Suchergebnisse

WITH THE OBJECTIVE OF IMPROVING POLICY MAKING, EFFORTS HAVE RECENTLY INTENSIFIED TO INTEGRATE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, COST-EFFECTIVENESS ANALYSIS, AND RELATED DISCIPLINES INTO AN EVOLVING FIELD THAT HAS BEEN TERMED "POLICY SCIENCES." THE PAPER DISCUSSES AN APPROACH, CALLED SITUATIONAL NORMATIVISM, BY WHICH THE COMPONENTS OF POLICY SCIENCES MAY BE PUT TO WORK EFFECTIVELY ON REAL DECISION PROBLEMS.

This special issue originated with the 1996 Organization Science Winter Conference (OSWC), which set out to explore the implications of the science of complexity for the field of organization studies. Following the OSWC, a formal program organized by the Organization Science section of INFORMS took place in Atlanta. The vast potential for complexity theory to inform and transform research in organization studies became evident from the discussions of 22 papers that were presented at that meeting. In response to the call for papers issued after the Atlanta meeting, 56 papers were submitted to Organization Science, of which seven make up this issue. Interest in complexity has grown dramatically since the 1996 OSWC first explored this idea. The purpose of this special issue is not to declare that a new era in organization studies and strategic management is at hand, but to explore the boundaries and links between the science of complexity—with its origin in evolution and biology—and the field of strategy and organization. The issue explores the implications of complexity research for organization studies in the context of new ways of modeling dynamic, nonlinear complex systems for advancing theoretical and empirical research in organization studies (e.g., theorizing within coevolutionary frameworks, decomposition of nested phenomena, multidirectional causalities).

The 1996 annual report of the LEGO Corporation featured the top management team decked out as a jazz ensemble with the CEO, Kjeld Møller Pedersen, playing the saxophone. The CEO of LEGO used the occasion to highlight his belief and expectation that improvisation is an art form that needs to become the hallmark of all levels of management, beginning at the top.

Hitotsubashi University and Organization Science cosponsored a conf erence on Asian Research in Organizations, which was held on the Hitotsubashi campus on October 19–22, 1995. Thirty papers were invited for presentation, out of more than 70 that were originally proposed. The conference was run in a format designed to maximize feedback to authors as a way to speed up and intensify the developmental process of each paper. The objective of the conference was to identify and develop papers for a special issue of Organization Science featuring Asian Research in Organizations.

The Management Organization Review 'Forum on Resilience' was kicked off by the editors' perspective on the lingering new normal (Välikangas & Lewin, 2020). We conclude the forum by reflecting on the persisting – perhaps hopeful, perhaps disturbing – take-aways. Not surprisingly, some companies have demonstrated resilience capabilities in quickly seizing opportunities even when faced with what initially looked like the end of business. Such determined agility represented, for example, improvising an emergent-opportunity-fitting strategy or it may have been manifested by government action (e.g., China, New Zealand, and Finland). Most famously, Zoom, the by-now ubiquitous video communications company, benefited from being in the right place at the right time, but also effectively dealt with issues such as 'zoom bombing', a security breach, including an upgrade of its encryption. Such successful growth strategy requires being ready for an opportunity. But the backward-looking depiction of successes also highlights the absence of a developed science of organization design underlying resilience and management practices (Lewin & Välikangas, 2020). In addition, building cognitive and stakeholder preparedness, as Zhang, Dong, and Yi (2020) and Liu and Yin (2020) point out, may be important, as well as considering leadership implications discussed by Giustiniano, Cunha, Simpson, Rego, and Clegg (2020) in the context of coping with the paradoxes unleashed by resilience. Emergency management systems become sorely tested (Cai & Ye, 2020). Do we have a new buzzword for uncertain times (Cai, 2020) or something to learn from that will help in coping with future crises or understanding the renaissance of resilience? Some themes rise above others.

In this paper, we set out to investigate whether strategic leadership matters at a moment in the life cycle of the firm when a change is made in the top leadership. By far, most of the conceptual and empirical literature on the consequences of CEO succession involves United States companies. Therefore, in this paper, we set out to investigate the impact of CEO succession on strategic and organizational changes in Japanese companies.The empirical study consisted of a matched control group design involving 81 Japanese companies experiencing a CEO succession event and 81 companies with continuity of their CEO leadership. The results of the study can be summarized as follows. Overall CEO succession was not associated with radical strategic and organization changes. Japanese companies did engage in evolutionary organization and strategic adaptations during the five year period of the study but independent of CEO succession. The governance structure moderates organization changes (independent of CEO succession) in particular when the firm was affiliated with a main bank and the firm was experiencing severe financial pressure.

This perspective paper addresses the issues of rigor and relevance in organizational studies in the context of idea migration and journal evolution. We argue that creeping parochialism can happen to any journal, which reflects an evolving narrowness within boundaries of academic subcommunities. Evidence suggests that ideas do migrate across academic subcommunities, although the underlying process is not well understood and the idea flow is not symmetrical. Two kinds of knowledge relevance are discussed—the value for end users such as managers in organizations, and the value for one's own or other academic subcommunities. We argue that the most important mission of Organization Science (OS) is to be a "source" journal for academic subcommunities in organization studies by attracting and publishing new theories and ideas that increase the varieties of knowledge about organizations.

This paper examines a single longitudinal case study of a professional service network in the public accounting industry, a network intentionally created and formally organized to pursue residual referral revenue for the member firms. Applying and extending a coevolutionary perspective (Koza and Lewin 1998), the paper explores the antecedents and stimuli for the formation of the network, the network's morphology, the motivation of the network members, and the ways in which the network coevolves with its environment and with the adaptation practices of its members. We find that the network was initially created with the strategic intent of producing incremental income in exchange for cross-border referrals. However, we also find that this strategy reveals asymmetric positive returns, which produce serendipitous opportunities for individual member firms to bypass the original intent of network by entering each other's market. We propose that such tensions may be endemic to alliance networks, and we explore their sources and consequences on a variety of characteristics, including network stability, member opportunism, and control. The paper concludes with a model of the coevolutionary process.

We advance arguments for why and how a coevolutionary perspective and framework of analysis can provide a new lens and new directions for research in strategic management and organization studies. We identify the distinguishing properties of coevolution in an attempt to define coevolutionary research from other evolutionary research in social sciences. We also outline and discuss the empirical challenges and requirements for undertaking research within coevolutionary inquiry systems. In particular we stress the relevance of specifying coevolutionary models for reframing the selection adaptation standoff when applied to research on organization change over time, in general, and specifically to the mutation and emergence of new organizational forms. Furthermore, a coevolutionary framework has the potential to bridge and reintegrate strategy and organization theory teaching and research within a holistic framework. In our view such a reintegration is the sine qua non for studying organizational change over time and parallels the world of management practice where organization adaptations and strategy are intertwined and interdependent processes.

This paper proposes a co-evolutionary theory of strategic alliances. The paper proposes a framework which views strategic alliances in the context of the adaptation choices of a firm. Strategic alliances, in this view, are embedded in a firm's strategic portfolio, and co-evolve with the firm's strategy, the institutional, organizational and competitive environment, and with management intent for the alliance. Specifically, we argue that alliance intent may be described, at any time, as having either exploitation or exploration objectives. We further discuss how the morphology of an alliance—absorptive capacity, control, and identification—may be isomorphic with its intent, and, in the aggregate, drive the evolution of the population of alliances.