Roger L. M. Dunbar

Learning to Design Organizations and Learning from Designing Them

The academic focus of organization studies has unfortunately drifted over the years from the issues that organizations pose for their members and their societies, and the issues that confront people who seek to improve organizations. However, studies of efforts to design organizations can help us to better understand organizations and may also help us to improve them. The papers in this special issue of Organization Science describe several specific efforts to design organizations, telling why people wanted to make changes and what happened when people sought to make them.

Dealing with Unusual Experiences: A Narrative Perspective on Organizational Learning

Experiences that do not fit squarely into known categories pose a challenge to notions of organizational learning that rely primarily on scientific or experiential approaches. Making sense of, responding to, and learning from such unusual experiences requires reflection and novel action by organizational actors. We argue that narrative development processes make this organizational learning possible. By developing narratives, organizational actors create situated understandings of unusual experiences, negotiate consensual meanings, and engage in coordinated actions. Through the accumulation of narratives about unusual experiences, an organization builds a memory with generative qualities. Specifically, through narratives, actors evoke memories of prior unusual experiences and how they were dealt with, and this generates new options for dealing with emerging unusual experiences. We outline a framework detailing how narrative development processes enable organizational learning from unusual experiences and conclude by summarizing how this approach differs from and yet builds upon scientific and experiential approaches to learning.

Budgeting for Control.

A budgetary control system is defined as a hierarchically linked combination of a goal-setting and a goal-achieving machine. The effects of four inputs to the goal-setting machine are discussed: (1) setting difficult as opposed to easy goals, (2) allowing the budgeted individual to participate in setting the goal, (3) providing financial reward for goal achievement, and (4) providing inadequate extrinsic reward for goal achievement.

A Frame for Deframing in Strategic Analysis

Deframing processes are needed to deal with pervasive change. We describe what is meant by a frame and how strategy analysts develop and rely on frames to help their understanding. We also discuss the limitations of frames and the need in a changing world for people to be able to both frame and deframe to facilitate their understanding. We then present a frame for understanding the deframing process.

Distributed Knowledge and Indeterminate Meaning: The Case of the Columbia Shuttle Flight:

We explore the processes that unfolded during NASAs ill-fated Columbia shuttle flight, as members of the mission team struggled to understand the significance of an unexpected foam-shedding event. It was difficult to categorize this event in real time, as two different criteria — a concern for safety and a concern for meeting schedules — were being used. Using in-depth data gathered on the Columbia shuttle flight, we describe the sensemaking processes that unfolded and discuss the implications for organizations.

Manager's Influence on Subordinates' Thinking About Safety

Organizational climate may be an important determinant of the way organization members think about safety. Some organizational climates may tend to encourage subordinates to take individual respons...

Developing Entrepreneurial Skills through the Use of Behavioural Simulations

Entrepreneurship education is struggling to define itself, to create a meaningful knowledge base, and to develop, entrepreneurial skills in managers. As an integral part of this process, the utility and appropriate‐ness of various teaching methods are frequently explored. It is suggested that the behavioural simulation technology, which has been successfully used to teach strategic and organisational processes and to diagnose and develop managerial skills, may be appropriate for developing entrepreneurial skills. Empirical data are used to support the argument that behavioural simulations create an appropriate teacher‐learner environment to accomplish many of the learning objectives of entrepreneurship education.

Context, Structure, and Academic Effectiveness: Evidence from West Germany

Using a sample of 35 university departments, this study relates aspects of research and teaching effectiveness in university departments to contextual and structural contingen cies. Three contextual measures (paradigm development, student emphasis, resource availability) and two structural measures (academic control, bureaucratic control) serve as independent variables. The contextual variables are found to be better predictors of effectiveness than the structural variables. Implications for developing and testing structural contingency theories as well as programmes for university reforms are discussed.

Trainings that Demystify Strategic Decision‐making Processes

It is argued that training programmes about strategic decision making tend to take an analytic approach. In doing so, they simply overlook the surprises and chaos that often characterises strategic discussions; they imply they are not important. Yet it is this discussion process itself that may be most in need of managing. Several behavioural simulations now existing are described which provide a structured context wherein participants can get insights into how executives reach agreements about strategy.

Regulating External Threats in the Cigarette Industry.

The authors thank Rudi Bresser, Catharine Buttinger, Pat Jolley, Wendy Liu, Jerry Salancik, Toni Wilkinson, and the anonymous ASQ reviewers for their assistance. This paper was supported in part by a grant from the Tenneco Fund Program at the Graduate School of Business Administration, New York University. The paper applies theoretical ideas about how threatened systems regulate external disturbances in an organizational context. The pattern of events in the controversy surrounding smoking and health was examined over a thirty-year period to determine whether the cigarette industry effectively regulated environmental disturbances to protect itself from potential threats. Both the extended theory and the empirical analysis demonstrate that the presence of third-party actors and the positions they take are critical in determining the outcomes of controversy.