Alan D. Meyer

Configurational Approaches to Organizational Analysis

The 1993 Special Research Forum on Configurations is dedicated to the proposition that configurational theory and research can significantly advance understanding of people, groups, and organizations. In this introductory essay, we define configurational approaches to organizational analysis, trace the history of configurational thinking, distinguish the contingency approach from the configurational approach, and highlight key contributions of the five empirical articles that make up the special research forum. Most of these articles report research conducted at the organizational level of analysis, but we argue that the configurational perspective has unrealized potential at other levels as well and suggest some configurational approaches to revitalizing theory and research at the individual and group levels.

Organizational Assimilation of Innovations: A Multilevel Contextual Analysis

This study examined the assimilation of innovations into organizations, a process unfolding in a series of decisions to evaluate, adopt, and implement new technologies. Assimilation was conceptualized as a nine-step process and measured by tracking 300 potential adoptions through organizations during a six-year period. We advance a model suggesting that organizational assimilation of technological innovations is determined by three classes of antecedents: contextual attributes, innovation attributes, and attributes arising from the interaction of contexts and innovations.

Organizing Far from Equilibrium: Nonlinear Change in Organizational Fields

Organizational fields undergo upheavals. Shifting industry boundaries, new network forms, emerging sectors, and volatile ecosystems have become the stuff of everyday organizational life. Curiously, profound changes of this sort receive scant attention in organization theory and research. Researchers acknowledge fieldwide flux, emergence, convergence, and collapse, but sidestep direct investigations of the causes and dynamic processes, leaving these efforts to political scientists and institutional economists. We attribute this neglect to our fields philosophical, theoretical, and methodological fealty to the precepts of equilibrium and linearity. We argue that ingrained assumptions and habituated methodologies dissuade organizational scientists from grappling with problems to which these ideas and tools do not apply. Nevertheless, equilibrium and linearity are assumptions of social theory, not facts of social life. Drawing on four empirical studies of organizational fields in flux, we suggest new intellectual perspectives and methodological heuristics that may facilitate investigation of fields that are far from equilibrium. We urge our colleagues to transcend the general linear model, and embrace ideas like field configuration, complex adaptive systems, self-organizing networks, and autocatalytic feedback. We recommend conducting natural histories of organizational fields, and paying especially close attention to turning points when fields are away from equilibrium and discontinuous changes are afoot.

Organizational Emergence: The Origin and Transformation of Branson, Missouri's Musical Theaters

We draw on complexity theory to explain the emergence of a new organizational collective, and we provide a much-needed empirical test of the theory at the collective level of analysis. Taking a case study approach, we use four dynamics of emergence posited by complexity theorys dissipative structures model--fluctuation, positive feedback, stabilization, and recombination--to explain how a collective of live musical performance theaters in Branson, Missouri, came into being and periodically transformed itself over a 100-year period. Our findings suggest a strong match between the theoretical perspective employed and the empirical processes uncovered, empirically validating the model at the collective level. The study demonstrates the value of conceptualizing evolution in terms of emergence, highlighting distinctions between the nascent complexity approach to evolution and the neo-Darwinian evolutionary approach that has dominated the theoretical conversation in organization science for the past generation. Our findings complement the insights of the dominant theoretical perspectives in organization theory, providing a more comprehensive understanding of organizational evolution by directly addressing the heretofore intractable phenomenon of emergence.

A Future for Organization Theory: Living in and Living with Changing Organizations

We believe that the field of organization theory is adrift. In sailing jargon, we are “in irons”---stalled and making little headway toward understanding organizations and their place in our lives. We first attempt to diagnose our maladies and then, in this light, offer three broad research questions that just might reinvigorate our work: First, how can we understand todays changing organizations? Second, how can we live in these organizations? And third, how can we best live with them? We close by calling attention to how our familiar approaches to building and testing theory might hamper any attempt to revitalize our field.

Managing creation : the challenge of building a new organization

Managing Creation describes, evaluates, and generalizes from an attempt to foster a high quality of work life (QWL) during the start-up of a medical-products laboratory. This book reports the second in a series of eight QWL projects being evaluated by the University of Michigans Institute for Social Research. It contributes uniquely to the QWL literature. First, the projects consultants set out to involve inexperienced workers operating complex, prototypical technologies in a brand-new plant. This combination is unprecedented in the QWL movement. Second, the projects evaluators (the authors) designed their research carefully and conducted it independently. Both characteristics are unusual. Third, the book was published despite the failure of both the QWL project and its evaluation to achieve their objectives. Administrative science can benefit from such candid reports of negative results.

Hospital capital budgeting: fusion of rationality, politics and ceremony.

Budgetary requests for medical capital equipment give rise to streams of rational, political and ceremonial decision making. As they cascade through hospitals, these processes influence the deployment of organizational assets and the viability of organizational cultures.

Managerial Ideology and the Social Control of Deviance.

This book should be of interest to both researchers and practitioners. Scholars interested in understanding the process of the social construction of reality in a specific organizational context will find here a detailed case study that supports an existing body of theory in a new setting. Organizational development and management consultants will extend their knowledge about the role an employee health and wellness program can play in controlling change in a corporation. Psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health professionals will understand more clearly the part they play in a large corporate setting.

Mahalo: Sustaining JMI’s Positive Spirit

Mahalo is a Hawaiian word connoting gratitude, admiration, praise, esteem, and respect. Management scholars should be full of mahalo for each other because we share exceptional educations and opportunities to think, write, and teach about organizations and management. Mahalo was the theme of the 2015 Western Academy of Management conference held in Kauai, Hawaii. The conference’s closing session was an interactive workshop that critically examined the submission, review, and publication of management research. Panelists and participants grappled with two issues: “How could the Journal of Management Inquiry (JMI) infuse more mahalo into the publishing process? What behavioral, structural, and technological changes on the part of authors, reviewers, and editors could enact more positive and developmental practices? This essay discusses some of the ideas offered by the workshop’s facilitators, panelists, and participants.

Reacting to surprises: hospital strategy, structure and ideology.

A physiciansstrike in San Francisco caused a severe environmental jolt to hospitals in the area. A look at the responses of three of those hospitals reveals striking differences among them regarding their market strategies, administrative structures and ideologies. An analysis of these differences can help administrators prepare for and cope with unpleasant surprises.