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Idiosyncratic jobs occur when formal job duties match the abilities or interests of a specific person. New duties can accrue or be negotiated to match an existing employee or a potential hire. Idiosyncratic jobs can help organizations deal with changing contexts, and influence organizational goals and structure. They can affect job holders’ careers and organizational job structures. The evolutionary accumulation of idiosyncratic jobs can potentially generate unplanned organizational learning. Promising research frontiers include links to work on job crafting, I-Deals, negotiated joining, and ecologies of jobs. Deeper exploration of these domains can advance core theories of job design and organizational transformation and inform normative theory on organizational use of idiosyncratic jobs without falling into cronyism, inefficiency, or injustice.

Jobs fundamentally influence and are influenced by individuals, organizations, and societies. However, jobs themselves are largely conceptualized in an atomized and disembodied way. They are understood as being designed, altered, and dissolved and bringing their consequences one at a time. I advance an alternative view of jobs as a system of ties that span jobs, organizations, and the environment beyond organizational boundaries. These ties create Gordian Knots that hold jobs in place and explain how they change. I illustrate the model with case study evidence and propose an agenda for research on jobs as organizational systems.

In this paper, we call for renewed attention to the structure and structuring of work within and between organizations. We argue that a multi-level approach, with jobs as a core analytic construct, is a way to draw connections among economic sociology, organizational sociology, the sociology of work and occupations, labor studies and stratification and address the important problems of both increasing inequality and declining economic productivity.

In an ever-complexifying business context, organizations need to continuously adapt, adjust and change their routines in order to remain competitive. Drawing upon a qualitative study focusing on three Southeastern European countries (Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia), this paper explores the role played by managerial feedback on routine change within small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The authors draw from an in-depth qualitative study of six manufacturing SMEs located in three Southeastern European countries: Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. The process of data collection, which spanned over a period of fifteen months, was centred around both interviews and observations.

The authors argue that feedback is a powerful and constructive managerial practice that sets to initiate changes in routines through three different means: (1) making sense of the changes required (by channelling information), (2) rationalizing the decision for changing the unproductive routines and (3) reviewing the process of change through the legitimization of situational routines. In addition to this, the authors found that managers perceive that routines need to change for four main reasons: inability to meet targets (e.g. performance); too cumbersome to deal with complex environments; inflexibility and failing to provide control; obsolete in terms of providing a sense of confidence.

This research provides evidence that feedback is an important managerial means of changing routines in informal, less bureaucratic and less formalized workplaces such as SMEs. Managers might embrace deformalized approaches to feedback when dealing with routines in SMEs. Working within a very sensitive structure where the majority of changes on routines need to be operationalized through their hands, managers and practitioners should deploy feedback in order to highlight the importance of routines as sources of guiding actions, activities and operations occurring in SMEs that create better internal challenges and processes.

The authors’ research suggests that routines are subject of change in dynamic and turbulent situations. Perceiving routines as antithetical to change fails to capture the distinctive features of change such as its fluidity, open-endedness, and inseparability. Likewise, the authors claim that routines are socially constructed organizational phenomena that can be modulated in different ways in SMEs.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model that explains how learning processes at the team level connect with individual and organizational levels of learning in technology-based ventures, thereby influencing the evolution of innovation capabilities in the entrepreneurial process.

The 4I organizational learning framework is used as an overarching theoretical structure to acknowledge entrepreneurial learning as a dynamic process that operate on multiple levels in technology-based ventures. Embedded in this logic, research on team learning is integrated into this theorizing to examine how learning processes at the team level bridge and connect with learning processes operating at individual and organizational levels.

The conceptual model identifies different sets of team learning processes critical for the routinization and evolution of innovation capabilities in technology-based ventures. In this respect, the conceptual model advances the scholarly understanding of entrepreneurial learning as a dynamic process operating across multiple levels in technology-based ventures.

By conceptualizing how individual streams of experiences over time become institutionalized via interaction, conversation and dialogue, the paper provides novel insights into the critical role of team learning for bridging individual and organizational levels of learning in the entrepreneurial learning process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea of practice‐based innovation and to propose a framework that can be used to conceptualize and analyze practice‐based innovation processes in organizations.

The argument is driven by conceptual analysis and theoretical synthesis based on theory and research on innovation, organizational change, individual and organizational learning.

The proposed framework portrays practice‐based innovation as a cyclical process of adaptive and developmental learning driven by contradictions and tensions between explicit and implicit dimensions of work processes.

The paper adds to previous research through its focus on practice‐based innovation and the conceptualization of this notion in terms of learning in and through everyday work. It thus creates connections between innovation research and research on workplace learning.

First makes the case that effective preparation, support, and training for international assignments to, from or within Asia and the Pacific need to be based on sound models of the skills required to meet the challenges of those assignments for the assignees themselves, their families accompanying them, those managing them, and the hosts with whom they are working. Then presents the characteristic ecologies encountered on these international assignments; identifies coping with ecoshock, developing strategies to effectively complete essential tasks in a new ecology, and maintaining motivation as the three key challenges faced in those ecologies; and describes the skills useful in dealing effectively with these challenges. Finally, presents the implications for intervention programmes to assist assignees in acquiring these skills and an illustrative training programme outline.

Profiles the development of the project IWW/Earth First Local 1, a group which brought loggers and environmentalists together in an attempt to combine labour and ecology issues. Describes anarchosyndicalist ideas that formed the basis of this alliance, suggesting that these have some merit for present day ecologists. Considers the common ground shared by labour and ecology movements and presents some learnings from the project for future mainstream environmental policies.

Short-term problem solving during production launch may result in extended lead times and increased overall costs of new product development, thereby reducing the overall profitability of a new product. While the previous literature suggests formalized procedures and systematic problem solving approaches, empirical analyses indicate improvised, non-systematic, and ad hoc responses actually being used in firms’ real world problem solving processes. The purpose of this paper is to explain the role of such non-systematic approaches for the efficiency and effectiveness of problem solving processes during production launch.

The paper empirically explores the impact of improvisational problem-solving behavior on a firm's production launch efficiency and on the success of new products. Moreover, the paper investigates the moderating role of technology familiarity, project complexity, and the number of occurring problems during production launch.

The paper finds evidence for a positive curvilinear effect of improvisational problem-solving behavior on new product success and production launch efficiency. Additionally, the paper finds that improvisation is especially reasonable in complex and familiar projects or in the case of many unplanned changes during production launch.

The study provides evidence for the relevance of routinized and improvisational behavior during production launch.

Improvisational behavior decreases the performance of the production launch and the financial performance of a new product in the case of frequent product changes or complex projects.

For the first time behavioral theory is applied to the phenomenon of production launch and problem solving.