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This book on uncertainty comprises the initial volume in a series titled “New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition”. We asked Frances Milliken and Gerard P. Hodgkinson, two well-known scholars who have made important contributions to our understanding of uncertainty to join us in this opening chapter to introduce this project. The brief bios found at the end of this volume cannot do justice to the broad range of their contributions, but our conversation gives a flavor of the kind of insights they have brought to managerial and organizational cognition (MOC). The editors thank them for helping launch the series with a decisive exploration of what defining uncertainty involves, how that might be done, why it is important, and how the task is changing. We were interested to discover that all five of us are currently involved in research that considers the nature and impact of uncertainty, and we hope that readers similarly find that paying attention to uncertainty contributes to their current projects. Working together, we can advance understanding of organizational settings and effective action, both for researchers and practitioners.

In this chapter, the authors reflect on their experience of editing the first five volumes of the book series New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition. The authors summarize some of the contributions of articles published in the series, including those comprising this fifth volume. From its beginnings as a follow-up publication of the second Frontiers in Managerial and Organizational Cognition (MOC) conference, the series has moved in several directions exploring how the field is developing, and what new applications of MOC theories and methods are being explored. The authors identify and highlight several lines of investigation in particular: work that furthers their understanding of schema and cognitive mapping, work on framing, work on identity, work on heuristics and intuition, work on emotions, and modern methodological advances, enabled by IT and other technologies.

Strategy researchers have given very little attention to services, even though they now dominate the gross domestic product of almost all countries. We encourage more research focused on service as the basic mode of generating revenue today, especially as the economic landscape is being restructured by recent financial crises. This chapter suggests a basic framework for services research and then outlines issues in three areas that are particularly important to customer-oriented service innovation: individuation, standardization, and export. Illustrative examples from Germany provide more specific contexts for considering the range of activity in this under-researched domain.

Some of Lou Pondy′s closest colleagues were invited to submit letters and articles, as a starting point for this special issue. Many letters were received from leading scholars at some of the most respected institutions in the world, capturing Lou′s human qualities and his unique analytic style. A selection of these letters are included here.

By theorizing choice as an information and decision problem, behavioral strategy research has not considered fully the agentic capacities of strategists. We argue that agentic capacities are distinct from decision-making and information-processing capacities as they rest on temporally anchored engagements with the world through habit, imagination, and judgment. We propose that understanding agency as temporally anchored action capacities is particularly important for research in behavioral strategy, as strategic phenomena encompass accumulated experience and path-dependencies (the past), ongoing competitive, market, and organizational interactions and exchanges (the present), and plans, visions, and forecasts for the future (the future). We outline how strategic choice and agency involve cognitive engagement in the three time horizons through distinct cognitive capabilities and the organizational processes that support them.

This chapter draws from Structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, 1984) and Schema theory (Niesser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. New York, NY: Appleton-Crofts.) to examine how words reflect changing frames of reference (Orlikowski & Gash, 1994) that affect adaptation to strategic technological change. The method of recursive dialogue analysis we use provides evidence of how expectations about a new technology introduced to a sales force changed over time. Individuals had expectations based on past experiences, made initial decisions about using the new technology, juxtaposed new concepts against previous ones, interacted with team-mates, and built further concepts around previously expressed phrases. The results we exhibit here allow us to visualize complex interactions under conditions of uncertainty, contributing a detailed view of the recursive and cognitive process of developing a frame of reference about technology in an organization.

This paper proposes to rethink the concepts of relevance and usefulness and their relation to the theory–practice gap in management research.

On the basis of the cognitive-linguistic relevance theory or inferential pragmatics, supplemented by insights from information science, we define relevance as a general conceptual category, while reserving usefulness for the instrumental application in a particular case.

There is no reason to hold onto the difference between theoretical and practical relevance, nor to distinguish between instrumental and conceptual relevance.

This novel approach will help to clarify the confusion in the field and contribute to a better understanding of the added value of management research.

Positive organizational scholarship in healthcare (POSH) suggests that, to promote widespread improvement within health services, focusing on the good, the excellent, and the brilliant is as important as conventional approaches that focus on the negative, the problems, and the failures. POSH offers different opportunities to learn from and build resilient cultures of safety, innovation, and change. It is not separate from tried and tested approaches to health service improvement – but rather, it approaches this improvement differently. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

POSH, appreciative inquiry (AI) and reflective practice were used to inform an exploratory investigation of what is good, excellent, or brilliant health service management.

The researchers identified new characteristics of good healthcare and what it might take to have brilliant health service management, elucidated and refined POSH, and identified research opportunities that hold potential value for consumers, practitioners, and policymakers.

The secondary data used in this study offered limited contextual information.

This approach is a platform from which to: identify, investigate, and learn about brilliant health service management; and inform theory and practice.

POSH can help to reveal what consumers and practitioners value about health services and how they prefer to engage with these services.

Using POSH, this paper examines what consumers and practitioners value about health services; it also illustrates how brilliance can be theorized into health service management research and practice.