Sarah Kaplan

Framing Contests: Strategy Making Under Uncertainty

I develop a model of framing contests to elucidate how cognitive frames influence organizational strategy making. By using ethnographic techniques to study the day-to-day practices of strategy making in one firm, I examine the ways actors attempted to transform their own cognitive frames of a situation into predominant frames through a series of interactions. Frames are the means by which managers make sense of ambiguous information from their environments. Actors each had cognitive frames about the direction the market was taking and about what kinds of solutions would be appropriate. Where frames about a strategic choice were not congruent, actors engaged in highly political framing practices to make their frames resonate and to mobilize action in their favor. Those actors who most skillfully engaged in these practices shaped the frame that prevailed in the organization. This framing perspective suggests that frames are not only instrumental tools for the ex post justification of actions taken through power, but rather are an ex ante part of the political process that produces decisions. Uncertainty opens up the possibility for new actors to gain power, and contesting frames is a way of changing the power structures in the organization. A principal contribution of the framing contests model is to locate a middle ground between cognitive and political models of strategy making, one in which frames are both constraints and resources and outcomes can be shaped by purposeful action and interaction to make meaning.

Cognition and Renewal: Comparing CEO and Organizational Effects on Incumbent Adaptation to Technical Change

We investigate the conditions under which managerial cognition affects the timing of incumbent entry into a radical new technological market. We address this question using a longitudinal study of communications technology firms entering the fiber-optics product market. Using a hazard rate model, we investigate the relevance of cognition based on the direction of CEO attention. We find that attention toward the emerging technology and the affected industry is associated with faster entry, and attention to existing technologies is associated with slower progress. Second, we assess the extent to which the effect of cognition is dependent upon the levels of relevant organizational factors and find that CEO attention to the emerging technology may amplify the effects of industry orientation. Managerial cognition is important in understanding organizational outcomes, and considering both the direction of cognition and its interaction with organizational factors provides a more nuanced view of entry behavior. These results contribute to the literatures on incumbent response to technical change and new product development by suggesting that context-specific managerial cognition has a separate and important influence on the degree and direction of strategic renewal. We argue that managerial cognition is therefore a dynamic managerial capability that can shape adaptation by established firms.

Research in Cognition and Strategy: Reflections on Two Decades of Progress and a Look to the Future

This review of cognition in strategic management research takes as its starting point the appreciation of the seminal paper – “Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities: The Case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers” – by Porac, Thomas and Baden-Fuller on cognitive categorization of competition published in the Journal of Management Studies only 20 years ago. In this paper, I reflect on the context in which their paper emerged, the impact it has had, and the future paths that research on cognition in strategy might take. In doing so, I highlight the challenges associated with establishing cognition as a legitimate factor in strategic management (alongside the traditional explanations of capabilities and incentives) and of showing the causal relationship between cognition and strategic outcomes. Subsequent work in cognition explored the dynamic relationship between cognition, capabilities and incentives and, in process models of framing, linked cognition with political action. Rather than managerial cognition becoming its own independent field, cognitive concepts have diffused throughout work in many different managerial fields, leading to a proliferation of terms, concepts and approaches. I conclude by exploring some of the paths that research in cognition and strategy is taking in the present day – particularly those involving studies of the construction of markets and categories, each of which are themes that the work by Porac, Thomas and Baden-Fuller brought to our attention.

Cognition and Capabilities: A Multi-Level Perspective

Research on managerial cognition and on organizational capabilities has essentially developed in two parallel tracks. We know much from the resource-based view about the relationship between capabilities and organizational performance. Separately, managerial cognition scholars have shown how interpretations of the environment shape organizational responses. Only recently have scholars begun to link the two sets of insights. These new links suggest that routines and capabilities are based in particular understandings about how things should be done, that the value of these capabilities is subject to interpretation, and that even the presence of capabilities may be useless without managerial interpretations of their match to the environment. This review organizes these emerging insights in a multi-level cognitive model of capability development and deployment. The model focuses on the recursive processes of constructing routines (capability building blocks), assembling routines into capabilities, and matching capabilities to perceived opportunities. To date, scholars have focused most attention on the organizational-level process of matching. Emerging research on the microfoundations of routines contributes to the micro-level of analysis. The lack of research on capability assembly leaves the field without a bridge connecting the macro and micro levels. The model offers suggestions for research directions to address these challenges.

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

This paper reports on a field study of strategy making in one organization facing an industry crisis. In a comparison of five strategy projects, we observed that organizational participants struggled with competing interpretations of what might emerge in the future, what was currently at stake, and even what had happened in the past. We develop a model of temporal work in strategy making that articulates how actors resolved differences and linked their interpretations of the past, present, and future so as to construct a strategic account that enabled concrete strategic choice and action. We found that settling on a particular account required it to be coherent, plausible, and acceptable; otherwise, breakdowns resulted. Such breakdowns could impede progress, but they could also be generative in provoking a search for new interpretations and possibilities for action. The more intensely actors engaged in temporal work, the more likely the strategies departed from the status quo. Our model suggests that strategy cannot be understood as the product of more or less accurate forecasting without considering the multiple interpretations of present concerns and historical trajectories that help to constitute those forecasts. Projections of the future are always entangled with views of the past and present, and temporal work is the means by which actors construct and reconstruct the connections among them. These insights into the mechanisms of strategy making help explain the practices and conditions that produce organizational inertia and change.

Entrepreneurship and the Construction of Value in Biotechnology

Through our historical analysis of the evolution of biotechnology, we show that highly varied understandings of the value embodied in biotechnology existed. Across three eras (1973-1986 and 1988-2000 and 2003-present), entrepreneurs constructed different economic logics for biotechnology, often in highly contested settings against multiple entrepreneurial adversaries. We also find that an economic logic was not easily stabilized; biotechnology’s evolution was arrested by moments when the stabilized constellations fell apart (in 1987-1989 and again in 2001-2002) and new logics were constructed. We argue that such breakdowns may occur when evidence fails to meet critical tests or when different understandings of value are in conflict. These breakdowns create new opportunities for other entrepreneurs to construct alternative economic logics. By exploring these processes of contestation, (temporary) stabilization and subsequent breakdowns, we contribute first to the entrepreneurship literature by expanding the definition of the entrepreneurial act. We find that the entrepreneur creating a new firm to commercialize a technology, while being a Schumpeterian opportunity seeker, is also acting as an institutional entrepreneur, constructing the economic logics and institutional setups as they build their organizations. Not only does this perspective redefine the role of Schumpeterian entrepreneurs, it also opens up the discussion of entrepreneurship to a whole set of different entrepreneurial actors who may not be creating firms but who are seeking to shape the economic logic and institutions which will govern the system of exchange. Second, we contribute to the literature on technical change by showing that entrepreneurs are central actors in this process. Their challenge is to exploit, negotiate and resolve the uncertainties created during the emergence of a new technology. They must develop an economic logic and constitute the logic in an effective organization. In doing so, they act to change the institutional setup in a process that shapes and is shaped by the evolving technology. By taking this view, we present a broader definition of the institutional arrangements that are central to technical change, placing legal institutions promulgating and defining patent law alongside government agencies establishing safety regulations together with financial market institutions validating the financial value of a startup. By examining the entire the institutional setup, we can more precisely explain patterns of technical change. We show that such change may not be smooth, but instead can be arrested or change direction when compromises about the economic logic break down. As such, the forces shaping technology evolution are best understood as not purely technical, but also, and unavoidably, economic.

On the Risk of Studying Practices in Isolation: Linking What, Who and How in Strategy Research

This article challenges the recent focus on practices as stand-alone phenomena, as exemplified by the so-called “Practice-Based View of Strategy” proposed by Bromiley and Rau. While the goal of “Practice-Based View of Strategy” points to the potential for standard practices to generate performance differentials (in contrast to the resource-based view), it marginalizes well-known insights from practice theory more widely. In particular, by limiting its focus to practices, that is, “what” practices are used, it underplays the implications of “who” is engaged in the practices and “how” the practices are carried out. In examining practices in isolation, the “Practice-Based View of Strategy” carries the serious risk of misattributing performance differentials. In this article, we offer an integrative practice perspective on strategy and performance that should aid scholars in generating more precise and contextually sensitive theories about the enactment and impact of practices as well as about critical factors shaping differences in practice outcomes.

Bounding an Emerging Technology: Para-Scientific Media and the Drexler-Smalley Debate About Nanotechnology

‘Nanotechnology’ is often touted as a significant emerging technological field. However, determining what nanotechnology means, whose research counts as nanotechnology, and who gets to speak on behalf of nanotechnology is a highly political process involving constant negotiation with significant implications for funding, legislation, and citizen support. In this paper, we deconstruct a high-profile moment of controversy about nanotechnology’s possibilities: a debate between K. Eric Drexler and Richard Smalley published as a ‘point—counterpoint’ feature in 2003 in Chemical & Engineering News. Rather than treat the debate as a stand-alone episode of scientific controversy, we seek to understand the forces that enabled it to be seen as such an episode. We introduce the term ‘para-scientific’ media to make explicit how certain forms of publication intervene in the dissemination of technical knowledge as it travels beyond its supposed site of production. The existence of para-scientific media is predicated on intimate association with formalized channels of scientific publication, but they also seek to engage other cultures of expertise. Through this lens, we show that Drexler and Smalley were not only independent entrepreneurs enrolling Chemical & Engineering News as a site of boundary work; members of the para-scientific media actively enrolled Drexler and Smalley as part of a broader effort to simplify a complex set of uncertainties about nanotechnology’s potential into two polarized views. In this case study, we examine received accounts of the debate, describe the boundary work undertaken by Drexler and Smalley to shape the path of nanotechnology’s emergence, and unpack the boundary work of the para-scientific media to create polarizing controversy that attracted audiences and influenced policy and scientific research agendas. Members of the para-scientific media have been influential in bounding nanotechnology as a field-in-tension by structuring irreconcilable dichotomies out of an ambiguous set of uncertainties. We conclude with thoughts about the implications of this case study for studies of science communication, institutional entrepreneurship and the ethics of emerging technologies.

Using Strategy Tools in Practice - How Tools Mediate Strategizing and Organizing

Recently there has been much debate about the usefulness of strategic management education and implicitly about strategy tools and frameworks. Yet, this debate is taking place in the absence of detailed knowledge about how, or indeed, whether, managers use the theoretical tools that they learn. This paper addresses this gap by taking a practice perspective to look at how strategy tools are engaged by different actors in mediating strategizing and organizing processes. Based on an ethnography of strategy making inside one firm, we explore how an actors search for rationality and objectivity through the use of tools is actually a political, symbolic and socially interactive process. Drawing on the boundary object literature, we provide a conceptual framework for analyzing strategy tools as key mediators of these contextual and political interests.

Taking "strategy-as-practice" across the Atlantic

An increasingly large group of scholars in Europe have begun to take a practice lens to understanding problems of strategy making in organizations. Strategy-as-practice research is premised on the notion that all social life is constituted within practices, and that practices and practitioners are essential subjects of study. Applying this lens to strategy foregrounds the mundane, everyday work involved in doing strategy. In doing so, it expands our definition of the salient outcomes to be studied in strategic management and provides new perspectives on the mechanisms for producing such outcomes. As strategy-as-practice scholars, we have been puzzled about how much more slowly the ideas in this burgeoning field have traveled from their home in Europe to the United States than have other ideas in strategic management traveled from the United States to Europe. In this chapter, we contribute some thoughts about the development of the strategy-as-practice field and its travels in academia.