Knowledge that Transforms

In this paper, I examine the use of metonymies in people's talk about organizations. Drawing upon a corpus of natural talk extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) I identify recurring categories of metonymies that appear to be a central part of people's talk about organizations. These categories of metonymies involve substitutions where an organization stands in for its members, its products, its facilities, its stock or shares or a company‐related event. I also found that metonymies in each of these categories are used as basic metonymic expressions that are only partially connected to metaphorical expressions and interpretations of organizations. Where those connections exist, the use of metonymies follows a metaphor‐from‐metonymy linguistic pattern (where a metaphorical meaning arises from the use of a metonymy) rather than a metonymy‐within‐metaphor pattern (where a metonymy is part of a metaphorical expression). I elaborate on the implications of these findings for our understanding of how organizations are discursively constructed and understood through metonymic language.

This study considers how organization‐level and field‐level meaning systems affect when firms adopt administrative innovations. We use a sample of over 1200 manufacturing sites to test hypotheses regarding the timing of adoption of Manufacturing Best Practice programmes. The results indicate that compatibility of the diffusing practice with the organization's internal meaning system is an important predictor of when firms adopt such programmes. However, the influence of such compatibility declines for later adopters – consistent with institutional pressures in the form of field‐level meaning systems playing an increasing role over time. We also find that this decline occurs for sites with high exposure to institutional pressures, but not for sites with lower exposure. The findings suggest that internal meaning systems and differential exposure moderate the role of institutional pressures in the diffusion of administrative innovations. We discuss implications for theory and research on institutionalization and the diffusion of innovations.

In a qualitative interview study, 20 Hong Kong Chinese informants were asked to report stories about colleagues who were either ‘good soldiers’ or ‘good actors’. In stories about good soldiers, informants attributed their colleagues' organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) primarily to prosocial or pro‐organizational motives. Informants' stories about good actors broke down into three major subcategories of citizenship‐related impression management: OCB attributed primarily to impression management motives; alleged pseudo‐OCB concomitant with minimal compliance; and alleged pseudo‐OCB concomitant with counterproductive behaviour. When distinguishing good soldiers from good actors, informants adopted two criteria for attribution: wilful behavioural inconsistency, i.e. low generality of behaviour across contexts; and alleged false pretence, i.e. discrepancy between claims or allusions and actual deeds. Our findings partially supported a prior hypothesis from attribution theory, that consistency was a criterion for attribution, but indicated that consensus, i.e. correspondence between the focal colleague's behaviour and other employees' behaviour, failed to differentiate good soldiers from good actors. Informants generally regarded OCB as socially desirable only when it was attributed primarily to prosocial/pro‐organizational motives.

This research investigated the factors that influence a decision that is often faced by employees who have made a transition from one organization to another: the decision about whether to protect secrets of their former employer or to share them with their new co‐workers. A total of 111 employees from two high‐tech companies participated in interviews. Their comments were analysed and, based on both relevant literature and the results of that analysis, a theory of the factors that influence newcomers' protect vs. share decisions was developed. According to that theory, newcomers first decide whether or not information is a trade secret of their former employer by considering (1) whether the information is part of their own knowledge, and (2) whether the information is publicly available, general, and negative (about something that did not work). If newcomers decide the information is a trade secret, they then evaluate (1) the degree to which their obligations are biased towards their former or new employer, and (2) the degree to which they identify more strongly with their former or new employer. Newcomers whose obligations and identifications are biased towards a new employer are more likely to share secrets. If these obligations and identifications are balanced, newcomers may share information in a way that allows them to believe they are fulfilling their responsibilities to both their former and their new employers.

This paper reports on a collaborative project involving organization scholars and clinicians to examine the ways in which individual and organizational health are conceptualized in the literature. We illustrate how the use of systems theories (in this case complexity theory) in relation to organizational health introduces problems such as the risk of promoting organizational health at the expense of individual well‐being. The phenomena of organizational health and individual health are often presented as having a symbiotic relationship and we suggest some circumstances where this is not the case. Our central argument is that we need to move beyond current conceptual limitations and move towards a more process‐based model of health in organization rather than organizational health.

Managers need to make sense of emerging strategic issues that could significantly impact their businesses. While models of this sensemaking process suggest that information gathering affects interpretations (which affect action and performance), researchers have argued that our understanding of the role of information in changing interpretations is underdeveloped. This paper investigates the role of the time managers spend searching for information and the diversity of the information they find in changing managers’ perceptions that an equivocal, strategic issue represents a threat and opportunity for their businesses. The methodology involves a longitudinal research design in which managers recorded multiple, process‐oriented measures of their information gathering activity. Results suggest that time spent searching for information leads to changes towards seeing the issue as more of a threat, while the diversity of information found leads to changes towards seeing it as less of a threat. We found no effect of information gathering on opportunity perceptions.

Top management theory has been strongly influenced by demographic studies of top management teams (TMTs), but not by research into organizational adaptation to conditions of extreme institutional turbulence. This article analyses the transformation of a post‐socialist enterprise through a combination of demographic and processual methods to develop an enriched account of the micro‐processes through which top management constructed organizational change. Adding layers of narrative data and processual explanation directly addresses the well rehearsed problems in demographic TMT studies. From the findings, we propose a set of theoretical arguments that conceptualizes top management in terms of management regimes, to which TMTs are politically tied and through which they seek to realize their values and strategies in organizational outcomes.

We analyse vertical boundaries of firms by identifying and comparing industrial, transactional and firm‐specific factors in such a way that industrial organization, new institutional economics and the capability‐based view are all taken into account. After testing the model in 155 firms in the Spanish meat industry, we observe that only factors associated with both transaction costs and capabilities have a statistical and economic relevance for explaining vertical integration. Firms vertically integrate to create specific investment between stages of the value chain, to internally exploit their pool of knowledge and capacities, and to guarantee quality of inputs and services employed. On the other hand, firms avoid high levels of vertical integration in the presence of high demand changes in order to stay flexible. Finally, providers or clients with market power do not seem to affect vertical boundaries in any consistent way.

This study examines strategic decision‐making at the boardroom level of two non‐profit professional associations, penetrating directors' strategic orientations, discourse and decisions in their holistic context. In comparison with the predominantly survey and interview based literature on board level strategy behaviour, this study employs a longitudinal complete member researcher, participant observer methodology. Its findings are analysed from an institutional theory perspective and reveal selective championing of strategies by directors, the evaluation of strategic proposals and progress in predominantly financial resource/outcome terms, and directors' attention to navigating strategic initiatives through organizational politics. Also revealed are private sector philosophies imported into the non‐profit boardroom, the predominantly ceremonial role of formal strategic plans, and an informally enacted strategic discourse. This study offers a unique insider view of strategizing at the highest organizational level.

Exporting relationships between manufacturers and foreign importers pose unique coordination problems because, on the one hand, transactions are recurrent and both firms make non‐trivial relationship‐specific investments, but at the same time, the exchange partners maintain separate legal entities with individual profit claims. This study examines the role of contracts as a governance mechanism in these relationships that are neither market‐based discrete transactions, nor can be governed through ownership‐based hierarchies. Drawing upon recent research on contract law and interorganizational relationships, we develop and empirically test a model that incorporates both the antecedents and performance implications of the nature of contract governing exporter–importer relationships.