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We link the exploration–exploitation framework of organizational learning to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a developing economy. SMEs in a developing economy generally lack abundant resources and capabilities because of an evolving set of industrial and environmental regulations. Studying two SMEs in China, we argue that their approaches to balancing exploration and exploitation depend on the development stages of the SMEs and their industrial and environmental contexts. In particular, we propose a four-stage framework that unfolds via initiation, innovation, transformation, and expansion. In this framework, SMEs balance exploration and exploitation by adopting temporal separation and organizational separation sequentially. We also find that SMEs may benefit from exploring a narrow scope of products and exploiting them in a wide market scope.

‘Acceleration’, that is, the performance of activities in ever-shorter periods of time, is a distinctive feature of contemporary organizations and societies that is reflected in, and driven by startups’ attempts to scale up their businesses in ever-faster ways. Although prior research has highlighted that temporary organizing is a key way to accelerate the startup process, little is known about how actors do so. Based on a one-year ethnographic study at a startup accelerator, the authors explore how actors enact temporary organizing to attempt to accelerate the startup process. Their analysis shows that this process involves a plurality of partly conflicting temporal structures. As their study shows, such conflicts invoke tensions that actors live out in their daily activities. The authors identify three temporal practices – sequencing, freezing, and merging – through which actors engaged in temporary organizing enact acceleration in the startup process by reconciling these temporal structures. Their study has implications for understanding time in the expanding literature on temporary organizing and acceleration.

As part of an exploratory study on the nature of global leaders' power, we interviewed 23 global leaders to address the question: “How do the task, culture, and relationship complexities of global leadership shape the way global leaders exercise power and influence their followers?” We identify five complicating factors that shape the use of power by global leaders: Language, culture, time zones, physical distance, and matrix organizational structures. When compared with domestic leaders, these five factors make the use of power more complex for global leaders and require global leaders to invest substantially more time and energy into building relationships, sharing leadership, and prioritizing communication to ensure common understanding of vision and goals. We highlight a sixth factor, high-quality relationships, as an enabling resource for global leaders to succeed despite contexts of global leadership complexity. We provide a conceptual model summarizing how global leader influence attempts are complicated and enhanced and offer implications for future research and practice.

Festivals are conceptualised in this chapter as temporary organisations embedded in more permanent structures (e.g. festival lead organisation). Festivals face a series of paradoxical tensions common to temporary organisations in creative fields. These tensions arise, in part, from the diversity of actors involved in festivals and the distinctive values and priorities they bring to their festival organisational involvement. Lucca Comics & Games (LC&G), which is one of the biggest comic-cons in the world, operates in the intersection of different institutional contexts, which include a wide range of actors involved. Thus, tensions appear within the LC&G domain as a result of these actors’ different levels of involvement in the festival organisation and their diverse identities. These tensions and their resolutions will be analysed from the perspective of extant theory on paradox. A specific focus of this chapter is on the belonging paradox, which concerns the role of competing identities among different types of festival participants and how these competing identities are manifested in the organisational identity of LC&G, its structures and processes. Our study provides evidence of identity tensions as both/and relationships that are not mutually exclusive or antagonistic. The authors also suggest that ‘place identity’ requires further examination as a distinctive feature of temporary organising in festivals, considering its role in mediating tensions arising from the belonging paradox amongst festival main actors (exhibitors, artists, public bodies and lead organisation employees).

The author argues and explains that the indigenous Eastern epistemological frame of yin-yang balancing can be taken as a unique system of thinking toward a meta-perspective. It is not only deeply rooted in the indigenous Eastern culture traditions, but also bears salient global implications, especially in the domain of paradox management. The purpose and contribution of this chapter are twofold: (1) to explain the unique and salient features of yin-yang balancing (the “either/and” system to reframe paradox into duality as partially conflicting and partially complementary, both spatially and temporarily) as compared with the Western logic systems (the “either/or” and “both/or” or “both/and” systems); and (2) to explore the global implications of the “either/and” system for future paradox research, including the three unique themes of overlap between opposites with the “seed” of one opposite inside the other; threshold from the contingent balance between partial separation and partial integration in line with specific contexts through three operating mechanisms, and knot for the special role of third-party to shift paradox from a dyadic level to a triadic and even a multiplex level.

Divestitures and other forms of organizational separation are not commonly associated with continuity and ongoing collaboration in inter-organizational relationships. Instead, separation is often equated with terminating relationships and gaining independence. Here, the authors argue that achieving separation does not require terminating relationships and that ongoing collaboration between separating entities may actually contribute to successful separation. The authors base this argument on the assertion that the objective of organizational separation is to achieve organizational autonomy for all entities involved and that separating entities can enable each other’s development of autonomy while remaining interdependent. The authors also discuss how collaborative separation may contribute to a range of benefits, as well as why it may nevertheless fail to emerge in practice. In this respect, the authors consider the relevance of ethical perspectives and emotional dynamics related to feelings of (dis)respect, (dis)trust, pride and shame. The authors conclude by discussing activities that may contribute to, and undermine, effective collaborative separation.

The authors examine how firms can achieve organizational ambidexterity, that is, how they can successfully engage in concurrent exploitation of existing competencies and exploration of new competencies in their search for new products. Existing research has identified three enablers to manage these fundamentally different activities: temporal separation, structural separation, and the creation of context. Studying the strategic orientation, organization design, and performance of a unique sample of mid-sized German manufacturing firms, the authors find that the controlled interplay of decentralized decision making and formalized processes and goals is another effective means to manage the challenges of pursuing an innovation strategy balancing both exploitative and exploratory activities. The findings of this study suggest that this balanced control constitutes a fourth enabler of ambidexterity.

There is a growing need for measures assessing technological changes in systemic contexts as business ecosystems replace standalone products. In these ecosystem contexts, organizations are required to manage their innovation processes in increasingly networked and complex environments. In this paper, we introduce the technology and ecosystem clockspeed measures that can be used to assess the temporal nature of technological changes in a business ecosystem. We analyze systemic changes in the personal computer (PC) ecosystem, explicitly focusing on subindustries central to the delivery of PC gaming value to the end user. Our results show that the time-based intensity of technological competition in intertwined subindustries of a business ecosystem may follow various trajectories during the evolution of the ecosystem. Hence, the technology and ecosystem clockspeed measures are able to pinpoint alternating dynamics in technological changes among the subindustries in the business ecosystem. We subsequently discuss organizational considerations and theoretical implications of the proposed measures.

Workplace temporalities are being reshaped under globalization. Some scholars argue that work time is becoming more flexible, de-territorializing, and even disappearing. I provide an alternative picture of what is happening to work time by focusing on the customer service call center industry in India. Through case studies of three firms, and interviews with 80 employees, managers, and officials, I show how this industry involves a “reversal” of work time in which organizations and their employees shift their schedules entirely to the night. Rather than liberation from time, workers experience a hyper-management, rigidification, and re-territorialization of temporalities. This temporal order pervades both the physical and virtual tasks of the job, and has consequences for workers’ health, families, future careers, and the wider community of New Delhi. I argue that this trend is prompted by capital mobility within the information economy, expansion of the service sector, and global inequalities of time, and is reflective of an emerging stratification of employment temporalities across lines of the Global North and South.