Organizational Ambidexterity: Antecedents, Outcomes, and Moderators

Sensemaking is the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some other way violate expectations. As an activity central to organizing, sensemaking has been the subject of considerable research which has intensified over the last decade. We begin this review with a historical overview of the field, and develop a definition of sensemaking rooted in recurrent themes from the literature. We then review and integrate existing theory and research, focusing on two key bodies of work. The first explores how sensemaking is accomplished, unpacking the sensemaking process by examining how events become triggers for sensemaking, how intersubjective meaning is created, and the role of action in sensemaking. The second body considers how sensemaking enables the accomplishment of other key organizational processes, such organizational change, learning, and creativity and innovation. The final part of the chapter draws on areas of difference and debate h...

Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward

While the strategy-as-practice research agenda has gained considerable momentum over the past five years, many challenges still remain in developing it into a robust field of research. In this editorial, we define the study of strategy from a practice perspective and propose five main questions that the strategy-as-practice agenda seeks to address. We argue that a coherent approach to answering these questions may be facilitated using an overarching conceptual framework of praxis, practices and practitioners. This framework is used to explain the key challenges underlying the strategy-as-practice agenda and how they may be examined empirically. In discussing these challenges, we refer to the contributions made by existing empirical research and highlight under-explored areas that will provide fruitful avenues for future research. The editorial concludes by introducing the articles in the special issue.

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Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective

/pdf/engaged-scholarship-a-guide-for-organizational-and-social-1od3lo0196.pdf

Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research

This review maps and critically evaluates the rapidly growing body of research in the strategy-as-practice field. Following an introduction on the emergence and foundations of strategy-as-practice, the review is structured in three main parts, based on the terminology, issues and research agendas outlined in the field. First, the paper examines the concepts of practitioners and praxis. A typology of nine possible domains for strategy-as-practice research is developed, based on the way that different studies conceptualize the strategy practitioner and the level of strategy praxis that they aim to explain. Second, the paper reviews the concept of practices, which has been adopted widely but inconsistently within the strategy-as-practice literature. While there is no dominant view on practices, the review maps the various concepts of practices that inform the strategy-as-practice field and outlines avenues for future research. The final section attends to the call for strategy-as-practice research to develop and substantiate outcomes that may better explain or inform strategy praxis. Five categories of outcomes are found within existing empirical studies, and an agenda for building upon this evidence is advanced. The paper concludes with a summation of the current state of the field and some recommendations on how to take strategy-as-practice research forward.

/pdf/strategy-as-practice-a-review-and-future-directions-for-the-3qnp9xese7.pdf

Strategy‐as‐practice: A review and future directions for the field

In this conceptual paper we examine how organizations can develop capacity for change, which we define as the allocation and development of change and operational capabilities that sustains long term performance. Making change happen without destroying well-functioning aspects in an organization and harming subsequent changes requires both capabilities to change in the short and long term and capabilities to maintain daily operations. The change literature includes a number of process prescriptions on how change can be mobilized such as, framing, participation, pacing, and sequencing, routinizing change, and recruiting. We examine how these process prescriptions contribute in developing an organization's (1) capabilities to change, (2) capabilities to maintain daily operations and (3) capabilities to implement subsequent change processes. While participation, pacing and sequencing are likely to have adverse effects on daily operations, routinizing change and recruiting personnel are likely to hav...

Developing capacity for change

“Change or perish” has become a corporate mantra (Abrahamson, 2000). What happens when change becomes excessive? We define excessive change as when organizations pursue several seemingly unrelated and perhaps conflicting changes simultaneously, or when organizations introduce new changes before previous changes have been completed. When change is perceived as excessive, organizational members react in various ways. In this paper we draw on existing literature in strategy and management to theoretically develop the phenomenon of excessive change, ways of coping with excessive change, and organizational consequences of excessive change. Implications include how excessive change can be managed as well as suggestions for future research.

When change becomes excessive

This chapter presents trailing research (TR) as an approach for studying organization change in real time. I argue that TR can contribute in bridging the practitioner-scholar divide as well as generating methodologically rigorous, theoretically strong, and practically relevant research. I contrast the method with more traditional ways of researching change, such as positivistic research and action research and discuss various phases of the research process by drawing on my own experience with TR. While the objectives of the research are more similar to action research, the role of the researcher differs from both action research and positivistic research.

Methods for Tracking and Trailing Change

In the “Effects of Change Interventions: What Kind of Evidence Do We Really Have?” Barends, Janssen, ten Have, and ten Have make several assertions about the state of organizational change management (OCM) research. Doing so, they alert us to the essence of a previously acknowledged problem in change research—that measuring change interventions is difficult (see Woodman, Bingham, & Yuan, 2008) and is fraught with challenges and constraints when it is done anyway (see Schwarz, 2012). In a similar vein, Woodman and Wayne (1985) highlight the rich history of debate on the lack of rigor and methodological dilemmas in evaluation research, which Burke (2011) explicitly concedes as often based on misleading assumptions about its measurement. Clearly, the state of OCM scholarly research is widely debated and problematized. Although we agree that it is important to evaluate critically the OCM field in terms of progress and evidence, we assert that Barends et al.’s argument is based on several errors, three of which stand out. They (a) adopt a weak categorization of progress, (b) present a narrowed range of what is evidence, and (c) unduly filter their perspective on OCM research. Our commentary addresses each of these errors. In focusing on how we research, the Barends et al. thesis misses a fundamental issue—of recognizing what is progress in OCM research. Progress is a multifaceted entity, and as Pollard (1968) pointed out, although it is portrayed as a belief “that things will in some sense get better in the future . . .it has never been limited to this simple idea of melioration” (p. 9). Yet it is precisely this variation that Barends et al. overlook in making their argument. They do so by adopting a narrow and isolating account of change assessment. In this context, and as a postscript to the article’s conclusions, progress in assessing OCM research and evaluations of how well OCM practices work are two separate issues (which they conflate in their argument).

Progress in Evidence: You Can’t Always Get What You Want

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