Reversal of Strategic Change

When planned change is cancelled, managers may be tempted to reverse their organization’s strategy. Our longitudinal case study documents a cancelled merger effort and a failed attempt to return to the organization’s widely accepted pre-merger strategy. We trace the failure to contradictions in symbolic change management. The phenomenon of change reversal draws attention to the historical continuity of sensemaking and raises caution about the popular view that managers need to destroy organizational meaning in order to facilitate the realization of strategic change

Explorative and exploitative learning from external corporate ventures

This study examines the antecedents of explorative and exploitative learning of technological knowledge from external corporate ventures. We compare different forms of external corporate venturing, namely corporate venture capital investments, alliances, joint ventures, and acquisitions, as alternative avenues for interorganizational learning. Furthermore, we test the effects of multiple relational characteristics on the type of learning outcomes. Our empirical analysis is based on citations in patents filed by a sample of 110 largest U.S. public information and communications technology companies during the years 1992–2000. We find that corporate venturing mode and technological relatedness have significant effects on the likelihood of explorative learning