Search results

Postmodernism has had a widespread influence on intellectuals throughout the world. It all started, as the chapter on Ghate will show, with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who was the first philosopher to sever reason (consciousness) from reality. We have been paying the price ever since. Postmodernism has now spread from philosophy into many other fields, including literature, history, sociology, psychology and business.

The thesis that rankings do more than just make visible an organization’s position viz-á-viz a competitor, but stimulate new competitive rivalries, has provoked much interest. Yet, to date, scholars lack an understanding of how such competitive rivalries unfold at the level of organizational strategy. Put simply, if competition is played out in rankings, how does this change the way organizations strategize? We answer this question through an ethnographic study of how information technology organizations engage with rankings. The strategic responses we observed included “leapfrogging a rival,” “de-positioning a competitor,” “owning a market,” and “encouraging a breakout,” which together are theorized as “ranking strategy.” This novel conceptualization extends understanding of the organizational response to rankings by showing how common reactions like gaming are only the tip of the iceberg of a broader array of strategic responses. The study also throws light on the different ways a ranking can pattern competitive rivalries, including creating more episodic forms of rivalry.

In this chapter, the authors introduce Ludwik Fleck and his ideas of “thought style” and “thought collective” to suggest a re-thinking of the divide between “micro” and “macro” that has perhaps more inhibited than inspired organization studies in general, and institutional theory in particular. With Fleck, the authors argue that there is no such thing as thought style-neutral cognition or undirected perception: meaning, constituted through a specific thought style shared by a thought collective, permeates cognition, judgment, perception, and thought. The authors illustrate our argument with the longitudinal case study of Sydney 2030 (i.e., the strategy-making process of the City of Sydney, Australia). The case suggests that – regardless of its actual implementation – a strategy is successful to the extent to which it shapes the socio-cognitive infrastructure of a collective and enables those engaged in city-making to think and act collectively.

This chapter explores the ways in which a large-scale accounting system, known as Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting and Compliance, contributes to the construction and organization of a new market for recreational cannabis in the US state of Colorado. Mobilizing the theoretical lenses provided by the literature on market devices, on the one hand, and infrastructure, on the other hand, the authors identify and unpack a changing relationship between accounting and state control through which accounting and markets unfold. The authors describe this movement in terms of a distinction between knowing devices and thinking infrastructures. In the former, the authors show that regulators and other authorities perform the market by making it legible for the purpose of intervention, taxation and control. In the latter, thinking infrastructures, an ecology of interacting devices is made and remade by a variety of intermediaries, disclosing the boundaries and possibilities of the market, and constituting both opportunities for innovation and domination through “protocol.”

The paper contributes to the discussion on valuation in organization studies and strategic management literature. The nascent literature on valuation practices has examined established markets where producers and consumers are known and rivalry in the market is a given. Furthermore, previous research has operated with a narrow meaning of value as either a financial profit or a subjective consumer preference. Such a narrow view on value is problematic and insufficient for studying the interlacing of innovation and value creation in emerging technoscientific business domains.

The authors present an empirical study about value creation in an emerging technoscience business domain formed around personalized medicine and digital health data.

The results of this analysis show that in a technoscientific domain, valuation of innovations is multiple and malleable, entails pursuing attractiveness in collaboration and partnerships and is performative, and due to emphatic future orientation, values are indefinite and promissory.

As research implications, this study shows that valuation practices in an emerging technoscience business domain focus on defining the potential economic value in the future and attracting partners as probable future beneficiaries. Commercial value upon innovation in an embryonic business milieu is created and situated in valuation practices that constitute the prospective market, the prevalent economic discourse, and rationale. This is in contrast to an established market, where valuation practices are determined at the intersection of customer preferences and competitive arenas where suppliers, producers, service providers and new entrants to the market present value propositions.

The study findings extend discussion on valuation from established business domains to emerging technoscience business domains which are in a “pre-competition” phase where suppliers, customers, producers and their collaborative and competitive relations are not yet established.

As managerial implications, this study provides insights into health innovation stakeholders, including stakeholders in the public, private and academic sectors, about the ecosystem dynamics in a technoscientific innovation. Such insight is useful in strategic decision-making about ecosystem strategy and ecosystem business model for value proposition, value creation and value capture in an emerging innovation domain characterized by collaborative and competitive relations among stakeholders. To business managers, the findings of this study about valuation practices are useful in strategic decision-making about ecosystem strategy and ecosystem business model for value proposition, value creation and value capture in an emerging innovation domain characterized by collaborative and competitive relations among stakeholders. To policy makers, this study provides an in-depth analysis of an overall business ecosystem in an emerging technoscience business that can be propelled to increase the financial investments in the field. As a policy implication, this study provides insights into the various dimensions of valuation in technoscience business to policy makers, who make governance decisions to guide and control the development of medical innovation using digital health data.

This study's results expand previous theorizing on valuation by showing that in technoscientific innovation all types of value created – scientific, clinical, social or economic – are predominantly promissory. This study complements the nascent theorizing on value creation and valuation practices of technoscientific innovation.

This study sets out to shed light on those infrastructures underlying the ubiquitous, yet contested nature of governing by numbers. Investigating the 30-year long emergence of Germany’s “external quality assurance system” for hospitals, the authors show how methods for quantifying quality align with broader institutional and ideational shifts to form a calculative infrastructure for governance. Our study focuses on three phases of infrastructural development wherein methods for calculating quality, institutions for coordinating data and reform ideals converge with one another. The authors argue that the succession of these phases represents a gradual layering process, whereby old ways of enacting quality governance are not replaced, but augmented by new sets of calculative practices, institutions and ideas. Thinking about infrastructures as multi-layered complexes allows us to explore how they construct possibilities for control, remain stable over time and transform the fields in which they are embedded. Rather than governance being enacted according to a singular goal or value, we see an infrastructure that is flexible enough to support multiple modalities of control, including selective intervention, quality-based competition and automatized budgeting. Infrastructural change, instead of revolving around crises in measurement, is shaped by incubation periods – times of relative calm when political actors, medical practitioners, mathematicians, and many others explore and reflect past experiences, rather than follow erratic reforms fads. Finally, analysing infrastructures as multi-layered constructs underlines how they produce multiple images of care quality, which not only shift existing power relations, but also change the ways we understand and make sense of public services.

The notion, technologies and organizational elaboration of traceability have become more prominent and more systematic in recent years in many different fields, notably food. This chapter argues that traceability has many faces: it is a programmatic value embedded in norms and regulations; it is a frontier of technology development such as blockchain, and it is a continuous processual and political dynamic of organizational connectedness, leading also to resistance. These different aspects make up “traceability infrastructures,” which embody a number of tensions and dynamics. Three such dynamics are explored in this chapter: the tension between organizational entities and meta-entities, problems of agency and the distribution of responsibility, and dialectics of connectivity and disconnectivity. These three dynamics generate three testable propositions, which define a prolegomena for a new subject of “traceability studies.” Overall, traceability is argued to be an ongoing process of connecting discrete agencies – a process of “chainmaking” – and is formative of more or less stable forms of distributed agency and responsibility.

Social media stage online patterns of social interaction that differ remarkably from ordinary forms of acting, talking and relating. To unravel these differences, we review the literature on micro-sociology and social psychology and derive a shorthand version of socially-embedded forms of interaction. We use that version as a yardstick for reconstructing and assessing the patterns of sociality social media promote. Our analysis shows that social media platforms stage highly stylized forms of social interaction such as liking, following, tagging, etc. that essentially serve the purpose of generating a calculable and machine-readable data footprint out of user platform participation. This online stylization of social interaction and the data it procures are, however, only the first steps of what we call the infrastructuring of social media. Social media use the data footprint that results from the stylization of social interaction to derive larger (and commercially relevant) social entities such as audiences, networks and groups that are constantly fed back to individuals and groups of users as personalized recommendations of one form or another. Social media infrastructure sociality as they provide the backstage operations and technological facilities out of which new habits and modes of social relatedness emerge and diffuse across the social fabric.

To identify the distinguishing characteristics and future challenges for the business coaching industry in Australia.

A telephone survey of business coaching firms was used to identify the main structural characteristics of the industry. Structured interviews with selected business coaches were used to identify the key business and professional issues they faced.

Firms in the business coaching industry in Australia have three main characteristics: most firms are young and small; most are not exclusively dedicated to coaching; and most have a poor appreciation of the competitive environment in which they operate.

The research identified three main challenges for the business coaching industry that will need to be addressed if business coaching is to develop further: the challenge of defining standards of service and performance that do not inhibit the flexible and personal orientation of the coaching process; the challenge of developing a more coherent and well understood perception of the nature and benefits of business coaching amongst industry more generally; and the challenge of establishing robust and durable coaching businesses that can take leadership in growing and developing the industry.

Business coaching is an emerging industry that is increasingly being used to provide learning‐based interventions in organizations. To date there has been little formal research into the nature of this industry or the services it provides. This paper addresses this by examining the “state of play” of business coaching in Australia.