A field study of 29 resource-constrained firms that varied dramatically in their responses to similar objective environments is used to examine the process by which entrepreneurs in resource-poor environments were able to render unique services by recombining elements at hand for new purposes that challenged institutional definitions and limits. We found that Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage—making do with what is at hand—explained many of the behaviors we observed in small firms that were able to create something from nothing by exploiting physical, social, or institutional inputs that other firms rejected or ignored. We demonstrate the socially constructed nature of resource environments and the role of bricolage in this construction. Using our field data and the existing literature on bricolage, we advance a formal definition of entrepreneurial bricolage and induce the beginnings of a process model of bricolage and firm growth. Central to our contribution is the notion that companies engaging in bri...

Creating Something from Nothing: Resource Construction through Entrepreneurial Bricolage:

Our era is one of increasingly pervasive digital technologies, which penetrate deeply into the very core of the products, services, and operations of many organizations and radically change the nature of product and service innovations. The fundamental properties of digital technology are reprogrammability and data homogenization. Together, they provide an environment of open and flexible affordances that are used in creating innovations characterized by convergence and generativity. An analysis of convergence and generativity observed in innovations with pervasive digital technologies reveals three traits: (1) the importance of digital technology platforms, (2) the emergence of distributed innovations, and (3) the prevalence of combinatorial innovation. Each of the six articles in this special issue relates to one or more of these three traits. In this essay, we explore the organizational research implications of these three digital innovation traits and identify research opportunities for organization science scholars. Examples from the articles in this special issue on organizing for innovation in the digitized world are used to demonstrate the kind of organizational scholarship that can faithfully reflect and inform innovation in a world of pervasive digital technologies.

Organizing for Innovation in the Digitized World

In recent years, there has been a radical reinterpretation of the role of policy making and service delivery in the public domain. Policy making is no longer seen as a purely top-down process but rather as a negotiation among many interacting policy systems. Similarly, services are no longer simply delivered by professional and managerial staff in public agencies but are coproduced by users and their communities. Th is article presents a conceptual framework for understanding the emerging role of user and community coproduction and presents several case studies that illustrate how diff erent forms of coproduction have played out in practice. Traditional conceptions of service planning and management are now outdated and need to be revised to account for coproduction as an integrating mechanism and an incentive for resource mobilization — a potential that is still greatly underestimated. However, coproduction in the context of multipurpose, multistakeholder networks raises important public governance issues that have implications for public services reform.

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Beyond Engagement and Participation: User and Community Coproduction of Public Services

This paper describes the emerging field of practice theory as it is practiced in relation to organizational phenomena. We identify three approaches---empirical, theoretical, and philosophical---that relate to the what, the how, and the why of using a practice lens. We discuss three principles of the theoretical approach to practice and offer examples of how practice theory has been used in the organizational literature and in our own research. We end with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities that practice theory affords organizational scholarship.

/pdf/theorizing-practice-and-practicing-theory-36ob7w5wmi.pdf

Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory

We advance arguments for why and how a coevolutionary perspective and framework of analysis can provide a new lens and new directions for research in strategic management and organization studies. We identify the distinguishing properties of coevolution in an attempt to define coevolutionary research from other evolutionary research in social sciences. We also outline and discuss the empirical challenges and requirements for undertaking research within coevolutionary inquiry systems. In particular we stress the relevance of specifying coevolutionary models for reframing the selection adaptation standoff when applied to research on organization change over time, in general, and specifically to the mutation and emergence of new organizational forms. Furthermore, a coevolutionary framework has the potential to bridge and reintegrate strategy and organization theory teaching and research within a holistic framework. In our view such a reintegration is the sine qua non for studying organizational change over t...

Prolegomena on Coevolution: a Framework for Research on Strategy and New Organizational Forms

The global technology strategy of Olivetti, a leading European computer firm, is analyzed over the last decade in order to illustrate how high-tech firms undergo transformations which not only tend to destroy their best core competencies, but also affect their very business identity. Task uncertainty is so pronounced that conventional ways of looking at the organizational structures and processes, such as the transaction costs approach or the strategy-structure link, need to be amended in favor of a more dynamic perspective. Such a perspective looks at organizations as platforms, or contexts, out of which specific structures are extracted, tried out and discarded in a pragmatic manner. A platform is a metaorganization, a formative context that molds structures, and routines shaping them into well-known forms, such as the hierarchy, the matrix and even the network, but on a highly volatile basis. Hence, the platform organization may appear to be confused and inefficient but its value lies in its readiness to sport whatever organizational form is required under the circumstances. Platforms are characterized by surprises, and organization members, no matter how they see themselves after the fact, are busy improvising and tinkering. Drawing on similar studies carried out in Silicon Valley, one can draw the conclusion that high-tech firms can survive if they are smart at doing what ‘savages do daily’, i.e. bricolage
In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it. (Heraclitus)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2634975

Claudia U. Ciborra

Papers

The Platform Organization: Recombining Strategies, Structures, and Surprises