The long march of modernization of the Western societies tends to be presented as following a regular sequence: societies and institutions were pre-modern, and then they were modernized, eventually becoming post-modern. Such teleology may provide an incomplete or distorted narrative of societal...

This article calls for research on organizational improvisation to go beyond the currently dominant jazz metaphor in theory development. We recognize the important contribution that jazz improvisation has made and will no doubt continue to make in understanding the nature and complexity of...

We present twelve propositions constituting a contribution to a contingency view of time in organizations and synthesize apparently opposite perspectives of time. To articulate them, we relate the planning, action and improvisation strategic orientations to the dependent, independent and...

This study uses structural equation modeling to test a model of the impact of human resource management bundles on perceived organizational performance and innovation performance, on a large sample of companies. Strategic management orientation and innovation as a strategic factor are proposed...

We discuss why surprises, defined as events that happen unexpectedly or expected events that take unexpected shapes, are important to organizations and should be considered in the organizational literature. The concept of organizational surprises is unpacked on the basis of a typology built...

Theories of management and organization have traditionally overlooked the concept of bricolage. Focused on the rationality of resource allocation, scholars have missed the relevance of the skill of “inventing” resources from available materials. Changes in the nature of competition are,...

Organizations have, in the past, often been discussed as if they were Cartesian mentalities, planning agendas, learning from doing, processing information, reducing equivocality, mimicking and copying, floating disembodiedly apart from the actors who work in these organizations. We are offered...

This paper advances a theory about the way patterns of positive and negative organizing unfold. It is grounded in data collected from 58 individuals. We followed an inductive logic and used critical incidents to collect information on positive and negative processes and outcomes. From this we...

This paper addresses the need for reliable action guidelines that can be used by organisations in turbulent environments. Building on current conceptual and empirical research, we suggest an analytical approach for the management of surprising and potentially damaging events. In order to do so...