Showing papers by "Walter W. Powell published in 2012"

From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk: Decoupling in the Contemporary World

Abstract: The pervasive spread of rationalizing trends in society, such as the growing influence of managerial sciences and increasing emphases on accountability and transparency, has created significant changes in organizations’ external environments. As a result, there is growing pressure on organizations to align their policies and practices, and to conform to pressures in an expanding array of domains, from protecting the natural world to promoting employee morale. In this context, we reconsider the concept of decoupling as it applies to organizations. Through a review and critique of existing research, we argue that the common understanding of decoupling—as a gap between policy and practice—obscures the rise of a more prevalent and consequential form of decoupling—a gap between means and ends. We describe when to expect both policy–practice and means–ends decoupling, and we indicate promising areas for research. The major consequences of this overlooked form of decoupling are that in an effort to monitor and e...

The Emergence of Organizations and Markets

Abstract: Contributors ix List of Illustrations xiii List of Tables xvii Acknowledgments xix Chapter 1 The Problem of Emergence John F. Padgett and Walter W. Powell 1 Part I Autocatalysis 31 * Chapter 2 Autocatalysis in Chemistry and the Origin of Life John F. Padgett 33 * Chapter 3 Economic Production as Chemistry II John F. Padgett, Peter McMahan, and Xing Zhong 70 * Chapter 4 From Chemical to Social Networks John F. Padgett 92 Part II Early Capitalism and State Formation 115 * Chapter 5 The Emergence of Corporate Merchant-Banks in Dugento Tuscany John F. Padgett 121 * Chapter 6 Transposition and Refunctionality: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence John F. Padgett 168 * Chapter 7 Country as Global Market: Netherlands, Calvinism, and the Joint-Stock Company John F. Padgett 208 * Chapter 8 Conflict Displacement and Dual Inclusion in the Construction of Germany Jonathan Obert and John F. Padgett 235 Part III Communist Transitions 267 * Chapter 9 The Politics of Communist Economic Reform: Soviet Union and China John F. Padgett 271 * Chapter 10 Deviations from Design: The Emergence of New Financial Markets and Organizations in Yeltsin's Russia Andrew Spicer 316 * Chapter 11 The Emergence of the Russian Mobile Telecom Market: Local Technical Leadership and Global Investors in a Shadow of the State Valery Yakubovich and Stanislav Shekshnia 334 * Chapter 12 Social Sequence Analysis: Ownership Networks, Political Ties, and Foreign Investment in Hungary David Stark and Balazs Vedres 347 Part IV Contemporary Capitalism and Science 375 * Chapter 13 Chance, Necessite, et Naivete: Ingredients to Create a New Organizational Form Walter W. Powell and Kurt Sandholtz 379 * Chapter 14 Organizational and Institutional Genesis: The Emergence of High-Tech Clusters in the Life Sciences Walter W. Powell, Kelley Packalen, and Kjersten Whittington 434 * Chapter 15 An Open Elite: Arbiters, Catalysts, or Gatekeepers in the Dynamics of Industry Evolution? Walter W. Powell and Jason Owen-Smith 466 * Chapter 16 Academic Laboratories and the Reproduction of Proprietary Science: Modeling Organizational Rules through Autocatalytic Networks Jeannette A. Colyvas and Spiro Maroulis 496 * Chapter 17 Why the Valley Went First: Aggregation and Emergence in Regional Inventor Networks Lee Fleming, Lyra Colfer, Alexandra Marin, and Jonathan McPhie 520 * Chapter 18 Managing the Boundaries of an "Open" Project Fabrizio Ferraro and Siobhan O'Mahony 545 * Coda: Reflections on the Study of Multiple Networks Walter W. Powell and John F. Padgett 566 Index of Authors 571 Index of Subjects 573

Amphibious entrepreneurs and the emergence of organizational forms

Abstract: We study the emergence of organizational forms, focusing on two mechanisms—reconfiguration and transposition—that distinguish the founding models of the first 26 biotechnology companies, all created in the industry's first decade, from 1972 to 1981. We analyze rich archival data using hierarchical cluster analysis, revealing four organizational variants of the dedicated biotech firm (DBF). Three were products of reconfiguration, as executives from Big Pharma used past practices to incorporate new science. One DBF variant resulted from ‘amphibious’ scientists who imported organizing ideas from the academy into their VC-funded start-ups. We argue that such transpositions are fragile, yet charged with generative possibilities. Copyright © 2012 Strategic Management Society.

The Problem of Emergence

Abstract: Darwin’s question about the origin of species is worth posing and exploring as much in the social sciences as it was in biology. Human organizations, like living organisms, have evolved throughout history, with new organizational forms emerging and transforming in various settings: new types of banks and banking in the history of capitalism; new types of research organizations and research in the history of science; new types of political organizations and nations in the history of state formation. All of these examples are discussed in this book. the histories of economies and polities are littered with new organizational forms that never existed before. in biological language, this emergence of new organizational forms is the puzzle of speciation. We economists, political scientists, and sociologists have many theories about how to choose alternatives, once these swim into our field of vision. But our theories have little to say about the invention of new alternatives in the first place. new ideas, new practices, new organizational forms, new people must enter from off the stage of our imaginary before our analyses can begin. Darwin asked the fundamental question, but our concepts are like those of Darwin before Mendel and Watson and crick. We understand selection and equilibrium, but we do not understand the emergence of what we choose or of who we are. our analytical shears are sharp, but the life forces pushing things up to be trimmed elude us. novelty almost by definition is hard to understand. something is not genuinely new if it already exists in our current practice or imagination. the terms innovation and invention, as we use them in this book, mean the construction of something neither present nor anticipated by anyone in the population. We do not mean that planned incremental improvement on what already exists is not possible—quite the opposite. this type of learning occurs far more often than does the production of genuine novelty. the conundrum for both researchers and participants is that logical cognition, no matter how useful for refinement and improvement, is unlikely to be a fundamental process for generating novelty, because logic can only use axioms that are already there. the literature on “organizational innovation” is voluminous, but that literature largely focuses on learning,1 search,2 and diffusion3 and often uses patents as indicators.4 the term innovation in organization theory refers to products and ideas, never to the emergence of organizational actors per se.5 social science studies processes of innovation, so defined, but mainly by abstracting

Decoupling revisited: Common pressures, divergent strategies in the U. S. nonprofit sector

Abstract: As the members of an organizational field adopt similar practices, considerable variation in enactment can ensue. Field-level theories, however, do not yet explain how and why organizations vary in their use of standard practices. To tackle this issue, we focus on the infiltration of managerial practices into a sector traditionally motivated by norms of charity, using data drawn from a random sample of 200 nonprofit organizations. We first carry out an inductive content analysis of interviews with executive directors (EDs) about their use of strategic planning, which reveals three main rationales for adoption— associational, managerial, and opportunistic—and two outcomes—symbolic adoption and symbolic implementation. We then use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to consider which combinations of organizational attributes and rationales are associated with the outcomes of decoupling or routinization. Our study shows creative yet patterned possibilities in the uses of a standard practice, with both adoption and implementation taking on symbolic meaning. The findings afford a deeper understanding of how multiple forms of decoupling can be used to understand micro-processes of variation, extending research on divergent outcomes of field-wide isomorphic pressures.

13. Chance, Nécessité, et Naïveté Ingredients to Create a New Organizational Form

Abstract: *The title comes from remarks by Genentech co-founder Herbert Boyer (2001: 95-96): “I think if we had known about all the problems we were going to encounter, we would have thought twice about starting. I once gave a little talk to a group at a Stanford Business School luncheon, and I took off on the title of a book on evolution by Jacques Monod...Chance et Necessité. The title of my talk was ‘Chance, Necessité, et Naïveté.’ Naïveté was the extra added ingredient in biotechnology.”