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The purpose of this paper is to examine how back-office service staff cope with the intricacies of administrative work.

The paper applies the research approach of “at-home ethnography” in a university back-office. The primary method of data collection was participant listening in the field, either in formal interviews or casual conversations. Photography helped the authors to zoom the conversation in to specific artefacts in administrative offices.

The study identifies both forward- and backward-looking recipes as essential administrative tools that back-office staff develop and use to handle intricacies that emerge in their daily work. Forward-looking recipes are based on anticipatory cognitive representations, whereas backward-looking recipes are based on experiential wisdom. The study elaborates on the different kinds of modelling practices that back-office service staff engage in while building and applying these two different kinds of recipes.

The recipes support administrators in knowledge replication and thus help avoid interruptions, reduce uncertainty, and produce consistency in administrative processes.

In contrast to existing studies of formal bureaucracies, the study provides a unique empirical account to show how back-office service staff cope with the multiple intricacies existing in current office environments. The study shows how recipes as models contribute to stabilizing or even routinizing work processes in complex administrative situations.

Behavior in organizations is predominantly driven by expectations and routines derived from past experience rather than by envisioned scenarios reflecting future potentialities. The disproportionate weight placed on expectations derived from past experience has been blamed for a variety of problems associated with individual and organizational creativity and change. Drucker addressed this long‐standing problem by arguing that decision makers must address the degree of “futurity” they need to factor into their present thinking and action. Specifically, decision makers must consider the relative weight or ratio given to ideas derived from two temporally distinct sources of knowledge – expectations constructed from remembering past experiences, and visions derived from imagining the future. In this paper I seek to describe how varying the priority given to remembering and imagining during enactment (action‐perception‐sensemaking) episodes affects organizational creativity and change.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the sensemaking strategies of managers involved in making decisions concerning arts sponsorship.

A qualitative, multiple case method is employed, using multiple informants in ten arts sponsorship decisions. Within and between case analyses were conducted and examined iteratively, along with literature to generate themes to guide future research.

This study finds art sponsorships may be seen as ambiguous, cueing sensemaking; the sensemaking strategies of senior managers involve response to pro-social cues while middle managers draw on commercial benefit cues; sensebreaking and sensegiving are part of the process; and the actors and their interpretations draw from cues in the organisational frames of reference which act as filters, giving meaning to the situations.

This study presents a novel perspective on these decisions, focusing on the micro-level actions and interpretations of actors. It extends current understanding of sponsorship decision making, contributing to a perspective of managers responding to cues, interacting and making sense of their decisions.

For arts managers, this perspective provides understanding of how managers (potential sponsors) respond to multiple cues, interpret and rationalise arts sponsorships. For corporate managers, insights reveal differences in sensemaking between hierarchical levels, and the role of interaction, and organisational frames of reference.

This study is unique in its approach to understanding these decisions in terms of sensemaking, through the use of multiple informants and multiple case studies.

In his previous article, “Measuring the immeasurables,” Rory Gear of Summit‐IMM made the case for measuring intangibles and introduced the Standard and Poor’s method as a viable approach. Here, he describes a worked example taken from a real “Intellectual Capital Rating” of a large international manufacturing company. The company is referred to as “Company X” for confidentiality reasons.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

We must begin, of course, by understanding the strengths and limitations of our own approach. If we are to make progress, it is necessary to examine carefully the institutionalist position, to view it not just as a battering ram with which to inflict damage on currently prevailing orthodoxies, but to identify the strengths and weaknesses in its current incarnations. In so doing, we must be critical as well as constructive.

In this chapter I put forward a framework to help us understand the underlying sources of national policy failures regarding intellectual property rights (IPR) protection, the need for international coordination, and how the coordination should be done. I also analyze whether global harmonization of IPR standards is necessary or sufficient for achieving globally welfare-maximizing policies. Then I move on to analyze the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which is a mighty effort to coordinate IPR policies across member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO). I discuss what TRIPS was supposed to do and what it has actually achieved, with reference to my theoretical framework. I explain that it is desirable for IPR to be included in world trade talks and be negotiated along with other trade issues. I offer analyses on the extensions of the basic model by introducing political economy and trade barriers, as well as allowing countries to discriminate against foreign firms. Finally, I comment on further potential extensions such as introduction of foreign direct investment (FDI) or licensing, parallel imports, cumulative innovations, subject matter of protection and costs of implementation. The main thrust of the basic model is that, provided that there is free trade and non-discrimination of foreign firms, there exist positive cross-border externalities as a country strengthens its IPR protection, since it raises the profits of foreign firms and the welfare of foreign consumers without causing any deadweight loss on foreign soil. This implies that national governments tend to provide too little IPR protection compared with the global optimum. The model also implies that a country with higher innovative capability and larger domestic market would provide stronger IPR. Thus, it is natural for the South to protect IPR less than the North in the absence of international coordination. These basic results largely continue to hold under various extensions.

In this chapter, the authors weave together a set of ideas that lead us closer to a more general institutional theory – one that embraces multiple levels of analysis, including the micro-level. The authors build on the roots of micro-institutional thought – including phenomenological and ethnomethodological underpinnings – as well as very active, social-psychological research areas that address key mechanisms in institutionalization. Among these, the authors discuss the important roles of legitimacy, trust, social influence, and routines. There is great promise for micro-institutional inquiry to make an integral contribution to institutional theory by bringing processes and people back in.