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Imperial College in 1969 looked like a man's world; it was certainly difficult to locate a ladies’ room which was not apparently hastily constructed in a tight space as an afterthought to a great design. Yet I joined a powerhouse of women. Joan Woodward had already tempted Dorothy Wedderburn from Cambridge and together they had secured large sums of research monies from the Research Councils, Fords, Pilkingtons, ICI, the Post Office, the Coal Board, government departments, and other supporters who were each captivated by the promise of the work and rare combination of intellectual strength and practical concerns of its leader. With research funds flowing in abundance, driving passions to explore further the relationship between structure, technology, and performance, and very few specific commitments, Joan and Dorothy set about recruiting what was to be one of the largest groups of young researchers in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s.

When Joan Woodward died in 1971 at the age of 54, she left behind an enormous professional and personal legacy. This volume is a tribute to her work and life, to the profound effect she had on those she worked with, and to the important impact her work has had on how we think about organizations. It is also a tribute to a woman who succeeded in what was, at the time, overwhelmingly a man's world. That she was only the second woman appointed as a full professor at Imperial College London provides ample evidence of her success in the unlikely and very masculine setting of post-war Britain.

Joan interviewed me for my first job in 1969. Little did I realize what an opportunity I was about to be given. I was about to be offered a post with one of – if not the – United Kingdom's most eminent industrial sociologist (as we were called then) and to join the most exciting and dynamic group of young researchers in the subject at the time; a group that have all gone on to make their mark in various ways. I was recruited because I was interested in the organization and management of industrial research and development, and Joan wanted to test her ideas outside traditional manufacturing environments.

Telidon, a second generation videotex system developed in Canada, was announced in August 1978. Since that time developments have occurred in planning field trials, developing information services and in planning a coordinated development for Canada of this new technology.

I may get my account of Joan Woodward wrong because I am relying on my memory of decades-old events, and others may be more accurate. Joan was, I believe, teaching at a technical university when she was asked to do a survey of a number of Midland firms in terms of industrial policy. It was an odd choice for a female professor with an Oxford degree in medieval history, with no background in industrial policy let alone organizational theory. This may have been her advantage. She came to the task without the medieval theories of organizations that reigned. She looked at these firms in a way that no one in organizational theory had before. She wrote a preliminary report that said that because they use different technologies, they had different structures; the most successful matched their structures to their technologies – routine processes allowed centralized control, nonroutine ones required decentralization, to put it crudely.

One common view of technology is as knowledge. “Defining technology as knowledge has important implications for how we comprehend technology in the making because it conceivably includes not only what exists, but what individuals believe is possible” (Garud & Rappa, 1994, p. 346). If “all knowledge and all knowledge-claims are to be treated as being socially constructed” (Pinch & Bijker, 1984, p. 401), the importance of discourse to such a view of technology is clear.

Despite a rich extant literature, it is unclear what business models are. We assess three dominant conceptions of business models in the academic literature: as transactional structures, value extracting devices, and mechanisms for structuring the organization. To overcome the shortcomings of these approaches, we draw on theories of performativity, social typecasting, and managerial cognition. We propose an alternative conception of business models as performative representations that work in three ways: as narratives that convince, typifications that legitimate, and recipes that guide social action. Rather than actual features of firms, business models are representations that allow managers to articulate and instantiate the value of new technologies.