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This chapter first examines the role of attention in the garbage can model of decision making and compares it both to prior approaches in the Carnegie School tradition and the attention-based view of the firm. Both the garbage can model and the attention-based view rely on the same assumption, one that is rarely recognized nor understood – that organizational decision making is characterized by situated attention, where organizational participants vary across time and place in what they attend to. In the garbage can model, decision opportunities are the temporal contexts for situated attention; in the attention-based view, attention is situated in both time and place within the organization's communication channels. In the garbage can, situated attention is also shaped by the ecology of problems and opportunities competing for attention. The final part examines the determinants and consequences of tight versus loose coupling of channels in organizations and its effects on participants’ situated attention. Attention structures external to channels and the architecture of channel structures shape the degree of coupling found in organizations. In viewing coupling as a variable, the chapter suggests that a modified garbage can model, combined with an increased focus on situated attention, provides the foundations for a more general theory of nonroutine decision making.

The attention-based view (ABV) of the firm highlights the role of decision makers’ attention in firm behavior. The ABV vastly improves our understanding of decision makers’ focus of attention; how that focus is situated in an organization’s procedural and communication channels; and how the distribution of the focus of attention among decision makers participating in those procedural and communication channels affects their understanding of a situation, their motivation to act, and, ultimately, their behavior. Significant progress has been made in recent years in refining and extending the ABV. However, the role of individual differences in the capacity to read other people’s desires, intentions, knowledge, and beliefs – that is, the theory of mind (ToM) – has remained on the sidelines. The ToM is a natural complement to the ABV. In this study, we explore how the ToM allows for an understanding of the advantage that organizations have over markets within the ABV.

The conditions that are constantly changing and transforming by digital technologies in today's world have forced businesses to think strategically and to comply with the rules and processes of strategic management. Technologies, such as the internet of things, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and big data, especially in the Industry 4.0 ecosystem, cause some conflicts or constructive and destructive effects on the management approaches and management strategies of businesses. Businesses need to understand these technologies and their effects to maintain their existence and manage their resources and capabilities effectively and strategically. In this chapter, it is aimed to examine the conflicts with destructive and constructive effects of digital technologies on the strategic management of enterprises. For this purpose, the literature was searched qualitatively, and a conceptual study was carried out. At the beginning of the chapter, strategic management literature was researched, and strategic management approaches and views were examined. In the next part, digital technologies in the Industry 4.0 ecosystem are explained. In the last part, digital technologies and their impacts in terms of strategic management approaches (position approach, resource-based approach, and complementing views of resources-based approach) have been examined.

Macro- and microorganizational perspectives on strategy processes are typically treated as distinct lines of inquiry. This paper proposes an attention-based theory (March & Olsen, 1976; Ocasio, 1997) of strategy formulation processes to bridge both perspectives. In particular, it links evolutionary perspectives on strategy (Burgelman, 1991, 2002) and strategic choice (Child, 1972) perspectives on organizational and strategic decision making (Bower, 1970; Carter, 1971; Cyert & March, 1963; Frederickson, 1986). Our treatment of the strategy process extends theory by viewing strategy processes as assemblages of tightly and loosely coupled networks of operational and governance channels (Allison & Zelikow, 1999; Ocasio, 1997), strategy formulation as a fluid and distributed process, and environmental, organizational level and individual level forces as consequential. Like Lovas and Ghoshal (2000), we view strategy formulation as a process of guided evolution. Unlike Lovas and Ghoshal who view strategic intent as the objective function that guides evolution, we view strategy formulation processes as more fragmented and contested, with multiple foci of attention, rather than an explicit objective function, and both top-down and bottoms-up processes capable of generating changes in the strategic direction of the firm.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) plays an important role in explaining firm performance. In this study, we investigate the relation between EO and performance at the strategic business unit (SBU) level and examine the influence of decision-making mode and social capital of the focal business unit manager. Adopting the attention-based view (ABV) as our main theoretical perspective, we examine the impact of decision-making mode (i.e., participative vs. autocratic) on the EO–performance relation. In addition, we investigate the extent to which strong network ties with actors at lower, similar, and higher hierarchical positions, respectively, enable SBU managers to effectively engage in participative decision-making processes when leveraging EO. Our findings based on 119 SBUs of one large international company provide nuanced insights into how local conditions interact to shape EO’s influence on performance.

This study updates the discussion on demand-pull attention as a source of radical product innovation. Demand-pull attention shows an ex ante alignment with market characteristics and needs as opposed to pushing resources toward markets. The authors suggest a holistic framework and specify three dimensions of demand-pull attention: anticipated or revealed market demand, market environment, and external economic environment. Based on a large German longitudinal panel consisting of 941 firm-year observations from 2003 to 2013, the authors conceptualized the measurement of demand-pull dimensions’ attention and radical product innovation using computer-aided text analysis of annual reports. The authors analyzed the relationship between the attention that a firm pays to different demand-pull dimensions and the firm’s strategic intention to radically innovate; thus, the authors actually focused on the cognitive sources of radical product innovations. This chapter suggests that radical product innovation activities are positively driven by attention toward the market environment and market demand orientation. However, the hypothesis, which assumed a negative relationship between attention toward the external economic environment and radical innovation, could not be significantly confirmed. This demands a closer look into the underlying decision processes of firms when deciding on radical product innovations. With the theoretical grounding on the attention-based view of the firm, the authors contribute to a better understanding of the role that organizational cognition plays in innovation processes.

This study examines the effects of organizational attention on technological search in the multibusiness firm. We argue that attentional specialization and coupling, or (respectively) attention given to problems within and across units, affect a unit’s ability to engage in distant and local search by shaping how problems are perceived and addressed. We test this theory by applying a probabilistic topic model to all Motorola patents issued from 1974 to 1997, thus identifying and measuring attention to technical problems. Our results suggest that (a) subunits with specialized attention are not myopic but instead explore broadly and (b) tight attentional coupling across units increases the breadth of search. This study contributes to attention-based views of the firm and to studies on organizational design and search.

Under currently uncertain and fast-changing environments, it is important for firms to supplement their main strategy with alternative ones so that they can quickly change courses of actions. Strategic flexibility is thus an important factor for the viability and success of firms. Although previous research has emphasized the need for strategic flexibility, some firms are reluctant to do so since it requires high investments. Existing studies on strategic flexibility have emerged from various disciplines and drawn on diverse theoretical perspectives. Due to the increasing importance of strategic flexibility, this chapter reviews and summarizes existing studies on strategic flexibility based on the applications of strategic flexibility in various business disciplines, including management and strategy, business entrepreneurship, and marketing. The authors also summarize different theoretical perspectives, including upper echelons theory, resource-based view theory, and dynamic capabilities theory, as well as their limitations.

The most widely used conceptualizations of organizing assume that organizational issues are known, and consequently, organizing targets on control and management. Traditional organizing focuses on planning for the known future with a small group of experts and for the most part neglects the experiential ambiguities of organizational stakeholders. That research stream neglects a topic of consciousness and if studied, it approaches consciousness mostly as an object. This chapter assumes that ambiguity holds many resources, which a storytelling approach – the quantum stream of it – accommodates. Furthermore, it indicates that consciousness can be included in the organization equation. It suggests understanding consciousness as an everyday process in organizations rather than a brain function only, and lets us to take consciousness seriously. This chapter draws on my dissertation about consciousness-based view of organizing. It claims that everyone working in organizations influences of the consciousness fields, which then become actors taking care of us in organizations unless we become aware of them. Consciousness provides momentous information for those interested in strategic leaps, accelerated innovations, and fosters sustainable and ethical ways of working and organizing.

Learning theory suggests that organizations learn when the activities and experiences of individuals become assimilated into the routines, systems, and policies of the organization (Grant, 1996). A premise of study 1 is that the greater the attention a firm devotes to developing new knowledge and to exploiting existing knowledge, the greater its learning. This premise is consistent with prior theory which holds that the amount of information learned and the ease of its retrieval depend upon the intensity of effort expended in its acquisition (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990), and with the notion that a firm's behavior can be envisioned as the pattern of effort and attention devoted to specific activities (Ocasio, 1997). The extent to which firms devote attention to learning in the international as well as domestic marketplace can be considered as critical outcome variables, and an important question pertains to how several factors affect this ‘learning effort.’