Participants (N = 350) were trained to operate a complex computer-based simulation. Exploratory learning and error-encouragement framing had a positive effect on adaptive transfer performance and interacted with cognitive ability and dispositional goal orientation to influence trainees’ metacognition and state goal orientation. Trainees who received the emotion-control strategy had lower levels of state anxiety. Implications for developing an integrated theory of active learning, learner-centered design, and research extensions are discussed

Inconsistent and Incongruent Frames During IT-enabled Change: An Action Research Study into Sales Process Innovation

Integrating research on the social construction of technology and social cognitive processes in organizations, technology frame of reference (TFR) theory has helped researchers investigate how stakeholder groups perceive information systems practices and opportunities, how these perceptions shift over time, and, how stakeholders may impact or leverage them to facilitate change. Such insights are particularly important in dynamic environments where individuals, groups, and organizations face a constant challenge to make sense of and respond to how industries undergo change, information technologies (IT) evolve, and new opportunities to transform processes and products emerge. Still, although extant research provides detailed accounts of TFR dynamics between groups, we know little about TFR dynamics in groups and about how intra- and inter-group TFRs interact during IT-enabled change. Accordingly, we report on an action research project in which we relied on TFR theory to assist organizational innovators in a rapidly growing mobile phone company, VoiceTech, during a sales force automation (SFA) project. Consistent with current TFR studies, our analyses reveal how the SFA project implicated frame incongruences between different stakeholder groups. In addition, our analyses reveal important inconsistencies in how individual groups framed the SFA project and consequential interactions between the observed inconsistencies and incongruences over time. Based on these findings, we argue that inconsistencies and incongruences in stakeholders’ technological frames play equally important but quite distinct and interacting roles during IT-enabled change. As a result, we extend current TFR theory with a nuanced account of how IT-enabled change efforts implicate these two fundamental characteristics of framing processes. In conclusion, we discuss the empirical and theoretical contributions to TFR theory and highlight implications for future research and for the management of IT-enabled change in dynamic contexts

Inertia and Incentives: Bridging Organizational Economics and Organizational Theory

Organizational theorists have long acknowledged the importance of the formal and informal incentives facing a firm%u2019s employees, stressing that the political economy of a firm plays a major role in shaping organizational life and firm behavior. Yet the detailed study of incentive systems has traditionally been left in the hands of (organizational) economists, with most organizational theorists focusing their attention on critical problems in culture, network structure, framing and so on -- in essence, the social context in which economics and incentive systems are embedded. We argue that this separation of domains is problematic. The economics literature, for example, is unable to explain why organizations should find it difficult to change incentive structures in the face of environmental change, while the organizational literature focuses heavily on the role of inertia as sources of organizational rigidity. Drawing on recent research on incentives in organizational economics and on cognition in organizational theory, we build a framework for the analysis of incentives that highlights the ways in which incentives and cognition -- while being analytically distinct concepts -- are phenomenologically deeply intertwined. We suggest that incentives and cognition coevolve so that organizational competencies or routines are as much about building knowledge of %u201Cwhat should be rewarded%u201D as they are about %u201Cwhat should be done.%u201D

Critical Review of Organization-Technology Sensemaking: Towards Technology Materiality, Discovery and Action

More than two decades of sensemaking research has brought thorough knowledge of how people understand organisational phenomena and attach meaning to them. This stream of research explores varied social and cognitive aspects of the process in the context of organisations and information technology (IT). However, such a large body of literature exhibits some significant shortcomings: there is a lack of IT materiality; a neglect of the discovery aspect of perception; and a lack of action orientation. So, there is limited understanding of the role that the material artefact plays in shaping users’ sensemaking of new IT, as well as how users’ actions affect their sensemaking. Moreover, while the literature mostly focuses on sensemaking as the creation of new meanings to rationalise user experiences, it neglects the discovery aspect of sensemaking that refers to perception of the meaning already available. To address these issues, this article provides a thorough review of the literature on organisation-technology sensemaking and synthesises our current understanding of the phenomenon. It then analyses the major shortcomings in our knowledge and highlights the need to address those shortcomings. It subsequently discusses an ecological approach consistent with the tenets of critical realism that can address some of the existing shortcomings

Legitimacy, Interest Group Pressures and Change in Emergent Institutions: The Case of Foreign Investors and Host Country Governments

We offer a simple model of policymaking emphasizing socialization and limits on human cognition to explicate mechanisms of change in emergent (as opposed to established) institutions. Emergent institutions are more susceptible to change, and their opponents may use frames or existing reference points to illustrate inconsistency with prevailing notions of legitimacy. Broader institutional structures and specific organizational characteristics moderate pressure for change. This perspective has novel implications for strategy and policy design.

Individual and Organizational Celebrity: Two Essays on Media Attributions and Organizational Agency

Organizational researchers are increasingly interested in how organizations are perceived by their constituents, because such perceptions have important implications for strategy formulation, strategy implementation and organizational outcomes. In this two-essay dissertation, I focus on a specific type of social approval asset, celebrity – the extent to which a social actor attains high levels of public attention and elicits positive emotional responses. Specifically, I examine how celebrity emerges at different organizational levels. In Essay 1, I first develop a theoretical multilevel framework of business celebrity, building on agenda setting theory and framing theory. Second, I propose a typology of business celebrity based on the different types of media narratives that foster its creations at different organizational levels. Third, I develop a set of theoretically driven propositions to examine contingency factors under which specific types of media causal attributions are more likely to emerge. In Essay 2, I empirically test under what conditions celebrity is more likely to emerge at the CEO or organizational level. On a sample of U.S. firms and CEOs from the Fortune 500 and the Unicorns lists, I investigate the role of organizational competitive actions, temporal information and communication materials in determining the development of celebrity at different organizational levels. Taken together the two essays examine the media attributional processes behind the development of individual and organizational celebrity. Specifically, this dissertation proposes theoretical arguments and empirical tests to suggest that individual and organizational celebrity emerge as journalists develop causal attributions about business events, and imprint those attributions in their reporting about organizational life. Moreover, the development of individual and organizational celebrity can be characterized as a frame dispute affected by not only the media understanding of specific events, but also by the agency exerted by organizations and their members in promoting specific interpretative frames, through communication materials

Thinking the unthinkable: managerialization of work related suicides as a framing process.

Managerialism has been studied in many ways, including diffusion of management techniques notably in public sectors, management ideology or the colonization of everyday life by management thought. However, the process leading to managerialism, namely managerialization, has been largely unexplored in this literature. This article draws upon framing theory to better understand managerialization processes. The article offers two case studies that investigate following theoretical assumptions: (1) managerialization acts as a framing process on every kind of issue; (2) managerialization has framing process characteristics. Two frame analysis based on newspaper articles about work related suicide show that one of the identified frames has strong managerial characteristics and suggest that managerialization took place as a set of framing processes. Taken together, these studies provide insight to characterize the process of managerialization. Research implications and limitations are discussed in order to highlight directions for futher researchs.Work related suicide; Framing process; Frame analysis; Managerialism; Managerialization;