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This volume seeks to develop processual understandings of how novelty emerges in the processes of organizing by drawing on scholarship from a diverse range of perspectives. The volume covers creativity, improvisation, invention, entrepreneurship, and innovation in organizations.
Providing a first tentative understanding of novelty and a set of implications for organizations to manage it, this book focuses on the potential offered by emergent novelty, namely novelty which is neither designed nor pursued. The author asks how organizations might increase their abilities and strategies to benefit from its early recognition. Such potential is broken down into positive terms and demonstrates how early recognition is beneficial both to organizations which aim to seize emergent innovations as well as those which aim to avoid emergent disasters. Understanding Novelty in Organizations aims to rethink the structure and strategies of organizations to gain a new balance between design and randomness in the generation of novelty. The varied perspectives presented in this work will engage scholars interested in novelty, innovation and creativity, and emergency management.
Setting an agenda for a more holistic theory on the emergence, evaluation, and legitimation of novelty, this volume showcases how novelty emergence and novelty recognition correspond to two distinct phases of the journey of novelty, from the moment it is generated to the moment it takes root and propagates.
The recent growth in research on the topic of evolutionary novelties inspired this volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations. While previous sociological work has done an admirable job of understanding selection and differentiation processes, it has widely ignored the origin of novelty and growth to form initial structures and practices.
The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, John Padgett and Walter Powell develop a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. In the short run, they argue, actors make relations, but in the long run, they argue, actors make actors. Organizational novelty arises from spillover across intertwined networks, which tips reproducing biographical and production flows. This theory is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of careful and original historical case studies, ranging from early capitalism and state formation, to the transformation of communism, to the emergence of contemporary biotechnology and Silicon Vally. -- from back cover.
This book views change as an ongoing process that should not be solidified or treated as a series of linear events. In drawing on data collected from over 40 years of research, it highlights the theoretical and practical value of using a processual perspective. Illustrative examples from a range of organizations including: Micro-X, General Motors, Pirelli Cables, BHP Billiton, Royal Dutch Shell, British Rail, British Aerospace, Hewlett Packard, Laubman and Pank and the CSIRO make the approach understandable and accessible to both researchers and practitioners. In a theoretical exploration of temporal context, sociomaterial relations and power-political processes the dynamics of changing organizations is brought to the fore and the implication for reshaping change examined. On the practice of engaging in longitudinal research, study design, data collection and processual analysis, as well as the write-up and dissemination of findings, are all considered. This is an innovative and highly practical research monograph that captures the truly complex processes of changing organizations and illustrates how these are best understood from a processual perspective.
Process approaches to organization studies focus on flow, activities, and evolution, understanding organizations and organizing as processes in the making. They stand in contrast to positivist approaches that see organizations and phenomena as fixed, static, and measurable. Process approaches draw on a range of ideas and philosophies. The Handbook examines 34 philosophers and social theorists, both those commonly linked to process thinking, such as Whitehead, Bergson and James, and those that are not as often addressed from a process perspective such as Dilthey and Tarde. Each chapter addresses the background and context of this thinker, their work (with a focus on the processual elements), and the potential contribution to organization and management research. For students and scholars in the field of Organization Studies this book is an entry point into the work of philosophical thinkers and social theorists for whom the world is far from being a solid place.
A pedagogical approach to the principles and architecture of knowledge management in organizations This textbook is based on a graduate course taught at Stevens Institute of Technology. It focuses on the design and management of today's complex K organizations. A K organization is any company that generates and applies knowledge. The text takes existing ideas from organizational design and knowledge management to enhance and elevate each through harmonization with concepts from other disciplines. The authors—noted experts in the field—concentrate on both micro- and macro design and their interrelationships at individual, group, work, and organizational levels. A key feature of the textbook is an incisive discussion of the cultural, practice, and social aspects of knowledge management. The text explores the processes, tools, and infrastructures by which an organization can continuously improve, maintain, and exploit all elements of its knowledge base that are most relevant to achieve its strategic goals. The book seamlessly intertwines the disciplines of organizational design and knowledge management and offers extensive discussions, illustrative examples, student exercises, and visualizations. The following major topics are addressed: Knowledge management, intellectual capital, and knowledge systems Organizational design, behavior, and architecture Organizational strategy, change, and development Leadership and innovation Organizational culture and learning Social networking, communications, and collaboration Strategic human resources; e.g., hiring K workers and performance reviews Knowledge science, thinking, and creativity Philosophy of knowledge and information Information, knowledge, social, strategy, and contract continuums Information management and intelligent systems; e.g., business intelligence, big data, and cognitive systems Designing Knowledge Organizations takes an interdisciplinary and original approach to assess and synthesize the disciplines of knowledge management and organizational design, drawing upon conceptual underpinnings and practical experiences in these and related areas.
Explorations in Organizations presents readers with contemporary issues in the study of organizations, and introduces the paths down which tomorrow's organizational scholarship might travel. A collection of recent papers by or co-authored by the eminent James G. March, the book consists of five sections: exploring theories of organizational action; novelty in organizational adaptation; institutions and the logic of appropriateness; the history of organization studies; and uses of literature in the study of organizations. Each section begins with a new essay by a scholar whose work has focused on the theme explored in that part of the book. These introductory essays not only introduce and tie together the papers that follow, but also serve to add additional voices to the volume in order to deepen the discussion within it.
