Davide Ravasi

Responding to Organizational Identity Threats: Exploring the Role of Organizational Culture

In this paper, we present a longitudinal study of organizational responses to environmental changes that induce members to question aspects of their organization’s identity. Our findings highlight the role of organizational culture as a source of cues supporting “sensemaking” action carried out by leaders as they reevaluate their conceptualization of their organization, and as a platform for “sensegiving” actions aimed at affecting internal perceptions. Building on evidence from our research, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding how the interplay of construed images and organizational culture shapes changes in institutional claims and shared understandings about the identity of an organization.

Strategies of alignment Organizational identity management and strategic change at Bang & Olufsen

During periods of strategic change, maintaining the congruence between new configurations of resources and activities (strategic investments) and how these new configurations are communicated to external organizational constituents (strategic projections) is an important task facing organizational leaders. One part of this activity is to manage organizational identity to ensure that the various strategic projections produced by organizational members are coherent and support the new strategic investments. Little is known, however, about how organizational leaders accomplish this crucial task. This study of strategic change at Bang & Olufsen highlights the different strategies available to organizational leaders to ensure members’ identity beliefs are aligned with their own beliefs about the distinctive and appealing organizational features that result from the new strategic investments and result in appropriate strategic projections. The study’s findings highlight the internal identity work – or identity management – that organizational leaders engage in to preserve this congruence. The findings also complement the current emphasis in the literature on the social validation of organizational identities by pointing to the importance of a connection between identity claims and beliefs, strategic projections and the material reality of organizational products, practices and structures.

Product Design: a Review and Research Agenda for Management Studies

This paper reviews research on product design in the broad domain of business studies. It highlights established and emerging perspectives and lines of inquiry, and organizes them around three core areas, corresponding to different stages of the design process (design activities, design choices, design results). Avenues for further research at the intersection of these bodies of research are identified and discussed, and the authors argue that management scholars possess conceptual and methodological tools suited to enriching research on design and effectively pursuing lines of investigation only partially addressed by other communities, such as the construction and deployment of design capabilities, or the organizational and institutional context of design activities.

A Cultural Quest: A Study of Organizational Use of New Cultural Resources in Strategy Formation

Our study was motivated by the growing influence in cultural sociology and organizational research of the view of culture as a “toolkit,” from which individuals draw resources flexibly to develop strategies of action that address different circumstances. To investigate if and how organizations can also use new and diverse cultural resources, we undertook a historical case study of the incorporation of new cultural resources in the cultural repertoire of the Italian manufacturer of household products Alessi. Through in-depth analysis of four rounds of incorporation of new cultural resources, we develop a robust theoretical model that relates the use of new cultural resources to the development of unconventional strategies and strategic versatility. We find that cultural repertoire enrichment and organizational identity redefinition are two core mechanisms that facilitate this process. The model contributes novel theoretical understanding regarding the use of cultural resources in strategy formation and change.

Organising the process of knowledge integration: The benefits of structural ambiguity

In this article we examine how loose coupling between units and people can benefit a firms ability to combine and recombine knowledge-based resources continuously in a creative and flexible way. An in-depth study of Oticon A/S suggests that loose coupling can be deliberately brought into the design of the organisation by introducing a certain structural ambiguity into the configuration of role systems and authority relationships. In the first part of the paper, we show how loose coupling among units and people is a distinctive feature of the way Oticon organises its administrative activities. In the second, we explore the structural properties of a loosely coupled arrangement. We develop the concepts of multipolarity, fluidity and interconnectedness and we show how these properties conduce to an increase in the effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility of the processes of knowledge integration. Structural ambiguity is thus proposed as a viable design principle for organisations operating in hypercompetitive environment, where flexible knowledge integration represents a critical condition of survival.

Going Public and the Enrichment of a Supportive Network

Past research on initial public offerings suggests that the reputation of a company positively affects the success of the offering. Success is usually measured in financial terms as if the essence of the operation lay only in the short-term inflow of money. In this paper, we investigate important albeit often neglected implications of going public by combining evidence from a series of preliminary case studies taken from the results of a survey of 57 Italian initial public offerings. Evidence from our research suggests that, besides providing an important inflow of capital, going public may actually improve the reputational and social capital of a company, by increasing its visibility, prestige and perceived trustworthiness. Therefore, going public may be an important way to support entrepreneurial activity, as it may expand and reinforce the network of relationships that offer access to external resources, complementary skills and investment opportunities.

The cultural side of value creation

The question of how organizations create value has become a central question for understanding inter-firm competition and performance differentials (e.g. Coff, 2010; Lepak et al., 2007; Makadok and Coff, 2002; Nickerson et al., 2007). Much of the work on the topic emphasizes the importance of technological innovation for improving operational efficiency and/or product functionality (Adner and Kapoor, 2010; Brown and Eisenhardt, 1995; Tushman and Anderson, 1986). Accordingly, much of the work in the area has focused on understanding the development of technological capabilities (Helfat and Raubitschek, 2000) and the dynamics of competition among different technologies (Henderson and Clark, 1990; Tushman and Anderson, 1986). Whereas this line of research has contributed greatly to our understanding of value creation through technology performance improvement, it has also left unexplored the strategies for differentiating products on the basis of their cultural significance. Yet, research in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology, to cultural sociology, and consumer behaviour, shows that consumers value products not only for their functional and technical performance, but also for their cultural meanings. The infusion of products with cultural meanings enables consumers to use these products to make statements about their personal and social identity and status. It is therefore well understood that consumers derive value not only from what products do (functional value), but also from what they signify in a given social group (symbolic value). Importantly, consumers pay premium prices for products that enable them to signal status and identity (Lawrence and Phillips, 2002; Ravasi and Rindova, 2008). While strategy scholars recognize that product meanings are a source of differentiation and generate price premiums (Porter, 1980), they also tend to view the activities that generate them – e.g. branding – as a part of the marketing strategy of the firm. More generally, strategy research has been criticized for its reluctance to delve into the demand side of value creation (see Priem, 2007). Rooted in disciplinary assumptions about atomistic consumers with idiosyncratic preferences, strategy researchers view demand as largely exogenous (Frenzen et al., 1994) and ignore its cultural embeddedness in social conventions that define the cultural meanings of objects and shape 452824 SOQ10310.1177/1476127012452824Ravasi et al.Strategic Organization 2012

Family Firms and the Decision to Go Public: A Study of Italian IPOs

Past studies on public equity capital options concentrated on the financial or the institutional side of the process. The finance literature considered going public mainly as a way to access new sources of funds and to decrease the cost of capital. Within the family business field, most scholars focused on the benefits of going public for family succession and the survival of the firm after the founder. Although some scholars suggest that going public may have also an important strategic rationale, the hypothesis has not been subject to extensive empirical research. In this paper, combining evidence from a comparative case study and an extensive survey of recent Italian IPOs, we investigate the consequences of going public for the capacity of the companies to build and sustain competitive advantage, through an increase in their reputational and social capital.

Organizational Identity in Practice

Introduction to Organizational Identity in Practice Section 1: Introduction to Section: Identity, Strategy, and the Environment 1. Scanias Bonneted Trucks 2. Why do Managers Talk About Identity? 3. Organizational Identity and Formulating Strategy: The Breaking and Remaking of AT&T 4. Handelsbanken and Internet Banking Section 2: Introduction to Section - Identity Construction 5. The Swedish Industrial Development Fund (Industrifonden): State Trust, Bank or Venture Capitalist? 6. Organizational Culture and Identity at Bang & Olufsen 7. An Identity Based Internationalization Process: The BP and Statoil Alliance 8. Practice and Identity: Using a Brand Symbol to Construct Organizational Identity Section 3: Introduction to Section - Projecting Organizational Identities 9. Starbucks: Constructing a Multiplex Identity in the Specialty Coffee Industry 10. Projecting Organizational Identity Through Organizational Dress at Air France (1933-2005) 11. Organizational Artefacts and the Expression of Identity in Corporate Museums at Alfa Romeo, Kartell, and Piaggio 12. Crafting an Inter-National Identity: The Nordea Case. Conclusion: Analyzing Organizational Identities - Some Guidelines for Practice

Combining Logics to Transform Organizational Agency Blending Industry and Art at Alessi

To understand how organizations combine conflicting institutional logics strategically to create and pursue new market opportunities, we conducted an in-depth longitudinal study of the multiple efforts of the Italian manufacturer of household goods Alessi to combine the logics of industrial manufacturing and cultural production. Over three decades, Alessi developed three different strategies to combine normative elements of the two logics, using each strategy to envision and pursue different market opportunities. By combining the logics of industrial manufacturing and cultural production, Alessi was able to envision new possibilities for value creation and to enact them through innovation in product design. The three strategies triggered a common set of mechanisms through which the purposeful combining of logics enabled the pursuit of opportunity, while each strategy structured the process differently. We develop a theoretical model linking the development of recombinant strategies to the dynamic restructuring of organizational agency and the related capacity to create and pursue new market opportunities. Our findings and theoretical insights advance understanding of the processes through which organizations challenge taken-for-granted beliefs and practices to create new market opportunities, use logics as resources to enable embedded agency, and design hybrid organizational arrangements.