Claus Rerup

Beyond Collective Entities: Multilevel Research on Organizational Routines and Capabilities

Organizational routines and capabilities are thorny constructs, but their complexity has been largely underappreciated. In this article, the authors illustrate how new and more complex understandings of organizational routines and capabilities can be generated. They do so by breaking them into parts and mapping their interrelationships. Because component parts of routines and capabilities exist at different levels of analysis, the proposal to investigate their multiple relationships contributes to bridging the micro—macro divide in management. Specifically, the authors show how new analytical and methodological techniques can catalyze future research.

Attentional Triangulation: Learning from Unexpected Rare Crises

Attention to weak cues lies in the eyes of the beholder, but there are ways to entice such cues into collective view. To examine the link between attention to weak cues and learning from rare events, I use longitudinal, qualitative data to develop an attention-based perspective on how organizations learn from a crisis, a specific type of rare event. Learning from a crisis involves understanding why the crisis occurred and developing organizational designs for preventing the crisis from reoccurring. My data illustrate how disparity in attention to issues across the chain of command and the inability to coherently attend to weak signs of danger resulted in an unexpected crisis at Novo Nordisk, a world leader in diabetes care. The main contribution of my study is the development of the concept of attentional triangulation, which refers to the intersection of three interdependent dimensions of organizational attention (stability, vividness, and coherence) to identify issues that have the potential of having critical consequences for the organization. I also elaborate on the structures and processes that organizations can enact to facilitate attention triangulation for learning from rare events.

Going Mobile: Aesthetic Design Considerations from Calder and the Constructivists

Design thinking has long tried to join form, function, and aesthetic appeal. In cars, furniture, architecture, typography, clothes, or photography, good designs regularly solve problems of movement, massing, and balance in attractive and inspiring ways. The field of organization design is comparatively young in this regard, having mostly focused on questions of efficiency and expediency rather than aesthetics; nevertheless, designers are increasingly being called on to create organizations that sing rather than just work. Here, we consider how aesthetically sophisticated design thinking from the arts might be applied in organizational design. Specifically, we consider the case of Learning Lab Denmarka research institute that has experimented extensively with aesthetically informed organizational designin light of the mobile art of Alexander Calder and other constructivist artists who championed flexible design. We conclude that in such organizations, (1) designers must strike an ongoing, interactive balance between centric and acentric design orientations and practices, (2) aesthetic consideration is fundamentally important when it comes to crafting effective design, and (3) designing processes should be given as much attention as design solutions.

Imperfection, Transfer Failure, and the Replication of Knowledge An Interview with Gabriel Szulanski

Virtually all management literature focuses on success stories. Gabriel Szulanski’s work is an exception. In this interview, Szulanski explains why replication and knowledge transfer are difficult and often fail. He discusses strategies to improve the odds of success for these activities and emphasizes that humility and discipline are essential for making them work. Szulanski starts the interview by identifying some challenges that he and other young scholars have faced when entering academia, and the strategy field in particular.

Situating the Concept of Organizational Mindfulness: The Multiple Dimensions of Organizational Learning

We consider how the literatures on organizational mindfulness and mindful organizing are relevant to research on organizational change and learning. We start with the tension between mindful and less mindful approaches, such as those that emphasize organizational routines, to change and learning. We posit that organizational routines are essential to mindfulness, but that this role is not elaborated in the mindfulness literature. Thus, we argue that further dialogue between these approaches is necessary and introduce a conceptual model with three dimensions to facilitate the conversation: (1) the periodicity with which learning occurs (i.e., rarely or often), (2) the extensiveness of the object of learning (i.e., local or global), and (3) the degree of cognitive intensity in the learning process (i.e., inert or reflective). The model explores how the different contexts or landscapes that organizations are embedded in influence their capacity for mindfulness, mindful organizing, and change.