Knowledge that Transforms

This paper begins with a story told by a corporation president to illustrate what his organization was doing to “help” women employees balance the demands of work and home. The paper deconstructs and reconstructs this story text from a feminist perspective, examining what it says, what it does not say, and what it might have said. This analysis reveals how organizational efforts to “help women” have suppressed gender conflict and reified false dichotomies between public and private realms of endeavor, suggesting why it has proven so difficult to eradicate gender discrimination in organizations. Implications of a feminist perspective for organizational theory are discussed.

This paper describes the methods being used by the Minnesota Innovation Research Program to develop and test a process theory of innovation which explains how and why innovations develop over time and what developmental paths may lead to success and failure for different kinds of innovations. After a background description of the longitudinal field research, this paper focuses on the methods being used to examine processes of innovation development. These methods pertain to the selection of cases and concepts, observing change, coding and analyzing event data to identify process patterns, and developing theories to explain observed innovation processes. We believe these methods are applicable to other studies that examine a range of temporal processes, including organizational startup, growth, decline, and adaptation.

Melanesian Bigmanship (a meritocratic, enacted career of political-economic leadership) is recounted as an anthropological metaphor for entrepreneurship. This “library tale” has two purposes. The first is a demonstration of conceptual uses of ethnographies for developing grounded theory. Propositions are generated on entrepreneurial orientations and opportunity structures. Opportunities are seen to arise in the creation of linkages between spheres of exchange, or fields in which an object exchanges at different values. Entrepreneurial tactics, such as converting between spheres, call for skills in informal planning, astute use of timing, and networking. These “tactical” skills coexist with “moral” skills, in persuasiveness, the manipulation of norms, and recognition of culturally specific opportunities. The entrepreneur's acts thus create a dialectic of moral (normatively approved) and tactical (instrumentally enacted) changes. The second purpose is a demonstration of methodological implications of ethnographies. Library tales are helpful in the process of “constant comparison” (Glaser and Strauss 1967), by augmenting available, within-site observations with other sources of insight, and of potential disconfirmation of emerging ideas. However, there are limits to the “translation” of library tales. There thus arises a need for observations tailored to specific comparative questions. Multiple site case replication research is suggested for tailoring observations to synchronic, comparative uses. Processual, continuous contextual analysis is suggested for diachronic, intensive followups to such questions as the relationships amongst constraints and individual agency.

Formulation of dynamic theories and process hypotheses is a crucial component in longitudinal research. This paper describes a framework for developing dynamic theory and hypotheses. The procedure require the theorist to address six dimensions of process in each variable: continuity, magnitude of change, rate of change, trend, periodicity and duration. Further, theorists are encouraged to explore the dynamic relations between sets of variables, including rate of change, magnitude of change, lag, and permanence. Consideration is given to the problem of feedback loops. A typology of analytical alternatives for studying dynamic processes and longitudinal research data is provided.

This paper considers how computer-based communication technology, specifically electronic group mail, might affect group behavior in organizations. It proposes a framework for analyzing groups formed by electronic distribution lists. It describes the scope and nature of electronic group mail in one organization, illustrates how members of electronic distribution lists can exhibit fundamental group processes, and compares behavior in different kinds of electronic groups. It suggests that the electronic group at work is a new social phenomenon that may contribute importantly to organizational behavior.