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This article aims to analyze the strategic work of Polish entrepreneurs in the furniture industry following the political changes in 1989. The authors examined how these entrepreneurs transitioned from local craftsmen or importers into leaders of international manufacturing companies and how their strategizing contributed to the unprecedented growth of the Polish furniture sector.

The authors examined extant data, specifically biographical interviews conducted with 11 prominent leaders in the Polish furniture industry (Hryniewicki, 2015, 2018). They analyzed within a theoretical framework that integrates J.C. Spender’s theory of strategic management with Barry Johnson’s concept of polarity management. Polarity is a way of understanding and managing interdependent, opposing pairs of values or perspectives that give rise to conflict.

The analysis reveals key patterns of strategic challenges at the level of human agency, history and sense-making. The authors identified four key polarities: life and business, knowledge presence and absence, concordance and discordance, and instrumental and non-instrumental sense-making.

The polarity concept illuminates the interplay of agency and determinism in strategic decision-making, offering valuable insights for methodology and a deeper understanding of Poland’s furniture industry.

In this paper we question whether we know enough about organizational theorizing to be able transfer it to the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. The researchers in general see that our organizational theorizing is heavily contingent on the social institutions of Western society. While we think of the CIS situation as one of political, economic, and social collapse, it is really more a matter of institutional collapse. Thus, given the contingencies noted above, it is not at all clear why we expect our organizational theories to apply to them. We propose an institutional analysis at three levels: universal, contingent, and developmental. At the universal level, there is no difference between the institutions of the CIS and the West. At the contingent level, the institutional fabric differs in ways that can be accommodated. At the developmental level, the most crucial, the CIS will have to develop their own new social institutions before their economies can gather momentum. We argue that such institutions are built up as organizational teams work on unresolved problems and build up the knowledge that is gradually institutionalized outside the originating organizations.

Recognizes the inherent conflict between multinationals’ (MNEs’) need to respond to local markets while using global integration to achieve economies of scale; and outlines relevant research from the fields of both economic and organizational theory. Criticizes the process approach based on normative theory and suggests that loose coupling theory is a more practical way of looking at MNEs. Discusses the application of these ideas to their management and identifies seven behavioural characteristics of loosely coupled systems (Weick). Links these to Doz and Prahalad’s (1991) criteria for assessing the applicability of organizational theory to MNEs. Considers the research implications and believes that MNE organization will eventually be seen, not as a special case, but as a general model.

The business world has enthusiastically adopted the idea that knowledge has become the most strategic of corporate assets, the principal basis for competitive advantage. This enthusiasm has not, however, been matched by an understanding of how to operationalize knowledge. It seems we argue that knowledge is important largely because it is a different kind of asset. While this is perplexing and suggests that it is important to understand the strategic significance of the different kinds of organizational knowledge, it also raises operational issues for managers. How are they to identify knowledge assets, and measure them? We offer tentative proposals for a new approach to assets evaluation.

Based on the growing interest devoted to knowledge management (KM) in inter-organizational contexts, the purpose of this paper is to systematize existing literature and understand how it developed over time, thus tracing its roots and evolution to unveil gaps and suggest new promising areas for future research.

This study used bibliographic techniques to analyze a sample of 85 studies along three main periods (1998-2010, 2011-2014 and 2015-2019). In particular, this study focused on co-occurrences of keywords to identify the most dominant themes, as well as connections among these themes.

Overall, the review shows the main outlets that have published papers on the topic of KM in inter-organizational contexts, as well as the theoretical background this research builds on. The temporal analysis exhibits the core topics that have persisted and grown consistently over time as the links between KM, innovation and networks. In addition, the review highlights new emerging themes, such as the human and social side of KM, and new interesting contexts of study (e.g. coopetition and open/user innovation), which opens exciting avenues for new research opportunities.

This study illustrates the conceptual structure of the field in three distinct periods and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the key topics and their interrelatedness within the area of KM in inter-organizational contexts. Both researchers and practitioners can profit from the study because it reveals consolidated topics while identifying areas that still need to be investigated to foster KM in inter-organizational settings.

There has been considerable discussion recently about business schools’ shortcomings and how their curriculum should be changed. Many presume discipline-wide agreement that managing is a rational and model-able decision-making practice. But practitioners are not convinced and often suggest rationality-dominated business schools are teaching impractical ideas. The purpose of this paper is to look at this discussion's micro foundations and offers a novel approach that presumes managerial judgment is crucial to firms’ processes and, indeed, is the reason firms exist.

The paper combines discussion of the conceptual nature of firms and managing them with data about business schools’ growth and curriculum evolution.

If we presume firms are rational apparatus for achieving known goals, managing is little more than computing; and if Knightian uncertainty is taken seriously, managerial judgment becomes the core of the analysis. But schools that attempt to train students’ judgment are extraordinarily difficult to manage, especially in the current academic environment.

While many are aware of Knight's influential thinking, it has not yet been brought into a theory of the firm or of managing. The paper works toward a novel theory of the managed firm (TMF) in which management's uncertainty-resolving judgments are key.

Uncertainty, managers’ frequent companion as they guide firms towards anticipated goals, is poorly dealt with in theories of the firm. If knowledge is to be treated as the most strategic of assets, we must consider its relation to uncertainty. Knowledge suggests a degree of certainty, an absence of uncertainty. The paper draws on prior research and categorize uncertainty as three types of knowledge deficiency: indeterminacy, ignorance and incommensurability. It is argued that uncertainties lead to emotion. The paper draws on analysis of emotions as value judgments, indicating a person attaches significance to things lying outside her/his control that affect her/his goals. This insight opens a way of relating knowledge and uncertainty. The impetus behind this approach is partly theoretical and partly personal, from observing and participating in New Yorkers’ emotions during and after the September 2001 WTC attacks. It is argued that it is no longer acceptable to ignore the ways in which emotion shapes our knowledge. The paper moves from rational self‐interest, the calculative basis for organization, to the social and cultural basis of identity through action, pursuing the idea that knowledge deficiencies produce emotional responses as they arrest rational decision making.

Companies inevitably interact and entrench in complex organic systems of business relationships with other. These business networks are not objectively defined, instead they are shaped by the subjective perception of actors. This inherent subjectivity is associated with the notion of network pictures, that is, a research tool that researchers or managers can use to grasp practitioner theories. In this chapter, we discuss how the importance of identifying these theories results mainly from underlying principles of sense-making theory, as well as from the idea around performativity. Drawing on these theoretical groundings, this chapter has two objectives: to explore how practitioners actually perceive their business surroundings and to assess the extent of overlapping between (IMP Group) academic theories and practitioner theories. To achieve these objectives, the researchers use a dimensional network pictures model previously developed in the literature to analyze the network pictures of 49 top-level managers across 17 companies from two very distinct contexts or networks: a product-based network and a project-based network. Among other practices, findings illustrate how practitioners tend to simplify what is going on in their complex surroundings, to personalize their relationships with those surroundings, and to think in a stereotyped way. Moreover, the juxtaposition between the captured practitioner theories and academic (IMP Group) theories show that these are not always overlapping, and are in some cases quite the opposite. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of the importance of grasping actors’ views of the world, arguing that sense-making theory and the notion of performativity are the two main conceptual drivers justifying the urgency in making those views more visible. This research also adds to the research on the impact and suitability of IMP Group theories on managerial thinking and practice. Finally, this research reinforces the current call for further practice-based research in business network contexts.

How does one speak of knowledge as an asset when it is non‐rivalrous and ephemeral? The purpose of this paper is to frame “knowledge management” (KM) as significantly more than asset management; instead of binding it to rational decision making, it is grounded in managers' creative responses to the typical deficiencies in their knowledge and to uncertainty.

Drawing on the method of distinctions a knowledge and intellectual capital (IC) management discourse is constructed that relates, first, to data, meaning, and practice, and second, to knowledge assets and knowledge absences.

The rationalist treatment of knowledge assets relates data and meaning to purposive practice. Under conditions of uncertainty this is balanced here with a radical constructivist approach that sees meaning as arising from managerial creativity and exploratory organizational practice.

The practical or managerial implications of this theorizing are legion. The main point is not a theory that supplants managerial creativity; on the contrary, creativity drives both our theory and the organizations that managers manage.

Managing uncertainty forces practice and experience into the foreground. KM and ICM must cover situations in which analysis fails when knowledge is absent just as it covers the management of knowledge assets when they are present.

KM (or ICM) is reframed as an empirically grounded critical theory, a direct critique of rational decision‐making and, by implication, of mainstream managerial theorizing.