Clues, cues and complexity: unpackuing the concept of organizational surprise

We discuss why surprises, defined as events that happen unexpectedly or expected events that take unexpected shapes, are important to organizations and should be considered in the organizational literature. The concept of organizational surprises is unpacked on the basis of a typology built around the (un)expectedeness of issue and process. This typology uncovers the several types of surprising events that organizations may face, and contributes to the literature by suggesting that different surprises require distinct approaches.

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

STRUCTURING FOR GLOCALIZATION: THE MINIMAL NETWORK

Globalization and localization seem to be opposite concepts – a thesis and its antithesis. Nonetheless, managers seem to be able to handle the paradox posed by these two contradicting tensions by enacting, via action, a synthesis that allows for the co-presence of a high level of global integration and local adaptation (instead of a compromise between both), which has been labeled glocalization. We discuss how the concept of improvisation allows this synthesis by developing the two poles that ground it, namely ‘glocal’ strategy and ‘glocal’ organization. Global advantage requires a dialectical capability that organizations rarely achieve, and the importance of which orthodox management theory rarely recognizes. JEL codes:

Organization Theory in Business and Management History:Present Status and Future Prospects

A common lament is that business history has been marginalized within mainstream business and management research. We propose that remedy lies in part with more extensive engagement with organization theory. We illustrate our argument by exploring the potentialities for business history of three cognitive frameworks: institutional entrepreneurship, evolutionary theory and Bourdieusian social theory. Exhibiting a higher level of theoretical fluency might enable business historians to accrue scholarly capital within the business and management field by producing theoretically informed historical discourse; demonstrating the potential of business history to extend theory, generate constructs and elucidate complexities in unfolding relationships, situations and events

Speak! paradoxical effects of a managerial culture of ‘speaking up’

We explore the intrinsic ambiguity of speaking up in a multinational healthcare subsidiary A culture change initiative, emphasizing learning and agility through encouraging employees to speak up, gave rise to paradoxical effects. Some employees interpreted a managerial tool for improving effectiveness as an invitation to raise challenging points of difference rather than as something ‘beneficial for the organization’.We show that the process of introducing a culture that aims to encourage employees to speak up can produce tensions and contradictions that make various types of organizational paradoxes salient Telling people to ‘speak up!’ may render paradoxical tensions salient and even foster a sense of low PsySafe.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Fully embracing the paradoxical condition: Banksy to organization theory

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Vita contemplativa: a life in part

Life, art and science are irremediably intertwined: how, where and with whom one shares the brief moments of existence necessarily affect what one thinks, how one writes, and what one will address. Being a scholar is a vocation, as Weber knew only too well, in which science, ethics and art blend; sometimes seamlessly, sometimes not. None who live an intellectual and public life are immune to the normal glosses of the sociology of knowledge and this paper provides glimpses, through a personal lens, of what such a gloss might see. It is a glimpse of a life still living and lived; an artist still at work, an agenda still being developed, frozen like a snapshot of an instant - and just as representative. Can a snapshot capture an essence? Sometimes. Whether this does is left to others to judge. Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications

Involving, countering, and overlooking stakeholder networks in soft regulation : case study of small-to-medium-sized enterprise's implementation of SA8000

To achieve effective stakeholder governance in the context of international social accountability certification (SA8000) requires constructing a network of agreement. In a case study of a small-to-medium-sized enterprise (SME), we examine managers’ attempts at enrolling participants in the supply chain to investigate how they strive to engage these stakeholders. We adopt actor-network theory (ANT) and sensemaking theory to develop a novel approach to understanding social accountability (SA) standards’ certification in stakeholder networks. We argue that the design and operation of any SA standard across a network requires not only attempts at enrolling other participants in the supply chain but management contextualizing and problematizing the terms of their involvement

Paradoxes of organizational change in a merger context

PurposeThe reorganization of the Portuguese national healthcare system around networks of hospital centers was advanced for reasons promoted as those of effectiveness and efficiency and initially presented as an opportunity for organizational transcendence through synergy. The purpose of this paper is to study transcendence as felt by the authors’ participants to create knowledge about the process.Design/methodology/approachThe paper consists of an inductive approach aimed at exploring the lived experience of transcendence. The authors collected data via interviews, observations, informal conversations and archival data, in order and followed the logic of grounded theory to build theory on transcendence as process.FindingsTranscendence, however, failed to deliver its promise; consequently, the positive vision inscribed in it was subsequently re-inscribed in the system as another lost opportunity, contributing to an already unfolding vicious circle of mistrust and cynicism. The study contributes to the literature on organizational paradoxes and its effects on the reproduction of vicious circles.Practical implicationsThe search for efficiency and effectiveness through strategies of transcendence often entails managing paradoxical tensions.Social implicationsThe case was researched during the global financial crisis, which as austerity gripped the southern Eurozone gave rise to governmental decisions aimed at improving the efficiency of organizational healthcare resources. There was a sequence of advances and retreats in decision making at the governmental level that gave rise to mistrust and cynicism at operational levels (organizations, teams and individuals). One consequence of increasing cynicism at lower levels was that as further direction for change came from higher levels it became interpreted in practice as just another turn in a vicious circle of failed reform.Originality/valueThe authors contribute to the organizational literature on paradoxes by empirically researching a themes that has been well theorized (Smith and Lewis, 2011) but less researched empirically. The authors followed the processin vivo, as it unfolded in the context of complex strategic change at multiple centers.</jats:sec