Jane K. Lê

Toward a Theory of Coordinating: Creating Coordinating Mechanisms in Practice

This paper uses a practice perspective to study coordinating as dynamic activities that are continuously created and modified in order to enact organizational relationships and activities. It is based on the case of Servico, an organization undergoing a major restructuring of its value chain in response to a change in government regulation. In our case, the actors iterate between the abstract concept of a coordinating mechanism referred to as end-to-end management and its performance in practice. They do this via five performative–ostensive cycles: (1) enacting disruption, (2) orienting to absence, (3) creating elements, (4) forming new patterns, and (5) stabilizing new patterns. These cycles and the relationships between them constitute a process model of coordinating. This model highlights the importance of absence in the coordinating process and demonstrates how experiencing absence shapes subsequent coordinating activity.

Responding to competing strategic demands: How organizing, belonging, and performing paradoxes coevolve

This article develops an empirically grounded process model of how managers in organizations respond to coexisting paradoxical tensions. With a longitudinal real-time study, we examine how a telecommunications firm copes with an organizing paradox between market and regulatory demands and how this paradox influences belonging and performing paradoxes for managers. These paradoxes coevolve over time as managers shift from defensive responses that attempt to circumvent paradox to active responses that accept and work within paradox. Our process model clarifies the recursive relationship between different kinds of paradox, the cumulative impact of responses to paradox over time, and the way that responses to paradox become embedded in organizational structures.

Strategy-as-practice meets neo-institutional theory

Strategy-as-practice and neo-institutionalism offer alternative approaches to studying organizations. In this essay, we examine the foundational assumptions and methods of these perspectives, unveiling different ways in which they could complement each other. In particular, we elaborate three areas of overlap: a focus on what actors actually do, their shared cognitions, and the role of language in creating shared meanings. We show how the two perspectives can inform each other and offer significant learning to organization studies more broadly.

Selling the Object of Strategy: How Frontline Workers Realize Strategy through their Daily Work

This paper explores how frontline workers contribute to an organization’s realized strategy. Using a workplace studies approach, we analyse the work of museum tour guides as a salient example of workers engaged in frontline work. Our findings demonstrate the subtle and intricate nature of the embodied work of frontline workers as they ‘bring into being’ the strategic aims of an organization. We identified five elements as central to this process: (1) the situated physical context; (2) audience composition; (3) the moral order; (4) the talk, actions and gestures of the guide; and (5) the corresponding talk, actions and gestures of the audience. Drawing on these categories, we find frontline workers to demonstrate ‘interactional competence’: assessing and making use of the physical, spatial and material specifics of the context and those they are interacting with, and enlisting interactional resources to uphold a moral order that brings these others in as a working audience, encouraging them to respond in particular ways. Frontline workers thus skilfully combine language, material and bodily expressions in the flow of their work. Demonstrating these dynamics gives a more central role to material in the realization of strategy than previously recognized; demonstrates that ‘outsiders’ have an important part to play in realizing strategy; and highlights the importance of frontline workers and their skilled work in bringing strategy into being.

Producing persuasive findings: Demystifying ethnographic textwork in strategy and organization research

Despite the importance and proliferation of ethnography in strategy and organization research, the central issue of how to present ethnographic findings has rarely been discussed. Yet, the narratives we craft to share our experience of the field are at the heart of ethnographic papers and provide the primary basis for our theorizing. In this article, we explain the “textwork” involved in writing persuasive findings. We provide an illustrative example of ethnographic data as it is recorded within fieldnotes and explain the necessary conceptual and writing work that must be done to render such data persuasive, drawing on published exemplars of ethnographic articles. This allows us to show how such texts, through various forms of writing and data representation, are transformed from raw fieldnotes to comprehensible findings. We conclude by asserting the value of these specifically ethnographic ways of presenting evidence, which are at odds with the canonical methods of data presentation in management studies.

The Role of Task and Process Conflict in Strategizing

The implementation of strategic initiatives is central to organizational success because it involves not just the execution of strategy, but also the formulation of strategy content. Yet, strategy implementation is complex, partially because it is critically affected by human dynamics. These dynamics are an integral but poorly understood aspect of how organizations negotiate multiple goals. Conflict is one dynamic that has received little attention in the context of strategy implementation. The authors address this gap by studying task and process conflict as a firm implements a strategy in real time. The study demonstrates that process conflict directs attention to problems with how to implement a strategy, while task conflict directs attention to problems with the content of the strategy. Critically, however, managers can only harness generative effects of conflict if they correctly diagnose process and task conflict, and respond to both forms of conflict. This requires an understanding of the entwined nature of task and process conflict, and highlights the necessity of aligning responses to these forms of conflict. Thus, this study offers conflict as one explanatory mechanism of how actors execute strategy and clarify strategy content.

How constructions of the future shape organizational responses: climate change and the Canadian oil sands

This empirical study examines the relationship between constructions of the future and anticipated organizational responses to climate change. Findings from the Athabasca oil sands region of Alberta, Canada indicate that actors’ views of climate change affect not only the way they construct the future of oil sands development, but also which responses they see as legitimate. Specifically, whether actors construct a future of no development, partial development or full development of the oil sands, influences the combinations of organizational responses they recommend (i.e. not responding, lobbying, engaging, developing and informing). These findings contribute to our understanding of organizational responses to climate change by showing that (1) climate action requires more than actors simply viewing climate change as strategic; (2) different constructions of the future create alternative strategic environments that necessitate divergent responses; (3) strong future constructions narrow the repertoire of business responses to climate change; and (4) in this process governments play a crucial role beyond setting climate change policy. This study thus highlights the importance of studying future constructions if we want to understand current organizational responses to environmental issues that contribute to climate change.

Studying Paradox as Process and Practice

This chapter develops a strong process and practice methodological approach to studying salience and latency in paradox. It assumes, first, that both paradoxes and responses to them are socially constructed within people’s moment-by- moment activities and practices. Second, that the experience of paradox as salient or latent is not inevitable but is constructed within these activities and practices. It develops three process- and practice-based indicators, language, emotion, and action, through which the construction of paradox as salient may be identified and studied empirically. It then looks at latent paradox, showing how the study of mundane everyday practices, and the juxtaposition of salience with non-salience across time and within different spaces, provide indicators of latent paradox. It extends existing paradox research by reasserting the need for embedded, qualitative, processual research designs that enable us to go beyond the study of paradox through response, cognition, and discourse.

Book Review: Practicing Strategy: Text and Cases

like–for example, targeting lower-ranked journals, publishing with fewer co-authors and applying for research grants from charitable organizations (p. 63–64)–his performative attempt to instantiate the paraversity in the final part of the book leaves him a little lost, metaphorically wandering the galleries of Borges’ infinite library (p. 119). Overall The University in Dissent is a much-needed intervention in debates around the future of academia in the UK and elsewhere. For all its flaws, the book succeeds on its own terms by presenting, à la Readings, ‘the act of reading as an incitement to act’ (p. 120; emphasis in original). For this is a book that should certainly be read by anyone who seeks to understand the rise of excellence in higher education; and while this may not necessarily result in the formation of a covert paraversity that operates beneath the radar of the University of Excellence, it could have the even greater effect of provoking others to act against the market-based principles that currently guide research and teaching in more immediately disruptive and unruly ways. This may ultimately allow us to meet the challenge originally set by Readings and only partially answered by Rolfe–namely, how to be a scholar in an institution that no longer seems to value scholarship.