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The literature on organizational change has long acknowledged the need to balance stability and economic efficiency with the need to be flexible and to change. Authors, certainly in the dynamic capabilities tradition but also in other perspectives, have stressed the importance of more open and loosely coupled systems to promote adaption. However, many organizations do not operate on such premises but rather rely on creating efficient business units through tight coupling, building strict social and administrative control, and jointly relying on common systems. In this study, we conduct 46 interviews with employees from three different retail organizations to investigate how units in such tightly coupled systems change within the framework of the set standards. Through contrasting the characteristics of high and low functioning units, we identify three mechanisms that seem to enable the units to successfully and repeatedly realign and establish new configurations. We conclude that the orchestrator of all three realignment mechanisms is the middle manager, and we discuss the middle manager's role and the different activities that enable a successful realignment.

We use normal accident theory to analyze the financial sector, especially that part of the financial sector that processed home mortgages, and the mortgage meltdown. We maintain that the financial sector was highly complex and tightly coupled in the years leading up to the mortgage meltdown. And we argue that the meltdown exhibited characteristics of a system or normal accident; the result of a component failure (unusually high mortgage defaults) that, in the context of unique conditions (which included low interest rates and government policy encouraging home loans to less credit-worthy households), resulted in complex and tightly coupled interactions that financial elites and government officials were ill-equipped to control. We also consider the role that agency and wrongdoing played in the design of the financial system and the unfolding of the mortgage meltdown. We conclude that a fundamental restructuring of the financial system, so as to reduce complexity and coupling, is required to avert future similar financial debacles. But we also conclude that such a restructuring faces significant obstacles, given the interests of powerful actors and the difficulties of labeling those responsible for the meltdown as wrongdoers.

In this article, we examine the different causal chains leading to the crisis in the United States and around the world, emphasizing the market developments, political decisions, and organizational factors that led to the financial and economic meltdown. We argue that a series of political, regulatory, and organizational decisions and events prepared the ground for a major breakdown of financial and economic institutions, a “normal accident” that produced systemic reverberations across markets around the world. In the United States, political, regulatory, and organizational decisions made during the 1990s led to a situation of simultaneously high complexity and tight coupling in the financial system. The global economy also became more complex and tightly coupled during the 1990s, contributing to the rapid spread of the crisis across countries. We propose that solutions to the crisis will need to be tailored to the specific ways in which countries experienced the meltdown and the political preferences of interest groups and citizens. For the United States, the best approach would be to allow for a complex and innovative financial system but with a much reduced degree of coupling so as to avoid another financial normal accident.

This chapter adopts a problem-solving perspective to analyze the competitive dynamics of innovation ecosystems. We argue that features such as uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, entail different knowledge requirements which explain the varying abilities of focal firms to coordinate the ecosystem and benefit from the activities of their suppliers, complementors, and users. We develop an analytical framework to interpret various instances of coupling patterns and identify four archetypical types of innovation ecosystems.

The term “loose coupling” has been widely employed in higher education research. Building partly on the “garbage can model” of decision-making, it proposed an alternative to rational and linear views on organizing and governing, emphasizing instead ambiguity and complexity. The review of higher education research literature presented in this chapter demonstrates that the concept of loose coupling has frequently been used as a background concept, often taken for-granted either as a point of departure for studies of organizational processes in higher education or as a diagnosis of the complexity of higher education organization that inhibits implementation of reforms. This chapter provides systematization and critical examination of how the term “loose coupling”/“loosely coupled systems” has been employed in journal articles focusing on higher education in the last 40 years. It presents a broad mapping of 209 articles and a more detailed qualitative review of 22 articles, which employed loose coupling as more than a background concept.

We examine how school districts in California help their high schools respond to state accountability requirements. We discovered two contrasting forms of district interventions: those aiming to increase schools’ internal coherence and those encouraging direct but narrower responses to state requirements. Drawing on interviews in six districts and eight high schools, we find that many district efforts focus on immediate responses to state requirements to raise test scores. Yet, our analysis suggests that without strong district efforts to increase internal coherence, interventions aimed at eliciting school responses will be less beneficial over time.

This chapter first examines the role of attention in the garbage can model of decision making and compares it both to prior approaches in the Carnegie School tradition and the attention-based view of the firm. Both the garbage can model and the attention-based view rely on the same assumption, one that is rarely recognized nor understood – that organizational decision making is characterized by situated attention, where organizational participants vary across time and place in what they attend to. In the garbage can model, decision opportunities are the temporal contexts for situated attention; in the attention-based view, attention is situated in both time and place within the organization's communication channels. In the garbage can, situated attention is also shaped by the ecology of problems and opportunities competing for attention. The final part examines the determinants and consequences of tight versus loose coupling of channels in organizations and its effects on participants’ situated attention. Attention structures external to channels and the architecture of channel structures shape the degree of coupling found in organizations. In viewing coupling as a variable, the chapter suggests that a modified garbage can model, combined with an increased focus on situated attention, provides the foundations for a more general theory of nonroutine decision making.

Existing financial market architectures combine astonishing complexity with tight coupling, making them prone to systemic crises or “normal accidents” and placing extraordinary demands on regulation. In light of this, we consider two routes for regulatory reform. A “high modernist” possibility attempts to regulate financial markets as currently designed. This path means not only increasing the capacities of regulators and rating agencies to estimate complex risks, but also designing systems that can manage more radical forms of uncertainty through learning and bargaining. We consider a series of proposals and challenges that lie down this path. An alternative possibility takes seriously the notion that regulation constitutes markets and uses the current crisis to rethink market architectures themselves, especially their complexity and tight coupling. Preventing failures from spiraling into systemic crises may involve using regulation first, to simplify financial products and their interconnectedness, and second, to create redundancies or hedge bets through specialized financial subsectors organized around alternative principles, including recapitalized community banks, credit unions, mutuals, and public financial institutions.

To be innovative is increasingly considered an imperative in modern society. The motto seems to be “the more, the better,” which is echoed in writings about phenomena such as “disruptive technologies” (Christensen, 1997), “disruptive innovations” (Christensen & Raynor, 2003), or radical innovation (Stringer, 2000; Leifer et al., 2000). Such phenomena are typically held up against “anti-innovative” phenomena, for example, “disruptive” is contrasted with “continuous,” and “radical” is contrasted with “incremental.” Distinctions drawn between being more or less innovative derive in part from studies that are based on stable causal factors that explain why some organizations happen to be more innovative than others.