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Companies create company-specific production systems (XPS) by tailoring generic concepts to fit their unique situation. However, little is known about how an XPS is created. This paper aims to provide insights into the creation of an XPS.

A retrospective case study was conducted in a Norwegian multinational company over the period 1991–2006, using archival data and interviews.

The development of the XPS did not start with a master plan. Instead, dispersed existing initiatives were built upon, along with an external search for novel ideas. Widespread experimentation took place, only later to be combined into a coherent approach. Once established, the XPS was disseminated internally and further refined. The CEO orchestrated the experimentation by facilitating the adaptation and combination of different concepts and by allocating resources to institutionalize the XPS in the global network.

This paper is the first to study how an XPS is created. This study contributes with novel empirical insights, and it highlights the role of top management in facilitating experimentation and step-by-step organizational learning.

The aim of this study is to document and analyze experiences with building a new hospital guided by lean-led hospital design (LLHD) (Grunden and Hagood, 2012) and to investigate key mechanisms enhancing healthcare professionals' participation and collaboration in implementing this innovative approach.

An in-depth case study of the implementation of LLHD in a Dutch hospital was performed based on multiple data sources. The case hospital presented a unique opportunity since there was embedded access to the data by the first author.

Three mechanisms supporting participation and collaboration of staff for implementing LLHD were identified. (1) Freedom in translating a concept enables managers to balance it with variations in practice at the organizational level. (2) A set of key principles governing the design process appeared an important anchor on a managerial level in a changing environment. (3) Creation of a supportive attitude toward lean and lean facility design, with co-creation as a key element of LLHD.

By using the emerging mechanisms, managers/change agents can enlarge collaboration and participation of hospital staff when implementing organization-wide innovations.

This case study delivers a unique inside view on the dynamics evolving in the complex change processes at organizational, managerial and personal levels involved in implementing LLHD.

This article addresses why movements towards less-hierarchical organizing may be unsustainable within organizations.

Eschewing hierarchy may prove sustainable if alternative forms of management are acceptable to both employees and managers accountable for those employees’ performance. Developing alternatives means dealing with the fundamentally contradictory functions of coordination and control. Through a qualitative case study of a manufacturing company that removed first-line supervisors, this article analyses how issues of control and coordination were dealt with formally and informally.

Removal of the formal supervisor was followed by workers’ and middle managers’ efforts to informally reconstruct hierarchical supervision. Their efforts to deal pragmatically with control and coordination were frustrated by formal prescriptions for less hierarchy, leading to contested outcomes. The article identifies upward and downward pressures for the hierarchy’s reconstruction, undermining the sustainability of less-hierarchical organizing.

This study is limited by the use of cross-sectional data and employees’ retrospective narratives. Future research on the sustainability of less-hierarchical organizing should preferably be longitudinal to overcome these limitations.

Unless organizational changes towards less hierarchy engage with issues of managerial control and upward accountability, they are likely to induce pressures for hierarchy’s reconstruction.

The article offers an original approach to the classical problem of eschewing hierarchy in organizations. The approach allows us to explore the interrelated challenges facing such restructuring, some of which are currently unacknowledged or underestimated within the literature.

Decentralisation attempts that aim to increase job autonomy do not always succeed. This paper aims to study to what extent the tendency to maintain existing operational task divisions is an important explanation for this lack of success.

In total, 456 employees in 25 organisations participated in a cross-sectional intervention study. Each employee filled out a questionnaire on job autonomy both before and after the decentralisation process, in which all organisations shifted regulatory, preparatory and supportive tasks to the lowest organisational level.

This study found small, but significant, effects of decentralisation attempts on job autonomy. The size of the effects, however, depended on the way the way in which the operational tasks were divided. Simultaneously, larger effects were found for organisations which decentralised tasks and changed the way operational tasks were divided. Both findings reached the conclusion that although decentralisation attempts seemed important for increasing job autonomy, the way in which the operational tasks were divided and even changed, was at least as important for a successful decentralisation process.

After decades of research on modern sociotechnical theory, this study is the first to show that decentralisation attempts do not merely increase job autonomy. The effect of such attempts depends on the way in which operational tasks are divided in organisations.

Publications in the managerial press tend to stress the positive sides of teamworking. Teamworking is heralded at the neglect of possible downsides such as the propensity to withhold effort. This is, however, studied in at least two strands of academic work: social psychology and economic organization theories. From these literatures the paper draws attention to the potential downsides of teamworking. However, various options for overcoming these problems have been identified in the same literatures. Thus, the body of our paper explicitly concentrates on possible solutions for managers to remedy the potential negative effects of teamworking.

This paper aims to explore how management practitioners make sense of management fashions as sedimented elements within organizations.

To further understanding about sedimentation in management fashion, an institutional perspective was used.

This analysis reveals that sedimented fashions within organizations are framed as comprising different forms that are systematically associated with divergent evolution patterns.

This study extends the current literature on management fashion by showing how, unlike present conceptualizations, the long‐term impact of fashionable ideas in organizations cannot be considered a single entity with a uniform pattern of development. Building on this, the paper seeks to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the evolution of popular management ideas in organizational practice, which opens fruitful new research directions.

This paper may help managers, as important consumers of fashionable ideas, to better understand how elements of fashions may remain in organizations and play an important conditional role in future change initiatives.

Despite the substantial attention to the field‐level dissemination and evolution of popular management ideas in the management fashion literature, the possible long‐term impact of these ideas within organizations has received scant attention beyond the assumed transience of a fashion's discourse and the possible persistence of the organizational practices associated with a fashion.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the production and diffusion of the balanced scorecard (BSC) by analyzing the reception pattern of the BSC in The Netherlands.

Print‐media indicators and content analysis.

The BSC is popular yet not transient. Consultants are the leading BSC disseminators, while on the “consumption side” the BSC tends to be interpreted differently in varying professional communities. Compared to its intensive discourse actual BSC use in praxis appears to be limited and lags intended use as strategic management system.

Use of secondary data limits insight into use of the BSC in organizations. Further research should focus on the influence of subsets of discourse on the evolution of the BSC in organizational praxis.

Discourse is loosely coupled to organizational praxis: publications on the BSC may affect organizational behavior but also reflect that behavior. In addition, increased understanding of how and why different interpretations of the BSC exist in organizational practice may assist managers to position their perspectives vis‐à‐vis others.

The study shows how Dutch BSC‐discourse evolves, gives “windows on BSC‐praxis” and argues that different interpretations of the BSC may be found between disciplines.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into the effects of an enterprise resource planning (ERP)‐implementation on job content.

Data are collected using a qualitative expert instrument (WEBA) and a questionnaire (NOVA‐WEBA) among HR‐assistants in a case study in the Dutch hospitality industry.

Contrary to what one might expect, the introduction of an ERP‐system does not automatically result in a more centralized organization: in granting local authorizations user/employee job decision latitude is affected c.q. realized. However, even when a decentralization policy is pursued as is the case in our study, job decision latitude is not necessarily enhanced. This is partly caused by ERP‐related changes such as increasing standardization of operational procedures and data entry requirements, and partly by organization‐specific developments in how tasks get assigned to jobs.

The configuration of ERP‐systems varies by organization, and is largely a matter of organizational choice. The case is unique, as is indeed any case.

Insights into ERP's effects can help organizations achieve better designed jobs. Pre‐implementation simulations of effects can help steering towards desired outcomes.

The paper provides useful insights into the effects of an ERP‐implementation on job content through a case study of HR‐assistants.

An organization concept is “a more or less coherent, prescriptive vision on (aspects of) organization design”. Practitioners are often faced with the problem of how to use insights from organization concepts. The redesign of a parts distribution centre is discussed to illustrate how two organization concepts and insights from other sources were drawn on and combined to formulate a new organization design. We derive four different reasons for such combinations, namely conceptual clarification, conceptual additions, technical instrumentalization and legitimation.