Organizational learning, like individual learning, involves the development of new and diverse interpretations of events and situations. Unlike individual learning, however, collective learning also involves developing enough consensus around those diverse interpretations for organized action to result. Traditional measures of organizational consensus are unable to capture the multiplex nature of collective agreement that encompasses both unity and diversity. Traditional wisdom thus suggests that to achieve unity in groups, one must sacrifice diversity. This study breaks the notion of consensus into two component parts: consensus around interpretations embedded in the content and in the framing of communications. Communicated content consists of the labels people use to convey their “pictures” of reality, e.g., pictures of issues as threats or as opportunities. The framing of communications refers to the form people use to construct a picture, regardless of its content, e.g., rigid or flexible perceptions of an issue. People may hold very different pictures of reality and still agree on the way they frame them. It is thus possible for groups to simultaneously agree and disagree, an essential component of collective learning. Simultaneous agreement and disagreement is especially important in corporate innovative efforts. Successful corporate innovation requires that decision makers develop a collective understanding that incorporates the new and the different. This paper describes the changing pictures and frames communicated in a new-venture development process in a large financial institution over a two-year period. Several linguistic analyses show how the venture team members developed unified ways of framing their arguments, while at the same time maintaining diversity through differences in the content of team members' interpretations. The results reveal one way that organizations manage to combine the unity and diversity needed for collective learning. The managerial implications present a challenge for anyone wishing to promote learning as a community: managers must actively encourage the development of different and conflicting views of what is thought to be true, while striving for a shared framing of the issues that is broad enough to encompass those differences.

This study is an integrative examination of three aspects of joint venture formation: complementarity of the partners, ownership/control and joint venture autonomy. Past research has examined each of these concepts individually without considering potential interactive effects. Moreover, most past studies have used global measurements ignoring critical dimensions within each concept. For example, most studies of ownership/control have examined the effects of dominant control by one partner versus shared influence. This approach overlooks the possibility that joint venture parents may exert varying degrees of control over decision making in the different functional areas. Personal interviews of 98 managers involved in oil and gas exploration and production joint ventures are used in an investigation of the three joint venture concepts. In this industry, complementarity had little if any effect on joint venture performance. In fact, complementarity actually appeared to have a negative impact on several dimensions of joint venture performance. Qualitative data suggest that joint venture partners with distinctive competencies in different functional areas may experience difficulties in implementing potential complementarities. Moreover, it may be important for all joint venture partners to perceive some influence over the strategic decisions of the joint venture, regardless of their actual influence over those decisions. Perhaps the most important implications of this study are for future joint venture research. First, a dimensionalized approach to the issues of implementation and performance is justified. Examining ownership/control over each functional area provided additional insights into issues of joint venture management and aided in explaining the results of tests using global measures. Second, analyses of joint venture autonomy and ownership/control produced different results based on the functional area under consideration. Thus, the use of global measures is likely to result in the loss of information. Third, joint venture performance is a multidimensional concept. The results of the analyses related to performance varied according to the dimension of performance under consideration. Some measures of performance were actually negatively related to others. It is believed that this outcome is appropriate. Performance is measured relative to the various goals established for a joint venture. Some goals may be in conflict with others or present managers with tradeoffs to consider. Research that fails to consider multiple dimensions of performance may lose some of the richness of the performance concept. Finally, joint ventures are particularly likely to be subject to goal conflicts since they are formed by two or more firms, each with its own set of goals. Ultimately, a joint venture is measured by the extent to which the venture meets the goals and expectations of the individual partners. As a result, it is necessary for joint venture research to examine performance related issues from the perspective of the individual partners.

The prevailing theory of mergers is that firms emphasize considerations of “strategic fit” in discussions prior to merger activity, and neglect considerations of “organizational fit”. The result is that immediately following a merger dysfunctional organizational behaviours occur. The number of empirical studies of mergers, however, is relatively modest and there are few case studies of the merger process. The present paper studies the merger involving two large accounting firms, over a period of four years. The unique features of accounting firms—in particular, their organization as professional partnerships—and of the accounting industry, make the case study an appropriate “tough” test of the general theory. Accounting firms are likely to take account of organizational fit in merger discussions. The case study rehearses the careful attention to issues of strategic and organizational fit (contrary to the general theory) but also maps the unfolding behavioural problems that followed formal merger. Interestingly, the specific difficulties observed in previous studies were less salient in the present case: problems and difficulties were of a kind peculiar to the type of organization, which suggests that theories of mergers should be sensitive to the context and setting of merger activity. The paper concludes by elaborating elements of a more systematic model of the merger process. These elements include the difference between mergers and acquisitions, the structure of governance, organizational capacity, sector cohesiveness and technology.

In this paper we argue that patterns of organizational niche overlap and nonoverlap influence the organizational niches in which entrepreneurs create organizations. Organizational niches characterize the different resource requirements and productive capacities of individual organizations in a population. Depending on which organizational niches are targeted, entrepreneurs will face different competitive landscapes. For a population of day care centers (DCCs), we measure organizational niches and compute organizational niche overlaps in terms of the ages of children they are licensed to enroll. Using weights based on organizational niche overlaps, we disaggregate population density (i.e., the number of DCCs) into overlap density and nonoverlap density to measure the potential for competition and cooperation among DCCs. The overlap density of an organizational niche is equal to population density weighted by the overlaps of the focal organizational niche with all other organizational niches. Conversely, non-overlap density is equal to population density weighted by the absence of overlaps of a focal organizational niche with all other organizational niches. We hypothesize that overlap density will be negatively related to the founding rate. We expect entrepreneurs will be much less likely to target or be capable of founding organizations in crowded parts of the resource space than parts that are less densely populated. We also hypothesize that nonoverlap density will be positively related to the founding rate. This is because differentiated DCCs do not compete directly for resources, and, at the same time, their presence can have facilitative influences through complementary demand enhancement and widening social acceptance of the organization form. Supporting these predictions, a dynamic analysis showed that overlap density had a competitive effect on the founding rate, while nonoverlap density had a positive effect. Parallel effects were obtained when overlap and nonoverlap densities were further disaggregated on the basis of geographic proximity into local and diffuse components. Overall, our findings are consistent with earlier research on organizational founding at the population level, but reveal intrapopulation patterns of mutualism and competition that influence the likelihood of organizations being established in different organizational niches. The key result of this study, that location in a multidimensional resource space, together with the distribution of other competitors and noncompetitors, has a significant impact on founding probabilities serves to illuminate some of the underlying dynamics of competition and mutualism that impact strategic and entrepreneurial processes.