A Grammar Of Organizing

A Grammar of Organizing A Grammar of Organizing Maria Bengtsson Professor, Umeå School of Business (USBE), Sweden Tom...

Author: Maria Bengtsson

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A Grammar of Organizing

A Grammar of Organizing Maria Bengtsson Professor, Umeå School of Business (USBE), Sweden

Tomas Müllern Professor, Jönköping International Business School, Sweden

Anders Söderholm Professor, Umeå School of Business (USBE), Sweden

Nils Wåhlin Associate Professor, Umeå School of Business (USBE), Sweden

Edward Elgar Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Maria Bengtsson, Tomas Müllern, Anders Söderholm and Nils Wåhlin 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited Glensanda House Montpellier Parade Cheltenham Glos GL50 1UA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A grammar of organizing / Maria Bengtsson ... [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Industrial organization—Social aspects. 2. Industrial organization— Case studies. 3. Industrial management—Methodology. I. Bengtsson, Maria. HD30.19.G73 302.3′5—dc22

2007 2006102430

ISBN 978 1 84376 604 9 (cased)

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

The need for a new grammar of organizing The orientation of activities in time and space The challenges of coordination Influence – taking a political stand on organizing Identity construction – mixing cultural diversity and integration in organizing Agreements – acknowledging the social processes of organizing The activity–community model of organizing Four challenges of organizing

1 11 36 61 90 111 139 154 170 183

References Index

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1. The need for a new grammar of organizing Cisco Systems, the Silicon Valley-based Internet network technology provider, has gained global reputation and market dominance through a combination of partnering networks, acquisitions and protection of core competence. As Cisco was looking into the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology for network communication, it found the two-year-old Swedish company Qeyton with 50 employees. Qeyton, founded by ex-Ericsson employees, had successfully developed the DWDM technology. Cisco made a bid for the company, subsequently bought it for $800 million, and incorporated the company and the technology. As in many previous cases, Cisco swiftly transferred the Cisco culture to Qeyton and the Qeyton technology into the global system of Cisco products and sales network. This example poses a number of important questions concerning how Cisco’s research and development (R&D) process can be designed and controlled given Cisco’s dependence on acquisitions for technology development. In late June 2003, Intel, Hewlett Packard (HP), and a number of leading research institutions all over the globe announced their commitment to form PlanetLab. PlanetLab is described as a global testbed for inventing and testing prototype Internet applications and services. PlanetLab emerged at the beginning of 2002 as an intitiative from Intel researchers to gather leading network and distributed systems researchers to discuss the prospect of building a new class of global services and applications on the Internet. This new class of services operates as an ‘overlay’ network, where PlanetLab uses the Internet for packet forwarding, but integrates its own intelligent routers and servers on top of the Internet to enable new capabilities. This network is designed for decentralized operating, running on many computers spread across the Internet and able to self-organize to form its own networks. Why would Intel and HP be interested in investing money and staff in this initiative, without keeping formal control over it? On Tuesday, 5 March 2002, Sony Ericsson announced a series of global partnerships with Sony Group’s content companies concerning mobile multimedia content and applications. Sony Ericsson’s agreements with Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Sony Music Entertainment Inc. and Sony 1

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A grammar of organizing

Europe GmbH (Sony Style Imaging – Sony’s digital imaging community on the Internet) cover technology collaboration, market building and business development. The announcement of these partnerships coincided with Sony Ericsson’s launch of a new product portfolio concentrating on mobile color imaging and messaging applications. With its focus on the upper end of the market, Sony Ericsson has managed to reach the position of number four on the global market and is nowadays showing a healthy profit. What were the challenges in combining the resources, competences and cultures from two very different organizations to create a new and successful player?

WHAT IS NEW OUT THERE? Three examples, three different stories, and three different industries. Nevertheless, there is at least one common theme in the brief notes above. It is obvious that neither Cisco, nor Intel, nor Sony Ericsson can rely exclusively on their own organization for success. However, dependencies on the environment go beyond developing network and commercial relations. Instead they have to do with actively taking part in activities that cut across organizational borders and formal hierarchies. Despite the fact that many corporations grow and become global giants, it seems as if research, product development and commercialization can no longer be contained within the walls of one single, albeit large, organization. Instead, it has become necessary to interact, to co-organize, intervene and cooperate in activity networks resulting in comprehensive products or service offerings unattainable for individual companies. Furthermore, serving only regional markets is of less importance in a world that communicates and coordinates across national and cultural borders. When companies outgrow their old, regional spheres and defined product portfolios, they tend either to specialize in core competences (such as commercialization or technology leadership), or in a portfolio of (semi-)independent divisions or subsidiaries to serve different areas, customers or technologies (the M-form). Each of the two approaches, concentrating on core competences or multidivisional organizations, has a different thrust. M-form organizations became popular as many companies looked for investment opportunities and reduced risks in their core business. Core competence approaches, in turn, became popular as low profit margin in peripheral businesses called for active leadership and specific business knowledge not obtainable in financially solid but market-ignorant corporate headquarters. However, the point is that, irrespective of organizational models or structural approaches, the management dilemma exists as a consequence of organizational size and market complexity. Not even the largest and most

The need for a new grammar of organizing

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powerful global organization can develop all the competences needed for long-term sustainability and development. And, more importantly, this obvious fact leads to the conclusion that management has to organize a multitude of different activities that formal hierarchical structures and management models fail to anticipate. On a more profound level, it can be claimed that the reach of formal organizations has been overtaken by contemporary technology development, commercialization and globalization. To us, this holds a research issue of the greatest importance. How can management processes in modern corporations be understood and analyzed? One obvious conclusion is that we need to go beyond formal structures and organizational borders to capture activities and organizing processes that create corporate wealth and sustainability. This book is not intended to be yet another book on a new set of management principles and organizational types based on processes instead of structure. However, we believe that organizing has to be the starting-point for any inquiry into the management dilemma outlined above. Along these lines, Karl Weick’s 1979 second edition of The Social Psychology of Organizing is helpful, with his urge to ‘stamp out the nouns’. The deliberate choice of a verb instead of a noun – organizing instead of organization – is more than just a change of words. It is a change of grammar in which the disclosure of a new language lies in wait. It is a fundamental shift in perspective. By using the word organizing we emphasize the temporary, dynamic and ongoing nature of modern business life (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Organizing, however, needs to be connected with something that we organize. We suggest that activities is the natural object of organizing. With the starting-point in activities, this book will be devoted to an exploration of an alternative perspective of organizing and to the implications of such a perspective for management. It is furthermore based on our belief that Weick’s work can be further developed into a truly processual framework of organizing and management in a dialogue with practitioners. At the same time, however, organizations, in terms of structural arrangements, prevail. They are still in existence and have major importance for any organizing effort. In fact, there are more organizations around today than ever before. Individuals as well as societies are heavily dependent on organizations and the decision-making and financial resources accumulated therein. Seemingly successful organizational models are made into valuable symbols for many to follow, and the power vested in global CEOs and boards of directors is, at first glance at least, enormous. This may look like a controversy or a contradiction. On the one hand, we claim that processes are important and essential to understand and that formal hierarchies are less efficient descriptions of what management is about. On the other hand, we claim that organizations are important and that their power

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seems to have increased rather than decreased. But this is not a contradiction in terms. A more sophisticated version of our claim would be that organizing needs to be the first and most important concept and point of departure for research. An understanding of processes, however, needs to take structural considerations, limitations and explanations into account. The main difference is that we do not view structural arrangements as the starting-point to define what organizing processes are conducted. Instead we start by looking into processes and asking ourselves what structural considerations are evoked by them.

TOWARDS A NEW GRAMMAR – EMPHASIZING THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN ORGANIZING AND ORGANIZATION There are a number of aspects related to this interplay between activities and the formal measures taken to organize. First, many tasks in an organization cannot be performed without the active involvement of people and resources currently held by other units within or outside the organization. Research and development is one example in which those designing new products need to collaborate with production engineers, customers or suppliers. Quality assurance people wander all over organizations. Production units need to coordinate their work with suppliers’ delivery schedules and customers’ buying behavior. Value creation takes place among organizations in, for example, constellations of organizations (Normann, 2001; Davidow and Malone, 1993; Matusik and Hill, 1998) instead of in value chains. Consequently, management needs to address the fact that tasks are spread out but still need to be kept together in a comprehensive manner. By focusing on activities rather than on formal structures we can more easily understand the boundary-crossing nature of modern corporate reality. At the same time, organizational structure, defined management control systems and legal entities provide an arena for activities. Very few commercial or development-intensive activities would prevail without a solid organizational structure in the background. The organization supplies resources, people, security and long-term guarantees for short- or mediumterm activities. The organization is still there! Second, people do not stay in the same units during a whole lifetime, instead, they move between organizations and across boundaries on temporary assignments (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996; Lindgren et al., 2001). Managers and empowered employees to some extent act independently of formal organizational structures (Eccles et al., 1992; Mosakowski, 1998) and take on different identities and roles (Schultz et al., 2000). They cooperate


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and bring the tasks of one unit into other units in an interrelated way, blurring organizational borders (Georgiou, 1973; Løwendahl and Revang, 1998; Hedberg et al., 1997; Ekstedt et al., 1999). In a working environment characterized by moving and crossing, the organization itself might prove to be less appropriate to understand the individual. At the same time, an organization is still the entity employing people and thus providing secure income for them. Long-term investments will, in many cases, have to be decided by a corporate board of directors. When conflicts arise, people still tend to go back to their formal roles and units to seek cover or support. Obviously, the organization is still there. Third, production (and similar value-chain activities) has become less of a core competence of many firms. Instead of efficient production, the delivery of uniquely designed systems for customers is likely to be a core issue. It might well be that more money and time are spent on design and construction than on production and assembly. Projects and temporary joint ventures, even with competitors, might be the rule rather than long-term commitments to a certain set of products and production facilities (Bengtsson and Kock, 1999; Ekstedt et al., 1999). Organizations are more rapidly both created and disposed of (March, 1994). They create value by, for example, inventions that are sold out or by attracting Internet traffic to a website and not by efficient production alone. Value creation is thus not as easy to target in a value-chain model as it used to be. Value can be added through industrial network competence, through logistics competence, technology competence, or competence in how to run projects. Competences and core competences are, as a consequence, not easy to portray in a structural map of the company. Rather they reveal themselves in the activities organized and, accordingly, activities are what need to be managed! However, large production plants and carefully planned distribution networks are still being designed and maintained in a traditional value-chain model. Many people work with repetitive activities in front of machines that are designed to be efficient and productive for a very clearly defined task, and many firms find their role on the market to be efficient producers of standardized components. The organization is still there. Fourth and finally, many new firms or new industries are different from the companies of the industrial era. It can be argued that business in the ‘knowledge era’, the ‘new economy’, the ‘information society’, the ‘post-industrial society’, or whatever label we put on long-term changes in the economy, is in a sense a less tangible economy, with value creation connected to nonmaterial phenomena (values, knowledge, information, experience, etc.). When boundaries are blurred, when stable structures are dissolved, and when we organize around processes in and around organizations, this also implies new challenges for creating identities (Giddens, 1991). However, the talk

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about corporate culture and core values of the corporation is still around. Some companies prevail by being very strong in terms of corporate identity. In so doing, they make sure that each and every employee will, for example, relate to a common set of goals or a certain way of interacting with customers. Thus the organization is still there!

THE LOGIC OF THE BOOK – INTRODUCING THE ACTIVITY–COMMUNITY MODEL OF ORGANIZING The four aspects of the organizing/organization dilemma discussed above indicate a need to create a bridge between different theoretical strands. On the one hand we need to incorporate a more active view of organizing; this is done through the activity concept. On the other hand we also want to emphasize that organizations ‘exist’ out there; they are constructed and people act as if they were ‘real’. We introduce the concept of community to deal with this aspect of organizing. Together the two concepts form the basis for a theoretical model we call the activity–community (A–C) model of organizing. The model’s label indicates that there is an interplay between activities, the foundation for our search for organizing, and community, which directs our attention to the formative and imaginative aspects of organizing. The seven chapters that follow are all connected to this model and they follow a certain logic that is explained below. The activity–community model involves dual attention to two interrelated aspects, both of which are necessary for our understanding of organizing. On the activity level organizing is defined as ‘coordinative measures taken to deal with the orientation of activities in time and space’. Whenever people meet to do things together, a need for organizing arises. With the activity concept we focus on the direct, coordinating measures that are taken to ‘drive’ the activity forward. On the community level organizing is viewed as ‘the attempts to form what we call imagined communities’. We can view this as two intertwined processes – once an activity is ‘on the move’, community building starts. Individual and groups begin to influence each other; they create identities and form agreements to deal with emerging issues within the activity. By putting activity and community side by side, we can create a better understanding of the full complexity of organizing. The activity concept takes on the challenge of Weick to seek a more active description of organizing rather than keeping us within the predefined boundaries of the formal organization. Activities can be captured in Euclidean space – in the interrelated dimensions of time and space. In Chapter 2 we set out to develop a terminology to locate activities in different time and space contexts. Even though the activity concept is still a noun, it


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is a noun that more explicitly shows the processes of organizing. Every activity is a coordination challenge, and this challenge can vary from simple situations where the coordination is virtually automatic to those that are highly complex and need elaborate systems of coordination. In Chapter 3 we highlight the need for coordination and develop a typology of various coordination situations related to activities. In Chapters 2 and 3 we develop a methodology to identify and understand four basic types of activity situations, thus giving the ‘A’ of the A–C model more concrete content. Coordination is, however, a concept that can be criticized for being undersocialized. It does not pay adequate attention to basic social processes going on when people meet to work on or in activities, and that both facilitates and complicates organizing. We define this as a problem of community building, with a focus on the processes by which people create bonds and identify themselves with abstract entities such as corporations, brands, projects and the like. It should be acknowledged from the beginning of the book that our concept of community is broader than the view presented in, for example, the community of practice literature. Our community concept is closer to Benedict Anderson’s (1983) idea of imagined communities that move beyond the limits of space and time, rather than the localized view on communities as presented by authors such as Brown and Duguid (1991) and Wenger (1998). We argue that two such related processes can be identified – influence and identity. Inspired by political theories, we claim that people are driven by interests, at the same time as it is deeply embedded in human nature to seek consent, or to ensure adherence to one’s views. Relations between actors are inevitably marked by attempts at influencing others in order to try to create imagined communities. We describe influencing as a communicative process and we use rhetoric to capture its essence. This is, however, not just an active process of people influencing people. It must be emphasized that we are also influenced by imagined communities already in place. As argued by institutional theorists, we are in many cases driven by what March and Olsen (1989) call a logic of appropriateness. We often find it easier to comply with established norms in society, rather than to act guided by a quest to change reality according to our own wishes. With rhetoric, people try to create preferred readings of reality, and through the use of metaphors (and other rhetorical tropes) reality is described and transformed. The world of organizing is no exception – in fact it is loaded with metaphors that direct attention, illuminate (or hide), inform and transform our images of organizing. Think of words like hierarchy, decentralization and network – they all make use of spatial metaphors (over–under, center–periphery, web, etc.). An important part of the forming of imagined communities is thus the metaphors that bind people together.

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A one-eyed focus on influence, however, can make us overpoliticized, and hide the other major process that we envision: identity. In the ongoing processes of influence, individuals assign meaning to, develop a reflexive attitude to, and relate themselves to others as well as to abstract entities, e.g. organizations and brands. This makes identity our second process to explore in the case of both individuality and collectivity. The classical view of identity is connected to the enduring and unifying aspects of identity construction with the aim to illuminate the core activities defining organizational processes. However, later views contrast these substantive aspects with development of more reflexive views of identity construction. Identities change and are contextualized in different cultural milieus, and this makes self-understanding important as a way of developing critical sensitivity to how indentities emerge, stabilize and are revised. Identity construction is a lived construction and not merely a category, a personality trait, a role or a label; it is more fundamentally a lived and negotiated experience. Consequently, the answer to questions about identity is not always that it is single and integrated. Rather, there may exist multiple answers and thereby multiple identities. Multiple interpretations seem to be part of everyday life in modern organizations. The description of the two basic processes – influence and identity – makes the analysis of activities and coordination more realistic. With influence and identity we uncover a tension between political and cultural processes that bring us to the question highlighed in Chapter 3 – how are activities coordinated? In the midst of the two processes, people are still able to coordinate their efforts and complete highly complex activities, and do so facing conflicts between individuals and groups of individuals. In Chapter 6 we introduce a generic social psychological mechanism to explain this – agreements. Agreements capture the variety of instruments we use to generate action when action seems hard to achieve. The concept of agreement is part of a coordination language at the same time as it acknowledges the social psychology of organizing in the processes of influence and identity. Agreements can be rooted in different ways, and one important aim of Chapter 6 is to develop a framework for capturing the richness of various forms of agreement. Four basic categories of agreements are suggested and the contextual factors that drive agreements are discussed. In Chapter 7 the activity–community (A–C) model of organizing finds its final formulation, and we are now able to integrate the four activity situations from Chapters 2 and 3 with the elaborate discussion on community building in Chapters 4 to 6. In Chapter 8, finally, we bring together and discuss a number of managerial challenges identified in the A–C model. The process through the following seven chapters is captured in the following questions:

The need for a new grammar of organizing ● ● ● ● ● ●

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How can activities be described in time and space (Chapter 2)? How are activities coordinated (Chapter 3)? How do processes of influence affect organizing (Chapter 4)? How do processes of identity affect organizing (Chapter 5)? How do agreements contribute to building communities (Chapter 6)? What are the elements of the activity–community model of organizing (Chapters 7 and 8)?

WHAT IS A GRAMMAR? An important argument in this book is that the concept of organizing, as we find it in Weick (1979), needs to be treated on both micro and macro levels, and includes an extended view of relations in order to capture the complexity of organizing in post-industrial society. A similar argument is put forward by Eccles et al. (1992), even though not connected to Weick, in their book, Beyond the Hype. For Eccles et al. the basics of organizing are hidden because of the tendency, both in academia and among practitioners, continuously to invent new and fancy labels to describe what we think is going on ‘out there’. The observations made by Eccles et al. concerning the ‘language game’ going on out there should not just be treated as a problem. They are an important characteristic of the processes of organizing. As human beings, we need labels and concepts to grasp a complex reality. In a sense, we live in a conversational reality (Shotter, 1993), where reality is created through communication. The idea of creating a grammar of organizing is founded on this need to talk about and define reality. The hope is that the purposeful labeling of our book as a grammar will draw attention to the ongoing communicative processes when activities are organized. The title of this book was chosen to provoke questioning of the commonsense understanding of how organizing is conceptualized. It deliberately presents the reader with a puzzle: is there really a grammar of organizing and, if so, has it really changed? The answer is clearly no, if grammar implies that there is one best way of organizing, applicable to all situations, and one structured set of rules that could be applied to help a single manager to build a successful company. In yet another sense the answer is yes, if grammar means that there are certain generating principles involved in human organizing. This book is an attempt to ask a number of fundamental questions concerning organizing, and to develop a theoretical framework built around fundamental generating principles. The word grammar seems to imply an interest in rules and rule-like behavior. The concept of grammar has, for instance, been used by Pentland and Reuter (1994) to describe certain aspects of organizational routines.

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Grammars, according to Pentland and Reuter, define sets of possibilities and are therefore useful to analyze organizational processes that are characterized by sequential structure and functionally similar patterns. This definition of grammar comes close to the standard linguistic usage of the term as a set of rules that allow a speaker to construct a vast variety of sentences. We give a slightly different meaning to the word grammar. A grammar can be thought of as a description of the linguistic properties of a subject matter, in our case organizing. What creative potential does talk about organizing embrace? What are the linguistic properties of a rounded statement on organizing? In this sense the word grammar comes close to the meaning attached to it by Burke (1969a) in his analysis of statements of motives, where grammar is characterized as a set of generating principles that enable us to talk about a subject matter. A grammar of organizing can thus neither specify the exact conditions for organizing nor predict the exact outcome of a specific attempt to do so. What it can do, however, is to draw attention to certain defining properties of organizing – it enables us to talk about organizing in a creative way. Weick also uses the concept of grammar in his discussion on organizing (1979). He differs, however, from both Pentland and Reuter (1994) and Burke (1969a) in treating grammar as an analogy. Weick writes: Organizing is like a grammar in the sense that it is a systematic account of some rules and conventions by which sets of interlocked behaviors are assembled to form social processes that are intelligible to actors. It is also a grammar in the sense that it consists of rules for forming variables and causal linkages into meaningful structures (later called cause maps) that summarize the recent experience of the people who are organized. (Weick, 1979: 3f.)

We would like to stress that a grammar of organizing needs to go beyond being a grammar of nouns if only to avoid reducing organizing to either structure or process features. Weick makes a claim for the introduction of the verb form into the language of organizations and organizing. As should be obvious by now, we fully agree with this as we make activities a core concept of our grammar. A simple answer to the question of what kind of grammar is developed in this book is that it is a descriptive tool created by the authors to further the understanding of organization. A more sophisticated answer is that the grammar also captures the necessary linguistic properties of organizing ‘out there’, emphasizing that languauge is, in fact, an integrated property of organizing. This point is most forcefully put forward in Chapter 4 on processes of influence, described from a rhetorical perspective.

2. The orientation of activities in time and space The basic premise of all organizing is that people meet to do something, which always requires a moment of coordination. The constituting element of organizing was, from this starting-point, defined as activities in Chapter 1. This might seem like an obvious and solid foundation, but it actually contains a great deal of both difficult and interesting issues related to the ultimate search for a grammar of organizing. There are a number of reasons for this, and the first and most obvious has to do with the fact that we are dealing with something ‘on the move’. With activities we want to capture the extension of human action in space and time. Activities are, as will be further analyzed below, composed of many individual acts, bound together by a multitude of instruments. They are collective phenomena, which means that there is an additional element besides being a mere sequence of individual acts. They are not obvious empirical phenomena in the same sense as more readily observable things or acts. An important aspect of an activity is its labeling, a process whereby it is actually constructed. At the same time there are in most cases highly visible and tangible aspects of activities. This tension is captured in our activity–community model and it constitutes the backbone of our whole grammar. But let us be more specific in our description of activities. Consider the spectactular example of the innovative project of developing and building a new generation of fighter aircraft in Sweden – JAS 39 Gripen. Originally conceived of in the late 1970s with the project organization still running, this turned out to be a groundbreaking project with a number of innovative practices and technological breakthroughs. What immediately catches the eye is the high complexity of this project and how it transcends the limits of time and space. Within the highly tangible scope of constructing a new generation of fighter aircraft, we find an activity of very high complexity. Project leaders, teams at Saab Ltd, and teams from other independent companies with a specified schedule and budget worked together to accomplish the development of the Gripen jet fighter aircraft. The different actors agreed to take responsibility for specific parts of the aircraft such as wings, computer systems, engines, cabin and communication systems. It was specified ‘who’ was going to do ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’. The different 11

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parts were progressively integrated and assembled into the final product. A developmental project such as the Gripen project is one example of how activities are organized through deliberate coordination of different actions in time and space that goes beyond the frame of one single permanent organization. This highly complex activity – developing and building a fighter aircraft – is further complicated by the dynamic interplay between phases in the project. Over the whole project time there is a continuous development of the specifications of the aircraft and a subsequent modification of aircraft already in production. There is also a commercial aspect to a military project such as this, with British Aerospace joining forces with the Swedish consortium responsible for developing the aircraft, to enter the long and complicated negotiations with potential buyers that might give both parties a solid profit. All in all, it takes some strong measures to coordinate these activities, and we will explore some of the complexity of doing so in this chapter and in the next one on coordination. Organizing an activity means that different actions that are handled by different firms, units or individuals are embraced by a common construction or definition of the activity. The activity described was not only the development of wings or engines but also the development of the Gripen jet fighter aircraft, in fact developing a whole system in which the aircraft is just one part. Furthermore, actions that are spatially dispersed are linked to each other. Developing the wings was, for example, the responsibility of a firm outside Sweden, whereas another team in another country was responsible for developing the engine. Each contracted team or company had to conform to technical specifications concerning interfaces, weight, performance requirements etc. Actions were not only distributed and coordinated in a space dimension; they were also distributed differently in time and dependent on each other in a temporal dimension. Timetables or plans and checkpoints or milestones were used to minimize delays and to coordinate the activity over time. For example, deliveries of newly developed components or subsystems had to be integrated with each other and were thus dependent on each other’s schedules. The JAS Gripen example is an example of coordination of complex and challenging activities over time and space, with a commonly understood definition of activity. Clearly, formal hierarchies or industrial bureaucracies cannot achieve the coordination necessary to develop and produce a jet fighter if only formal rules and regulations are used. Other means of coordination are needed and, following our argument in Chapter 1, such means might be far more interesting to managers than formal organizational lines of command (or other management principles based on traditional organizational concepts).

The orientation of activities in time and space

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This chapter takes on the challenge of Chapter 1 to reinstate activities, rather than formal structures, as the basis of organizing. The concept of activities thus answers the basic question: ‘What are we organizing?’ The what-question of activities is by no means restricted to the simple argument that activities are directed towards a goal. It can, in fact, be claimed that there is much more to an activity than just goal orientation. In this chapter a framework is introduced to describe and explain the nature of activities. The concepts and tools developed here constitute the starting-point for the activity–community model of organizing. It might seem risky to claim that we have identified a new ‘species’ out there, but we like to think of human beings forming communities around activities, and this is something different from just claiming that people engage in them. Although the concept of activity communities is cumbersome, it nevertheless captures the essence of our grammar of organizing – an essential interplay between activity and community. But suffice for the moment to state that the starting-point in the model is activities. The theoretical arguments and deliberations will be further expanded below. The conceptualization of ‘activity’ in the activity–community model is inspired by two very different streams of research. On the one hand it takes the obvious starting-point in activity theory and theories on coordination. On the other hand it is argued that activity theory and theories on coordination can be criticized because of their lack of focus on the social psychological mechanisms involved in organizing activities. The activity focus is thus inspired by social constructionist ideas, with the assumption that we need to further our understanding of the process of constructing activities. Following the brief example from Saab, two major questions form the basis for this chapter: (1) How are activities defined? and (2) How can distances in space and time be understood? Related to these questions, a highly relevant question is (3) What principles are available to accomplish coordination of activities in time and space? We devote the whole of Chapter 3 to reflections upon this third question.

ACTIVITIES ARE CONSTRUCTED IN A PROCESS OF LABELING Before applying an activity-based perspective to organizing, we need to raise some basic questions about the nature of activities. First, let us recognize action and activities as related concepts. Action is, however, a phenomenon more directly related to the individual. It is argued in the activity theory dating back to Leont’ev and Vygotsky that activities can be described as object-oriented actions, making them a collective phenomenon, whereas

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actions are related to individuals. Individuals have the capacity to act, to ‘do’ something, and can assess intentions to perform actions, reflect upon them, and learn from them (see e.g. von Wright, 1966 for a discussion on action from a philosophical point of view). A single act of an individual, e.g. opening a door, can be related to actions of other individuals through social interaction, e.g. opening a door to allow a friend to enter. Action is thus a social concept in the sense that it is directed toward others. That is, what we do is related to, or dependent on, actions of other individuals. Hence single individual action can be understood as a part of a larger system of social interaction forming ‘lines of action’ (Mead, 1934; see also Weber, 1968 on meaning-adequate contexts), or action nets. Action nets are social actions linked to each other in different ways. It is these action nets that we refer to when we use the concept of activity. Consequently, action nets make up the core of activities. It is important to note that the characterization of individual actions as related to others, being social, does not make them a collective phenomenon, and this is the crucial difference between action and activity. Activities need to be understood as a collective phenomenon, something that is done in relation to others, and not just directed toward others. Essentially, an action net constitutes an activity at the moment when a label, a ‘headline’, is assigned. A number of ‘headlines’ are, of course, possible. In any organization, you are bound to find ‘product development’, ‘joint ventures’, ‘production processes’, ‘distribution networks’, ‘computer system development’, ‘staff training’, and many other labels that constitute activities performed in that particular organizational setting. Some of them are truly innovative and challenging, while others are more or less continuously repetitive tasks. Some are defined by the presence of machinery and physical equipment, while others only exist as abstract ideas. Some involve top management, while others are the main responsibility of lower-level management. With our grammar of organizing we need to encompass this rich variety of activities without losing the simplicity of the activity concept. Obviously, activities differ in various ways (albeit only a few mentioned here). It is important to note that activities can be labeled differently depending on the process that brought the activity into focus. Individual managers or teams can emphasize certain aspects of a planned organizational change by labeling it ‘quality improvement’ instead of ‘downsizing’. Along these lines we can claim that subjective social action and interaction play an important role in the labeling of an activity along with more rational considerations as they are expressed in, for example, the finalization of technical requirements for a new product development project. Activities are therefore to be viewed as the result of a construction process. Both social constructionist theory and symbolism emphasize


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social aspects in relation to the creation of interaction, culture and common understanding. In the context of this chapter, we argue that activities might be closely related in physical manifestations, but physical entities get their significance from human interpretation and interaction. The symbolist perspective takes its starting-point in the manifestation of ideas (artifacts, myths and rituals), and argues that individuals can come to share certain meanings (forming cultures), or, in our words, to share certain labels defining an activity. Social constructionist theory, on the other hand, focuses on the creation, socialization and institutionalization of ideas into action patterns or action sequences, and leans less on the manifestation of ideas. We share with activity theory, as well as with pragmatist philosophers such as Dewey and Mead, the conviction that we need to overcome simple dichotomies like thought and action, matter and idea. With the idea of a construction involved in activities, a possible solution to these dichotomies is offered. This transcending is further explored in the light of our activity–community model of organizing. The creative work done within the field of activity theory is an important source of inspiration that has guided our understanding of activities. However, we want to emphasize some important differences between the approach taken in this book and the central tenets of activity theory. The most important difference is the way the community concept is treated. In Engeström et al. (1999) the community concept refers primarily to a group of people adhering to the object of the activity: it captures the social basis of activities. In our model the community takes on a much more important and active role. With the concept of imagined communities we emphasize the wide array of agreements that bind people together in a community. In fact, we make community a concept as important as activity. We furthermore argue that there is an interplay between activity and community that makes them virtually inseparable. The process of activity creation and labeling is not easily delimited. From the initial imagined ideas on how a new house is to look, the activity becomes further clarified as documents are prepared (limiting the number of possible interpretations) and the construction site is opened. To make initial abstract ideas less ambiguous, it is necessary to synchronize the work of different teams (such as construction workers and electrical contractors) as the activity unfolds. In a way, it would be tempting to argue that activity construction is an ongoing story that continues from the first day until termination of the activity. For practical reasons, it seems relevant to distinguish between activities that are genuinely ambiguous and unclear on one hand, and those that are clear and explicit on the other hand, and to distinguish between different phases of an activity over time to cover the changing nature of activities. The

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latter case is perhaps the more common. Activities can be expected to be less clear initially than at the end (for time-limited activities), while ongoing processes might change towards more narrow interpretations as people gain experience and a common understanding. For example, product development projects need a technical specification as well as a shared vision of the future product’s qualities. In the early stages of a product development project there are fewer concrete components and more imagined ones. Collaboration with a supplier needs a formal contract as well as a mutual understanding of the atmosphere of the collaboration. It might start out with a handshake between friends but will gradually be transformed as contracts and formal agreements are added. Organizations are well equipped to deal with both these aspects of an activity. An array of standard operating procedures creates bundles of manifestations of an activity (contracts, blueprints, agendas, machinery etc.), while efforts to create corporate symbols and a common culture work with imagined and genuinely ambiguous components. In some cases, an activity is very much a blueprint of something done previously with only negligible innovative elements. Norms, rules and expectations that are enacted during the constructing process can be institutionalized and inherent in a specific context. Institutional pressure hence has a major impact on how activities are defined and organized (Scott, 1995). Languages, stories, routines, policies, rules, norms and experiences are among those ‘components’ that are used during constructing processes. Such components are not distributed evenly in society. Certain organizational settings provide more rigid and solid guidance for the constructing, while others seem to be less rich in this respect. It is not only organizational settings (such as churches, military forces, advertising agencies etc.) that provide this kind of guidance or pressure. The activity itself entails norms that direct further definitions of what to do. This also includes the assignment of roles, professions and identities that entail norms for how to participate in an activity. For example, ‘building a house’ immediately releases information on who should be brought into the activity, what kind of competences are needed, and what sets of rules or regulations have to be attended to. A carpenter entering a construction site is expected to have certain skills and to perform certain actions. ‘Building a house’ is a fairly obvious example of an activity with strong beliefs about how it should be done. But when activities are organized with less physical and less obvious connotations, the assignment of activity labels is indeed more complicated and the institutional pressure is less apparent, with no obvious assignment of roles and attention to rules. ‘Reorganizing the quality control department’, ‘implementation of a new system for distribution’ and ‘outsourcing’ are some examples of activities


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that have less ready-to-use action plans and thus more room for local constructing and ambiguity. The extreme case of an unclear and ambiguous activity is characterized by being dependent on imagination (rather than facts), on ideas (rather than physical manifestation), on different interpretations (rather than a shared understanding) and on implicit (rather than explicit) knowledge. This could be a vision-based organizational change effort at its beginning or an innovative technological development process. At the other end of the scale is the clear and explicit activity characterized by institutional connections, physical manifestations, a shared understanding, explicit knowledge and factual conditions. Repetitive construction projects, well-known production process activities or annual review procedures are some examples of activities of this type. Following the previous discussion, activities can also differ depending on the level of complexity inherent in the activity context. Complexity rises as the activity requires complicated and not easily organized relations between systems, technologies, actions, individuals and so forth. Even though there is a strong institutional component (‘we are building a house according to construction industry norms’), the activity can be complex (‘the house will be a sphere with a high-tech innovative working environment’) and thus call for new solutions to be developed as part of the activity. Complexity requires actions performed to be connected, synchronized or related to actions within other activities, maybe activities that are far away geographically, technologically or in time. In our terms, complexity is a context variable, constituting an activity context to be either complex (numerous dependencies and considerations between activities) or simple (self-contained activities). Consequently, an activity can be complex even though it is clear and built around well-established knowledge or on ready-to-use role definitions. A platform development project organized as a joint venture between competitors (or divisions within large corporations) can be fairly clear in terms of technology and goals but still complex, as it requires different companies and company cultures to interact. Different technologies, controlled by different teams in the companies, need to be integrated even though engineers may not share an appreciation of the systems to be integrated. Outside suppliers and vendors as well as production facilities have to be included in the project, further emphasizing the need for coordination and synchronization among partners. Complexity, in these terms, thus indicates a need for intra- and inter-activity coordination and synchronization as a result of systemic dependencies. An activity organized to train new staff members for their future tasks might be ambiguous but still not show much complexity in terms of being dependent on the synchronization or coordination with outside people or

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Activity labeling Clear

Ambiguous

Activity context

Complex

Simple

Figure 2.1

Two basic dimensions of activities

technologies. We will use the fairly vague concept ‘simple’ to indicate a situation when complexity is low. Simple thus indicates a situation in which there is no or very little demand for intra- or inter-activity coordination and synchronization. A simple activity can be carried out quite independently of other (past, parallel or future) activities. So far, two dimensions have been used to discuss the coordination needs in different types of activities. First, the activity label can be defined as being clear or ambiguous. Second, an activity context can be defined as being simple or complex. Combining the two dimensions results in a 2 2 matrix as presented in Figure 2.1. Taken together, the boxes in Figure 2.1 show four typical situations that require different coordinative efforts depending on labels and context. This typology, however, is not enough to capture the nature of activities. What we need is further understanding of the context of activities. Activities are always situated in time and space; that is, they have an extension in time and space and we need to develop the tools to capture this extension. We will thus continue our discussion on activities by relating them to their orientation in time and space. Obviously, the previous discussion provides us with some basic concepts for the discussion of activities, but we still cannot say much about how activities are coordinated, synchronized and organized. This will be possible when we incorporate time and space dimensions.


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Figure 2.1 is a useful instrument to capture the overall challenges of organizing activities. It has, however, restricted scope in that it does not encompass the full dynamics and complexity of activities; it is in a sense a static classification of activities. The discussion below on time and space makes the description of activities more realistic and aligned with the general purpose of finding a more active way of understanding organizing. In the next chapter the discussion is further complicated by adding the concept of dependencies to the general framework of activities.

ORGANIZING ACTIVITIES IN TIME Time is an important aspect of social interaction and hence of the organizing of activities. In a grammar of organizing, time is an indispensable tool for capturing movement, dynamics and, in fact, activities. It is, however, both dangerous and erroneous to treat time as an object existing outside of the actors. Within an activity community time can thus be constructed in a unique way – it must therefore be understood as a cultural phenomenon. Activities, consisting of actions, always have an extension in time, but different people, in different locations and in different times, construct this extension differently. Before discussing the organizing of activities in time it is, however, necessary to elaborate on the overall construction of institutionalized time. Time is a taken-for-granted institution in temporary societies. Institutionalized time is expressed in the various time-reckoning systems in use, and it is a point of reference that provides principles and a language that is used when specific activities are constructed. We note, however, that within the framework of overall institutionalized time, time is also locally constructed. When activities are formed through interaction among actors, they are socially constructed in time. These activity-specific constructions of time differ from each other. We argue that the differences can be described and understood using four dimensions (rate, duration, synchronization and sequence), and that these dimensions are important for the organizing and coordination of activities. Institutionalized Time as a Frame of Reference The constructing of activities in time is closely related to how time is measured and conceptualized. Certain conceptions and perceptions of time are inherent in standardized time-reckoning systems (Munn, 1992) or time markers (Elias, 1992). Time-reckoning systems – calendars and clocks – are commonly used in society when meetings are scheduled, when stories are told, and also when the future is planned. An institutionalized conception

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of time is inherent in these reckoning systems. Time-reckoning systems and institutionalized conceptions of time have developed over time as a response to the need for coordination. This need, however, has changed over time due to technological and social change. The following three lines of development can be observed: (1) changes due to enlargement of the geographical reach of activities; (2) changes due to increased precision and specialization of activities; and (3) changes due to increased integration of activities. Time-reckoning systems in use are related to common activities at different times and different locations. Early time-reckoning systems often depicted natural rhythms, as the most common activities in primitive societies were related to the agricultural sector. The solar cycle (the year) allowed farmers to coordinate annual activities according to the time of year. The lunar cycle (the month) is also a cycle in nature that was made into a time marker. The day is a cycle that divided work from rest and sleep. The week, in contrast, was a political and social invention not corresponding to any natural rhythm, but to norms, rules and regulations that governed certain activities. These norms, rules and regulations differed between different locations and three-, five-, thirteen- and nineteen-day weeks have been used in different societies. The seven-day week has its roots in Middle East Jewish and Babylonian cultures that eventually became institutionalized by the Greeks and Christians (Zerubavel, 1985). The constructing of time was, for a long period, measured locally and differed between neighboring communities. Differences between communities’ local time eventually became an inconvenience as railroad communication and scheduled mail services were introduced. Activities were no longer carried out in small communities. Therefore, different local times did not meet the coordination requirements demanded by new technology. This inconvenience was first experienced when the United Kingdom introduced regular and punctual mail-coach services in the late eighteenth century. Greenwich Mean Time was introduced as standard time for timetables (Zerubavel, 1981), and the railway operators later adopted the same standard. The USA experienced the same problem, but on a larger scale, and needed to gain acceptance for the idea of mean time in lieu of solar time. Moreover, they needed the public to accept the principle of time zones with different mean times. An international time-zone system was introduced in the 1880s, which divided the world into 24 zones (Zerubavel, 1981). A globally standardized time-reckoning system was introduced to decide mean time, to measure differences between communities, and to define dates. This standardized time-reckoning system was necessary to coordinate activities with increased geographical reach. Besides the increased geographical reach, many activities have also changed in other respects over time. They have, for instance, become more


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precise and specialized, and many activities have become more integrated with one another. As a consequence of these changes, measuring time units such as hours, minutes and seconds became more important. This was possible through the introduction and spread of clocks. Earlier, time was linked to certain events and often marked differently depending on the event. Church services were marked with a bell. Political city meetings, evening gatherings etc. had other markers. Yet these markers were not coordinated. Time spent in church could not easily be compared with time spent in meetings. Cities soon erected bell towers and the churches built cathedrals with big mechanical clocks that struck the hours. While the mechanical clock was invented in the fourteenth century, clocks with greater precision were invented over the centuries as demands for precise timekeeping became more pressing. The second is now one of the units in the International System of Units (SI). The demand for precise timekeeping and time coordination also increased as a consequence of industrial development and the increased integration of activities in industrial firms (Thompson, 1967). Clocks went hand in hand with capitalism and industrialism in creating the illusion of time as a commodity. Industrialization introduced a distinction between ‘time at work’ and ‘time off work’. The subsistence of the family was dependent on how much pay could be generated during ‘time at work’. In addition, work became more monotonous since each day in the factory was a repetition of the previous day. The presence of a physical clock was important to create the needed coordination and discipline. Workers had to be in the factory at the same time in the morning. Organizations had to decide on working hours, supplies had to be delivered at certain times, and buyers and sellers had to agree on delivery dates and times. Increased division of labor meant that individual workers did not produce an entire commodity but only performed one specific step in its production. Thus coordination in the workplace had to be based on time. These needs paved the way for ‘scientific management’ and other efforts to coordinate factory work effectively. Clocks have become important components of all organizations. Signals or announcements indicate the start and end of the activities in factories, schools, ice-hockey games, airports, and at the stock exchange. These signals demand that we keep track of time. We have to hurry if we are late and we are permitted to rest if we arrive early. In other words, we coordinate what we do in accordance with the time-reckoning system that gives us reference points for synchronization (Munn, 1992). Since other people also do this, everyone arrives at work on time, and we will do our best to arrive on time for a scheduled meeting. Although our ingenuity has provided us with increasingly precise timekeeping devices, this creativity has, to some

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extent, turned against us and enslaved us to time (Ferrarotti, 1990). Thus time is now perceived as a ‘quantity’, a ‘commodity’, and a fact of nature that exists independently of humankind and independently of what we do. Time is abstract and we conceive of it as having properties of its own (see discussion in Lauer, 1981: 22–5 and in Clark, 1990: 140–41). The standardization of time by 24-hour clocks and calendars exhibits a linear conception of time. For example, seconds add up to minutes, minutes add up to hours, hours to days, days to months and months to years. Time is rarely affected by external factors and is rarely disagreed upon, or reversed (tomorrow is after today, no matter what). Somewhere during the standardization process, time was disconnected from being defined by activities or by the natural rhythms, and was seen as a number of periods. This contributes to the widespread conception of time as an independent entity. A new time has become institutionalized, and standardization has been successful in terms of its impact on the organizing of our lives and on the acceptance of standardized units. In order to bring time-reckoning systems into the Internet age, Swiss clock manufacturer Swatch recently introduced a new time standard. The 1000 beats-a-day clock shows the same time regardless of location. However, since Swatch time changes from 999 to 000 at midnight in Biel, Switzerland, it is merely an extension of that time zone to the rest of the world and a conversion to a metric time-measuring system. Even though daily-life activities do not require us to keep track of fractions of a second, we are currently living lives that require us to keep track of minutes. Such a requirement is quite far from the timekeeping requirements of farmers only a century ago. However, even though a time standard has been decided upon, that standard was not immediately recognized around the world, and the impact of the standard varies between different activities and locations. ‘Old’ conceptions of time are still a part of our life. We plan what will be done during this year and position the occasion of certain events using the natural rhythms. One activity will be performed during the spring whereas another takes place during the fall. Old institutionalized conceptions of time remain although new conceptions are constructed. The importance and meaning of natural time-reckoning systems have changed and become integrated with the standardized and taken-for-granted conception of time that functions as a frame of reference when individual activities are organized in time. The Social Constructing of Activities in Time When as a child I laughed and wept, time crept. When as a youth I waxed more bold, time strolled. When I became a full-grown man, time RAN. When older still I daily grew, time FLEW. Soon I shall find, in passing on, time gone. O Christ! wilt Thou have saved me then? Amen. (Henry Twells)


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The quotation illustrates that time is constructed differently in different social contexts even if we use standardized time-reckoning systems and act within the frame of the institutionalized time discussed above. Timereckoning systems tell us what time it is, but they do nothing to unveil what time is. The fact that we tend to view time as a commodity does not mean that we are closer to its inner or true meaning. Obviously, time is measured with great precision. Yet time is a social and cultural phenomenon with many symbolic notions attached to it. Let us assume that it is possible to cluster the perceptions of time held by individuals according to situation, nationality, organizational type or other social contexts. We would then end up with a specific type of social time for peasants, for bureaucrats, for Hopi Indians, for ancient Greeks, for sailors, for different types of societies etc. Gurvitch (1964), for example, defines eight different ‘social times’: enduring time, deceptive time, erratic time, cyclical time, retarded time, alternating time, time pushing forward, and explosive time. He links these ‘social times’ to different social classes, different historical societies (e.g. patriarchal and feudal society), and different contemporary societies (e.g. capitalism and centralized collectivist societies). Gardet et al. (1976) show that, among others, the Chinese, the Bantu people, Jews, Christians and Muslims have different conceptions of time. Anthropological studies examine the different conceptions of time and different ways of social construction among secluded cultural groups (Munn, 1992). Time can also be constructed differently within the same location and culture. We all know that a period of one hour can be perceived differently depending on where we are and what we are doing. One hour in front of a television set might pass unnoticed while an hour at the racetrack may contain many noticeable events. Similarly, an hour can feel like a very long time while waiting for a bus, but can feel like only a short amount of time when a deadline is approaching. Differences in the conception of time can have an impact on our actions and interactions, as well as on our expectations, memories and perceptions. Flaherty (1991) argues that time seems to move slowly during periods when there is almost nothing happening (when you are waiting without anything to do, time seems to run slowly) and also during periods that are unusually eventful (a dangerous situation that calls for your immediate action can seem to last forever). ‘Protracted duration’ is the term he coins to describe how time is perceived under unusual circumstances. Here time is socially constructed and dependent on both situations and the individuals involved in them (Clark, 1990; Butler, 1995). Time varies across situations and settings. In some cases, time can be constructed for one single event without being linked to other time constructs outside that event. For example, at the global conference on security and trust among nations in Stockholm in

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1986, the delegates were unable to reach a joint statement before the end of the last day. The clocks in the main auditorium were stopped five minutes before midnight in order to gain more time to negotiate. Three days later, when the delegates were ready to sign the statement, the clocks were restarted. In a simple way, this incident illustrates how time, even linear clock time, is essentially socially constructed. Time can thus be constructed differently in different cultures, in different settings within a culture, and even for individual events. Many of these differences are closely related to differences in space that will be further explored in the next section. If the notion of the presence of an institutionalized time globally agreed upon is accounted for, the constructing of time can be described along with certain dimensions independent of where it takes place and who is involved in the constructing process. First, conceptions of time differ in terms of how activities are related to each other. Within the framework of a standardized time conception the organizing of activities in time is usually described in terms of sequencing. Sequencing is related to synchronization (see below). Sequencing refers to the necessity for actions to occur in a defined order. A sequence is defined by attaching values to a sequence – work before play – or by claiming that a certain sequence comes out of necessity (Lauer, 1981: 35). The necessity claim is often assigned to industrial processes. For example, in a pulp-and-paper plant there are some steps that have to be taken in order to achieve the desired outcome. Agricultural work also uses the necessity claim (Moore, 1963). Bureaucrats are often sequence oriented, as they demand that things be done in one predefined way that arranges activities according to time sequences. A second approach to account for different conceptions of time addresses the duration or extension of events. A long duration means that events go on for a long time. Parkinson’s law (‘work either expands or contracts in order to fill the time available’) illustrates that duration has to do with perceptions and expectations. Long duration also means that appreciation and a feeling of accomplishment are seldom achieved. Short duration, on the other hand, indicates that we perceive the time to be too short for the tasks that we deal with. On a more general level, scholars of anthropology claim that some societies are characterized by long-duration events while other societies are organized around short-duration events. A third approach to account for different conceptions of time concerns the synchronization of events. Some activities may require that other activities be done simultaneously. Everyone who has tried to prepare a complicated dinner according to a precise recipe knows how difficult this can be. Such a situation demands that people work in correlation with each other in order to achieve a common goal. Even the task of synchronizing family activities so that the whole family can dine together can be difficult. Bells


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or other audible signals are often used to indicate a need for synchronization (Moore, 1963). Schools, factories, railway stations and sports events utilize bells or audible signals for synchronization. However, modern organizations have other means to synchronize by using information technology and extensive planning. Generally, synchronization has to do with timing of events (Lauer, 1981). The more complicated and more specialized our work tasks are, the higher the demand for synchronization. A fourth approach concerns the rate of events (Flaherty, 1991). The rate of events refers to the rate, tempo or frequency of events that individuals create or address, or to the intensity of the events at hand (Heirich, 1964). A high rate means that many events happen with only short intervals. Highrate situations create more stress and there is less time to deal with the past or plan for the future. High rates lead to an emphasis on the present. Rate is often used to analyze the number of similar events that occur during a time period, but it could also be used to describe the rate of overall changes in society (Lauer, 1981). Above we discussed four different dimensions of time along which local activities can be organized differently within the institutionalized time framework discussed in the previous section. Different authors use different concepts, although the content of those concepts seem to be fairly similar. Moore (1963) talks about synchronization, sequence and rate. Heirich (1964) uses duration, intensity and rate, while Lauer (1981) proposes five elements: periodicity, tempo, timing, duration and sequence. The four dimensions we have chosen may not be exhaustive yet they represent some basic features that can be used to relate the organizing of business activities to time. Table 2.1 summarizes some of the main features of each one of these four dimensions. These four dimensions – rate, duration, synchronization and sequence – can be used to analyze how activities are organized in time. Basically, we presume that different activity situations (presented in Figure 2.1 above) are characterized by different rates, requirements for synchronization, different duration and different types of sequences. The complex and ambiguous activities are, if analyzed from a time coordination perspective, heavily dependent on continuous synchronization; they most likely have a high rate (tempo), with many things happening all the time, the duration is being considered to be (too) short and the sequence is complicated. Actions need to be balanced or controlled against each other as they are being carried out. All of this is obvious in a complex product development project where different subsystems have to be checked against each other throughout. Planning a city neighborhood with transportation, housing, shopping and industry zones dependent on each other reveals complex needs for synchronization and sequencing during a limited

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Table 2.1 Four different dimensions of time and their typical characteristics Dimensions of time 1. Sequence, dependencies over time.

Typical characteristics or situation Short sequences: a limited number of activities linked together, or even only one. Dependencies span a limited period of time.

2. Duration, extension Long duration: slowin time. The length moving context. of ‘the present’. Generations, decades or ‘long waves’. More time than we need. 3. Synchronization, timing. The simultaneous performance of activities.

Long sequences: activities linked together over a longer period. Each activity has a defined relation to other activities. Long-term commitment. Short duration: less time than we need, hurry. Possibly high uncertainty.

Few demands for Many demands for synchronization: single, synchronization: webs of independent activities, no activities, interrelated, or few relations to other complex tasks that need activities or the activities to be ordered with respect of others. to each other.

4. Rate, tempo. The Low rate: relaxed, calm, or High rate: stressful, intense. frequency of events. boring situation. Waiting.

period of time that is hard to plan beforehand in terms of an orderly sequence. Other examples of this kind are activities focused on community environment protection, development of medical drugs, etc. In these cases, the activity itself is ambiguous and time dependencies have to be dealt with as an ongoing element of the activity. Similarly complex but less ambiguous are activities in which, for example, subsystems or parts of the overall sequence can be planned beforehand. An activity focused on the delivery of a technical system for telecommunication needs to be synchronized and sequenced in terms of technical performance of different subsystems, available space in buildings, and interfaces between the delivered system and other communication systems. In this case, however, such needs for balancing and adjustments are or might be possible to foresee, and specific synchronization points can be determined as part of the overall activity design. Such points for synchronization also provide a vehicle that allows for definition of several time units (or several ‘sequences’) that can be planned in parallel and are not fully dependent on each other.


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Clear activities that are simple show few web-like dependencies on other past, parallel or future activities. They are also easy to plan since both sequence and duration are known variables (e.g. as a result of the activity having been organized several times before). Most production processes are of this kind. The sequence of actions and dependencies among them is predefined and built into the production system itself. Deviations are not allowed and duration is long (‘plenty of time’) as there is no fixed end point. Repetitive tasks or heavily institutionalized activities are of this kind. Finally, simple but ambiguous activities are those with long duration, fairly easy sequence but vague preconceptions of the specific path to take or what to expect along the way. An organizational change activity can be used as an example. It is theoretically easy to outline the change and to sequence different parts of the activity (first outlining the new structure, then appointing managers and designing management information systems, then implementing), but it is almost impossible to plan the activity in detail since there are so many unknown variables that might come into play during the activity. It is also difficult to define the end point of the change project or to define success measurements. The activity is ambiguous even though the context as such is fairly simple. Depending on the combination of the clear–ambiguous and complex– simple dimensions, we have defined four different types of time coordination situations following the discussion above. It should be noted, though, that this is only one step in our analysis of activities. In the next section we will discuss the space dimension and thus add space-related issues to the matrix. However, for now, Figure 2.2 distinguishes four activity types.

ORGANIZING ACTIVITIES IN SPACE The concept of space is abstract, with no self-evident meaning. A ‘space’ has both physical and abstract attributes and is constructed through social processes (Schoenenberger, 2000). Space is most commonly related to a physical or geographical location, but can also be both functional and related to certain technologies and practices, and to institutional fields with taken-forgranted values and norms. Traditionally organizing has been described as a process at a specific physical place within the organization, but at the outset of this book we argued that organizing is a boundary-spanning process. Activities are embedded in physical, functional or institutional locations and fields beyond the borders of the organization. Activities can also span dissociated locations and fields. This is not to say that organizing has an infinite reach. The reach depends on the ability to overcome distances in space.

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Activity context

Activity labeling

Figure 2.2

Clear

Ambiguous

Complex

Planned time coordination activities

Continuous time coordination activities

Simple

Predesigned time coordination activities

Flexible time coordination activities

Different activities in different time contexts

Values and norms inherent in Christianity are, for example, farther reaching than values and norms developed within a soccer team. It is necessary to dwell further upon the concept of space to enhance understanding of the spatial dimension of organizing, i.e. the reach of activities. In the context of space we argue that organizing can be viewed as a process of bridging distances – without people necessarily having to meet in a physical sense. It is also important to emphasize the social constructionist focus of this work – space is thus socially constructed in a complex interplay between highly material (furnishing the office) and highly ideational (creating a shared feeling of belonging to the same organization) aspects. Physical distance in space is related to places and geographical distance between physical locations. Alvater (1998) distinguishes between local space defined as a place or a location and global space defined as an abstract phenomenon. Global space is not, according to Alvater, influenced by the natural endowments of geographical places to any great extent, as new technology, and the possibility to communicate information throughout the world in a short amount of time, makes the physical distance less important. This definition of global space implicitly assumes that interaction among actors can easily take place through universal information that is easy to interpret and incorporate in the actions taken by participants in different local spaces. This simplified description of global space does not account for the functional and institutional connotations inherent in much information needed


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for activities in global space. Czarniawska and Joerges (1998) argue that local and global spaces are socially constructed. They describe local space as a location and argue that global space is created through the linking of local spaces through translations and social constructions forming a global net of locations. These nets expand when new locations are included. The linking together of local spaces is, according to them, achieved through the carrying of ideas from one local space to another. Either people or, in abstract form, fashions and fads, standards etc. are carriers of ideas that contribute to the creation of global space. The ideas that are carried have local functional and institutional meanings that are translated and interpreted within new local contexts as the ideas are carried on. Consequently, geographical distances cannot be bridged by the spread of simple information with a universal meaning, but by continuous translations and interpretations of ideas from one local space into another. Despite the mechanistic metaphors used by Czarniawska and Joerges (translating, linking, forming and carrying), we share the underlying idea that the space dimension transcends the restrictions of local space. This is reinforced in the activity–community model, where it is claimed that we can travel, not just in physical space, but also in an imagined space, thereby creating what we call imagined communities. The two seemingly contradictory definitions of global space can be unified if the notion of different types of activities is taken into account. Far-reaching activities performed through communication of information that is easy to interpret are more palpable than far-reaching activities that develop through the dissemination of more subtle ideas. Compare, for example, Amazon’s retail business in global space and the joint product development project described in the introduction to this chapter. The ability to bridge distances in physical space hence depends both on the activity that is organized over distances and the bridging mechanism or process in use. Functional distance in space can emerge due to technological differences. First, the technology in use is different in different technological fields. The knowledge that develops within a certain technological field or innovative community (see Lynn et al., 1996) is embedded in practice norms and professions that develop within the field. Problem-solving processes, principles for the design of technological developmental work and principles for the training of engineers are different (Gertler, 1995). Furthermore, specific standards and regulations are in use in different technological fields, and the disciplinary affiliation of a technological field shows distinct characteristics. The field can therefore be described as a distinct space with specific characteristics, and it can be difficult for one actor to fully cover the knowledge norms and practices represented in more than one or a few technological fields.

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Second, application of the technology is specific within a technological field. Besides the scientific knowledge, the utility provided by products, process or service (see the definition of technology by Friar and Horwitch, 1985) is also unique. The coincidence and simultaneous development of technological (scientific) knowledge and market knowledge characterizes firms’ operations and relations within a technological field (see Fontes and Coombs, 1997). If technology in one field, for example the biotechnology field, is to be applied in another field, say the grocery field, there is a distance in the technological space that needs to be bridged. Institutional distance in space can develop due to cultural and institutional aspects inherent in both physical and functional spaces. A physical distance often implies the crossing of cultural and institutional borders between regions, nations or groups of nations. The social context in a local place contains informal relations with informal values and norms, social links between actors, and many arenas for interaction due to membership in political, religious, athletic and other organizations (see Yates, 1984). A local community often has its own institutionalized norms and rules for interaction. Similarly, specific institutionalized norms and rules also develop within technological fields. Technological fields have institutional connotations related to engineering traditions and practices. Professional identities and subcultures develop within technological fields having specific norms, values and attitudes that are farther reaching than geographically demarcated cultures and institutions. Many technological fields, such as the biotech field and the laser field, span many different geographical areas. A common technological language develops in the field, and engineers all over the world read the same scientific magazines and meet each other at international conferences, which contributes to the development of field-specific taken-for-granted values and norms. Institutional distances in space are, however, not only related to physical and functional spaces. It is possible to distinguish between institutionalized norms and values due to the history of a certain religion. Norms related to Christianity and norms related to Islam are different, and span many functional and physical spaces. Also the political history in different parts of the world can explain the development of separate spaces. Institutional conditions in the eastern and western world, for example, differ from each other. Distances in institutional space have consequences for the organizing of activities. Boisot and Child (1996) argue that information is codified differently in different cultural spaces, and we argue that this is the case in all the various institutional spaces discussed. Boisot and Child (1996) distinguish between four institutions existing in different cultural fields which differ in the codification of information: bureaucracies, markets, clans and fiefs. As codification of information is linked to and has implications for


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the diffusion of information or dissemination of ideas, they argue that information is diffused differently in these different institutions. The three spaces discussed so far are intertwined. Distance in one spatial dimension can enhance distance in other spatial dimensions. For example, it was argued that technological fields often span large geographical areas. Geographical locations are nevertheless important in such fields. Problemsolving processes, and principles for the design of developmental work and for staff training are often different between locations. Gertler (1995) argues that sets of dominant workplace practices in different countries vary due to economic and social institutions created by nations. With this notion in mind it can be concluded that the spatial context of activities varies depending on multidimensional distances in space. The contextual differences can be discussed in terms of degree of spatial complexity. First, complexity in space is related to the reach of an activity. An activity, built up by actions taken by many different actors in different geographical locations and/or different technological fields, is performed in a spatial context with a high degree of complexity. Furthermore, if the different functional and local areas involved represent very different institutional contexts, the context is even more complex. An example of an activity in a complex spatial context is the development of a new power plant combining construction engineering and electrical engineering, and involving actors from both eastern and western countries. It is to be installed in an undeveloped country where both local political actors and development assistance organizations are involved in its specification. Similarly, activities that are conducted in contexts with demarcated spatial reach are simple. A local geographical area with a homogeneous industrial community is a simple spatial context for activities that only involve actors from that area. However, not all local places constitute a simple spatial context. Some are more global than others, and distances can also be present in geographically demarcated areas. In a local industrial cluster where a number of corporations have international linkages and where a number of people originating from other geographical places work, spatial difference, which is most often linked to distance in geographical space, is brought into the local setting. It makes the local space complex. However, the linking to other local places in global space can be expected to be easier in such places than in local spaces with no spatial complexity. The formation of a global space, defined as the linking of many local spaces, can in a similar way differ between technological fields. Powell et al. (1996) describe the international integration in the biotech industry through contracts and worldwide strategic alliances in many different functional areas that are constantly changing. Global space in this industry is more complex than that in many traditional manufacturing industries,

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Activity labeling Ambiguous

Activity context

Clear

Figure 2.3

Complex

Boundaryspanning standardized activities

Boundaryspanning entrepreneurial activities

Simple

Local standardized activities

Local entrepreneurial activities

Activities in different spatial contexts

where international affairs are mostly related to transactions that are managed through export or representation abroad by, for example, own subsidiaries. This leads us to the second dimension of importance when discussing the organizing of activities in space: the activity as such. In the first section of this chapter it was stated that activities differ with regard to the degree of clarity in their labeling. The character of an activity and its complexity in space need to be accounted for simultaneously in order to understand distances in space through the organizing of activities. From an activity perspective, different kinds of coordination problems arise depending on (1) the type of distance in space that needs to be overcome, and (2) the type of activity that is coordinated. If these two dimensions are combined, four separate activities can be distinguished, as illustrated in Figure 2.3. Two of the activities are described as boundary spanning, which implies that they consist of actions taken by actors in different geographical, functional and/or institutional spaces. The action net that builds up the activity is hence boundary spanning. In the extreme case boundary spanning concerns all spaces discussed earlier, but boundary-spanning activities can also be performed in less complex spaces. Two boundary-spanning activities can be distinguished: standardized and entrepreneurial. If we return to a comparison between international operations in the biotech industry and in traditional manufacturing industries, many activities in the former are characterized as boundary spanning and entrepreneurial whereas many international operations in the latter are characterized as boundary spanning and


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standardized. The coordination and organizing of these two types of activities in a complex context differ. The two other activities are described as local activities performed in a simple and demarcated context. In the first case we have local activities performed under a clear activity heading, and we characterize this situation as a local standardized activity. This is usually a situation in which the participants are close to each other in all three space dimensions and the activity has been performed before, having being standardized. In the second case we still have a local setting but the heading is more ambiguous, which would then characterize activities that could be (but not necessarily are) new and have a higher degree of uncertainty concerning their definition.

FOUR TYPES OF ACTIVITIES IN TIME AND SPACE This chapter has discussed (1) the activity concept and types of activities, and (2) activities in temporal and spatial contexts. First, a simple matrix was presented illustrating four different types of activities. The sections on time and space added to the matrix by defining the time and space aspects of the four activity situations initially presented. The description, however, does not capture the inherent dynamics of activities, which is partly due to our separation of time and space for pedagogical reasons. This separation hides the fact that time and space are mutually intertwined and both need to be attended to simultaneously. In order to draw our discussion on activities closer to the goal of this book – to develop a grammar of organizing – we need to go deeper into the challenges of organizing activities in time and space. A natural starting point for a discussion on the combined effects of time and space is to bring together Figures 2.2 and 2.3. The result is the grey area of Figure 2.4; in the white areas we indicate some possible cross-sections between time and space. On a general level it can be concluded that on the one hand space localizes time, by, for instance, pointing out where something is taking place or in what direction it is moving. On the other hand time puts space ‘on the move’ by emphasizing that we travel in space and that time is crucial to understanding how this movement is taking place. By combining time and space we therefore come to emphasize the dynamic character of activities, the movement inherent in their temporal–spatial location. A further factor, however, needs to be added to the model to capture the inherent dynamic and tensions in activities. It is essential to acknowledge that activities are also social systems, with actors driven by interests, efforts to influence others, and motivations/identities. We will use the concept of dependencies

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A grammar of organizing Activity labeling Clear • Planned time coordination • Boundary spanning, standardized

Ambiguous • Continuous time coordination • Boundary spanning, entrepreneurial

Complex

Activity context

NETWORKING Dispersed systemdependent activities

VIRTUALIZING Intertwined reciprocally dependent activities

• Predesigned time coordination • Local standardized

• Flexible time coordination • Local entrepreneurial

SEQUENCING Distinct and lineardependent activities

TASK FORCING Fluctuating interdependent activities

Simple

Figure 2.4

A framework for describing activities

in Chapter 3 to highlight the inherent dynamics in activities. The four timespace-related situations depicted in this chapter (see the grey area in Figure 2.4) can also be described in terms of dependencies. Our four situations can thus be further described by adding dependencies. In the white area in Figure 2.4 we indicate the type of dependencies we could expect to find in each activity type. The first type describes a situation with a simple activity context and with a clear activity labeling. We would expect to find a type of dependency here resembling the logic of the assembly line, what we refer to as a distinct and linear dependent activity or, to coin a phrase, sequencing. It should be emphasized, though, that the assembly line, as an example of sequencing, is just one out of many concrete manifestations of this basic type of activity. The second type describes an activity with a complex context but where the labeling is still clear. The challenge here, as compared with the first type, is to deal with the boundary-spanning issues related to the space dimension. We are expecting a type of dependencies based on the fact that many activities are linked on a system level but distributed in space; we shall refer to these as dispersed system-dependent activities. We have labeled this type of activity ‘networking’.


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The third type is a simple activity context but an ambiguous activity labeling. The spatial setting is still local but it requires an entrepreneurial approach at the same time as we would expect flexible time coordination. The dependencies found in this category are expected to fluctuate at the same time as there are strong interdependencies within the activity. We refer to this type as ‘task forcing’, to draw attention to the type of coordination situation found in, for instance, the emergency room in a hospital. The last and most complex type is a combination of complex context and ambiguous labeling. This refers to a type of dependency that we label intertwined and reciprocally dependent activities. In organizing this type of activity we face the challenges of combining both a continuous time coordination and linking the activity in a boundary-spanning way. To indicate the level of complexity we think of this situation as ‘virtualizing’, with a web of partners collaborating to solve complex problems. A much more thorough description of the four basic types of activities is found in the next chapter, where the coordination challenges in each type are discussed in depth. By introducing the four types of activities we have fulfilled the aim of this chapter: to create an understanding of the nature of activities, and describe their different types. The classification presented in Figure 2.4 also highlights the strong relations between space and time, ranging from the first situation where a standardized spatial setting makes time coordination a somewhat easier task, to the more complex situation where actors need to be able to handle both a dynamic, boundary-spanning situation and a time-related situation with the need for continuous time coordination.

3.

The challenges of coordination

Activities imply that more than one actor contributes to the formation of the activity or the action net as discussed in the previous chapter. This means that through the organizing of activities certain actor-to-actor relationship issues are dealt with (see also Noorderhaven, 1995), and specific coordination mechanisms are inherent in these relationships. The actor-toactor relationships can be understood as a problem of decision and property rights distribution (see Grandori, 1997b), and are expressed in the influence over and control of an action net. Most research on coordination issues addresses this question by examining how activities or tasks are distributed between firms or units. Coordination mechanisms (such as pricing goods and services, and the exercise of authority over subordinates) are primarily devoted to determining what firms, units and/or persons in firms should do. The organizing of activities, however, is not only a question about ‘who will do what’, but also a question about how activities are distributed and coordinated in time and space. In the previous chapter, the activity context was discussed from a temporal and spatial perspective, and different contextual dimensions were introduced. Activities are organized in certain ways regarding their duration, synchronization, sequence and rate, and different coordination principles are in use depending on how these dimensions are dealt with. Simple and more standardized time-reckoning systems can be used for some activities whereas time is more vague and unpredictable for others. Furthermore, time can be more or less vague for different parts of an activity. Similarly, different organizing principles are in use depending on the embeddedness of activities in geographical, functional and institutional spaces. To coordinate activities over distances in space includes both abstract and concrete coordinating mechanisms such as the dissemination of ideas and knowledge through interaction among individuals and the communication of explicit ideas and information through the use of the Internet, contracts and standards. Hence the coordinating issue in the organizing of activities is a question of (1) whose action is linked and coordinated with the action of others, (2) when different actions of an activity shall be performed and (3) where actions shall be placed, i.e. how actions are distributed among actors in time and space. A discussion of these questions (who, when, where) provides a 36


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perspective through which the organizing of actions, across time and space and in relation to various activities, can be understood. Before discussing how the three coordinating questions are dealt with in the four activity types discussed in the previous chapter, we briefly review current thoughts on coordination of business activities.

ORGANIZING IS A MATTER OF COORDINATION Coordination as a device for structuring is elaborated on in many very different theoretical fields. The literature on coordination using various theoretical perspectives is helpful for providing a description of the linking and coordinating of actions. Organizational forms are defined in terms of distinct combinations of integrative characteristics, and we believe that the organizing of activities can also be described in integrative or coordinative terms (for further arguments for an activity approach to coordination see Crowston, 1997). Each of the theoretical fields that elaborate on the coordination issue is, however, limited by four factors. First, coordination has traditionally been an issue of coordinating conduct, organizations or individuals within a certain superior governance structure (i.e. market, networks, alliances etc. or hierarchies). However, we claim that examples of inter- and intra-organizing practices of the modern firm indicate that actions within different superior governance structures are linked to each other and coordinated through the organizing of activities. Second, research is somewhat narrow since often only one superior coordination mechanism is elaborated on when discussing coordination mechanisms (Litwak and Meyer, 1966), and coordination formats (Brickman, 1979; Grandori, 1997a; Schleicher, 1986). We have claimed that coordination is a more mixed and comprehensive phenomenon. Third, coordination is usually described as a cause with foreseeable effects. A certain mechanism is argued to coordinate people and their actions in a determined way. Price, for example, is argued to coordinate the exchange in a market. Our claim, so far, is that processes through which different features such as words, objects and numbers are translated to forge links between actions have not been acknowledged (see Latour, 1986 and Czarniawska, 2001). As argued earlier, organizing and hence coordination needs to be perceived of as a constructing process. Fourth, research has focused on the whoquestion of coordination, leaving out the when- and where-questions. With these four arguments in mind, we shall examine current thoughts on coordinating business activities. Alexander (1998) argues that coordination is primarily stimulated by interdependencies. Interdependencies can be found within the organization

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between actions performed by individuals, teams and units, within the market between actions taken by competing firms, and between the actions of interacting organizations within a network. Normal means of coordination include price, authority and negotiations in markets, in hierarchies and networks respectively. In economic theory, price is the mechanism that is seen as coordinating the production (supply) of firms, and the purchases (demand) of customers. In industrial organization theory, markets are described as coordinating structures defined by the interdependency between competitors (Scherer, 1980; Tirole, 1988; Schmalensee and Willig, 1989). Competitors’ relative market positions and power define how firms act in different markets. These descriptions are simple, as actions in a market are affected by other factors and as individuals’ and firms’ interpretation of interdependencies, of coordinating mechanisms, and of the consequences of an action do not always correspond with postulated theories about markets and industries. Coordination is also, however, an issue within various fields of organization theory. There is normally assumed to be a close relation between coordination mechanism and organizational structure or design. The perfect or ideal form, bureaucracy, is supposed to have unified leadership, a clear line of command, and a clear distinction between levels in the hierarchy (see Weber, 1968). A bureaucracy coordinates activities through unified leadership. Organizations are, however, considered to be open to their environments. This means that issues concerning the environment must be given their own place in the theory and that internal conditions of the organization must be described differently (see the discussion in Silverman, 1970; and Scott, 1992). The preconditions for the unified control system of the bureaucracy and strong coordination through the division of labor, specialization and strict line of command have naturally eroded and the organization is described as less rational and more cultural. In contrast to economic and organization theory, network theory attempts to identify a coordination form in between markets and hierarchies (Johansson and Mattsson, 1991). Granovetter (1973) asserts that this organizing form is not homogeneous, as he differentiates between loosestructured and hard-structured networks (more or less coordinated and integrated networks). There is no unified leadership to coordinate activities in a network. Investments and bonds are instead argued to link actors in a network to each other. Power due to the centrality of a firm’s position in a network (Burt, 1997) and the possession of resources are also seen as aspects that define which firm’s leadership will coordinate the activities in a network. Hence it is a multitude of interdependencies that foster coordination of actions. The myriad of organizational arrangements around various activities that can be observed empirically illustrates that actions are coordinated by many different coordinating mechanisms or principles (see Martinez and


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Jarillo, 1989; Storper and Salais, 1997; and Smith et al., 1992; Hennart, 1993), and that activities are often integrated across the borders of organizations, industries and markets. Grandori (1997a), for example, discusses the following coordinating mechanisms: price, negotiation, authority, gaming, voting, agency relations, peer groups, use of stable models of action and conventions. Her definitions are based on the different cognitive models that economic actors hold and conditions where these models are known to work (Grandori, 1997b). Again, our claim is that coordination mechanisms are not primarily connected to either a market, an organization or a network. Instead, it is the activity level that is more interesting and relevant for the analysis of coordinating principles. Different coordinating principles will be discussed in the following section, addressing the three coordinating questions highlighted in the introduction to this chapter. By following the practice of organizing specific activities over time, certain coordination principles can be observed. We have categorized activities from our own empirical studies into the four basic types of activities generated in the discussion in Chapter 2. It should be emphasized that these four types are generated from our empirical data, and they are by no means exhaustive – more types are obviously possible on theoretical grounds. Furthermore, practice is never simple. Some principles can be used for coordinating the activity as such, while other principles are in use for coordinating a specific action that is part of the activity. Moreover, coordination of an activity changes over time both on the activity and the action level, and different principles can be combined at different points in time. However, our analysis is a simplification that shows the coordination principles in use to handle the three coordination questions discussed earlier in different situations when an activity can be characterized as one of the four ideal types of activities discussed in Chapter 2 (see also Figure 2.4). If the four types are related to the coordination questions, who, where and when, the result is shown in Table 3.1 In the following, we will discuss the four activity forms in more depth. Thus we conclude the discussion initiated in Chapter 2 where the basic dimensions to define activities were introduced. Here we examine the activities more carefully to see how relevant organizing is achieved through the answering of who-, where- and when-questions.

COORDINATION THROUGH SEQUENCING Assume for example that you walked into Henry Ford’s assembly plant and looked at the many workers on the factory floor. You would be in the

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Table 3.1

Who?

Coordination principles for the four basic types of activities

Sequencing (simple context and clear label)

Task-forcing (simple context and ambiguous label)

Networking (complex context and clear label)

Virtualizing (complex context and ambiguous label)

Linear dependencies

Local System Reciprocal entrepreneurialism dependencies and expertise focal firm control

Where? Standards and Expertise, task separation commitment

Spatial separation Linking of and local practice integration

When? Time schedules Time levelers

Time bracketing

Checkpoint synchronization

middle of a sequencing mode of coordinating activities. Each worker performs specific actions that are well defined, and all of the actions add up to a car being manufactured. Some workers place fenders on the cars; others assemble engine parts. The sequence would be clearly labeled and the context easy to understand. Activities performed would be further emphasized by technology used, work organization and division of labor among different workers. With Alexander (1998) we argue that coordination is stimulated by the dependencies inherent in the activity. The dependency between actions in Henry Ford’s assembly plant is a linear one. But sequencing does not only occur in factories, and we shall provide three examples to illustrate how well-defined activities in simple contexts are coordinated as sequences. Three Examples of Sequencing The first example is the simplest of the three: a technologically fairly uncomplicated product, produced and governed by one unit in one organization. The activity is the manufacturing of front loaders, devices that attach to farmers’ tractors. A front loader consists of lifting arms locked to the sub-frame of the tractor by a hydraulic coupling system. There is a tool carrier at the end of the lifting arms (designed as part of an attachment system) to which different tools, such as bale spikes and buckets, can be attached. Manufacturing consists of distinct working operations such as atomized welding at flexible manufacturing stations, manual welding,


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painting etc. Each working operation is linked to the next one so that the product is finalized by gradual stages in the production process. Design of the manufacturing plant is also done in accordance with a linear step-wise production process, literally visualizing the value chain. Each day shows the same work pattern and it is well defined what task each worker is responsible for at each moment. Thus experience, construction of the product and layout of the factory accurately mirror the sequence of the activity. Coordination is mainly achieved through the design of the plant and the manufacturing process. The second example concerns production of a technologically complex product, supervised by an external agency. This activity is found in a pharmaceutical company that manufactures a biologically based drug used for the diagnosis and treatment of cancerous tumors. Although the product is more complex than a front loader, and is the result of major scientific research and product development and testing efforts, the production process itself is standardized and follows a set of predefined and scheduled steps. Since the company manufactures medical drugs, the manufacturing process and the quality control system are defined, controlled and verified by the Medical Products Agency (MPA). The quality control system is thus of immense importance when designing the activity. Quality control systems define how the different steps in the production process will be taken. Each step needs to be documented, tested for accuracy and verified. All in all, the activity is built on routines to be followed each and every day to ensure that each unit of the final drug is of the predefined quality. Similarly, quality certification organizations, such as the International Standards Organization, contribute to the coordination and standardization of activities in many other industries, defining a linear dependency and contributing to stability rather than to change (see Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000). It should be noted, however, that the activity is only distinct and linear during certain periods when an approved product is being produced. As research reaches a conclusion that calls for changes in any of the product features or in the production process, a new round of certification and validation is needed, overlooked and approved by the MPA. In between such periods of change, however, changes are non-existent and the activity is standardized, linear, predesigned and extremely distinct. Changes are kept on hold until there are enough to justify a new verification procedure. The third case, Cisco’s acquisition of a small Swedish company, illustrates how the complexities of cross-national mergers and acquisitions can be reduced by a sequential attention to the merger process. A richer description of this case is presented in Chapter 6, but suffice it to say at this point that the integration process was driven by Cisco’s strong ambition to

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rapidly integrate the Swedish counterpart into the Cisco organization and way of working. The Swedish company, Qeyton, had around 50 employees at the time of the acquisition, and they formed a department of Cisco Sweden, located in Stockholm. With experience of more than 70 acquisitions, Cisco had developed a consistent strategy for dealing with the crosscultural problems involved in merger processes. The working practice was changed to the ‘Cisco way’ through a predesigned step-wise process, including the presence of an integration team for a couple of weeks, and changed routines, artifacts, structures and management techniques. Through this step-wise process, Qeyton was turned into a department of Cisco Sweden, and, apart from the people, there was little left of Qeyton one year later. Who – Defined by Linear Dependencies The first coordinating question – who will do what – is (in the three examples) answered by the division of the task into certain parts and steps. Who will do what in the chain of dependent acts is well defined, and the individuals develop specialized capabilities to perform a certain task. The value chain is a good metaphor for this way of answering the who-question. Value chains are normally understood as a description of a sequential system in which activities are incrementally dependent on each other (Porter, 1980). This emphasizes sequential dependency, meaning that later steps are dependent on earlier ones. A value chain where each step adds some value to the final product is obvious in the first two examples given above. Interactions are performed due to principles previously agreed on, and are thus relatively repetitive and well known. Workers are specialized on some sequences of the production. Furthermore, workers know the sequence and how their part of the activity fits into the sequence. The chain of actions stipulated in the integration strategy of Cisco is in a similar way aimed to produce a culture that coordinates the manufacturing activities in accordance with the Cisco way of working. Integration into this culture was also divided into certain steps and tasks to be performed in a sequence during a limited period of time. Where – Defined by Standards and Task Separation Sequencing is organized in a simple and clear context characterized by spatial proximity. Activity standardization and codification reduce distances in geographical, functional or institutional spaces. Furthermore, a manufacturing plant is designed in accordance with a linear step-wise production process. Consequently, workstations for various parts of the manufacturing process are physically lined up in accordance with a value-chain


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model of the process. The three activities described are all located in one place, the production plant or the office site, and the activity within this space is coordinated in detail. The Cisco activity is slightly different, even though we also characterize it as a sequence. The acquisition process was local, and only concerned integration of a former independent company into a Cisco subsidiary. The sequence is repetitive when it comes to how Cisco performs integration activities around the globe. In terms of our approach, Cisco’s integration process is a sequencing activity. When – Defined by Time Schedules The sequences described above all have a predictable and foreseeable prolongation in time and they are primarily time coordinated through the use of (time) schedules. It is, for example, explicitly defined how long a welding operation of a front loader should take, and when the following operation should start and end. Sequences in assembly lines are carefully scheduled so that each event along the line can be anticipated. Time scheduling is also of the greatest importance for the manufacturing of medical drugs since each batch has to be produced in certain defined steps and with rigorous quality control. Also, in the integration of Qeyton into Cisco, actions were performed in a prescheduled way and according to an overall timetable. Similar principles of coordination in time are used throughout contemporary society. Giddens (1985) argues that time schedules are one of the most prominent features of modern organizations in general. He uses the term timetables in lieu of time schedules, but they refer to the same phenomenon. Schedules determine when workers arrive at work, in what order they perform tasks in the factory, when they attend meetings, when trains depart and arrive, and also when workers perform monthly maintenance work. They order the work in air traffic control and determine what happens during church services. If the production of front loaders or medical drugs is to be efficient, speed must be quite high and thus the rate of events is high for each worker. A new unit arrives in front of a worker approximately every 30 seconds in some workstations. The duration of each event is short, as it has to be finished before the next unit arrives. Henry Ford’s assembly-line factory is often the prototype when time as an analytical concept is applied to organizational settings. It is easy to assess standardized time slots for different operations, and time passes by in a regular and repetitive order. Normally, events during the day do not create unique landmarks in time. Every day is exactly like any other day. In much the same way it can be argued that the acquisition process in the Cisco case was driven by a clear time schedule

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with a clear sequence of events and at a high tempo. The duration of the activity was fairly short – the integration process was completed in a couple of months. Furthermore, through the use of time schedules the performance of individual workers can be closely monitored. Both Thompson (1967) and Zerzan (1994) discuss how time schedules in industrial organizations have been used as a tool for discipline, control, and also oppression. Typically, success or good performance is valued as ‘units produced per day’. Workers receive rewards when ‘10 000 units are produced’, or as ‘worker of the month’, or when ‘10 000 units have been produced with zero errors’, and so on. These awards can be seen as coordinating devices to keep the activity on the time track. Clocks are used to calculate hourly or monthly wages, to determine how efficient workers are, to determine the overall efficiency in the company, to design ‘just-in-time’ delivery systems, and to deal with bottlenecks. The workers’ wages are more or less determined by the volume produced over a period of time. Changes in a schedule are both costly and difficult, as, for example, in the case of medical drugs. When a new schedule is introduced, management and workers expect it to be used for a considerable time. In some cases, schedules are used for an indefinite period. In others, they are used for a definitive period (e.g. railroad timetables that are changed twice a year). A time schedule provides an instrument for improvements in efficiency or incremental learning. Time studies are one attempt to make a schedule more efficient by shortening the time needed in manufacturing processes. ‘Lean production’ and ‘incremental change’ are phrases related to the desire to improve schedules by using the time more efficiently or simply by using less time.

COORDINATION THROUGH NETWORKING Not all activities comprise such standardized, well-defined and repetitive actions as the situations described in the previous section. Many product development projects, for example, are formed through the interaction among many firms from different locations and technological fields. A predominant feature of this type of activities is their boundary-spanning character, the bringing together of actors in different locations. It is difficult to formalize the activity and to predesign a timetable for all actions, as they are not related to each other in a ready-made, sequential matter. Many of the activities that we have studied are such complex activities. However, dependencies inherent in complex activities can be of various kinds. One type is system dependency, and the coordination of such activities will be further elaborated on in this section.


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A system-dependent activity is at hand when the contribution of single parties in the activity is dependent on the functioning of a wider system in which results of different parties are important. Such activities are often formed as networking activities rather than as sequential value chains. Networking means that there is a constant orientation towards the system as a whole, and sub-actions must be performed in accordance with the development of the system (see e.g. the discussion on value systems in Normann and Ramírez, 1994). We shall therefore refer to this as networking activities. Three Examples of Networking Three examples illustrate how networking activities are coordinated in practice. The first activity is organized around the development of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS), intended to be used as part of a production line for the manufacture of Volvo cars. The FMS studied was an investment in a completely new line and not a reinvestment in existing lines. Volvo thus had an opportunity to investigate new methods of manufacturing, new manufacturing equipment, and new logistic principles. Among other things, Volvo aimed to develop its cutting and welding engineering by using new equipment and new methods. The company had previous experience of laser technology for cutting, and wanted to take advantage of the flexibility of this technology for welding as well. A decision was made to invest in an FMS based on YAG (yttrium aluminum garnet) laser technology. A robot was needed to maneuver the laser and to replace cutting and welding tools. Kuka Roboter GmbH, a German line producer, was appointed to be responsible for design of the production line. They had previously delivered robots used for maneuvering cutting lasers. Volvo contracted Permanova Lasersystem AB, a laser agent known to be a leader in fiber-optic-equipped lasers (an important part of the system). Volvo had previous experience of Permanova and knew that they were able to deliver advanced services in a very short time. Volvo also contracted ABB Robotics for the delivery of robots needed to maneuver the laser and the replacement of tools. Volvo wanted an advanced robot with many transmission lines and stressed that it was crucial that Permanova could work efficiently with the robot manufacturer. Therefore Volvo contracted ABB Robotics instead of ordering the robots from the line producer. ABB Robotics and Permanova were geographically closer to each other and to Volvo than the line producer, even though the line producer had an assembling unit in the geographical area. A spatial distance existed, however, due to the technological and institutional distance between the firms. They represented different areas of knowledge, laser and fiber optics, automation

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and robotics, and line construction and manufacturing, and the difference in size between the firms meant that they had different norms and organizing practices. Furthermore, they had no previous experience of working together. The second example is the coordination of the development of JAS 39 Gripen jet fighter aircraft (mentioned in the introduction to Chapter 2). A jet fighter is a highly innovative and technologically complex project involving a number of subspecialties and advanced system engineering work. Several performance norms were decided on before the initiation of the project. Some of those, e.g. the weight requirement, meant that new, not yet invented technologies or materials had to be used. Other requirements, e.g. being able to perform several different roles such as combat, defense, and reconnaissance, required new methods, aircraft frames and configurations to be developed. At the same time, it was crucial to maintain tight control of financial resources and to keep up with the time schedule set for the project. Development work was divided into several subcategories such as wings, computer systems, engine, fuselage, cabin, communication systems and armament, which were executed partly in parallel by several companies at different locations but under close supervision and with very specified limits and requirements on technology as well as performance and time. Some modules were made in house but basically with the same control system in place in which technology, time and cost were constantly measured and reported. The third example illustrates how an activity can be undertaken without people actually meeting each other and in a much less integrated way than the previous two examples. It is centered on a group of scientists at Intel who developed the idea of building a truly global testbed for running prototype Internet applications and thus being able to draw on the combined power of a network of computers linked through the Internet. This case, already mentioned in Chapter 1, relies on a very different mode of operating but still with a similar type of dependencies between participants. PlanetLab, as the effort is called, has grown to form a community of researchers, companies and other actors who collaborate to achieve the stated goals. The actors, in a sense, work independently of others, but the results of individual contributions are, potentially, highly relevant for the rest of the community. Who – Defined through System Dependencies and Focal Firm Control The answer to the ‘who will do what’ or, in Grandori’s (1997b) terms, the actor-to-actor relationships question, is related to decision and property rights distribution expressed in the influence on and control of the activity.


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The organization or hierarchy (or one unit in the hierarchy) that ‘owns’ a system or product under development also controls the activities described. However, all activities are also dependent on ‘external’ actors contributing to the activity. The focal firms define what actors to invite and what contribution they should make. Influence and control are thus unilateral, in the sense that there is one supreme participant making final decisions on how to design and proceed with the activity. This is achieved through, for example, contracts and agreements in which responsibility for development of various parts of a system is handed over to other participants, or (as in the case of PlanetLab) through design and construction of the Internetbased test bed. Control and influence resemble hierarchical decision making (as for sequencing), but are more complex as many independent actors are involved. Negotiations and mutual adjustments among partners take place as part of the process even though there is one participant making final decisions or designing the system. Participators are thus independent of the deciding and focal participant, and provide competences and capabilities needed for development of the system. Consequently, it is the fit between a system’s functional requirements as interpreted by the focal participant and different actors’ capabilities and competences that defines which actors do what. Where – Defined by Spatial Separation and Local Integration Networking activities are embedded in an industrial setting where a number of issues are linked to each other as parts of the activity. Most commonly, there is also a spatial distance between different participants. Thus organizations might operate in different institutional contexts and represent different technological fields, which contributes to a large distance in space. Decisions on ‘what to do where’ were reached by applying the principle of spatial separation. Spatial separation indicates that various parts of the networking activity are temporarily separated from the system. Complexity is thereby reduced as each batch of work can be planned in isolation from the overall complexity of the system. As a consequence, it was not necessary for the partners to share the full range of competences in use in different locations when developing the FMS system or the jet fighter. Likewise, PlanetLab allows individual researchers to define relevant parts to work on, and, once this is done, work can proceed fairly independent of other participants’ efforts. Obviously, separating subtasks from the overall task does not reduce geographical distances, but it reduces the complexity inherent in the coordination of activities over distance. Separation can also be described as a

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modularization of a final product into several small technological pieces, functional components or subsystems, dealt with separately without constantly coordinating work on one module with work on other modules (Sanchez, 1995). Separation creates several independent actions or development processes performed in separate domains of competences and learning (Kreiner, 1999). In the modules, however, localized innovative processes may well occur (which happened in the examples given), thus creating situated knowledge (see Post, 1997). Separation shows some similarities with how sequencing activities are divided into smaller steps. There are some major differences, though. First, separated activities are not sequentially related to each other. Rather they are system dependent. Second, separated activities are not only execution of routines and application of behavioral rules. Rather they require some innovative work and they may develop in other ways than expected, but still be able to deliver as expected. Separation is important but should not be overemphasized. Once a project in PlanetLab comes up with significant results, these results are shared with other community members. Participants in the development of the laser system and the aircraft were linked together through monitoring and part-time delivery requirements. Separation is thus temporary. Following separation, however, there is a need for integration throughout the life cycle of the activity. This is obtained through standardized interfaces between modules (see Sanchez and Mahoney, 1996) and specific requirements. For example, each contracted team or company involved in the development of the airplane had to conform to technical specifications (e.g. weight, material requirements and a number of other technical specifications) to meet overall design and performance requirements. This example points to a focal firm’s integration capabilities as a major principle to achieve coordination. As the development teams were distributed across large geographical distances in the Saab case, it was crucial that a ‘heavyweight manager’ (Hauptman and Hirji, 1999) in the focal firm had the authority and competence to finally bring the work of different modules or teams together into a coherent and codified result. The integration process was hence localized and was the responsibility of one firm. Situated knowledge and local norms at different places had to be translated into specified information formats required by the focal firm, e.g. on technical solutions developed in different modules. Such codified (or translated) knowledge made it possible to transfer situated knowledge and to integrate the different parts into a larger system. However, situated and local knowledge was essential for the exploration of technology through localized innovation processes in different places, whereas the translation and transfer of this knowledge made it possible to communicate the achievements and to comply with the standardized interfaces and requirements (see Cook


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and Brown, 1999). The outcome of actions in different modules could thereby be integrated into the final product or technological system (see Henderson and Clark, 1990; Galunic and Eisenhart, 2000). Spatial distance was thereby reduced, and more standardized coordinating mechanisms could be used in coordinating manufacturing of airplanes, and production in the FMS station developed. When – Defined by Time Bracketing If organizational activities are studied in detail, we see that most of them are time limited. Activities do not go on forever. Although they are sometimes ambiguously defined, there is a beginning and an end, demarcating location in time of a certain activity. In light of the previous examples, this is how duration of developmental projects and its actions are linked to a specific time period. In Chapter 2 we referred to similar time coordination situations as planned coordination, thus indicating that the context is complex even though the labeling is clear. Defining beginning and end dates means that brackets are put into place, and within those brackets appropriate actions are supposed to be executed. For example, when Permanova was assigned to the development of an FMS cell, the assignment included a definition of time brackets within which they had to complete the assignment (‘you must begin today and finalize the project this many days before the date when the production of the cars is planned to start’). Bracketing is common for projects (Lundin and Söderholm, 1995). Projects with a formal contract structure and/or with a customer or client waiting for deliveries are especially likely to have brackets as a means of coordination. In companies organized by projects, bracketing also helps to allocate resources on a project portfolio level. Time, although calculated in linear terms, is perceived of as something that ends. Time is consumed once you pass the beginning bracket and approach the end bracket. That is why there is always too little time in the end, creating the urge for speed as the end approaches. In the PlanetLab example, the standard operating mode is to define smaller projects in the realm of PlanetLab as a whole. Each project is run by an individual or a group and can be carried out in isolation from other projects as long as it is kept within the brackets. The beginning bracket of an activity can be linked to a number of events. For example, it might indicate an allocation of financial resources to a team given formal responsibility for an activity. In some cases, a separate timelimited organization, a project, can be set up to run the activity. Beginning brackets may also imply a decoupling of people, resources and so on from surrounding organizational structures. End brackets, on the other hand, may define when evaluations will be made or when a final delivery is

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expected. Most typically, end brackets are conceived of as a deadline. At that time, people and resources may be transferred to other units or activities. An end bracket is set up to occur at a specific time. A contract with a customer can define an exact date when a system needs to be delivered. In summary, beginning and end brackets define a certain time slot in which specified tasks or sets of actions are accomplished. Activities that fit within brackets thus push out other activities from that time slot, either to a period before or after, or to other persons, units or organizations. Activities with fixed brackets and strong incentives (e.g. rewards, harsh evaluations, immediate resource allocation/withdrawal, promotions in sight etc.) will most likely be prioritized above activities with vague brackets (no clear assignment, lack of interest from management etc.). Bracketing can be of major importance, then, for directing attention to certain activities while neglecting or ignoring others.

COORDINATION THROUGH VIRTUALIZING Activities formed through interaction among many different firms, not system dependent, were also observed in our studies. Such activities cannot be divided into demarcated actions located in different spaces, as the performance of a single action is continuously dependent on and integrated with the performance of other actions. Actions are thus mutually dependent. Furthermore, some of the actions that become linked to each other are not known at the outset, as they emerge over time. Uncertainty is a paramount characteristic here! Uncertainty makes it difficult to coordinate an activity, as it is difficult to define who will participate as things unfold. It is also not easy to know where and when an activity begins and ends. We have chosen ‘virtualizing’ to label a coordination mode for this set of activities. The cases presented below show that complexity cannot be reduced. Instead actors need to take the multidimensional context of the activity into account when the activity is coordinated, thus creating a virtual coordinating practice. Two Examples of Virtualizing Two examples of activities that are built up around actions that are continuously integrated and linked to each other, instead of being separated, will be presented. Our first example is a joint development of lasers equipped with fiber optics, involving Rofin-Sinar Laser GmbH (a manufacturer of laser sources) and Permanova Lasersystems AB (manufacturer of fiber optics). Laser source and fibre optics are intimately related to each other,


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requiring partners to work closely together during development of laserequipped systems. Bringing the two technologies together is an advanced task. Neither one of the two companies had previously developed integrated fiber-optic lasers, which added to the complexity and unique character of the task. Permanova was responsible for the development of a new coupling system designed to direct the laser beam through fiber cables without destroying the fibers and to adjust that system to the other firm’s laser source. Rofin-Sinar was responsible for the further development of the laser source so that it could produce laser beams easily transmissable through fibers. Permanova had previously been an agent for Rofin-Sinar’s lasers; thus the two companies had some previous knowledge of each other. However, to facilitate the desired collaboration, one individual from Permanova who had been the most central person in development of the coupling system spent 6 months at Rofin-Sinar working with the development there. His opinion about his placement is that it may not necessarily have led to tremendous progress in the development of the product. Nevertheless, it gave him an insight into national as well as company culture, and an understanding of the way things were done in the company and of the individuals working on the same project. The people (and companies) involved came from different technological fields and provided unique competence and capabilities that had to be combined and integrated throughout the performance of the activity. Capability integration implies that specialized knowledge created and stored by individuals is integrated through interaction between them (see Grant, 1996). Specialized knowledge consists both of explicit knowledge that is easy to communicate (as it is possible to codify), and of situated knowledge that is ‘tacit’ and not possible to verbalize (see Polanyi, 1967). This gives the activity its specific features. The second example of a boundary-spanning integrated activity is the development of new technologies and products in collaboration between MedicProducts Ltd and universities or hospitals. MedicProducts develops, manufactures and markets biologically based drugs used to diagnose a particular type of illness. Using a biologically based drug for this purpose has some distinct advantages and has proven to be a successful product for the company. Initially, the innovation was made by a research group at the nearby university, and since then MedicProducts has maintained a close relation to academia. MedicProducts is heavily dependent on basic research for the development of new versions of the product. To this end, it has chosen to fund research projects at universities. Funding goes to areas related to the field in which the company operates, but is to be used and published freely by researchers. The company also assigns its own staff members to basic

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research projects in collaboration with universities, and staff members participate regularly in conferences and other academic activities. Thus the company gains access to situated knowledge about broad research areas and research results. Relations between the company and universities are not highly formalized, but organized around a mutual interest in taking part in each other’s activities. The relationship also provides MedicProducts with a developed channel to the research community, and it has facilitated international screening of important research results. From a product development perspective, the many various activities are not directly dependent or linked. From time to time, however, activities become more ‘dense’ and interactive as a major breakthrough is close or when new research funds are to be released. When research results are published or presented, this triggers intense activity in order to share knowledge among different participants. When test results from the company are presented to the research community, this in some cases means a change in research direction at the university. There is, thus, an indirect reciprocal dependency among parties participating in the activity. In other words, there is a dependency between different contributions, contributors and actions in the activity, although this dependency is not maintained on a daily, or even monthly, basis. Instead, the activity varies, from periods when actions are carried out totally independently of each other to periods when there are strong efforts to integrate different actions and contributors. Who – Defined through Reciprocal Expertise Both activities discussed above are ambiguous, and participants contribute to the activity in accordance with a unique competence and capability that they are able to demonstrate. Competence and capability of individuals is of importance when the coordinating question ‘who will do what?’ is answered. Dependencies inherent in activities (e.g. technological) constrained the way in which the activity was performed and coordinated (see Crowston, 1997). A change made by one engineer in, for example, Permanova had to be designed and implemented so that it did not negatively impact other design components. At least, consequences had to be investigated continuously. Thus actions were carried out and continuously compared with other actions, and were eventually changed as a result. Actions were truly interdependent, and in many cases the engineers had to work in parallel on different design issues to create shared capabilities. In fact, mutually created capabilities were considered as a goal by both companies. The risk of opportunistic behavior was reduced, as both firms were dependent on each other to achieve their goals. Also, both of them would


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benefit from the joint achievement that neither could have achieved independently. The interdependence between the single actions thereby functioned as a coordinating mechanism in itself. Furthermore, none of the companies or organizations in the two examples above had full influence over the activity. Participating actors had a capacity to influence and control their own contributions, but less obvious possibilities to exercise final control over other parts of the activity. Coordination of ‘who will do what’ could thus not be insured through authority-based decisions by one actor. Interdependence, mutual confidence and trust that arose over time supported bilateral influence and control in one case (lasers), and multilateral influence and control in the other case (medical drugs). A process of give and take evolved over time, which meant that final influence and control were not an issue for one actor alone. Influence and control were relatively evenly distributed among those participating in the activity. They reached their decisions and exercised control over parts of the activity but ignored, more or less, how influence and control were exerted in other parts. In both cases, participants also applied some simple behavioral rules or procedures to guide the interaction (see March and Simon, 1958; Nelson and Winter, 1982, for reasoning about the function of routines in coordination activities; see also Pentland and Reuter, 1994). Cross-wise patenting is one example of mechanisms used in the laser case. The patents defined partners’ influence and control over the activity, and meant that none of them could run off with innovations made as part of the joint effort. Actually, proprietorship of the final product was held by both companies and was based on the distribution of patents between them. MedicProducts, in a similar way, used the traditional university format for the research funding and had no additional requirements. Thus it was easy for researchers to know what to do once they made significant progress, and it was easy for MedicProducts to keep track of their achievements. Several other parts of MedicProducts’ relations with universities and academic organizations were, in a similar way, based on routines and standard procedures facilitating interaction and helping to sort out how to deal with dependencies. To sum up, the who-question is answered based on what is provided by the expertise of contributing companies and individuals. Interaction is continuous, in many cases based on routines agreed upon, and dependencies are reciprocal rather than one-way. Where – Defined through Linking of Practice Both cases display a distance in institutional terms; for example participating organizations and companies work within different institutional

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norms, in different technological fields etc. Even though MedicProducts understood and accepted university rules on publishing, they would try to keep their own in-house discoveries away from publication until they had made a commercial and competitive assessment of them. In the case of laser equipment, both companies had to draw on their own expertise while developing their contributions to the project, and not many of the deeply rooted technological considerations could be easily communicated. Boundary spanning or linking does not happen easily and without resistance but, at the same time, the projects require constant contacts and continuous awareness of the actions of other parties. Boundary spanning, in these cases, does not mean spanning separate and independent activity modules, but integrating an ongoing development process without initially knowing exactly what will be the main issues to link. Linking thus implies a division of a larger task into smaller parts without separating them (as in networking coordination). Consequently, implicit knowledge and the creative process of innovating in different parts of the activity are linked to each other. According to Ahuja (2000), the establishment of links occurs if essential resources that are non-tradable can be shared among partners. ‘Resources’ are, according to Ahuja (2000), an asset that can not otherwise be obtained on the market. Examples of resources include specific technological competence or highly skilled employees in a certain area. Ahuja illustrates certain conditions that facilitate (access to ‘resources’ or innovations) or hinder (lack of such resources) the formation of interfirm linkages. Thus we assume that the composition of resources of each linked partner is of critical importance to the linking of modules during technology development. In our terms, the non-tradable resources are the implicit knowledge held by individuals and are inherent in localized processes. Linking between units, companies and individuals during technology development is therefore a mutual give-and-take process in which each partner provides something and gains something from the others. In order to link innovative processes and implicit knowledge at different places and in different technological areas, certain mechanisms are needed. Extensive traveling of key individuals is one example of how continuous coordination can be facilitated. Through face-to-face contacts, it is possible to share implicit knowledge and to reduce cultural and technological distances. It is also possible to develop social relationships to facilitate knowledge spillovers (see Brown and Duguid, 1991). Liebeskind (1996) argue that boundary-spanning social networks increase learning in individual firms. Network activities give access to scientific progress that would otherwise be out of reach of the participants (see also Kreiner and Schultz, 1993). In line with Liebeskind (1996), Bolland and Hofer (1998) discuss the need to access knowledge and resources, and examine how firms cope with


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this need by informal team-building and boundary-spanning activities. All of these mechanisms were in place in the two cases described above. Recent research has also shown that information technology can be used to link innovative processes at different locations and in different technological fields. Virtual teams (Lipnack and Stamps, 1999) are one organizational device used to link people separated by geographical distance but working on a common task. Modern information and communication technology is a necessity, however, and tools such as videoconferencing, Internet and collaborative software are often used to facilitate the communication (Townsend et al., 1998). Hauptman and Hirji (1999) discuss crossfunctional teams and conclude that their efficiency is increased if team members can rotate between jobs and also if certain team-based rewards are available. In this way, technological and cultural distances can be reduced. Communication between modules is further simplified if the people communicating know each other personally. In addition, the project manager needs to carry out a liaison role in addition to being a team leader. Linking is thus dependent on a number of more specific mechanisms that reduce distances in the team or project. The examples of Permanova and Rofin-Sinar illustrate the use of some linking mechanisms. As mentioned earlier, a key person at Permanova spent 6 months at Rofin-Sinar during the initial phase of the development process. During his stay, he gained knowledge about Rofin-Sinar and their work, and this knowledge was essential for the collaboration that followed. Among the things that he learned and claimed were important were Rofin-Sinar’s organizational and technological culture, various skills and responsibilities of individuals at Rofin-Sinar and the local industrial infrastructure. The implicit knowledge received during the stay, in combination with frequent face-to-face meetings between engineers in the different modules, facilitated communication and made possible the linking between different and localized innovative processes. Both Permanova and RofinSinar realized that they were dependent on the local environment for the development in each module and therefore needed to bridge the geographical distance. In the other case, MedicProduct’s researchers had had a previous career at the university and they thus knew the conditions under which research was conducted. From time to time, company representatives and academic researchers would spend time with each other for minor assignments, meetings and discussions. When – Defined by Checkpoint Synchronization The activities described are difficult to coordinate in time by using brackets (as in networking), as it is difficult to define when an activity begins and when

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it should end, or by the use of schedules (as in sequencing), as it is difficult to know in advance the chain of different actions. When the activity labeling is ambiguous and the context is complex we have characterized it as a situation of continuous time coordination. Checkpoints are used to coordinate activities and to achieve synchronization between different actions. Checkpoints work as landmarks in time where different actions are brought together in order to assess what has been achieved and to ascertain how to continue. Between checkpoints, different actions can be fairly unrelated and performed without being synchronized (even though communication and linking might be needed). Initially the task is broken down into a number of shorter and smaller tasks, but these tasks are not completed separately. Subtasks are instead brought together several times during the process to make sure efforts made so far will fit with other efforts. Checkpoints can also be used to determine when to make go/no-go decisions. For example, decisions to continue from concept models to full-scale development might be delayed at a checkpoint if there is not enough information available to make an informed decision. Checkpoints also provide an opportunity to detect errors, address issues not dealt with, and to make plans for the near future. Development of lasers equipped with fiber optics was coordinated through checkpoints, since synchronization of the developmental work was the main time coordination problem perceived by the firms. Moreover, synchronization was exaggerated since the firms were located in different countries. Both firms agreed that when one of them developed a new idea or a new design, they had to check with the other firm to determine if the design caused new problems. Development and adjustment of the coupling system had to be continuously checked with the design of the laser source to make sure that the transmission of laser beams would work properly when the two parts were integrated later on. If problems arose, the first firm had to wait until a solution was reached before development could proceed. MedicProducts had a number of checkpoints attached to its development of new drugs and updated products. Medical drug development needs to adhere to rules, for example related to documentation and testing. Thus a number of checkpoints could be taken directly from the development and documentation procedures. Others were taken from research project presentations. There were also regular meetings among project participants to verify progress and decide how to proceed. Checkpoints can be decided on by at least two different principles. First, a checkpoint can be set for fulfillment of various subtasks, as in the laser case. For example, a checkpoint occurs when a certain state of affairs has been reached. Second, a checkpoint can be planned to occur regularly. An example of this is when a medical drug development team meets monthly to report and discuss the present state of the project. Irrespective of the


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type of checkpoint used, activities might be put on hold while waiting for a checkpoint and the decisions that are expected to be made at that time.

COORDINATION THROUGH TASK FORCING The fourth type of activities is task forcing. Task forcing is a problem- or event-driven activity type where actions are triggered by special, often predefined, events or circumstances. Not a continuous activity, task forcing is typically organized with the deliberate intention to be undertaken at a specific point in time or with a specific rate or intensity. It is only carried out if needed, when the state of affairs is of a specific type or when something unforeseen occurs. On the other hand, it may be possible to prepare for such events using more or less standardized ‘to do’ lists. A hospital emergency room is an example of where situations of this kind occur frequently. It is not known beforehand what complaints incoming patients will have; it is not known when they will come or how bad their condition will be. Similarly, in a customer service department the nature of a customer’s problem requires various schedules and interactions. A major breakdown of the computer system at an important client’s site triggers one schedule and interaction pattern while other problems trigger other schedules and interactions. Again, it is not known in advance what problems will occur during a particular day but, once they are known, there are readymade actions to perform. In other cases, such as when the totally unforeseen or unexpected happens, there are no prepared actions to take and there are no managers or employees easily defined as those responsible to respond. Still, we consider this to fall under the heading of task forcing. In such circumstances, a similar activity pattern will unfold but in a much more gradual way where it is not always known where to go next. A crisis group or response team will perhaps be set up to oversee and insure that necessary actions are taken. Examples of such truly unforeseen events are a newly launched product with a serious defect, a violent robbery of a business office, a hostile takeover attempt etc. Task forcing may seem completely different from the previously mentioned activity types. However, it is not! Task-forcing activities are quite common. The unexpected, prepared for or not, happens all the time, and some organizations, such as hospital emergency rooms, have that as their basic organizing principle. Weick and Sutcliffe (2001) outline several features of so-called highly reliable organizations and managing the unexpected is the main issue in their discussion. Organizations such as aircraft carriers and nuclear plants are highly reliable since they prepare for the unexpected. They constantly try to avoid surprises and if these nevertheless

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occur, they have action schemes to deal with them. This is task forcing made the norm! But, as Weick and Sutcliffe argue, unexpected events happen all the time in all organizations. Thus task forcing is not only for highly reliable organizations, it goes on in all organizations. Two Examples of Task Forcing Our first example is the one already mentioned: the emergency room (ER) in a hospital. Everyone who has followed the work in an ER has seen the continuous flow of patients, doctors, paramedics, nurses and relatives. Seen from the outside, it may look like a random process but in fact it is task forcing in action. A professional team meets the patient and each member knows more or less precisely what to do once the patient’s complaints have been assessed. Thus various time schedules and actor interaction are triggered when the situation occurs, i.e. when the patient is assessed. A patient with a severe heart attack requires one type of schedule and one type of interaction while a patient with flu needs a different type of schedule and different actions. In the former case, doctors and nurses will rush there to perform life-saving procedures, leaving other demands aside. In the latter case, the patient will have to wait, maybe for hours, before he or she can eventually see a doctor. Almost everything is based on rules, routines, roles and special competences held by individual employees. Even though they do not know what the day will bring when they arrive at work, they mostly know what to do on every occasion throughout the day as patients come in. It can be stressful, and too many demanding patients can cause the system to fail but, nevertheless, task forcing usually works. The other example is taken from the world of projects. Engwall and Svensson (2001) describe how ‘cheetah teams’ can be set up to overcome difficulties in a project. These teams are not set up until there is a real problem, for example a component failure that threatens to delay a new product launch. The team is supported by top management, ad hoc, initiated to accomplish a specific and defined mission through full-time efforts by a small dedicated team, and it is dissolved when its task has been completed (Engwall and Svensson, 2001). Cheetah teams move fast, but they will not last for long. It is a short-term strategy to deal with immediate problems. It is a true task force. Where and Who – Defined through Expertise, Commitment and Entrepreneurialism The where- and who-questions are quite closely related in task forcing. When problems occur, actions are often taken rapidly, and where, what


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and who to do them are decided as a result of similar processes or mechanisms. Who should do what in task forcing is to a large extent defined by expert and commitment qualities. In both cases briefly discussed above, it is obvious that people (or organizational units) assigned a task must be those whom management expects will make an extra effort and utilize whatever resources they have access to in order to solve the problem. A detailed order may be given (‘treat this patient’ or ‘fix this component flaw’), but how to do that and what fine-tuning action is needed is not necessarily defined. It would be expected, however, that people doing task forcing would be knowledgeable and committed. In other words, they are expected to have the information on rules and routines as well as on institutional practices, together with previous experiences regarding the problem at hand. All this should be combined with a strong determination to achieve results in a short time. There are obvious difficulties in organizing this category of emergent and sometimes unexpected activities. We characterized this situation in Chapter 2 as local entrepreneurial, indicating a need for a flexible approach to the where issue (i.e. the spatial issue). Where to do it is, in some cases, decided by where the right people are located. When people are selected for a cheetah team, they will be taken out of their daily work from different places and brought together in the task force. In other cases, the location is set, and the who decision is settled among those people who are present at the time. In ER, patients need to be treated by doctors available at the specific point in time when they are admitted. Entrepreneurial capacity, commitment and expertise are issues brought together to decide on where and who; sometimes starting with the location, sometimes with the people. When – Defined by Time Levelers Time coordination – the ‘when’ issue – needs to be adaptive when it comes to task forcing since unexpected events must be dealt with as they occur. From a time perspective, this has to do with how the rate and sequence of actions are coordinated. In ER and for the cheetah teams, there are several action plans or routines to apply once a problem occurs. This means that the time schedule must be available and can be used when needed. In order to cope with the fluctuation in the rate of activities, some slack resources (Cyert and March, 1963; Galbraith, 1973) are needed. Slack resources can be a pool of permanent or temporary staff who can be called in, lower performance expectations for a time, or easily accessible supplies. In ER there must be a number of doctors, nurses and others to help with events

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occurring throughout the day and night. If there is more work than available staff, it must be dealt with in order of urgency. For cheetah teams, a similar argument holds. The team may delay something less important in order to fix an unexpected problem regarding something crucial. Again, a priority is set. Thus the ‘when’ issue is resolved by different time levelers defining when to do what. First, this is done by priorities. The most important issues are attended to first and less important issues after that. Task forcing is problem solving and has to be directed toward important issues. It would be less relevant to set up a task-force activity for something of marginal importance. Second, it is done through inactive time schedules that are activated once needed. As stated above, inactive time schedules may define both what to do and in what order. Inactive schedules are the result of mindful preparations made in advance to mitigate the consequences of unexpected or fluctuating demands for action. Both these mechanisms, priorities and inactive time schedules, are different types of time levelers frequently used in and between organizations to facilitate task forcing in general and to resolve the ‘when’ issue in particular.

CONCLUDING REMARKS We have not yet reached the end of the core activity argument in our new grammar of organizing. As already stated several times, it is our firm belief that an understanding of organizing processes needs to be founded on something other than organizational units or roles. Thus activities are what we claim to be the first level of understanding. Based on such a coherent understanding and coordination of activities (as discussed in Chapter 2 and the present chapter), we now turn to a discussion of values, individuals and power linked to activities. Later, in Chapters 7 and 8, we shall return to the core activity concepts and formulate management issues and challenges following from our perspective.

4. Influence – taking a political stand on organizing In the processes of organizing inherent in the different activity types discussed in the previous chapters we find both converging and diverging forces. There is, in fact, a great deal of tension between forces that pull people together and draw them apart. We try to capture this tension by the related concepts of influence and identity. With influence, the topic of this chapter, we envision a world where organizing involves people trying to gain adherence for their views – it involves politics. When observing even the least complex type of activities from Chapter 3, it is inevitable that relations between the different actors involved in the activity are marked by attempts at influencing others. Sequencing, as the metaphor for the first type of activities in Chapters 2 and 3, is by no means a setting for organizing free from attempts to influence others – far from it. In this case we would expect influence to be found within the realm of the hierarchy of the organization. In Chapter 1 influence was described as one of the two core processes constantly going on whenever people meet to do things together – forming the ‘C’ in the A–C (activity–community) model. It is thus a basic ingredient in organizing, as a tool but also as a contextual factor, or maybe it is better to describe organizing and influence as intertwined, parts of the same process. This should not be taken too literally, it does not mean that people are constantly involved in conflict-ridden relations with each other. What it means, though, is that interests are involved whenever actitivies are performed, and, whenever stakeholders differ in their interests, political processes abound. This chapter aims to explore this human tendency to act driven by interests, and develops its significance for the general understanding of organizing. This also means that organizing can partly be understood as processes of influencing people, and this will be developed using an ancient tool – rhetoric. With our interest in building a grammar of organizing, we obviously also take a keen interest in language, and not just our own language as researchers. A basic premise of this book is that the processes of influence inherent in any attempt at organizing can be viewed as communicative processes with the intent of persuading others. The use of rhetoric has a 61

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double edge to it that is highly useful – it is a tool that can describe things ‘out there’ at the same time as it is actually used by people in their daily ‘confrontations’ with others. To put it another way, rhetoric is both a perspective and an art! The models and concepts discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 create a basic understanding of the context for organizing, with the starting-point in activities and highlighting the need for coordination. With an influence perspective, the discussion is complicated (made more realistic!) by emphasizing the political nature of organizing. Influence and politics are not just a complication, but an essential tool for understanding how people manage to achieve anything from simple activities to highly complex and elaborate ones. With the concept of influence, a marked step towards the ‘C’ in the A–C model of organizing is taken. The chapter will conclude with a discussion on the forming of imagined communities, a concept that will be developed further both in Chapter 5 on identity but also in Chapters 6 and 7. Our understanding of processes of influence is guided by two simple observations, both of which lead us toward a rhetorical perspective. The first points out that influencing other people is necessarily an act of communication. It is through language that we can reach out and influence others. The understanding of influence can therefore be elaborated using insights from the rich field of rhetoric, the art of persuasive communication. We shall, for instance, use ideas from rhetoric to explore the basic aims of influence, whether it is more directly aimed at changing/influencing behavior (making people comply with your wishes) or whether it is focused on changing motivation/attitudes/understandings (gaining the adherence of others). The second observation tells us that influence is seldom unidirectional; it is a relation where influence can go both ways – and often does. A key question in any rhetorical analysis is to explore the nature and extent of influence between the person trying to persuade someone (the rhetor) and the person/s being persuaded (the audience). This is described below as a rhetorical dialogue where the power to influence can be more or less symmetrically distributed among the actors in a process of organizing. Within this constantly ongoing rhetorical dialogue we witness both compliance and adherence seeking. By choosing the word dialogue, however, we stress the crucial insight that influence is reciprocal rather than unidirectional. It is also important to keep in mind the connection with the activity perspective discussed in the previous two chapters. We argued that there is an essential constructive element in the organizing of activities. A crucial step in moving from individual acts and actions to activities is the labeling resulting from a construction process. Ideas from the field of rhetoric can help us understand this process. The notion of imagined communities emphasizes this explicit link between the labeling/construction of activities

Influence – taking a political stand

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and the use of rhetoric. An important concept we make use of in the concluding section of this chapter is metaphor, and we explore how metaphors are used to build imagined communities. The four basic forms of activities identified in Chapters 2 and 3 constitute very different settings for forming imagined communities and building a rhetorical dialogue, and we provide the tools for using rhetoric to further understand the four types. The activity focus brings a sensitivity to relations, relations that go beyond the archetypical hierarchic relations based on subordination in traditional organizational models. It also shifts the focus toward how power is shared rather than owned. And this is not just a shift in words; it is once more a shift of grammar that helps us enforce the processual nature of organizing.

INFLUENCE – SOME INITIAL CONSIDERATIONS Open a basic textbook on leadership and it will most certainly tell you that influence is at the very heart of any attempt at affecting basic processes in organizations. Gary Yukl, in his widely read textbook on leadership, concludes: ‘Most definitions of leadership reflect the assumption that it involves a process whereby intentional influence is exerted by one person over other people to guide, structure, and facilitate activities and relationships in a group or organization’ (Yukl, 2002: 2). This definition, typical of many traditional as well as modern treaties on leadership, echoes a view on leadership and influence as unidirectional. Yukl, however, points out that this definition doesn’t exclude the possibility of influence processes going both ways – the leader influencing the coworker and the co-worker influencing the leader. We certainly agree with Yukl’s emphatic point that leadership can fruitfully be viewed as a shared process of influence, rather than as unidirectional. ‘Researchers who view leadership as a shared, diffuse process are likely to pay more attention to the complex influence processes that occur among members, the conditions that determine when and how they occur, and the consequences for the group or organization’ (Yukl, 2002: 4). This argument is also well in line with the point made in Chapter 1 that organizing transcends the formal boundaries of the single corporation. Our deliberate shift toward activities rather than organizations as the focal unit of analysis further emphasizes the relational character. It is also well in line with the recent arguments from Achtenhagen et al. (2003) concerning reciprocal sensemaking as the basis for leadership in innovative forms of organizing. ‘Using the notion of reciprocal sensemaking indicates that mutual processes of sharing ideas might be important in complex and

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dynamic organizational configurations, as opposed to the focus on imposing ideas in a top–down way’ (Achtenhagen et al., 2003). There is a widespread opinion, at least among leadership scholars, that influence, and the related concepts power and politics, are crucial to our understanding of social phenomena. Pfeffer (1981), in his Power in Organizations, broadens the scope of influence beyond the field of leadership and argues: ‘Power and politics are not neglected because they lack relevance in explaining what occurs in organizations. The theme of this book is that these are fundamental concepts for understanding behavior in organizations’ (Pfeffer, 1981: 1f.). Even though Pfeffer restricts his analysis to those influence attempts aimed at overcoming resistance, we share his belief that influence is a central and necessary concept. Considering the importance attached to influence in definitions of leadership, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that little is done within the leadership field to further explore the nature of influence. Paradoxically, the importance of the matter seems to be inversely related to the coverage it gets in books and articles on leadership. We therefore need to turn to other areas of inquiry to learn more about influence, and more specifically to social psychology, with its interest in social influence. The theory and study of social influence has traditionally focused on the concepts of conformity and obedience. Conformity is described as the tendency of men to follow socially accepted rules and norms (Argyle, 1998; Tomicic, 2001), and it is often attributed to group pressure on the individual (McIlveen and Gross, 1999). As human beings we have a basic need to compare ourselves with others and gain their approval, and, as argued by Festinger (1957), we strive to get our ideas confirmed by people around us. Conformity can refer to behavioral as well as attitudinal change. It is often described as an indirect form of influence in the sense that it is usually not a consequence of direct attempts at influencing. Conformity, as a social phenomenon, is often contrasted with obedience, which is the response to direct attempts at influencing the behavior of people. A further difference is that obedience presumes a difference in rank between the subject of influence and the person executing it, whereas conformity occurs between peers and doesn’t specify an explicit requirement to act. The social science literature in general is not so clear about the more specific meaning of the word influence. The ambiguity centers on two basic dimensions, the first being conformity versus obedience touched on above. It seems as if definitions in general lean toward influence as direct attempts at affecting people, which is obvious in the obedience literature (Cialdini, 1988). Leadership, for instance, is intimately connected to the leader as an individual, and his/her direct attempts at leading. But leadership can also be depicted as the attempts at creating environments/cultures for achieving


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goals, that is, a more indirect form of influence. Leaders can indirectly affect behavior by trying to influence norms, attitudes and values, as well as the physical, psychological and social environment. The second dimension has to do with the intended goals of influence attempts, basically to change behavior or motivations/attitudes/understandings. The literature is clearly dominated by a behavioral view of influence, the goal of leading being behavioral change (and often in a direct way). Leaders are assumed to act rationally, in the sense that they have a clear view of where to go and the route to that goal. Rational goal orientation is metaphorically described as a road along which certain steps have to be taken in order to reach the final destination, a viewpoint evident in, for instance, the path–goal theory of leadership (House, 1971). But influence attempts can also aim to change the underlying motivation for behavior. In the normative leadership literature a basic assumption is that if we affect the motivations of human beings, they are more willing to contribute than if we ‘just’ try to change their behavior. Even though the distinction between compliance (change of behavior) and adherence (change of motivations) is simplified, it nevertheless captures an essential element of leadership – what can a manager do to reach people? This question is further complicated by the fact that we are often facing situations that come close to both virtualizing and networking – the two activity types encountered in a complex activity context. Both types require boundary spanning and they comprise some startling challenges from a rhetorical pespective when it comes to changing motivations. A highly relevant question is whether we could expect to find a stronger emphasis on changing motivations and indirect forms of influencing in virtualizing and networking types, as compared to sequencing and task forcing. One factor supporting this hypothesis would be the increased reliance on lateral relations, with symmetric power relations, that we often find in cooperative relations between companies, where we would not expect to find direct attempts at influencing behavior. The complexities in the space dimension make it more difficult to enforce direct, behavioral control, and this would favour more indirect forms. The symmetric power relations also make it harder to focus strictly on the behavioral aspects. Figure 4.1 summarizes the two dimensions discussed here, and indicates some interesting relationships between them. There are obviously numerous ways of exerting indirect influence, and it is beyond the scope of this section to explore them in depth. The first square can be exemplified by different attempts at changing/modifying the environment for human interaction. The indirect forms of influence are exemplified in square 2, with two forms of cultural influence observed in the vast literature on organizational culture and symbolism (e.g. Alvesson and

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Changing behavior

Indirect influence attempts

Direct influence attempts

Figure 4.1

Changing motivations

1. For example, creating physical and social environments

2. For example, creating cultural processes

3. For example, directive by planning and deciding

4. For example, classical rhetorical influence attempts

Social influence – some basic dimensions

Berg, 1992). The creation and interpretation of rituals in organizations can be used as an example of how behavior can be affected in an indirect way. It should be stressed, though, that rituals also work by molding our motivations – they are interpreted and reinterpreted in ongoing cultural processes (Hannerz, 1992). The field of organizational symbolism also points to another form of indirect influence, by using non-behavioral symbols (myths, stories, artifacts). Turning to the direct forms of influence, behavioral change can be exemplified by the tools provided in the field of project management. The strong focus in project management on rational planning techniques clearly aims at guiding behavior in projects. Finally, square 4 can be exemplified by the tools of classical rhetoric where the ultimate purpose, to quote Perelman (1982), is to gain adherence for one’s view. Based on the two dimensions in Figure 4.1, numerous other examples and illustrations can be generated. A general observation is that the focus is gradually shifting towards changing motivations, and that managers and others pay more attention to imagination and vision. Creating imagined communities, by its very nature, is often indirect and aimed at changing motivations. In a study of strategic change projects in two European companies, Müllern and Stein (1999) documented a tendency of top management to use a great deal of


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rhetoric, producing what we will later refer to as imaginative agreements. The form of influence was clearly indirect in that top management avoided more detailed and specified descriptions of what they expected from the members of the organization in favor of a more open and emotional rhetoric. The goal of influence was also directed towards motivations, and more specifically the sentiments of the members. Leaders wanted to create a more general, favorable attitude to top management and the strategic intent of the strategic change initiatives. This was especially evident in the parts of the rhetoric that focused on the future. A great deal of emphasis was put on building an aesthetically appealing picture of an imagined future state of the company. The trend towards more indirect forms of influence, and a motivational focus, is obvious in the recent leadership literature on values-based and visionary leadership. Very much in line with the growing interest in corporate culture during the 1980s, Bennis and Nanus argue that organizations depend on their members sharing basic beliefs and interpretations of reality. This is created by imaginative leaders focusing attention on a vision. ‘Leaders articulate and define what has previously remained implicit or unsaid; then they invent images, metaphors, and models that provide focus for new attention’ (Bennis and Nanus, 1997: 37). The aesthetic dimension is obvious in the quotation above, with deliberate stress on the communicative tools of images, metaphors and models. The quotation also points to an essential feature of rhetoric: it aims at directing attention towards ideas. Bennis and Nanus show that there is a growing interest in building commitment rather than compliance. They put less emphasis on behavioral change as the essence of leadership influence; rather they stress the need for understanding and voluntarily accepting visions. ‘Effective leaders, including most of those in our panel, learned early in their careers that it was far better to secure voluntary commitment to changes through open communication, participation and mutual trust’ (Bennis and Nanus, 1997: 172). The values-based leadership literature also points to another marked trend – the need for a moral underpinning of companies. Companies today are expected to have a metaphorical conscience, and they are forced to defend actions that violate the expectations of different stakeholders. The quotation below from an executive in the petroleum industry is a statement typically found in top management speeches: Studies in the economic community support this idea. A recent study at Princeton University found ‘no evidence that environmental quality deteriorates steadily with economic growth’. Instead, it found that after an initial decline, a nation’s environment improved as its economy grew. So the real secret to environmental improvement is economic growth. And as this growth continues, the

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A grammar of organizing economies of this region will need to import more oil, and, to a lesser extent, gas. (Lee R. Raymond, chairman, Exxon Corporation. World Petroleum Congress, 13 October 1997)

This particular quotation shows a typical form of moral persuasion, with the intent of making us view Exxon as a good citizen. This attempt at reaching a moral agreement focuses on the change of motivations, finding a defence against the accusations commonly levelled against the petroleum industry. Compared with the imaginative aspects discussed above, this, and many other moral arguments, is more direct. They often focus more directly on the issue at hand, by either accusing or defending. With this brief description of social influence and different forms it can take, we conclude this section by establishing a more direct link to rhetoric. In this chapter we pay attention to the processes of influence where actors use direct/indirect forms of influence to change behavior or motivations. Following the linguistic/rhetorical turn in the social sciences (Müllern and Stein, 1999), it is claimed that communication in general, and communication aimed at persuasion more specifically, plays a key role in these influence processes. Even though processes of influence can be indirect, language is still the medium through which thoughts are shared. The different forms through which influence is exercised are based on linguistic conventions and communicative tools that shape the influence process. Shotter (1993) argues that shared understandings are developed over time in an ongoing conversation among actors. ‘Primarily, it seems, they are responding to each other’s utterances in an attempt to link their practical activities in with those of the others around them; and in these attempts at coordinating their activities, people are constructing one or another kind of social relationship’ (ibid.: 1). This argument can be further supported with reference to the so-called new rhetoric of Kenneth Burke and Chaim Perelman. In the new rhetoric the communicative and linguistic aspects of rhetoric are problematized. Humankind is described as a linguistic entity that creates a world using language as the basic medium. The role of rhetoric, then, is not purely technical. Rhetoric becomes a paradigmatic precondition for our linguistic meeting with the world, to paraphrase De Man (1979). People’s use of language is by its very nature rhetorical, including the use of both tropes and schemes, and not least the master tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. De Man (1979) sharply criticizes the refererential view of language with its focus on language as a grammatical system governed by predefined rules. This argument has gained a great deal of acceptance in the field of organization science, and not least in the idea that organizing needs to be understood in a practical context. Watson (1995: 807), as an exponent


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of a rhetorical perspective, writes: ‘This is the view of rhetoric as involved in all processes of human communication and reality construction.’ To conclude this section on social influence we can identify two distinct forms of influence, as captured in Figure 4.1. The first form is labeled compliance; it is focused on changing behavior and is usually a direct form of influence. Compliance is often associated with a more unidirectional form of leadership, and the means for influencing people are very different from the second form. We label the second form adherence to underline the crucial insight that influence relates not only to change of behavior, but often means attempts at changing the motivations for behavior, that is, values, attitudes, knowledge etc. The discussion concerning adherence will be further developed with the rhetorical perspective below, and the two forms will also be used in Chapter 6 in the discussion on agreements.

INFLUENCE – ESTABLISHING A RHETORICAL DIALOGUE The Need for a Rhetorical Perspective The success of any attempt to organize activities and coordinate the efforts of a number of people in space and time is highly dependent on the abilities of managers (and others) to influence and build consistent ways of thinking and acting, and yet manage to incorporate dynamics. The basic argument of this section is that it takes rhetorical skills to achieve this. The short history of Dell Computers is illustrative in this respect. From the very beginning of the company’s history (it was founded in 1984), Michael Dell was inspired by the vision that how a computer was presented and sold to the customer was as important as its technological outline (Koehn, 2001). Sticking to that simple but compelling idea, the company has experienced radical changes, and still managed to develop its strategic position in the PC market. And by the turn of the millennium the ‘Dell concept’ became a worldwide standard. The short but very intensive history of Dell can provide important insights concerning the organizing of activities and how skillful use of rhetoric can create a widespread acceptance of the core values of Mr Dell both in the company and outside. But a word of caution is needed. Without the explicit focus on rhetoric, our view of organizing runs the risk of neglecting the impact of social structure and processes, and more specifically the asymmetric power relations in most corporations. When trying to understand a company like Dell Computers, it goes without saying that Michael Dell is a highly influential person in ‘enforcing’ agreements internally. Any study of influence processes needs to start

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from the existing relations among actors – the actual distribution of power. From a rhetorical perspective this observation is already built into the theory – rhetoric assumes asymmetric distribution of power. These asymmetries, though, do not mean that Michael Dell is always successful in building agreement. Quite the contrary! The beauty of rhetoric is that the ‘power of words’ can empower people even in highly asymmetric relations. And maybe we find here one reason for the recent upsurge of interest in rhetoric connected to leadership – rhetoric becomes the tool for influence in the boundary-less corporation. And this influence goes both ways. When activities are to an increasing degree characterized by virtualizing and networking, we expect to see more of the lateral relations envisioned in the rhetorical perspective. All companies are obviously not able to emulate the example of Dell, IKEA, Starbucks and Nokia in redefining the rules of the game in their industry. In fact, most managers are influential on a much narrower scale. The majority of companies rely on established models of organizing and strategizing, and they struggle hard to balance order with change. Even though not as spectactular as the aforementioned companies, the work of managers to construct the company and its future direction rhetorically is no less important in the ‘ordinary’ company, even though the efforts seldom capture the attention of the global business press. The tools for doing that are in many ways similar to those applied to more revolutionary changes. Any company needs to work with the understanding and communication of basic questions such as: ●

● ●

Who are we? How do we understand ourselves and the situation we are facing? Is this understanding compatible with how other actors view us? Why are we here? How do we understand the motivation for our existence, and where did we come from? Where are we heading? What is the future trajectory that we should follow? What trade-offs do we have to make in order to get there?

These questions are clearly concerned with finding/constructing an identity, which is the subject of Chapter 5. But they also point to the essentially political nature of human relations and they stress the need for rhetoric in the process of organizing. Philosophical questions concerning human existence and orientation are bound to be open-ended, because they are invitations to dialogue and debate. At the same time complex questions seem to require simple answers, or at least people tend to ask for simple answers. How can we agree on complex questions like those mentioned above? These questions are certainly related to identity, but they are also communicative questions, or, as we prefer to label them, rhetorical. They are


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repeatedly asked by numerous stakeholders, externally and internally, and they constantly demand an answer. Managers at different levels and in different locations need to communicate answers, or at least attempts at answers, on a daily basis. When attempts are made to influence people to achieve common aims, language is used to gain adherence for certain people’s views. With rhetoric we further our understanding of organizing in three distinct ways. The first important step is to emphasize the essentially political nature of human organizing, and the second step is to underline the crucial role of language. Rhetoric is a theoretical field that manages to connect an understanding of politics and a deliberate focus on language as a medium for social interaction (Kastely, 1997). But perhaps the most important step is to underline the link between rhetoric and our interest in tensions. When Aristotle developed and described a theory of rhetoric in The Art of Rhetoric, he stressed that it is a practical art, and compared it to other skills. It is thus important for our understanding of rhetoric to realize that it is something used ‘out there’ – it is not just a theory. It points to the tools that can be used to persuade an audience, and to resolve tensions and dualities. The theme of tensions was introduced in Chapter 1 and it has been mentioned in subsequent chapters, but without any deliberate attempts to discuss how it can be approached. If we view rhetoric as a practical art, there are at least three different areas where it connects to tensions. The first area has to do with the understanding of reality, and it describes how rhetoric is used to construct the past, the present and the future. This corresponds to the ceremonial genre in classical rhetoric. Managers (and other actors) in any organized setting need to spend effort on writing (in a metaphorical sense) the history and the future. But a word of caution is needed here. Rhetoric can influence how people view the past and the future, but it can never determine it. Rhetoric is always used in a dialogue between rhetor and audience, and the outcome is only partly determined by the rhetor. When Andy Grove of Intel wrote Only the Paranoid Survive, this should not be taken as the true statement about Intel. It is better described as an attempt to influence how people understand a certain period in the history of Intel, and it reflects the position and ideology of one influential actor. Basic areas of tension emerge because reality can never be ‘written’ in a uniform way. It is differently comprehended by different actors, and sometimes these understandings are fundamentally different. Reality is, in a sense, constructed in a rhetorical dialogue between actors where the basic processes of influence are sometimes highly asymmetric and sometimes symmetric. There is, in a sense, a hermeneutic dimension in all human interaction, or, to quote Martin

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Heidegger, ‘We are bound to interpret!’ We can’t escape the fact that reality needs to be interpreted, but it is never completely determined how it should be interpreted, and this is where the tension is set up. The second area has to do with the motivating of actions and activities, and it corresponds to the legal genre in rhetoric. Dualities and tensions often arise because people differ in their opinions concerning right and wrong, good and bad, etc. There is obviously a strong need for both defending and criticizing in any social setting. This area is primarily focused on the past and how to value it, and is clearly related to our previous discussion on influence and how people act politically. The tensions based on people’s different opinions of right and wrong, good and bad, and other areas of dispute are framed in the language of rhetoric, with people constantly trying to persuade others to accept their view. This is an important aspect of the rhetorical toolbox: to provide people with the means of arguing motivational issues. The third area focuses on tensions that arise because people have different views on acting. In the classical rhetoric the political genre describes how rhetoric is used to influence decision making, and it attempts to persuade people to take certain actions. This area focuses on the future, trying to resolve conflicts concerning future actions and decisions. In the first two areas the focus is more on the cognitive processes of organizing – how we understand and motivate actions. In this third area the focus is more directly on actions, and the tensions inherent in the basic human question: what shall we do now? Tensions arise because there are always different options for action in any situation, making rhetoric a useful tool in choosing which course of action to take. The Rhetorical Dialogue – Establishing a Relation with the Audience Bureaucracy and hierarchy, as role models for traditional forms of organizing, favor a unidirectional way of communicating, usually following the lines of authority. This is the type of organizing we would expect to find in those activities we labeled sequencing. The description of innovative forms of organizing as transcending the boundaries of the single organization (in space and time) makes the unidirectional model highly problematic. The bureaucracy/hierarchy draws its strength from regulative agreements (for a further discussion on agreements see Chapter 6) and the cognitive acceptance of it as a natural way of organizing. These forms of agreements are also highly institutionalized in today’s society. Even though it is commonplace to criticize both the bureaucracy and the hierarchy, people often cry for more order and structure in situations of disorder and chaos. With the move towards more open ways of organizing, and particularly virtualizing and networking, the unidirectional model gives little guidance


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on how to form agreements in other activity types than sequencing. From a managerial perspective the challenge is real and pressing – how to coordinate activities/people in other activity types than the single, unified organization. Many leaders acknowledge the need for replacing authoritarian forms of leadership with the communicative, and this is where rhetoric plays an important role in the practicing manager’s toolbox. The challenge of reaching agreements is clearly a rhetorical task, with the ultimate aim of gaining adherence for your views (Perelman, 1982). To agree is to organize a meeting of minds where an important precondition is that there is some common ground between the actors. Any agreement among different parties needs to rely on some shared premises, be they contract forms, shared experiences or socially accepted conceptions of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. ‘To adapt to an audience is, above all, to choose as premises of argumentation theses the audience already holds’ (Perelman, 1982: 23). Rhetoric is primarily a technique/theory focusing on attempts at persuading, which is described in rhetorical handbooks as the challenge of persuading others. Perhaps more interesting for the purposes of this book is the recent discussion in rhetorical theory on reciprocal communication, where more emphasis is put on understanding the rhetorical dialogue, that is, the relation between the rhetor and his/her audience, or to quote Chaim Perelman once more: ‘Argumentation is intended to act upon an audience, to modify an audience’s convictions or dispositions through discourse, and it tries to gain a meeting of minds instead of imposing its will through constraint or conditioning’ (Perelman, 1982: 11). A similar point is made by Kenneth Burke, the second key figure in the rediscovery of rhetoric in the twentieth century: ‘Rhetoric as the speaker’s attempt to identify himself favourably with his audience’ (Burke, 1969b: 37). Any attempt at influencing others needs to identify some shared premises on which to base the rhetoric. The shared premises can in general be of two kinds. They can be formal, identifying the means, techniques or tools used to seal the agreement (be they contracts, moral authorities, scientific proofs, knowledge transfers). A basis for agreement can thus be created by sharing certain ideas concerning its format. Shared premises can also be based on content, people sharing beliefs, values and knowledge that one can draw on to form agreements. The cultural component involved in the rhetorical construction is highly important. Culture works both for and against us, depending on the cultural distance between the rhetor and the audience. The boundary-less forms of organizing envisioned in this book carry with them special challenges for this rhetorical dialogue with its meeting of minds. It is a challenge far removed from direct communication in front of an audience as described by classical rhetoric. When organizing along the

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lines of activities, we often have to meet people outside our own hierarchy (if there is one), with whom we have to form agreements. Emerging phenomena such as external networks and virtual corporations are real and pressing examples of this different rhetorical challenge. In more formal terms it can be argued that loosely coupled systems (virtual corporations) carry with them special rhetorical challenges compared to more tightly coupled systems (internal hieararchies). Put another way, sequencing, as the typical activity, is replaced by other, more complex types. The move towards more open and democratic ways of organizing should not be overemphasized, however. Many companies are, in fact, trying to balance openess and closure, decentralization and centralization, and freedom and control. As argued by a number of authors (e.g. Achtenhagen and Melin, 2003), organizations need to be able to deal with seemingly incompatible orientations, to build a capacity to manage tensions. This is very much in line with one of the observations from Chapter 1, that organizations can be expected to both strive for renewal and stick to established forms of organizing at the same time. The advances of information technology form an interesting paradox in the role and forms of rhetoric in loosely coupled systems. On the one hand any boundary-spanning type of activity is dependent on the speed and accuracy of modern information technology to form communicative networks. On the other hand classical rhetoric is having a renaissance, particularly the spoken word. A top manager is now expected to be able to deal with a variety of audiences, and represent/symbolize the company by the use of discourse. The virtuality of modern corporations seems, in fact, to require a strong rhetorical construction to symbolize the abstract network of relations and identities involved in organizing complex nets of activities. But regardless of what type of organized setting a leader meets, an audience must always be faced. The challenge is clearly to turn that audience from being abstract, unknown and maybe even hostile into a ‘community of friends’. Reaching, or moving an audience, as classical rhetoric coins it, is important to mobilize enthusiasm and motivation to contribute to the goals of others. Moving an audience means that you have to reach out to the totality of being human, with rational as well as seemingly irrational aspects, using emotional as well as logical appeals. The challenge of leading and trying to influence an audience is no different from the challenge of advertising – how to create a more favorable attitude to your views. As Aristotle said, any combination of logos, pathos and ethos is useful as long as it ‘hits’ the audience. But this is also the major problem with the practice of rhetoric: it is not until you finally meet your audience that you know what kind of appeal will be most effective.


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The notion of gaining adherence to one’s ideas implies that rhetoric, defined as communication aimed at persuasion (which is consistent with our initial characterization of rhetoric as communication with a high degree of energy), is an activity involving not only the rhetor but also the audience, whether in the form of a real, specified audience or an abstract, imagined audience. That is, rhetoric is not unidirectional but is better characterized as a reciprocal activity, or as Perelman (1982: 11) puts it: ‘Argumentation is intended to act upon an audience, to modify an audience’s convictions or dispositions through discourse, and it tries to gain a meeting of minds instead of imposing its will through constraint or conditioning.’ The audience is a central concept in the so-called new rhetoric as formulated by Perelman (1982). In the ancient rhetorical tradition the audience is considered as a specified group of people (a court, a political meeting, a dinner, etc.) whom the rhetor is trying to persuade (Aristotle). The rhetoric, thus, is tightly connected to a specified time and a specified space. Perelman, among others, wants to broaden the realm of rhetoric, arguing that the idea of an audience must be loosened from the grip of a specified context. ‘In contrast to ancient rhetoric, the new rhetoric is concerned with discourse addressed to any sort of audience – a crowd in a public square or a gathering of specialists, a single being or all humanity’ (Perelman, 1982: 5). Dating back to Aristotle, the audience has been a major component in the rhetorical framework, even though the medieval preoccupation with panegyrics and style as ornament meant a de-emphasis on the audience. In the Art of Rhetoric (1991), Aristotle connects the audience to the three genres of rhetoric: the forensic (legal); the deliberative (political); and the epideictic (ceremonial). The audience differs depending on which genre we are talking about – and so must the rhetoric used in each genre. In the normative rhetorical teaching it is argued that the message has to be adapted to the audience. In Aristotle, and to a large extent in the subsequent rhetorical tradition up until the twentieth century, the audience is described in specified situations – in the courtroom, in the senate, at a party. The basic assumption is also that the orator is making a deliberate, and planned, attempt to persuade the audience. Perelman (1982) makes a central distinction between the specific and the universal audience. The distinction between the two depends on the intentions of the speaker, whether he wants ‘the adherence of some or of every reasonable being’ (ibid.: 18). The universal audience, though, should not be viewed as only a construct. It is the conception the rhetor has of his/her audience, but it also involves all people that the message could, potentially, reach. The audience is freed from the limitations (in time and space) of classical rhetoric, and is transformed into an imagined audience (which doesn’t exclude the possibility of audiences being very specific in a number

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of situations). In relation to the role of the audience, we need to draw attention to Perelman’s distinction between persuasion (aimed at a specific audience) and convincing (aimed at a universal audience): ‘discourse addressed to a specific audience aims to persuade, while discourse addressed to the universal audience aims to convince’ (Perelman, 1982: 18). Perelman, however, never explains fully the difference between persuading and convincing, and he acknowledges that the distinction is hard to draw. His main characterization is that it has to do with the intentions of the orator (whether he/she wants the adherence of some or of every reasonable being). The latter case involves a moment of construction on the part of the rhetor – he needs, in a sense, to create his audience at the same time as the audience can come alive and react (Anderson, 1983). It is also important to note that the universal audience implies a special relation between rhetor and audience, a relation that is abstract. Perelman describes the audience as external to the orator, and the purpose of persuasion is to establish a meeting between audience and orator – a meeting of minds. In Kenneth Burke, we find a different approach to the audience. He shares with Perelman the conviction that rhetoric is always addressed to an audience (Burke, 1969b). A key concept in Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives is identification (Biesecker, 1997). The relation between an orator and his/her audience is basically a relation of identification. Both Burke and Perelman stress the idea that some form of common ground between the orator and the audience must be established in order to persuade successfully. This description, though, should not be stretched too far. In line with Eco (1981), we argue that rhetors use strategies of ideological closure to influence the audience to make sense of a text in a preferred way. You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his. (Burke, 1969: 55)

The identification between two persons (A and B) is not a case of bringing them together, making them a substance. The identification establishes a link without joining. Burke uses the word consubstantial to describe the identification between A and B. A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so. (Burke, 1969: 20)

The audience is not just ‘there’; it is created. In his A Rhetoric of Motives (originally published in 1950), Burke argues that modern society carries


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with it new possibilities (and difficulties) when it comes to defining a particular audience. His analysis is even more relevant in the age of information technology and the Internet, which brings the universal audience of Perelman much closer to the orator. And both Aristotle and Cicero consider audiences purely as something given. The extreme heterogeneity of modern life, however, combined with the nature of modern postal agencies, brings up another kind of possibility: the systematic attempt to carve out an audience. (Burke, 1969b: 64)

Our grammar of organizing is further elaborated with this notion of a rhetorical dialogue. By stressing the dialogic nature we avoid the unidirectional mode that has been prevalent in research on power and politics. We want to avoid fixed stereotypes and roles in our grammar of organizing, and rather emphasize its reciprocal and processual nature.

RHETORIC – THE FORMING OF IMAGINED COMMUNITIES The characterization of rhetoric as persuasive communication (influence) directed at an audience can be pushed even further. We described rhetoric initially as a form of mental and emotional energy in human communication, with people exerting influence over others. When we communicate, we do it with more or less rhetorical energy. Any utterance made by a person can be analyzed with reference to the rhetorical content and energy (and how the person makes use of the ‘rhetorical toolbox’). Rhetoric, in the most general sense, may thus be identified with the energy inherent in an utterance (or an artistic representation): the mental or emotional energy that impels the speaker to expression, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy received by the recipient who then uses mental energy in decoding and perhaps acting on the message. (Kennedy, 1998: 5)

The observation that we use more or less rhetorical energy in our attempts at persuading others is highly useful for the understanding of the communicative patterns inherent in the four activity types. The four archetypical activities pose different challenges and we would expect different forms of rhetoric deploying varying levels of energy. With these considerations we move more explicitly over to the C in the A–C model, and as the heading for this section suggests, we believe rhetoric is a basic ingredient in the forming of imagined communities. Using the notion of rhetorical energy in human communication, we need to put the focus on the actual communicative patterns. The effectiveness of

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any attempt at persuading depends on the orator’s ability to make an impact on his/her audience. We have found the concept of emphasis most useful to describe and understand attempts at persuasion. Weaver (1990) defines rhetoric as the art of emphasis. Emphasis (or reinforcement) is an important component in a theory of leadership rhetoric. In classical rhetorical teaching the choice of arguments was central. But it is not enough to just choose a set of arguments, a way of describing things. In the ongoing quest for attention, the reinforcement of argument is essential for the ultimate goal of rhetorical effectiveness. Perelman also stresses the role of choice and emphasis: Choosing to single out certain things for presentation in a speech draws the attention of the audience to them and thereby gives them presence that prevents them from being neglected . . . The tie which is established between the presence to consciousness of certain elements and the importance we give them has allowed us to see in rhetoric alone the art of creating this presence, thanks to the techniques of presentation. (Perelman, 1982: 35–6f.)

Emphasis has also been a matter of dispute during the history of rhetoric. A major criticism of the rhetorical field is that it tends to overemphasize things by playing on the feelings of the audience. He overstresses the importance of his topics by puffing them up, dwelling on them in great detail, using an excess of imagery or of modifiers evoking the senses, and so on. (Weaver, 1990: 1051)

Emphasis relies on the following key ideas: focus, image and trust. Focus deals with the ability to convey messages clearly and corresponds to the narratio in classical rhetoric. Image is the ability to transform abstract ideas into concrete images (corresponding partly to tropology and partly to ethos and pathos). Trust is connected to the ethos we feel in an orator. In the new rhetoric, imagination as a tool of rhetoric stands in contrast to sensation. But whereas, in this terminology, sensation requires the actual presence of the thing sensed, imagination does not require the presence of the thing imagined. (Burke, 1969b: 78)

In this quotation Burke points to an essential feature of human rhetoric: it creates an imagined reality, a reality that has come alive by the play on words. It is therefore not a necessary aspect of rhetoric that it conform to sensory experience. It can, to paraphrase Burke, be ‘creative’. Rhetoric can deal with intangibles such as unicorns, the past and the future, whereas the senses can only deal with what is present before us. This description of rhetoric as basically an act of imagination should not be taken too far,


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though. The imagination of the orator is always counterbalanced by the trust, or ethos, the audience feel in him or her, and the trustworthiness of the arguments, or, to quote Francis Bacon: ‘The duty and office of Rhetoric is to apply Reason to Imagination for the better moving of the will’ (Bacon, 2001: 629). The concept of trust is crucial to our analysis in this book since it creates a link to our second process, as described in Chapter 5. Rhetoric is not just an act of imagination where anything can happen. In the rhetorical dialogue we discussed in the previous section people form imagined communities, and this requires an element of trust among the members of the community. In Chapter 6 we will develop this argument further using the idea of agreements. Wardy (1996: 2) captures this link between rhetoric and the building of imagined communities in the following: ‘Indeed, one might reasonably contend that engagement in persuasive negotiation, very broadly conceived, is precisely what makes a collection of individuals into a community.’ The Metaphorical Understanding of Reality The idea of imagined communities suggests that people connect through ideas, rather than just acts or behavior, and rhetoric shows us the way toward understanding how ideas are transmitted. Keeping in mind our elaborate discussion on activities as the things we organize, connecting through ideas is a deliberate addition to the coordination issue raised in Chapter 3. Activities are not just created in situ in a physical sense, that is where people actually meet and interact. They are also created as mental phenomena, through acts of imagination, and are transferred between people through numerous channels and regardless of people actually meeting. This doesn’t exclude the possibility of physical meetings between people as excellent arenas for persuasion. There is also a dynamic relationship between matter and idea: activities get their significance from being patterned and described, and our ideas are also shaped by what we actually do. To put it another way, they are both needed. This duality is also at the very core of the A–C model, where ‘A’ and ‘C’ are viewed as two interrelated aspects of the same process of organizing. It is important to note, however, that the stress is on the forming of imagined communities – we emphasize strongly the processual nature of organizing and the need for a continuous forming and re-forming of relations between people. Imagined communities are always in a process of becoming, and any attempt at describing the ‘state’ of a certain community will always lag behind the actual forming of ideas in that group. The stress on the active forming of communities and our considerations concerning ideas

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versus matter raises important questions about how to capture the forming of imagined communities. We can, once more, enhance our understanding by turning to the field of rhetoric, and more specifically the idea that metaphors (and other tropes) are used to build and sustain imagined communities. This is by no means a new idea in the study of organizing and organizations; Gareth Morgan (1986) was undoubtedly right in his call for a metaphorical understanding of organizations. Organizational metaphors are used to address the complexity and diversity of modern organizational life, to capture the richness of human organizing. And it seems as if we need the imaginative strength of metaphors (and other rhetorical tropes) to appreciate the abstract nature of organizing and organizations. When this book claims that a rhetorical perspective is necessary, it means that a more direct focus on the constructs and the language used to organize is needed. Metaphors are rhetorical tools that help us move between the abstract world of ideas and the concrete manifestations ‘out there’. Rhetorically skilled managers have long known that persuasive communication is achieved by using compelling images and analogies. The visual aid of a good picture seems to carry with it a power to turn abstract ideas into concrete experience. Metaphors are used to stretch out and reach the audience (to speak metaphorically), to establish the common ground discussed in the preceding section. Metaphors for organizing direct attention to important issues and aspects, and can thus be used for rhetorical purposes – to move an audience in a preferred direction. When Jan Carlzon stated in the early 1980s that we should tear down the pyramids, this metaphor challenged a great deal of established thinking in the company (Scandinavian Airline Systems, SAS), but also in broader management circles, with SAS becoming an international role model for the decentralization movement in the 1980s. The metaphor of a pyramid made people aware of the power of the hierarchy, and by asking people metaphorically to tear down this hierarchy, a powerful manifesto was launched. At the same time as metaphors can be used to focus attention and energy on a common goal, they are open to interpretation. The whole point of metaphors is that they play with transferred meaning, so they are often ambigous and open-ended. The metaphor does not argue that SAS is a pyramid (or was), but rather that the organizing principles could be compared to a pyramid. Perhaps this is the reason for the rhetorical strength of metaphors and similar tools: they are open enough to attract a variety of people that might not reach agreement otherwise. A metaphor is, simply put, a word that is used in a transferred meaning to illuminate a certain point or to evoke emotions (Vickers, 1988) or, in more formal terms, an implied comparison between two things of unlike nature


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that yet having something in common (Corbett, 1990). The metaphor is an example of a set of rhetorical tools called figures of speech and, more specifically, tropes. Tropes are a special category of rhetorical figures that involve a deviation from the ordinary meaning of a word. Tropes are thus characterized by transferring the meaning of words. In classical rhetoric a huge variety of tropes are described, and it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between them. In modern rhetorical theory the interest has focused on the so-called master tropes (Burke, 1969a): metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. In the metaphor a perspective is created where one phenomenon, for instance an organization, is compared with something else (for instance a machine or a brain). The machine metaphor, then, creates a perspective from which we understand an organization. It is customary to think that objective reality is dissolved by such relativity of terms as we get through the shifting of perspectives (the perception of one character in terms of many diverse characters). But on the contrary, it is by the approach through a variety of perspectives that we establish a character’s reality. (Burke, 1969a: 504)

A survey of the emerging literature on new, innovative forms of organizing shows a creative use of metaphors to capture the new and innovative (and sometimes the not so new and innovative). When Miles et al. (1997) describe something they label the ‘cellular organization’, they use the cell as a metaphor to capture certain elements in how we organize to increase flexibility: the cell is used in a transferred sense. The cellular metaphor adds a richness and a focus to a basic description of organizations, captured in many definitions as goal-oriented systems of people in certain relations with one another. The metaphor furthermore highlights important issues in innovative organizations: ‘The cellular metaphor suggests a living, adaptive organization. Cells in living organisms possess fundamental functions of life and can act alone to meet a particular need’ (Miles et al., 1997: 9). In this specific example the use of a metaphor is explicit and deliberately chosen by an external observer (the authors of the article), which is also the case with Morgan’s influential work on metaphors used to characterize organizations. This chapter is concerned both with the observer’s view on organizations, and how actors are able to rhetorically construct their own reality. And this is where metaphors play a decisive role. Talking about an organization as a cell is more than just inventing a label. In line with Lakoff and Johnson (1980) it is claimed that metaphors, in fact, govern the ways people both think and act. New labels thus have the power to change how people conceive of and act in and around organizations: ‘Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 3).

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The reader is already aware of how we, as authors of this book, use metaphors to describe different types of activities. In the case of sequencing, virtualizing, networking and task forcing, we have used four verbs to draw attention to different types of activities. It is obvious that the activities we classify as belonging to sequencing do not have to be strict sequences, but they exhibit traits that make it worthwhile to talk about them as if they were sequential – they are metaphors put forward by an observer to elicit understanding. The choice of specific metaphors is never neutral to the interests of different actors. Metaphors are used to direct attention in certain directions, to gain the adherence of others – they are tools for influence. This can be done with different degrees of rhetorical energy and intensity. In some cases the rhetorical energy is high, creating deliberate attempts at changing people. The specific metaphors in use thus reflect the interests of different actors, and not least influential managers in the organization. For an external observer the metaphors people use to construct their organizational reality give us a great deal of information about change orientations, values and basic beliefs. Metaphors also carry with them emotional connotations – they are loaded with value – and this is an important part of metaphors, as will be shown below. When leading actors in the IT industry proclaimed that we entered a ‘new economy’ in the late 1990s, this made perfect sense since many both traditional and new companies in the IT industry had a major stake in people believing in such a phenomenon. The metaphorical description of the ‘new economy’ was further strengthened by massive media interest, and numerous books were published, with titles such as Managing in the New Economy, Funky Business and Creating Value in the Network Economy. During a number of years at the turn of the millennium strong pressure was put on the ‘bricks and mortar’ of the ‘old economy’, creating a strong impetus for change, articulated by Lou Gerstner of IBM: But my message today is that the real revolution is not about technology. It is about a new model of computing based on the Internet. We are witnessing nothing less than the rise of a new economy – a digital economy – and a new global medium that will be the single most important driver of business, economic and social change in the coming century . . . So it will challenge the very nature of the nation-state, shift the ways democracies behave, fundamentally alter the challenges of national security, and create the first global venue for debate and decisions on issues that affect all the world’s people. (Lou Gerstner, Chairman and CEO, IBM. Joint Economic Committee, 14 June 1999)

But why use metaphors? The metaphor, as a rhetorical tool, is built on difference, the deliberate comparison of two things that are by nature


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different. The understanding of the metaphor therefore depends on both the sender and the receiver being able to interpret it in a similar way. Metaphors are always used in a transferred sense. The cellular metaphor discussed above is not used because organizations are cells, but because they bear a certain resemblance to cells. The discussion of metaphors is also complicated by the fact that they are used in rhetorical dialogues, and there is no guarantee that the metaphor is equally understood by all actors. As with all rhetoric, the attempt by a rhetor to persuade his/her audience can be more or less successful, and the preferred reading by the rhetor can be challenged by other readings in the organization. The degree of agreement can thus differ depending on the relation between the rhetor and the audience. It is nevertheless argued that managers can use metaphors deliberately to achieve a number of important rhetorical aims that can assist in the ongoing constructing of any organizing effort. Four basic aims of metaphors stand out as especially important to us, summarized in the acronym FALL: focusing; animating; labeling; and loading. We now examine each of these in turn. Focusing Metaphors are used to highlight certain aspects and create a preferred image of reality. As already implied by the discussion on activities and how they are coordinated in space and time, people need to select aspects of reality to focus on or otherwise drown in calls for attention. The use of metaphors is one tool to use in this selection and communicating of important aspects. The metaphor is a concentrated description of key characteristics of phenomena, where these phenomena can be very complex. By pointing to certain key characteristics, this complexity is reduced and attention is directed to important aspects, or, as Burke put it, a perspective is given. The focusing of attention always proceeds in two steps, where the first step is the attempt by the rhetor to select aspects to communicate, and the second step is actually to communicate the selected aspects. The Nokia slogan of ‘Connecting people’ is a good example of this focusing, where the physical image of a connection between people is used to draw attention to Nokia as a provider of communicative tools (in this case mobile phones). The slogan singles out one aspect of the technology, the very basic fact that by talking to another person in another place you are in a sense connected to that person. In our first type of activities from Chapter 3 – sequencing – we can see how the focusing works. By using the notion of sequencing we single out certain aspects of activities that resemble archetypical aspects we can find in this type of activity, for instance in the assembly line. The linear dependency that was a defining feature of the sequencing draws our attention to the sequential nature of certain activities.

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Animating Metaphors are used to turn abstract ideas into something tangible. In the ongoing processes of organizing, many abstract constructs are used to describe the basic features of strategies, production processes, organizational forms, goals and visions, and planning tools. The very abstract nature of many constructs is a problem from a rhetorical perspective. Abstract ideas are easy to misunderstand and can be less effective in moving people. A good metaphor can be highly useful in giving life to abstract ideas. This animating function is eloquently used in the quotation by Lou Gerstner above, in his vivid description of the new economy. The animating function of metaphors is perhaps most vividly deployed in the task-forcing type from Chapter 3, where the ER gives life to the fairly abstract characterization of this type of activity, with its focus on activities that are fluctuating and interdependent. Labeling Metaphors are used to give names to things, abstract as well as concrete. A basic feature of metaphors is that they act as labels for phenomena, where we associate the label with certain aspects of complex phenomena. It can even happen that the metaphor develops from just a rhetorical tool into a thing in itself – a brand. And this is no coincidence: the field of branding is highly metaphorical, where a number of famous brands carry a transferred meaning (Microsoft, RayBan1). The labeling function is important in the ongoing quest for attention, where metaphors can be important markers of identity. This role of metaphors reflects a basic human need to put names not only on things but also on groups (for instance projects that are often identified by the specific name of the single project) as well as more abstract phenomena. In the virtual research lab, branding aspects are especially emphasized, as an explicit attempt to build identity. Loading Metaphors are used to value things, so that they become loaded with positive or negative connotations. The hierarchy and the project are examples of two very different metaphorical understandings: the hierarchy is loaded with negative images and the project-based form is positively loaded. ‘Hierarchy’ is nowadays used in a more pejorative sense, to criticize something, and this can be highly useful as a rhetorical tool when people want to argue for the need for renewal. Words are never neutral: they always carry with them positive or negative images. The power of metaphor to evoke feelings and create compelling images of preferred readings is well known in the classical rhetoric of Aristotle, Quintilian and Cicero, and it has more modern exemplars in advertising


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and politics. Even though rhetoric lost much of its importance in the rationalist thinking of the scientific revolution in the eighteenth century, it experienced a renaissance in the late twentieth century, and with inspiration drawn from the new rhetoric, modern linguistic research and social constructionist thinking, we argue that metaphors (and other figures of speech) are important tools in the ongoing organizing of human effort. To conclude this section, a number of observations can be made concerning the rhetorical perspective in general and metaphors in particular. We have stressed the forming of imagined communities and indicated that rhetoric fulfills important roles by focusing, animating, labeling and loading: these in a sense turn the imagined from being abstract to being more concrete and tangible. It should also be stressed that we make this analysis well aware of the fact that it is a political process we are analyzing.

THE FORMING OF AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY – THE CASE OF SUN MICROSYSTEMS The discussion so far in this chapter has relied on general arguments and the presentation has aimed at introducing a perspective on influence processes in which rhetoric has played a predominant role. Based on the discussion on forming imagined communities in the previous section, this section will use the case of Sun Microsystems to illustrate and discuss the challenges of the community idea. It is argued that the community metaphor can act as a bridge between a traditional perspective on the single corporation as the ‘house’ of innovation and a more modern perspective claiming that innovation is taking place in networks. What is interesting with the Sun case is that the company deliberately plays with the community metaphor to extend its thinking on organizing. Sun – from Hardware Producer to Network Enabler Within the IT industry the open source movement has created some ambiguity, at least for the large corporations used to guiding their operations by protecting intellectual property. The major players such as Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Adobe and Sun, as well as many others, use different strategies to master the challenge of the open source movement. As argued by Eric Raymond in his White Paper, ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’, there are two archetypical strategies: either you focus on restricting access to source code or you set it free. The Sun case illustrates a possible combination of these two strategies, by encouraging developers to share insights of other developers at the same time as the company is trying to make money on the development

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work done by thousands of developers all over the globe. This case describes the development of the Java and Jini technologies, and it analyzes the differences between the two approaches Sun has taken in developing them. The IT industry has undergone some distinct changes in the past two decades, from being mainly hardware dominated to being driven by software. The remarkable success of Microsoft and its dominance with Windows and the Office suite is case history at virtually all leading business schools worldwide. In the late 1990s the Internet started to change this – and Sun was struggling to keep pace with the global development. Sun started off in the early 1980s as a producer of workstations; the founding idea was to build a desktop computer with more power than a PC. Generally acknowledged to be both fast and reliable, and built to work in networks, the Sun workstation soon became the industry standard. As early as 1982 Sun incorporated the ability to communicate on the Internet in its workstation (it included TCP/IP – Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), although it took another ten years before the Internet became a force to consider. But things were moving fast in the computer industry and by the late 1980s the PC was a major threat to the Sun workstation. The company was also considered to be inward looking and less customer and innovation oriented than many of the competitors. Commited to the vision of the network being the computer, Sun set out to develop a universal software platform to be used both on the Internet and on corporate intranets. This initiative eventually became known as Java and it was presented in 1995. Java is a multiplatform, object-oriented programming language, and in 1996 it was licensed to all major hardware and software companies. Following on the success of Java, Sun introduced the Jini technology in 1998 and the Jiro platform in 1999. The hope with Jini was to be able to connect any software and hardware component to enable them to discover each other over networks. When Jini was introduced, Sun tried to position it as a consumer device that would enable dishwashers to communicate with other electronic devices, to virtually make it possible to plug-and-play anywhere and with anyone. Four years later the Jini vision has transformed from being oriented toward customer applications to being applied in business applications. Jiro, in much the same way, is intended to create the possibility of open storage management. However, Sun was not entirely successful with the Jini and Jiro technologies and, in 2002, proudly presented the idea of an architecture that could virtualize networks to make them act as one computer. Named N1, this new architecture is said to deliver a huge gain in efficiency in hardware and software, or to cite Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer at Sun, ‘N1 is designed to create a single pool of resources that can be dynamically provisioned to meet the needs of an entire list of services.’ The aim is to use all


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hidden resources available in a network and, metaphorically, build computers from networks, rather than attach them to the network. N1 is envisioned to make network resources behave as a single, dynamic and integrated system. So, what is N1? Well, the answer is that it is nothing and . . . everything. It is not a tangible product sold to a customer like a workstation or a disk with software. On the other hand it is everything in the sense that it is a vision permeating Sun. In mid-2003 Sun officials explained N1 in the following compelling way: ‘N1 is Sun’s long-term vision for the computing system infrastructure of the future. With such a fundamental set of changes in the specification, design, deployment, and operation of computing systems, N1 is a vision to be realized and adopted in phases.’ Development through Communities Sun has been, and continues to be, committed to the vision of open standards. It is, in fact, a pronounced part of the Sun strategy to make its technology available to partners and developers, and to leverage the expertise of a dynamic community. The strategic intent is clearly to dominate its designated markets by spreading the technology as fast as possible. The Jini technology and the N1 vision are the two most recent examples of this commitment to open standards, and the promotion of compatibility between technologies. Perhaps most notorious is the release of Java in 1995, where Sun made the code available for downloading at no cost. This made it possible for programmers in other companies quickly to learn Java and incorporate it into their own products. Contrary to the Microsoft strategy, Sun’s strategy is to lower the barrier for developers to access the technology as quickly as possible. With the introduction of Jini in 1996, Sun took a different approach to open standards. The commercial idea with Jini is not to sell products based on it, but rather to promote its use to further sales of servers and Sun’s own software. At the beginning of 2003 there were about 150 000 developers and 100 commercial licensees hooked onto Jini, even though the commercial applications are not so numerous. The Jini technology has, for instance, found some success in connecting distributed computing systems. Sun describes the development strategy chosen for Jini as follows: In alignment with Sun’s philosophy, technologies such as Jini are truly open to the marketplace, allowing more widespread innovation and providing a level playing field for manufacturers, developers, and service providers alike. Jini technology is being developed through the Jini Community, a non-competitive, industry consortium focused on open standards. (www.sun.com, 29-05-2003)

The Jini Community was established in 1999 to provide developers worldwide with a forum for communication. The Listserv [email protected] has

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served since then as the basic mechanism of communication. The Jini Community has accepted a Community Constitution, a document specifying how the Community is governed. The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has a fundamental role as advisor when it comes to technical and nontechnical decisions. This committee consists of representatives from individual members, commercial members and Sun. To guide decision making within the community, a document called the Jini Community Decision Process (JDP) has been developed. It consists of a set of rules, norms and recommendations by which the Jini Community reaches its decisions. All members of the Community are allowed to vote on decisions to be taken, a procedure that is carried out in two houses (one commercial with all commercial licensees, and one general house that contains all individuals). Both houses must approve decisions that affect the whole Community. The Jini Community is actively supported by Sun, for instance, by offering technical information and support services. On the Sun website, members of the Community can access technical information, a shared resource library, and professional-level technical support. Supporting open communities is not new to Sun – it was already adopted in the development of Java in 1995. Sun realized early that in order to stay ahead of the competition it needed to share knowledge, code and cases internally. The Java Center Organization is designed to facilitate knowledge sharing between different units in Sun (Sun is best described as a divisionalized organization). The Java Center Organization is also the host of the Java Center Community, consisting of a number of core members and others who work with Java and take advantage of their solutions. Compared to the Jini Community, the Java Center Community is markedly more inward oriented. The basic aim is to support sharing of knowledge within Sun. It is formally a part of Sun, which is a radically different idea from the Jini Community, which is totally separated from Sun. The idea of building open communities has also found its way into Sun’s own organizing principles. In the iForce Initiative, Sun is trying to facilitate collaboration between Sun and a variety of industry partners to deliver solutions to customers. The idea is as simple as it is compelling: build a network of actors that, although not formally part of Sun, act as if they were. This is described by Sun officials in the following way: ‘Our partners invest so much of their business in Sun that they have become an extension of Sun’s own sales team, with equivalent skills, services, practices and product knowledge.’ The association between Sun, partners and customers is referred to as the iForce Community, and it rests on some core values that enforce openess and collaboration. For the customer the so-called iForce Centers are the most visible part of the iForce Initiative. There are three types of centers, either run by Sun or,


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as in the case of Authorized iForce Ready Centers, run by strategic partners of Sun, and finally software product focused. The iForce Center in Augsburg, Germany is a good example of Sun’s strategy of partnering with high-profile collaborators/competitors all over the globe. The strategic partner in this case is Siemens, and its Industrial Solutions and Services (I&S) division. This partnership system works to strengthen both Sun and Siemens. It is evident that Siemens attaches great importance to being an iForce partner. It is actually described as one of the four pieces building up the strategic offering of Siemens I&S. Some Comments on the Sun Case It is obvious in the case description that Sun is deliberately experimenting with the community metaphor. Three examples were mentioned briefly above, ranging from the controlled efforts of Java and the iForce Initiative to the open Jini. The iForce Initiative is similar to Cisco’s networked model of organizing, as discussed in Chapter 3, and it can be described as an attempt to build a virtual type of organizing, and create tighter bonds to suppliers (partners) and customers. The predominant activities that can be found within the iForce Initiative can be classified as networking. The Java community is primarily focused on the sharing of knowledge internally in Sun, and it is formally a part of Sun. The Jini Community, with its loose connection to Sun, can best be described as virtualizing. It is important to note that the Community is governed by a set of coordinative mechanisms. The Community Constitution and the Community Decision Process are two such examples. The community idea is not the only metaphorical component in Sun’s view of itself. It works in a very conscious way to build a coherent vision based on the Internet and the slogan from the mid-1990s – ‘The network is the computer’ – still contains a high rhetorical energy and it is obviously alive in the N1 ideas. N1 also illustrates how a powerful logotype can be created by a play on words. N1 should be read as n computers acting as one – and this clearly is a focusing and labeling function. There is also an animating function in the N1 – imagine thousands of computers co-acting to provide computing power for one user.

NOTE 1. Technically both Microsoft and RayBan are metonymies, where some attributive or suggestive word is substituted for what is actually meant.

5. Identity construction – mixing cultural diversity and integration in organizing In Chapter 4 we described influence as a fundamental ingredient of organizing. The political nature of organizing was highlighted, and thereby tensions between different interests and viewpoints. In this chapter we stress that a one-eyed focus on influence can make us overpoliticized and hide the other major process that we envision: identity construction. In the ongoing processes of influence, individuals and collectives assign meaning to, develop a reflexive attitude to, and relate themselves to others as well as to abstract entities. This can be viewed as a process of identity construction that highlights the most significant sensemaking aspects in organizing. Identity construction serves as a process that distinguishes attributes that are central, distinctive and enduring in various activity communities. It connects to stronger sources of meaning than social roles, and by viewing this process we extend the vocabulary in order to contextualize activities and occasions in a more socio-psychological language at both the individual and the collective level in different cultural settings. Organizing through the lens of identity construction can be viewed as an issue of relating as well as an issue of distinguishing which values create a sense of belongingness. This identification with what constitutes the values of organizational action goes beyond valuation of single trademarks on the market. In this book we assume that different stakeholders relate to each other in a much wider array of agreements in various activity communities. These differences can appear at both the individual and the collective level in terms of motivation, innovations, emotions, meanings and values that people and organizations can be committed to in different degrees. Take, for example, the public expectations of companies in terms of environmentally and socially responsible behavior that increase the need for longterm and sustainable action. Agreements based on business, legal, cognitive and moral grounds are intricately linked. For instance, transnational corporations now aim to legitimize their actions and try to be more socially responsible through engagement in corporate citizenship by adhering to 90

Identity construction – cultural diversity and integration

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voluntary codes in different communities. Few developments in corporate citizenship have attracted as much public attention as United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s call for a global compact between business and society (31 January 1999). Such a compact aims to persuade companies to adopt and implement core agreements on issues concerning human rights, labor and environment promulgated by the United Nations. Although the compact does not specifically encourage companies to adopt agreements, it requires them to make the principles part of strategy, culture and daily operations. The principles mention human rights, freedom of association, abolition of child labor, elimination of discrimination, environmental responsibility, fight against corruption etc. Identity construction rooted in core values thereby goes beyond short-term market evaluations; companies try to find a path that simultaneously leads to longterm competitiveness, sustainability and social cohesion. To find an adequate path in different activity nets and communities is not easy but necessary. In order to be able to sell products to conscientious consumers and attract innovative and loyal employees, companies must act in a socially and ethically acceptable way. In much of the literature on modern organizations that we have seen over the years, an emphasis is placed on the pluralistic nature of society: we should accept that people are different and that things can be viewed in many different ways. It is persistently argued that such social, cultural and intellectual diversity is basically positive and a prerequisite for innovativeness and renewal. Such a view, moreover, should gain the support of people who are not hidebound by tradition. On the other hand, such endorsement is more problematic for those who are more tied to traditions and whose identity construction is of a more conservative nature. Building one’s life on heartfelt and conscientiously formulated values that integrate the subject has its attractions in our turbulent times but, at the same time, difficulties arise in terms of practical action. How can one take heed of pluralism in the form of cultural differentiation in organizing while also developing a meaningful form of enduring and integrated identity construction?

DEVELOPING PERSPECTIVES ON IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN ACTIVITY COMMUNITIES This chapter aims to problematize this question and consider whether something is either a cause or a symptom of a larger problem. It also aims to develop the perspective of how to understand identity construction and dualities in different activity communities. As was mentioned in Chapter 4, people try to influence action in certain directions by persuasive

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arguments and communication. In this chapter we investigate how such arguments are connected with a sense of belongingness and identification. We examine the quest for identities in a globalized world with unclear boundaries and all its tensions and dual orientations. How can the fundamental flow of human action be understood when the rules of the workplace are changing and the organizational boundaries are challenged? Mobility and multi-project work practices have become more common, and traditional organizational boundaries are thus questioned. Cross-unit teams challenge former boundaries and create space for innovative forms of organizing. When boundaries are blurred, there are also new challenges for identity and identification. If we are to keep our sense of purpose, we must have an idea of ‘who we are’. But when the physical outside world becomes more blurred and dynamic, this sense of identity has to emerge from activities performed in other domains and with other stabilization forces than before. Identities need to be constructed in the interplay of identity and its alterity in performative responses. Multiple commitments and experiences from different activity communities imply that identity construction cannot always be viewed as a single route; instead it can be viewed as a nexus of multi-membership (Wenger, 1998). We are workers, managers, professionals, group members, parents, women/men, family members and we can, for example, be Swedes working in Finland for a Swiss company using English as our working language. This multiplicity delineates the pieces of a puzzle that we put together in our identity construction. We participate in different communities and behave rather differently in each of them, sharing different aspects of ourselves. Several calls have been made to reorient management practice in order to embrace these changes more openly. However, such tensions and transformations seem to remain largely backstage as organizational thinking is still dominated by questions of stability and structures. However, continuous change is at the center of organizing activities, and tensions between change and stability are always at hand. To explore organizing from such an angle requires us to include the full repertoire of the organizational grammar and to reject the ontological and epistemological assumptions that have underpinned research into the subject. With the concept of identity construction we stress the ‘both–and’ character of the concept. It is more of a dynamic journey than a stable state, but it also includes distinctive, enduring and integrating aspects. This view embraces the need for simultaneous treatment of stability and change, and thereby a more complex and process-oriented view of identity construction. In a landscape of activity communities identities are shaped. But this process is not a passive reflection. On the contrary, it is an active and creative process in


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which we dynamically encompass multiple perspectives in the translation of new meanings. Across the landscape of activity communities we construct bridges and create relations that involve agreements and reciprocal sensemaking in different forms. These agreements are variously developed in a mutual interplay between individual and collective needs. Take, for example, the complex requirements for cognitive and moral agreements in a project such as the design of a new jet fighter aircraft. And imagine the complex interplay between business and society needs in supply-chain development at the global clothing company H&M (Hennes & Mauritz) with almost 3000 production units worldwide and a workforce of approximately 540 000 people. In line with how intertwined multinational businesses are with society’s needs and expectations, organizational actors need to counterbalance various contradictory forces and consequences of business. Increased requirements for globally responsible codes of conduct have, for example, created a partnership between the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) and the United Nations Global Compact in order to address the question of how to best develop a new generation of globally responsible business leaders (29 January 2004). However, in line with the perspectives expressed in this book, we are of the opinion that it is necessary to go beyond standardized codes of conduct stimulated by quality revisions and imitation of standards, although an imitation can be translated in an innovative way (SahlinAndersson and Sevón, 2003). Identities are constructed as lived experiences with unique narratives that incorporate and mobilize cognitive and moral as well as imaginative agreements at both the individual and the collective level. At the collective level, for example, companies are often engaged in alliance building and development communities in different forms. Firms join together in alliances, strategic partnerships, projects etc. as a way to handle competition and to generate sufficient returns for all partners. Collaboration is built on a mutual interest to interact and to complement and enhance each other in different areas. By abolishing old definitions of industries, new alliances can start to emerge and reconfigure industry structures. This raises questions of how to remain close to the roots of agreements and the core of the company’s knowledge base, and at the same time be adaptive to new impulses. The Cisco/Qeyton case shows to what degree events during the integration process influence identity construction at both the individual and the organizational level. In order to handle identity processes rhetorically and maintain coherence and continuity across multiple locations, we need tools that make things easier by highlighting leading principles and using reified markers for our identity construction. Brands and labels have become more and more important markers of identities for

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organizations in a world that we usually describe as boundary-less and virtual. Identity sharing becomes a critical element when showing how work is accomplished across different locations and networks of global companies (Orlikowski, 2002). Another example is that the call for corporate social responsibility raises the need for common agreements that create value beyond internal economic objectives and rivalry between companies. Good reputation in the community and integrity of the brand, to which good corporate citizenship presumably contributes, are of importance. Consequently, a lack of boundaries between organizations paradoxically leads us to think more, not less, about identity. Where are we heading and who are our co-producers in these value-creating processes? Companies try to create new alliances in innovative forms of organizing, and thereby new combinations of different brands have attracted increased leadership attention. From being simple labels, combinations of brands are now conceptualized as important symbolic constructions and highly valued assets. Nevertheless, when companies start their journey into new conceptual domains and reinterpret their identity, it seems to be a basic task for leaders to ensure that identity and manifestation of identity are not confused.

TENSIONS BETWEEN SINGLE AND MULTIPLE IDENTITIES Identity construction in an environment with complex and multiple connections raises questions about the basic terms of existence for organizations. Complex interaction and competition among organizations stress the need for concepts used to characterize aspects of the organizations (i.e. identity as a self-reflexive question). We simultaneously express distinctiveness and sameness through categorization processes that vary depending on the categorizations available. These reflexive processes can reach the level of existential inquiries and thereby call for assessment of fundamental values in organizations. When questions about the basic terms of existence arise, it is usually argued that by traveling to other places we can obtain perspectives on ourselves and stimulate our reflexive capacity. In this chapter we take the global telecommunication company Ericsson’s ‘journey’ into partnership with Sony as one example of problematizing the quest for identity. The critical situation for Ericsson, and Nokia’s dominance of the mobile telephone market not least through their highly valued design image, actualize some form of new strategic moves. Ericsson’s alliance with Sony is part of that strategic change, and the collaboration


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raises questions about identity construction and not least about changes in identity constructions. An encounter with a new company and another culture generates reflection and a review of assumptions. Consequently, entering the dialogue with ‘the other’ can be eye-opening and illuminate the shadows of our own identity. However, crossing the border and searching for a new identity is not unproblematic. Instead it can be frustrating, creating tensions and a sense of disorientation. This is often coupled with our search for one-way solutions. Nevertheless, the answer to each single question is often not a single answer. Rather, there may exist multiple answers and thereby multiple identities. At the individual level Mead suggested as early as 1934 that a ‘parliament of selves’ exists within each person (Mead, 1934). Also, formulations on the organizational level have shown that organizations can be conceptualized as having many ‘selves’ (see Albert and Whetten, 1985; Cheney, 1991). These expressions and intangible resources comprise values that need to be taken into account in the modern ways of organizing (Schultz et al., 2000). In this book we will take those conceptualizations a step further. We will argue that organizations can be conceptualized as multiple organizational identities, and we intend to discuss how leadership can be understood as a way of organizing these (see Pratt and Foreman, 2000). The growing landscape of brands and the symbolic turn in organizations can be described in different ways. Much of the branded world can be criticized for reducing individuals to passive consumers in a global network of super-brands (see Klein, 2000). However, individuals both inside and outside organizations can achieve a much more critical and reflexive position. At the same time that individuals are shaped by an increasing flow of symbols and lifestyle expressions, they can develop an independent position in relation to those aesthetic influences. This aesthetic reflexivity (see Beck et al., 1994) and citizenship can create new spaces for individuality but also stress the need for self-responsibility. The self becomes a reflexive project in a context with many influences and impressions. This reflexivity is especially triggered by the global and multinational orientation of modern companies. Cultural encounters and sensemaking beyond stereotypical images need to be consciously processed and treated in more detail than the explanations offered by unreflected stereotypes. Consequently, we need to pay attention to how the individuality of today works together with our attempts to theorize organizations. One fruitful way to analyze these identity constructions is to bring tensions between different perspectives to the foreground. Specifically, we begin by defining and delineating the scope of these tensions by finding a path between individual and organizational identities in different activity communities.

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FINDING A PATH BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTITY Modern workforces face the challenges of temporality, social discontinuity and fluid work situations (see Lindgren et al., 2001). Flexibility and mobility have become signs of the time, and for that reason research interest should focus on how these patterns of movement are contextualized in order to capture, in a multitude of ways, the critical significations that are interwoven between people and organizations. In this chapter we borrow from the insights of individual-level theories to enrich our understanding of organizational-level dynamics. It could, for example, be stated that organizations articulate the same search for identity as that evident in individuals. We search for drivers of organizational and business attempts that create a uniting overarching vision, purpose and ambition combined with continuous improvement. However, we are strongly critical of overstretching analogies between individual and organizational identity construction (see Whetten and Godfrey, 1998). For us, an organization can never mirror the complexity and diversity that an individual can be said to represent. In the same manner, organizations contain elements that an individual can never encompass (for example, the cross-generational life duration of many organizations). Nevertheless, we aim to recognize and understand the connections between individuality and organizing, and how encounters start to emerge and create new opportunities in different activity communities. Both individuality and organizing are subnarratives in late modernity and are inextricably intertwined (Giddens, 1991). It is thereby necessary to view such processes as complex encounters between the human individual and her/his social and cultural context. In this chapter we work with the concept of reflexive identity construction as one way of developing critical sensitivity to those relational and emergent processes. This concept enables us to portray similarities and differences between these analytical units with the aim of finding elements that unite and those that separate. Individuals and organizations display facets of both similarity and difference, and the concept of reflexive identity construction can be said to embrace this paradox in that we both identify ourselves with others and, at the same time, construct something distinct through our internalization and externalization processes at both individual and institutional levels (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). This is also a way to bridge dual thinking in organizational theory and thereby take into account that organizational theories are increasingly approached in terms of paradoxes, dilemmas and dualities (see Janssens and Steyaert, 1999; Pettigrew et al., 2003). This places tensions in organizing in general and identity construction in particular in the foreground. In institutional theory Scott (1995) claims that ‘identity theory’ has emerged as a


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corrective to over-institutionalized views – giving room for renewed attention to an active and reflexive self that creates, sustains and changes social structures (1995: 24). One of the greatest challenges of studying modern organizing is that of doing justice to how human characteristics and actions are intertwined with social and structural conditions. The individual is always in a process of getting/assuming an identity that is emergent and never finalized. People enact the world, and, assisted by the language and understandings of their context and culture, individuals make sense of the ambiguous worlds of which they are a part, and then act in the light of those interpretations. Inspired by individual-level theories, organizational identity is usually portrayed as that which is central, distinctive and enduring about the character of an organization (Albert and Whetten, 1985). That is, organizational identity consists of those attributes that members feel are fundamental and uniquely descriptive of the organization and that remain in the organization over time. However, contemporary large organizations in complex contexts are often viewed as multiple organizational identities incorporating different conceptualizations regarding what is central, distinctive and enduring. For example, different views may be expressed around such issues as divisions, disciplines, specializations, professions, gender, race, age and so on. Thus organizations can plausibly present a complicated, multifaceted identity. This raises the need for new conceptualizations that incorporate more differentiated views of identity construction and link organizational identity research to other research areas. Schultz et al. (2000) claim that the concept of organizational identity needs to be related to organizational culture and image as well as to corporate identity. The authors try to cross the borders between culture, image and identity using the method of relational difference. Martin (2002) asserts that studies of organizational identity have the same limitations as studies of organizational cultures, relying heavily on integrationist assumptions. However, she outlines perspectives on how both areas can be enriched by a full consideration of the relevance of ideas drawn from differentiation and fragmentation research. Organizations and people within them show many faces and perform multiple functions. Consequently, there is a need to extend the definition of identity construction and open up to alternative interpretations that take into account plurality and multiplicity.

FINDING A PATH BETWEEN IDENTITY PLURALITY AND IDENTITY SYNERGY Many organizations fail to establish sensible priorities for some of the messages they produce. This narrow viewpoint creates blind spots and

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anonymity in organizations. A relatively small clique of decision makers speaks on behalf of others and for that reason many organizational members are left with a passive role. The double challenge for contemporary leaders is consequently to find a mix between identity plurality and synergy. This interpretative flexibility simultaneously builds on integration and diversity and creates a both/and thinking that challenges orthodox views. These views stem from the breakdown of the boundary between internal and external aspects of organizations. This is due to increasing levels of interaction between organizational members and suppliers, customers, regulators, competitors and other environmental actors. The multiple identities of organizational members often imply actions both as ‘insiders’ (i.e. as employees) and ‘outsiders’ (i.e. as consumers, community members or special-interest groups). These boundary-crossing and moving individuals in cross-unit teams both associate and disassociate with different organizations in activity communities, and the construction of the organizational self becomes an independent and self-reflexive project. This reflexive positioning implies that the traditional distinction between sender and receiver is no longer given. Instead, encounters between individuals and organizations create space for reflexive considerations at both the individual and the organizational level. Therefore it seems important to analyze encounters that mix individual and organizational aspects as well as identity synergy and plurality. It seems fruitful to critically analyze the different versions of identity constructions along two key dimensions (see Figure 5.1). Our aim is to analyze the nature of these dimensions and their interconnections, and thereby provide a conceptual vocabulary for thinking about identity construction. This view embraces constructive treatment of tensions in organizational activities in a reflexive manner, in which actors continually strive to make sense of what they are doing in a highly ambiguous world. The first dimension describes the tension between individual and organizational identity construction. If this is dichotomized, we can talk about either construction in a simplified manner. But if we talk instead about bridging the duality between the individual and the organizational perspective, we underline how intertwined these perspectives are. The second dimension describes the tension between integrated identity and multiple identity constructions in cultural environments in general. Through this dimension, activities and agreements are contextualized beyond both the single individual and the single organizational level. Correspondingly, we can talk about how integrated and multiple identity constructions influence each other, and if we bridge the duality between these differing identity construction forces we can ask: ‘How can we find the right balance between unity and diversity?’


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Individual identity construction

Multiple identity construction

Integrated identity construction

Organizational identity construction Figure 5.1

Two critical dimensions in identity construction

BRIDGING DUALITY BEYOND DICHOTOMIZING: TAKING A REFLEXIVE POSITION IN ACTIVITY COMMUNITIES Combining the two dimensions shows how these perspectives overlap, and consequently, we can analyze integrated and multiple identity constructions at both an individual and an organizational level. Our idea is that this analysis can be extended beyond single organizations and single individuals in different activity communities. As mentioned earlier in this book, a broader perspective on activities can build the platform for analyses of identity constructions. The main point about connecting these organizing principles with an identity construction perspective is to identify those encounters that begin to take place and become intensified and strengthened. These encounters can be value constellations that occur in the meeting between individuals and organizations and in the meeting between identity synergy and plurality. These activity communities connect ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in heterogeneous nets and thereby stress the view of organizational members crossing boundaries and acting as reflexive employees. Consequently, the mapping of these dimensions can be used as a way to move beyond simple dichotomizing. Figure 5.1 can be used to see how opposites influence each other, thereby taking a reflexive position. For example, it might be said that it is a particular mixture of individual and organizational characteristics that makes identity construction possible.

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Identity plurality

A grammar of organizing INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION Agreements

Reflexive identity construction in activity communities

Flows of activities

Agreements Identity synergy

Figure 5.2

ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

Spaces of flows and identity construction

What we need to understand better, in any given organizational setting, is how interaction between the individual and the organization operates, through the forces of both integrating and multiple identity construction. This reflexive positioning is connected with movements between opposites, and our aim is to highlight these translations in what can be described as heterogeneous activity nets. These nets include both humans and nonhumans (e.g. organizational artifacts and entities) and construct collective identities that cannot exist without being relational (see Latour, 2005). When we move beyond bipolar modes of thinking, we try to picture a movement involving interactions of various kinds (see Figure 5.2). These interactions create mediation, connectivity and relationality. It is this prioritizing of relational becoming over essential qualities that makes the reflexive position distinctive to our understanding of the formative processes underpinning identity construction and organizing. Relational identities emerge through associations and creations beyond the obvious and clearly stated – we construct imaginative as well as regulative, moral and cognitive agreements. Reflexive identity construction can thereby be defined as one way of bridging the duality between these different versions of identity construction. And this, in its turn, means that reflexive identity construction can be viewed as relational constructions in activity communities that find a mix of converging and diverging forces at hand. Reflexivity and relationality are therefore necessary steps in the theoretical development of an identity concept that takes dynamism into account. This dynamic view of reflexive identity construction corresponds to a view of an implicit contract between individuals and different organizational


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attempts. The individual steps into the flow of activities and in different ‘spaces of flows’ (Castells, 1996: 1) identities emerge through multiple inclusionary and exclusionary practices. The Internet is one example of such a societal inclusion that has been made possible by technological advance. It also provides an example of the double character of sovereignty and dependency that characterizes the reflexive subject. The subject emerges within a constellation that simultaneously constitutes it and provides it with a field of play (Turkle, 1995). However, experiences from this elementary example of interplay can create ambivalence and foster identities as ‘surfers’ and ‘drifters’ with bounded responsibility. The fragmentation of life as it can be experienced is not addressed as a lucky combination of postmodern events. Rather it can be interpreted as an image construct on the surface (Sennett, 1998). ‘Where are the pilgrims of our time?’ asks Zygmunt Bauman (1996, 1997), and he notes that the problem of modern life is not to make identity stable but to avoid becoming fixed. Bauman explains it in this way: ‘If the modern problem of identity was how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern problem of identity is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open’ (Bauman, 1996: 18). Nevertheless, this tendency is not one-way. Instead, our way of describing the dynamic view of identity construction shows that there seem to be new integration forces that combine synergy and plurality in new ways at both the individual and the organizational level (see Figure 5.2). In these encounters activities can be strategically shaped and start to move into multiple domains and multiplying events. This perspective extends the definition of what a company is and how we can understand leadership. Traditionally a company was defined in terms of hierarchical relationships between managers and employees. The extended definition involves recognizing the importance of non-hierarchical relationships between all of the company’s stakeholders in different activity communities. This increased level of interaction in activity communities between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ also collapses the internal/external boundaries and raises questions about how identity construction can be contextualized in different cultures and how it can be linked to expressions of organizational images. The relationships between identity, culture and image construct mutual interdependence (Schultz et al., 2000). Culturally embedded identity construction provides the symbolic material from which images are constructed and with which they can be communicated. These interdependencies occur at all levels in organizations and are enacted among organizational members and customers as well as among top management and key stakeholders. Let us briefly consider the leadership challenge and try to understand what responses these perspectives imply.

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INTERMEDIATION BETWEEN BOUNDARY CROSSING AND BOUNDARY DEMARCATION – THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE The breakdown between internal and external boundaries poses new challenges for top managers because they must manage across boundaries that, in most organizations, have been institutionalized. New moral, regulative, cognitive and imaginative agreements are sought and need to be settled. Questions of global responsibility are only one example of what extends and redraws the boundaries of organizational attempts. It has become increasingly clear to businesses as well as to business schools that there is a need to better understand and train business leaders to handle global challenges, problems and dilemmas. Societal and environmental issues have an impact on business models and sometimes even change the businesses themselves. Through enhanced self-reflexivity organizational members can become aware of and sensitive to the impact and the consequences of their activities. Stakeholder dialogues require communication with a wider array of partners beyond classical systems of accountability. This extracorporeal accountability in different communities needs to take into account the views of those that are most vulnerable to corporate conduct. Reputational damage to the brand, for instance, can be disastrous for a company. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and various activist groups in particular work effectively with media and make visible some of the negative social and environmental consequences of business conduct (Castells, 1996). Consequently, business leaders are challenged morally in the encounter between business and society and for that reason they need to create reflexive awareness of what distinctive values the company stands for and represents through its identity creation processes. Cross-border alliances, mergers and acquisitions are other examples of dramatic events that trigger various identity construction processes and actualize encounters between cultures. One current example of a form of cross-border interaction with imaginative implications is represented in the partnership between Ericsson and Sony. The following is an excerpt from the press release. Tuesday, March 5, 2002, Sony Ericsson announced a series of global partnerships with Sony Group’s content companies concerning mobile multimedia content and applications. Sony Ericsson’s agreements with Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Sony Music Entertainment Inc. and Sony Europe GmbH [Sony Style Imaging – Sony’s digital imaging community on the Internet], cover technology collaboration, market-building and business development. The announcement of these partnerships coincides with Sony Ericsson’s launch of a new product portfolio concentrating on mobile colour imaging and messaging applications. With


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a digital camera snapped on to the phone, it is for example possible to take pictures and send them as a Multi Media Sender-message (MMS) to another phone, e-mail them to a PC, or store them in the phone’s photo album.

Mobile imaging seems to be a hot topic in the industry, and Sony Ericsson demonstrate its presence in this area with a range of color imaging products. The company tries to create value for its operator customers ‘on the move’ by bringing new ways of using mobile multimedia communications. However, if we use stereotyped images of the companies, we can say that the heavy engineering firm Ericsson collaborates with imaginative Sony in a joint venture. Ericsson works with mobile and broadband Internet communications through its continuous technological development. Sony is a manufacturer of audio, video, games, communications and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets. With its music, pictures, computer entertainment and online businesses, Sony is positioned as a leading personal broadband entertainment company. Combining innovation and imagination with powerful technology seems to be the recipe for changing the images of the products. The cultural artifacts – mobile phones – are used to present a new image that will be interpreted by others. Two brands are thereby mixed and loaded with new meaning, and the question is how various stakeholders will receive and accept the ideas. This became even more pronounced when Sony Ericsson decided to use the Sony brands of Cybershot and Walkman. Can this alliance challenge Nokia’s dominance of the mobile telephone market? The collaboration is expressed in a new brand name, ‘Sony Ericsson’, and this seems to be a sign of how important each single brand is. This dual identity can be described as an ideographic form of collaboration and connect to Thompson’s (1967) concept of buffering an organization’s core technology (Albert and Whetten, 1985). The companies protect their technological cores and separate identities at the same time as they collaborate in this joint venture. Both brands build the platform and are represented by a moving symbol in a warm, organic green color. It is interesting to note the shift to this color when blue traditionally appears in the logotypes for technology-oriented companies (see, e.g., the logotypes of Ericsson, Nokia and IBM described in Björkman, 2002). The symbol is said to represent the company’s visions and ambitions, and the moving image is one significant sign of this, as is also the green color that creates associations with ecological thinking. The symbol is used as a way of influencing and creating a new meaning with generic power (see Vaara et al., 2003). This type of ‘co-branding’ seems to be more common in industries with high technological development costs, but an unusual combination of brands is also a powerful way to create a stir in the extensive flow of signs

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that demand our attention nowadays. Metaphorical qualities of highly charged brands and logotypes create new access to our collective consciousness. These strong mass-marketing forces are illustrated and critically analyzed in Naomi Klein’s book No Logo, exploring the multinational brands’ huge cultural global impact (Klein, 2000). Corporate images are waging a war on public spaces; they comprise a form of homogenization and occupation of our thoughts. However, the book’s title, No Logo, suggests the dream of a place with freedom from branded and occupied spaces. ‘The branded multinationals may talk about diversity, but the visible result of their action is an army of teen clones marching – in “uniform”, as the marketers say – into the global mall’ (Klein, 2000: 129).

IN SEARCH OF FLEXIBLE SOLUTIONS AND MULTI-VOICED DIALOGUES Regardless of these critical views of how well multinationals can incorporate diversity and global responsibility in their way of organizing, there seems to be a search for alternatives and multi-voiced dialogues with more differentiated needs. When tensions between two or more realities become problematic there is a need to develop new frames of references. By mobilizing many and new competences in new combinations, multiple organizational identities have the capacity to meet a wider range of expectations and demands than similar entities with only one identity (Salzer, 1994). At the individual level, research in social psychology shows that people with multiple identities are better able to respond to a variety of situations, because they can draw on a wider range of self-referential frames (Pratt and Foreman, 2000). At the organizational level, Albert and Whetten (1985) claim that organizations with dual identities may have an advantage over organizations with single identities when confronted with a complex organizational environment to which they need to adapt or respond. This seems to correspond to the law of requisite variety (Ashby, 1956) and the need for mapping and choosing how to interact with the environment. This ‘ecological interfacing’ stresses the need for interaction with demanding environments (see Normann, 2001) in order to create ‘clusters’ for improvement. In these clusters no definitions or boundaries are sacred. Much of what organizational members do goes on in the virtual or imaginary communities where employees can be described as wandering nomads crossing invisible and indefinable boundaries on their journey through working life (Lindgren et al., 2001). However, this lack of boundaries, temporality, social discontinuity and fluid work situations paradoxically leads us to think more about identity. If we are to keep our sense of purpose and


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identity, we must have an idea of ‘who we are’. But when the physical outside world becomes more blurred, this sense of identity construction must emerge from reflection and from activities performed in conceptual domains. This more abstract domain must in some way compensate for the insecurity experienced in other domains. In this book we work with the metaphor of imagined communities as a way of conceptualizing these transcending capacities of human beings. With our aesthetic capabilities we are able to envision and dramatize a much richer repertoire of our relational becoming. Through metaphors and narratives we illuminate these emotionally loaded experiences in a story-like form involving characters with interests, motives, emotions and moralities. The renewed interest for the concept of identity in research seems to correspond to our need to reframe our way of contextualizing identities. Discursive voids are identified through historical descriptions and through new narratives, and the forgotten characters of discourses should be included. The concept of identity is thus widely used on a daily basis in both texts and conversations, and during the last decade it has also entered into public debate. The notion of postmodern society also implies a redefinition of the individual (Gergen, 1991) as compared with modernist collectivism: the individual is someone special that should have a stimulating job, a stimulating life, possibilities for self-realization etc., but will lack the taken-for-granted structures of society that could be used as a source of ontological security and identification (Giddens, 1991). Our modern way of life can thus be seen as an ongoing process of identity construction, in which the individual – in the absence of the cultural stability and homogeneity that characterized industrial society – tries to understand and define herself/himself from the various social situations to which she/he is exposed.

UNDERSTANDING IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION DYNAMICS Traditionally, research tends to analyze such identity construction in terms of what we may call institutionalized identities, i.e. concepts such as professional or gender identity. While often providing exciting and relevant analyses, such research also implies a risk of reducing identity construction of individuals to one institutional dimension only. Even if we might claim that, for example, gender is one of the most basic, stable and manifest dimensions of identity in individuals (see Alvesson and Billing, 1997), we cannot always explain the self-understanding of either men or women merely by relating them to the conceptions that are usually attributed to the

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respective gender categories. Individuals differ from each other in the way they describe themselves in gendered terms, and they also differ in the way these descriptions are made. Moreover, the taken-for-granted implications vary within and between different cultural contexts; individuals in different professions might experience different definitions of gender differences, and individuals at the same workplace might also have different definitions because of other discursive influences (such as ethnicity, profession or social class). Consequently, individuals shape and reshape their identities through exchange and conflict with others, and we need to investigate more thoroughly diversity in different institutional domains. Identity is also referred to in everyday conversation as static, implying that human beings ‘are something’ and that their identity construction process is more or less complete when they reach adulthood. This is not usually true: identity should rather be seen as something that is constructed and reconstructed in daily social interaction throughout life. When exposed to discontinuities in life, the identity of an individual is thus open to change through a process of reflection on both the past and the future (see Jenkins, 1996). The analysis of identity construction is also dependent on the choice of level of analysis. When using profession, ethnicity or gender, the institutional level of analysis is – implicitly or explicitly – inevitable. The individual is seen as dependent on established collectives in her/his social context in order to be able to define and understand herself/himself. On an aggregate level socially defined identities are valid and homogeneous to a certain extent, but on the individual level they are expressed in a multitude of ways depending on how different individuals describe themselves. Different individuals tend to compose their identity from different institutional and cultural sources, and they also vary in the extent to which they use established categories in constructing it. Consequently, we argue for the need to understand identity construction at both the individual level (self-organizing) and at the organizational level (organizing). Individuals participate in overlapping activity communities and become involved in a multitude of organizational identity constructions. This raises basic questions at the core of identity construction such as, ‘Who am I?’ or, in the case of a collective, ‘Who are we?’ However, the answer to each single question is often not a single answer. Rather, there are multiple answers and, accordingly, multiple identities that need to be conceptualized. In the case of Sony Ericsson there seems to be a need for crossing in a boundary-less manner but also some kind of self-reflection that points out the boundaries for Ericsson and Sony. Identities cannot get lost in the collaboration; the ambition is instead to strengthen the individual brands through collaboration. This emphasizes the question raised about relational and reflexive identity construction. In order to understand who


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you are, you need to travel to other places and look at yourself through others’ eyes.

A REFLEXIVE JOURNEY OUTWARDS AND INWARDS Reflexive identity construction can be described metaphorically as a journey in both time and space, suggesting that we need to travel to other places in order to understand ourselves better and to discover more about who we are. For example, the journey in space can be associated with concrete geographical or organizational moves (outward) and with people’s inner moves (inward) involving such things as feelings, hopes, aesthetic reactions and moral dispositions. When individuals move and break patterns in their outer journey, periods of increased self-reflection occur. ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where am I going?’ are examples of the kind of questions raised. In these situations people tend to turn inward in search of deeper values and/or theoretical grounds for their pathfinding. New locations and new working environments call for reflection relating to both the past and the new, creating an openness to what is happening in the present. The inner and outer journeys through life thereby interact in a special way for people who cross borders, since discontinuities appear more frequently and emphasize the search for inner safety and ontological security. If we start our journey from the perspective of an engineer at Ericsson, we can see a driving force for the creation of a professional identity in an integrated manner (see Figure 5.3). To become an engineer at Ericsson after graduation is desirable. Nevertheless, this pursuit of identity cannot take place in a vacuum. Ericsson becomes the social arena that shapes the professional identity construction and the career. The need for matching individual and organizational needs in reciprocal identity construction is illustrated. However, this is not a closed system; it is open to many other influences. When Ericsson’s identity is questioned in the mobile telephone market, this also affects employees inside the cooperation. This raises questions of new strategic moves, and the alliance with Sony is a part of this shift. Ericsson is reconstituted in terms of the dialectical interplay of the local and global involving cross-cultural moves. Consequently, the alliance between Ericsson and Sony cuts across both cultures and industries in activity communities. The companies strive to reorganize activities in transnational projects in order to meet more differentiated needs in the market. By opening the boundaries between industries they try to construct imaginative agreements beyond the obvious and clearly stated. Undeniably, the joint venture has also created high

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A grammar of organizing Individual identity construction

Multiple identity construction

Integrated identity construction

Organizational identity construction

Figure 5.3 Ericsson’s and Sony’s collaboration and different identity constructions expectations. It seems to build on aesthetics and design as key components and to include how imaginative the new expressions of the cooperation will be. Encounters between employees in multiple projects challenge established views and construct new emergent identities. Entering the dialogue with ‘the other’ can be eye-opening and illuminate the shadows of our own identity, and at the crossroads between the different cultures, reflexivity is stimulated. Employees at Ericsson and Sony can compare views with each other and start self-reflexive processes triggered by the collaboration. This example shows how multiple identity constructions and combinations of brands have achieved increased leadership attention. From being simple labels, brands are now conceptualized as important symbolic constructions and highly valued assets that affect the strategic core of organizations. Ericsson’s journey into the partnership with Sony is an illustration of co-branding that changes impressions and creates high expectations for the future. However, in order to analyze this joint venture more thoroughly we argued for the need to take into account both diversifying and integrating identity construction forces. Likewise, it is important to analyze how individuality operates together with organizing. Both are inextricably intertwined in modern organizational arenas and thereby call for reflexivity. Individuals are not passive employees or passive consumers. Instead,


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individuals both inside and outside organizations take critical and reflexive positions. Movements and identity constructions cannot be enforced. Human characteristics and actions are instead intertwined with social and structural conditions, and consequently the game of consumption cannot be controlled and directed solely by companies. Encounters between organizations and individuals and between production and consumption are more complicated and unpredictable than those in a society subject to a constant stream of emerging images and brands. The question is if the imaginative community constructed through this collaboration will continue to grow and attract employees and consumers. Can this collaboration fill a felt void in relation to different stakeholders? Consequently, how this collaboration will succeed in the flow of offers in a ‘branded world’ is still a question. Is this co-branding aligned with what customers want from the company? Can this umbrella image, that casts a rosy glow over an array of products, be successful? It is obviously difficult to make any clear statements at this early stage. Instead, we have used this empirical case as an illustration of how modern organizations search for identity. Globalization and more differentiated needs call for multiple identities that handle complexity and diversity more effectively. These multiple identity constructions can build bridges between industries in new constellations and thereby challenge established views. Nevertheless, in this chapter we also take a reflexive position on identity construction. This position embraces a dialectical view of identity construction and thereby underlines the necessity of understanding all the different positions of identity construction described in Figure 5.3. For example, it is not a question of either multiple or integrated identity construction. It is instead a combination of those identity construction forces that is important to analyze. In the same way as Sony and Ericsson create a new common identity, they re-create their respective core identities. They still protect their technological cores and unique patented domains. For that reason we can talk about boundary setting with distinctive aspects as well as boundary crossing with integrating aspects in these forms of cooperative agreements. Identities emerge through both regulative and imaginative agreements, and involve mutual drawing and redrawing of boundaries.

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION THROUGH PRESENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE IN ACTIVITY COMMUNITIES This chapter has examined the quest for identities through balancing cultural differences and integration forces. When the physical outside world

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becomes more blurred, identity construction has to emerge from activities performed in more conceptual domains. In spaces of flows, encounters take place and identities become apparent through reconciliation of both identity plurality and identity synergy. People pursue their projects in life and manage their continuously emerging identities by exchanging meanings and resources with others and through a dialogue with their organizational and cultural environment. Through implicit contracts and agreements, activities are performed and become multiplied in time schedules, agendas, projects and intentions. These activities need to be reflexively treated in order to maintain accountability in different activity communities. With reflexive positioning we thus try to embrace both institutionalization and individualization forces in organizing attempts, and paint the landscape that blends different agreements into the emergence of responsible activity communities. We picture a situation in which activity communities emerge through combinations of loose and integrated forms of organizing. Such movements in activity domains stimulate interactions of various kinds that reveal both our desire to diversify and our desire to integrate at an individual as well as at an organizational level. These desires use dualities and tensions in a creative way to create presence in ongoing activities and transcendence in order to paint the landscape of the future.

6. Agreements – acknowledging the social processes of organizing The parallel concepts of influence and identity break the simplicity of the argument from Chapters 2 and 3. The conceptual development in the previous two chapters creates some startling challenges for our understanding of organizing. The social processes of influence and identity both carry with them the capacity to release large amounts of human energy directed towards specific goals – they can thus be beneficial for the performing of activities. At the same time the combined effects of influence and identity processes can be detrimental to organized activities. Multiple and changing identities, and opposing forces of influence, make it somewhat surprising that people actually manage to coordinate their efforts toward common goals. The influence and identity concepts show that there are strong social processes involved in activities, and that the question of organizing soon moves beyond the basic coordination envisioned in Chapter 3. A question that still awaits an answer is how people, in real situations, are able to act in a coordinated way despite strong pressure for disorganization. We propose the concept of agreements to provide a tool for facilitating coordinated action. Our reasons for adopting the agreement concept are straightforward, and they are based on the following simple question: is it possible to think of organized activities involving more than one individual without any form of agreement? Our unanimous answer to this question is no; we need to agree upon certain things in order to be able to act in a coordinated way. Implicit and explicit agreements are the mechanisms that coordinate and link different actions to each other in action nets. An important point about the agreement concept is that it is neutral when it comes to the form of organizing. It can be used to discuss highly hierarchic forms of organizing as well as more horizontally, network-oriented forms of organizing. It does not presume a fixed form of organizing. In order to introduce the agreement concept, two cases that highlight some important features of organizing are presented. The first describes a straightforward acquisition process where a large company bought a small, knowledge-intensive company. The second deals with the forming of a large research network fostering collaboration between the business 111

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community and academia. Both cases were introduced in the vignettes in Chapter 1.

THE CISCO/QEYTON CASE – BUILDING TRUST THROUGH AGREEMENTS Consider the example of Cisco and the acquisition of the small Swedish company Qeyton Systems in May 2000. Qeyton had been founded two years earlier by a small group of seven people, five of them formerly working for Ericsson. They decided to form their own company to further develop and launch technical products to enhance the capacity in optical telecommunication networks. The technology that they developed, Metropolitan Dense Wave Division Multiplexing, was so successful that Cisco decided to make a bid for the company, offering to pay more than $800 million. The seven partners decided to accept the bid and the paycheck of 7.3 billion Swedish kronor (they were paid in Cisco stocks valued at around $800 million at the time of the acquisition) created some large headlines in the Swedish business press. At the time of the acquisition Qeyton had around 50 employees. The set of activities leading to the incorporation of Qeyton in the Cisco organization started when the seven founders decided to leave their former employers to form their own company. The lack of agreements with their former employers to further develop their ideas was the driving force behind Qeyton Solutions. The integration of Qeyton in Cisco Sweden marked a new era in the company and transformed the company from a fast-growing but small company to an integrated part of a global corporation. With integration in the Cisco organization, Qeyton gained access to the American market and to the global sales force of Cisco, and Cisco gained full control over the technology developed by the Qeyton people. With the experience of more than 70 acquisitions, Cisco took a number of steps to rapidly integrate the Qeyton people in the Cisco organization and culture. In the middle of 2002 the department of Cisco Sweden working with the optical technology that Qeyton brought to Cisco consisted of more than 60 people. But the market for advanced optical systems in building metropolitan networks was tough indeed – it virtually disappeared in the autumn of 2000. Top management in Cisco realized that the market would probably only show a tiny growth in the next few years, and it was overpopulated. A decision was taken to centralize the development of optical systems and the department in Cisco Sweden was closed in October 2002, and all development was moved to the USA and Italy. The products that were developed by Cisco Sweden and others will, however, still be offered on the market.

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The brief example above illustrates how political and cultural processes create a pattern of organizing with high complexity. It also shows that it is perfectly possible to bring activities forward and deal with this complexity. The starting-point for the activity described above was the conflict, or rather lack of agreement, between the founders of Qeyton and their former employer – Ericsson. Their unsuccessful attempt at influencing Ericsson to let them develop their ideas pushed them to leave the company and set up their own business. In this phase the process was marked by a strong identity among the founders of Qeyton – a feeling of ‘us against them’ (Ericsson). The new venture was highly successful and grew rapidly in just a short time. Qeyton was then approached by Cisco. Maybe Cisco did what Ericsson did not – it appreciated the technology developed by the team. The offer was accepted, and Qeyton formally became a part of Cisco. But from the perspective of influence and identity it is not self-evident that the acquisition process should run as smoothly as it did. Important questions can be raised concerning how the American and Swedish counterparts were able to coordinate the sequence of activities eventually leading to the successful integration of Qeyton in Cisco, a process taking more than one year. It further shows that how we actually manage to produce coordinated activities is a real and pressing problem. Complex social interaction is an invitation to misunderstandings and conflicts, which require powerful tools to counteract, and mergers and acquisitions are good examples of that. This example still describes a fairly straightforward activity, and one that was performed within the asymmetric relation between the giant Cisco and the small company Qeyton. The complexity grows rapidly when the relations are more symmetric and when more actors are involved. From a political perspective it can be argued that the process of approaching Qeyton and the subsequent integration in Cisco was driven by mutual interests – Cisco obtained access to a technology it wanted to explore and Qeyton obtained a better opportunity (with the resources of the large company) to further its ideas. The price of losing the identity of the small, but successful company seemed, in this case, easy to accept, considering what it gained. There was agreement between the key actors. This agreement came to a definitive conclusion in October 2002, when all the employees at the department in Cisco Sweden were notified by the decision taken in Cisco US to close down the department. The concept of agreements opens the way for a deeper discussion on the coordination of activities. Even very straightforward and simple activities expand in time and space, and must rely on some mechanisms to coordinate the efforts of different actors. The more the complexity and dynamics involved in an activity grow, the more important the mechanisms for coordination. The concept of agreements suggests that it takes some mutual

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adjustments and some degree of shared understanding to successfully produce interlocked behavior. The example of Qeyton and Cisco starts with a powerful agreement between the seven founders of the company, based on mutual understanding and trust – they actually left their former employers to pursue the high-risk project of starting their own company. The integration of Qeyton in the Cisco organization also requires strong agreements, but in this case fundamentally different from the agreements between the seven founders of Qeyton a couple of years earlier. In the midst of powerful processes of influence and identity an activity evolved and was successfully organized. The example also shows that an agreement is only valid as long as there are people adhering to it, and the October 2002 crisis shows that Cisco US gradually realized that keeping the previous level of ambition in the field of optical systems was over-optimistic, and the former agreement was, in a sense, broken. Some basic observations concerning the social psychology involved in organizing have guided our understanding of agreements. As argued by Weick (1979) and many others, organizing is a process where the behavior of two or more people is interlocked (see further the discussion on activities in Chapter 2). The concept of agreements is used to describe how such interlocked behavior is achieved. This concept must be open enough to deal with a variety of expressions of agreement. It must be able to incorporate agreements ranging from simple ‘market mechanisms’, that is, shared information, to complex moral and cognitive assumptions deeply embedded in our culture. It is thus not a necessary condition of organizing that people share understandings or beliefs. It is sometimes enough if they agree upon the means for doing something. The point that agreement does not necessarily require consensus has been shown empirically by Tomicic (2001) in a study of a management team. The degree of mutual understanding and the degree of commitment to a set of values are two contextual factors that we will discuss at the end of this chapter. Suffice it to say at this point that mutual understanding and sharing of beliefs are not necessary conditions for agreements. It can nevertheless be argued that they are important factors in coordinating systems that rely less on hierarchy and bureaucracy as tools for coordination. Agreement does not require the actual meeting between the actors that agree. This is why the concept of imagined communities is so important to us – people are capable of organizing even complex activities without the need to be in physical contact with each other. The concept of imagined communities also suggests a constructive element in all organizing. It relies on human ingenuity and our capacity for fantasy and imagination. The Cisco/Qeyton case described above, however, captures a process where the key actors are in fairly close contact with each other, and where a


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limited group of people interact to drive the process. The activity is also performed within the realm of an integrated organization – Cisco. Let us consider another example with a less intimate interactive pattern but still with a high degree of organizing and with a well-developed capability to innovate. This example was briefly mentioned in the vignettes in Chapter 1 – Intel and PlanetLab.

THE INTEL/PLANETLAB CASE – COORDINATING A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY THROUGH AGREEMENTS Intel, the world’s largest producer of microprocessors, has recently contemplated the value of relying just on internal resources and capabilities for R&D. With the Intel research network of laboratories a new step was taken in developing industry–university collaboration. In October 2003, the network consisted of four research laboratories: Berkeley, Seattle and Pittsburgh in the USA, and Cambridge in the UK. Intel described the mission as follows: ‘to conduct the highest quality research in emerging, important areas of Computer Science and Information Technology, by joining the unique strengths of universities and Intel in concurrent, collaborative efforts that are both broad in scope and deeply penetrating in exploration’ (www.intel.com; accessed 14 May, 2005). Beyond this glorifying statement, we nevertheless witness a commitment to collaboration in research. The labs are wholly owned and funded by Intel but the research they generate is published and shared widely. Each lab contains facilities for up to 20 researchers from Intel and a similar number of academics and/or visiting members from the larger research community. Besides this commitment to open research, Intel also sponsors more than 250 research engagements all over the world. In line with the vision of open communication, the research within the network of labs is focused on exploring what has become known as disruptive technologies that are believed to drive so-called proactive computing where numerous embedded devices will try to anticipate our needs and even take action on our behalf – science fiction certainly, but also an area where a great deal of research is done within the research community in computer science. Important questions need to be raised concerning how to organize such complex research efforts without violating the ‘beauty’ of the open source ideas. One of the more interesting projects where researchers from Intel’s network of labs are active is PlanetLab. As described in the vignette in Chapter 1, PlanetLab is a collaboration between Intel and HP researchers, and members from the academic research community from more than

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60 universities. The purpose is twofold – to build a so-called global testbed for running prototype Internet applications and services, and to provide a deployment platform to support the migration of an application from prototype to popular service on the Internet. The project started in March 2002 and at the end of 2003 PlanetLab consisted of 160 machines, hosted by 65 sites in 16 countries. In May 2006 it consisted of 672 machines, hosted by 324 sites in more than 25 countries. The ambition is for PlanetLab to grow to more than 1000 widely distributed nodes (a node is described as a server machine capable of running components of PlanetLab services). By connecting large client populations, for instance a university, to PlanetLab, researchers can carry out large-scale experiments to test new network services and applications under realistic conditions. All machines belonging to PlanetLab run a common software package including a Linux-based operating system. PlanetLab can be thought of as in part consisting of hardware and software that enable researchers to use an infrastructure for experiments. But PlanetLab is also a good example of an imagined community where a large number of participants are able to act in a coordinated way. A number of agreements work to facilitate the coordination of PlanetLab. There are some simple but strict rules that all participants need to adhere to, and the testbed is also controlled by a management service that, for instance, can discover the set of nodes in the overlay, monitor their health and keep the software running (Peterson et al., 2002). There is, in a sense, a core of regulative agreements (see the further discussion on different forms of agreements below), but they alone would never suffice to coordinate this self-organizing network of nodes and people. Beyond the hardware capabilities provided, PlanetLab is in general a research community driven by the urge to collectively build an ecosystem for studying different services that eventually will create the future Internet. Even though the project started with a strong ‘bottom–up’ perspective, driven by individual researchers, some elements of formal organizing have been introduced, for instance through the forming of a consortium of PlanetLab users and developers, hosted by Princeton University. The university is committed to providing administrative and technical support as PlanetLab is growing. The different researchers working in PlanetLab are self-organized in different working groups. Within the community, communication is achieved by mailing lists and workshops, as well as through an architectural document series known as PlanetLab Design Notes (PDNs). Compared to the Cisco/Qeyton case described above, the Intel/PlanetLab case shows some interesting features. The project started with a small group of people joining together to form PlanetLab, but it rapidly outgrew that small group and was transformed into a widespread network of people


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without close physical contact with one another. It can be characterized as a low-interaction type of activity, where the coordination is achieved through a combination of rules on the one hand and imagination and normative agreements on the other. It seems that even a highly distributed and virtual setting needs a certain degree of formalization, but to the people within the community the driving force is the combination of imagination and values. PlanetLab is a lively metaphor that seems to capture the imagination of a large number of people. Even big companies such as Intel, HP and Google rapidly agreed to provide PlanetLab with computers and other facilities and services. The community is also bound together by a mutual belief in open source ideas, beliefs that function as a strong ideology binding people together.

HOW WE BUILD IMAGINED COMMUNITIES – THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF AGREEMENTS With these two cases in mind we now turn our attention towards the agreement concept. A natural starting-point for a discussion on agreements is the coordination concept we used in Chapter 3. Coordination as a device for organizing is elaborated on within various theoretical fields. However, traditional coordination theory is limited by three factors. First, coordination has traditionally been an issue of coordinating conduct, organizations or individuals within a certain superior governance structure (i.e. market, networks, alliances etc. or hierarchies). Second, the research is partial since only one superior coordination mechanism is included when discussing these mechanisms (Litwak and Meyer, 1966), and coordination formats (Brickman, 1979; Grandori, 1997a; Schleicher, 1986). Third, coordination is usually described as a cause with foreseeable effects. Price, for example, is supposed to work in a certain way and under given circumstances the outcome can be predicted. In essence, traditional coordination explanations are insufficient to explain situations where activities span the boundaries of single governance structures. However, as Alexander (1998) argues, it can be claimed that all coordination is based on interdependencies. Interdependencies can, of course, be found within the organization (between actions performed by individuals, teams and units), within a market (between actions taken by competing firms), and between interacting organizations in a network. On the activity level, actions in the market, in networks and within hierarchies can be linked to each other. Activities thereby comprise a multitude of different interdependencies and different governance structures that foster coordination. These interdependencies are dealt with by many different forms of agreements.

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One brief example can illustrate this. A Swedish firm, Permanova Lasersystems AB, develops fiber-optical laser systems together with a German firm, Rofin-Sinar Laser GmbH. The action of these two firms is at the center of the product development activity and their different actions are linked together in a network form, including actions taken by suppliers, research institutes and other organizations. However, transactions are also crucial for the activity. Components are bought on the market at the market price. Optical lenses, for example, are bought from an American firm providing the quality needed at the right price. Besides development in cooperation between the firms, both of them also perform in-house development as a part of their joint activities. While the former work is coordinated with respect to their joint activities, the latter is coordinated with respect to yet other activities performed by each company. Market transactions, and interaction in networks and within organizations all need to be included to frame an activity in order to understand how coordination through different agreements is achieved. If we agree on the coordinating function of agreements, we need to answer questions about how we come to agreements – how is agreement produced? How different and sometimes conflicting agreements and interests can coordinate one and the same activity is of special interest, as many different agreements are combined in an activity (Tomicic, 2001). Activities, since they are rooted in capable individuals’ actions, are subject to continuous negotiation, conflicts, intrigues and power struggles. Moreover, things can change over time so that earlier interests and beliefs or earlier actions can become meaningless or obsolete. What might, in retrospect, appear as a distinct activity is a result of actions, applied norms, continuous negotiation, beliefs and emotions combined and made sense of in a way that is neither completely random nor completely foreseeable (see discussion in Weick, 1979; Strati, 1998). With the concept of agreement we propose a tool for describing the coordinating of different actions into concerted human efforts or activities. The following definition of agreements satisfies our need for an open and generic qualifier: ‘An agreement is a mutual commitment between two or more individuals to follow the matter agreed upon.’ Agreements are always social and they are marked by a mutual commitment within the realm of the agreement. We can thus agree upon some legal details specified in a contract even though we do not share values with the other party to the contract. Whenever we discuss an agreement we need to specify its what, when and where: what does it specify and when and where is it valid? The last part of the definition underlines the need for an open definition to cover all possible forms of agreements, and it states that there is always an area that the mutual commitment covers.


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Agreement is often depicted as a formal decision among a group of people, being both outspoken and openly discussed. When we agree, we arrive at a conclusion that the different parties involved find right, good, agreeable, reasonable etc., and that they commit themselves to follow. We argue, though, that this leads to a restricted view of agreement. Many agreements are hidden, subconscious and taken for granted, and they are based on many foundations other than the legal. Sometimes these patterns are inherent in the technical outline of a given system (as in many production systems), and sometimes it takes a lot of human imagination to construct links. We therefore need a conceptualization of agreements rich enough to cover the whole spectrum of organizing principles. In the following we shall develop a typology for analyzing different components agreements. Important input to a discussion on coordination and agreement comes from neo-institutional organization theory, with its focus on isomorphism and institutional dynamics. Neo-institutional theory offers a powerful exploration of stabilizing forces in human interaction. This focus on stability has also been criticized, even though influential writers have tried to broaden the scope of institutional analysis to include change. Scott (1995) defines an institution as ‘cognitive, normative, and regulative structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behavior’. The discussion on foundations or pillars of institutions works as a starting-point and an important inspiration for our classification and description of different forms of agreements. We follow Scott’s description of the regulative pillar, but argue that the scope of the normative pillar is somewhat limited, and we prefer to label it moral to highlight the valuebase for human interaction. Scott’s discussion of pillars of institutions can also be criticized for its narrow focus on the cognitive pillar. The cognitive pillar is very much oriented towards a strict cognitive approach, with an interest in the internal representation of the external world, even though Scott explicitly refers to symbolism as a source of inspiration, where one relevant aspect is missing. While the cognitive pillar refers to the need for human beings to be able to represent the world in a coherent way, we need a category for dealing with man’s imaginative capacities. With this last addition we end up with four basic categories of agreements: ● ● ● ●

Regulative Moral Cognitive Imaginative

Before discussing the four categories we need to clarify that we deviate from Scott’s (1995) and DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) approach in two respects.

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First we have shifted the focus from the field level in these authors to an activity level. Keeping in mind the shift of level, we still find Scott’s characterizations useful for our purposes. Second, we apply a more active view on organizing than the neo-institutional view expressed in the following quotation: ‘Although constructed and maintained by individual actors, institutions assume the guise of an impersonal and objective reality’ (Scott, 1995: 34). We argue that the concept of agreement has a double edge to it: it simultaneously refers to stabilizing factors (many forms of agreement are socially accepted and codified in cultural beliefs and rituals) and to an active view on human organizing (the process of agreeing). With the deliberate use of rhetoric in our emerging grammar, we point to the crucial role of persuasion in human interaction. When we interact we seek closure, or, to paraphrase Chaim Perelman (1982), we want to gain the adherence of others. Rhetoric presupposes actors/groups of actors, acting on purposes more or less hidden, and interacting with others driven by their purposes. We further emphasize the political nature of organizing using rhetoric. ‘My main reason for this choice is that the exercise of power, in modern society, is increasingly achieved through ideology, and more particularly through the ideological workings of language’ (Fairclough, 1989: 3). The discussion on each of the four categories of agreements is based on a number of aspects that we have found useful to capture the essence of each. It should be noted, though, that we describe each category in a stylized way, in order to capture its archetypical character. In an empirical context it is usually more difficult to make clear-cut distinctions between agreements – there is often considerable overlap and cross-reference between our four theoretical categories. The description of each category starts with an outline of the basis for the agreement, and we claim that each category of agreement is rooted in some basic function of human interaction. The regulative agreement, for instance, is rooted in the need to regulate exchanges and the moral agreement is rooted in the value-base for human interaction. They further differ in terms of bases of power, where the imaginative agreement, as one example, is based on its emotional appeal. The different categories of agreements are also described in terms of typical outcomes and expressions found in each. The cognitive agreement, for instance, often searches for a consistency or shared understanding of how to represent the world, and a typical expression is a decision or a description of a certain subject matter. Regulative Agreements The sheer complexity of social behavior necessitates instruments that regulate/try to regulate individual acts. The regulative agreement is rooted in


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the need for human beings to formalize behavior and avoid arbitrariness in attempts at coordinating activities. Regulative agreements control exchanges between people. In its purest form the regulative agreement does this by enforcing sanctions/rewards. The binding nature of regulative agreements is a way of achieving a high degree of closure in the rhetorical construction. It is enforced by both the form and the content of the agreement. Closure is achieved by trying to state the preferred behavior as clearly as possible and also by following specified procedures for authorizing the agreement (written contracts, formal decisions and protocols). The physical signing of a regulative agreement is also often accompanied by rituals further enforcing the binding nature, by signing contracts, voting, or by referring to rules, standards and paragraphs. We find regulative agreements everywhere and not only in the strict legal form. It is important to note that we can use regulative agreements without the formal authority of courts, governments or other boards. The formal nature of regulative agreements is not dependent on an authorizing body per se, but can be found in informal settings as well. In political terms, asymmetric distribution of power between actors can, in fact, create regulative agreements. This doesn’t mean that formal bodies of authority are unimportant. On the contrary: governments, boards, officials and managers are very important in ‘legalizing’ such agreements. Examples of regulative agreements that function as coordinating mechanisms can be found in markets, networks and hierarchies. Economic theory in general and transaction cost theory in particular argue that price agreements control the exchange in the marketplace (Coase, 1937; Williamson, 1975). Volume supplied and demanded is, if simplified, a result of regulative price agreements. Basically, price is the coordinating mechanism determining both supply and demand. According to Williamson (1975), transaction costs determine company choice to purchase from actors in the market, or to integrate vertical actors into the hierarchy (i.e. in the organization). Regulative agreements also coordinate actions within hierarchies. Formal authority is what early organization theorists pointed to as the coordination mechanism within a bureaucracy or hierarchy (see Weber, 1968). The bureaucracy is supposed to have a unified leadership, a clear line of command, job descriptions and a clear distinction between levels in the hierarchy. A bureaucracy thus coordinates activities through a unified leadership that exercises formal authority, which the members of the organization adhere to. Regulative agreements are thereby established between the members of an organization and the organization. Organizations are, however, in later theory, considered to be open to their environments. This means that issues concerning the environment must be given their own

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place in the theory and that internal conditions of the organizations must be described differently (see Scott, 1992). The preconditions for the unified control system of the bureaucracy and the strong coordination through the division of labor, specialization and strict line of command have naturally eroded, while the organization is described as less rational and more cultural. In contrast to organization theory, network theory accounts for the openness of organizations and attempts to identify a coordinating mechanism between markets and hierarchies (Johansson and Mattsson, 1991). There are a number of different forms of contracted transactions or interactions that coordinate actions in networks (see Coase, 1937; Leblebici, 2000; Williamson, 1975; Williamson and Ouchi, 1981). Regulative agreements in the form of a contract with stipulated sanctions coordinate joint ventures, strategic alliances etc. Equity is another regulative agreement that coordinates inter-organizational relationships. Nagarajan and Mitchell (1998) argue that this form of agreement gives the owner control over an action and reduces the risk of opportunistic behavior. The Singh (1997) study, however, shows that alliances with other firms, which are more formal than social networks, only partially reduced risks of failure – especially for firms with more complex technologies. Long-term contracts involving joint investments and mutual adaptation also reduce company flexibility (see Tirole, 1988). Regulative agreements in markets, networks or organizations are aimed at producing compliance rather than conviction, and behavior rather than thought. The contract, for instance, does not get its strength because people firmly believe in the agreement, but rather because they find it more useful to conform to the contract than to break it. In that sense it can be argued that the role of rhetoric is less important, at least as a means for producing adherence. This point should not be overemphasized, though. It can still be argued that the image of a regulative agreement is a rhetorical construction in need of its own rhetorical expression, even though many regulative agreements are highly institutionalized. We can think of the form and rituals surrounding regulative agreement as a rhetorical construction of acceptable behavior. It can further be claimed that the regulative agreement, by its very nature, is reductionist in its striving to sanction acceptable behavior. In fact, the simpler the categories used, the stronger and easier is the agreement to understand. A contract, for instance, should preferably not be open to interpretation, and in that sense not open to individual arbitrariness. If we return to the product development example above, practical examples of regulative agreements can be given. Spectra Physics Group, an American laser manufacturer, acquired Permanova in 1994. A regulative


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agreement through equity thereby developed between Spectra Physics and Permanova. This agreement was reinforced when Spectra Physics tried to get Permanova and two other firms within the group to cooperate in the technological development of fiber optics. Permanova had to act in accordance with the owner’s wishes, whether it wanted to or not. However, Spectra Physics did not succeed in its efforts since the differences between the firms’ operations prevented the creation of a developmental network within the group and since none of the firms was eager to find new partners. Another example of a regulative agreement can be found in Permanova’s cooperation with Rofin-Sinar. This activity took place in a network-like form but regulative agreements were still important for the coordination of different actions. Formal legal agreements were made through the use of cross-wise patents of the developed products. Permanova had patents for some parts of the product whereas Rofin-Sinar patented other parts. Consequently, neither of the firms had proprietorship of the entire product, which reduced the risk of opportunistic behavior and increased the stability of the relationship. The two regulative agreements described cannot, however, be seen in isolation. They are related to each other and many other agreements were present in the coordinating of the product development activity that Permanova was involved in. We will therefore refer to this example again, later on in this chapter. Cognitive Agreements The cognitive agreement is based upon the advances in the cognitive sciences and especially individual psychology. As depicted by Scott (1995), the cognitive view of individuals focuses particularly on their internal representations of the external world, forming cognitive maps that help them orient themselves in the world. This implies a strong inclination to view the human mind as an information processor (Bower and Hilgard, 1981). The structure of the mind determines the result of the information processing and consequently of actions. It should be stated, however, that we are not arguing that cognitive psychology is a simple matter of ‘just’ depicting/copying the external world by rational information processes. Within social psychology, cognition is recognized as more than information processing in that it is socially structured and transmitted. It is rather a question of constructing the world in representational categories (see Jönsson’s, 1997 critique of Scott’s cognitive pillar). We ignore the question of how the information processing or constructing process develops, and focus on the outcome of these processes – a consistent view of a matter of fact – when we talk about cognitive agreement.

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The notion of cognitive agreement is a metaphorical description in the sense that we move beyond the functioning of the individual’s brain and focus on agreement between individuals, not in terms of sharing cognitive maps but rather sharing knowledge, experiences and descriptions. Graesser and Clarke (1980) describe these knowledge structures as a schema that guides individuals’ perceptions and interpretations. Galambos et al. (1986) use the concept of scripts to describe these knowledge structures. When knowledge structures are discussed it is commonly found that these structures build on repeated experiences and guide actions. The agreements that we call cognitive agreements develop among individuals who interact frequently with each other. Lorentzon (1985) argues that common ways of thinking among individuals develop when they interact. Interacting individuals agree upon a common grammar and action pattern through sharing observations and discussions (see Daft and Weick, 1984). This form of agreement specifies how individuals can come to share certain descriptions of the world. Agreements can range from simple facts that the train has just stopped at Stockholm Central to complicated scientific arguments building on a world of common definitions, methodologies and practices. Clearly, individuals need to agree upon certain aspects of the world they experience in order to coordinate their activities. Cognitive agreement focuses on the communicative aspects, how the collective, rhetorically, tries to create more consistent images of the world. In industry, Spender (1989) argues that industry recipes develop among firms that monitor each other and the performance is created through certain actions, where recipes for the most successful way of acting develop and coordinate the activities within an industry. The product development activity that Permanova was involved in also included cognitive agreements that defined and coordinated action. When Rofin-Sinar started to cooperate with Permanova, the former’s competitors worked on different solutions to make it possible to combine lasers and fiber optics. Most manufacturers invested in fiber-optical technology and developed the knowledge needed within the organization. Rofin-Sinar deviated from the common strategy within the industry by cooperating with Permanova instead of developing their own knowledge within the fiber area. Permanova had, at the time, a unique patent on the coupling system and extensive knowledge about laser applications. Permanova was a small company and therefore needed to cooperate with other firms to get access to knowledge about lasers and to the market. A reason for cooperating given by both firms was that they thereby gained access to each other’s already developed industrial infrastructure. Both actors based this cooperative relationship on a shared representation of reality – each needed access to each other’s technological skills. Even though the individual strategies


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and motives were different, they were, nevertheless, able to form a cognitive agreement that later on developed into a moral agreement. Another cognitive agreement between these firms was that their customers within the automobile industry consisted of a few large and powerful firms such as Volvo and Volkswagen, and that these firms, to a large extent, could determine with whom the firms should interact and from which firm to buy lasers, fiber, optic, robots, etc. Permanova’s cooperation with Rofin-Sinar was therefore sometimes inconsistent with its cooperation with other actors in the value net dictated by the car manufacturers. Permanova has been involved, for example, in the development of a production system for Volvo’s manufacture of automobiles, and also in tests of different equipment for Volkswagen. Volvo chose to install a Rofin-Sinar laser and Permanova’s fiber optics for one production line, but a Trumph laser was chosen for a production-line investment two years later. Volkswagen wanted Permanova to test the equipment in its production line and decided that the equipment should be tested with a Haas laser instead of a Rofin-Sinar laser. This implies that Permanova has been forced by its customers to cooperate and deliver fiber-optic systems or parts of the system to Rofin-Sinar’s competitors, which threatens the moral agreements between the two firms. However, the cognitive agreement about the power of customers saved the moral agreement. They have searched for solutions to make it possible to sustain the moral commitment to each other, and have developed informal or implicit rules about how to inform each other and how to interact with other firms in the value net. The cognitive agreement between Permanova and Rofin-Sinar was not the only cognitive agreement affecting the interaction. A cognitive agreement also existed between car manufacturers about how to contract other firms. Two different arguments are given by the car producers for the exchange of suppliers of equipment and test partners over time. First, it is argued that different firms lead the development of lasers at different times, and it is important to choose the leader of the time for an investment or a test. Second, it is important to play one supplier off against others in order to assure that there are plenty of competing alternative suppliers, and continuously to compare different alternatives. Moral Agreements Whereas the regulative agreement focuses mainly on formal issues, avoiding inconsistencies by specifying the relevant aspects of the agreement, the moral agreement focuses more on the value-based beliefs giving agreements strength and direction. We prefer to use ‘moral’ rather than ‘normative’ (which is the term Scott uses) to emphasize the value-base for agreement.

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Moral agreement is most often hard, if not impossible, to regulate in more formal terms. Agreeing upon moral issues is by its very nature an informal social process. With its roots in sharing values, the moral agreement draws its power from being perceived as legitimate, from being apprehended as right or wrong, good or bad. Moral agreements are behavioral norms that impact actions (Bennis and Nannus, 1997) or normative standards for actions (Trevino, 1986; Kelly and Dorsch, 1991). Moral agreements must be seen as both evaluative (Zajonc and Markus, 1985) and embedded in interactive contexts. The agreement involves a positive or negative evaluation that in simplified terms distinguishes right from wrong, good from bad, acceptable from unacceptable etc., and tries to create standards for acceptable behavior. In line with Berg’s (1979) reasoning about emotions, we argue that moral agreements are collectively produced moral ties between actors, charged with ideas about collective guiding activities as well as individual action. Compared to the regulative agreement, the moral agreement focuses less on compliance as the preferred outcome. In fact, compliance is a poor indicator of a moral agreement. The moral agreement gets its strength from individuals sharing the value, believing in the same moral judgments. And even though the end results are behavioral compliance, the key component is the adherence to the moral judgment. In the literature on moral judgments in negotiations, the violation of norms is argued to lead to sanctions in the form of social disapproval (Whyte, 1956; Aquino, 1998). In rhetorical terms the moral agreement uses ethos (trust) as its main tool for persuasion. This means that the ‘causality’ between the content of the agreement and a subsequent behavioral adjustment on the part of the individual is not as clearcut as in the regulative agreement, where the link is often built into the contract or formal agreement. The moral agreement adds an important aspect to the regulative agreement by explicitly noting that individuals act upon values that go beyond the simple regulative agreements that can be specified in contracts and formal decisions. Moral agreements thereby offer more room for flexibility than regulative agreements and are thereby less reductionistic. Liebeskind et al. (1996) argue that boundary-spanning social networks not built on equity relationships increase flexibility and learning. The moral agreements derive their strength from commitment to the agreement and from being perceived as legitimate. If we go back to the product development activity that Permanova Lasersystems AB was involved in, we find moral agreements, besides the regulative agreements already described. The German manufacturer of laser sources, Rofin-Sinar Laser GmbH, started to develop lasers equipped with fiber optics in cooperation with Permanova, the Swedish manufacturer. The


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cooperation concerned core technology of strategic importance for both firms, which implies that the interdependency between the firms was high. The agreement to cooperate gradually deepened over time and came to assume the form of a moral agreement, with a mutual feeling of obligation and loyalty between the two parties. The coordination of personal relations and trust between individuals were of importance for the cooperation. Engineers from the two firms needed to work closely together. Permanova had previously functioned as an agent for Rofin-Sinar’s lasers, which meant that the two companies had some knowledge about each other through earlier regulative agreements. To facilitate the desired cooperation, a representative from Permanova who had been most central in the development of the coupling system spent half a year at Rofin-Sinar working on the joint development. During this time he came to know engineers at Rofin-Sinar personally, which was of importance for the relationship and communication in the future. Engineers from the two firms also traveled and met each other face to face several times. Over time the two firms developed informal or implicit rules about how to interact with each other and with others in the value net. Imaginative Agreements The cognitive analysis of human behavior can be criticized for its strict focus on a representational ontology, leaving out the ‘formative’ aspects of the human nature. The cognitive assumption of a direct link between a thinking subject and an objective, external world, has been heavily criticized from a number of different perspectives, with perhaps the fiercest attack coming from postmodernist psychologists such as Gergen and Gergen (2000) and Bruner (1990). With the categorization of moral agreements made above, we clearly need concepts to describe other aspects of how we apprehend the world and form agreements. We have used the term imaginative agreements to describe the innovative and transcending capacities of human beings, their ability to go beyond the obvious and clearly stated. When we agree, we do not just base our agreements upon the legal, legitimate and analytical powers of the first three forms of agreement. We need a language for understanding agreements based on aesthetic judgments. The complication (and inherent value) in the last form of agreement is that it is continuous and abstract. Regulative and moral agreements are to a large extent discrete, that is, formulated in simple, and often dichotomous, terms, whereas the imaginative agreement is based on storytelling and a richer description using many categories. In much the same way the cognitive agreement is based on a direct, representational view of the individual’s

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orientation in the world, whereas the imaginative agreement focuses on the understanding of the world in more metaphorical terms. Aesthetics as a key component of the imaginative agreement shifts our attention to how we describe, or rather construct, the world using categories such as beautiful or ugly, interesting or boring, etc. This last form of agreement is important in capturing the need for individuals to understand a world that is abstract, complex and continuously changing. The postmodernist interest in phenomena such as metaphors, narratives, rhetoric and aesthetics is a clear signal that we have a much richer repertoire of agreements than the first three forms envision. In rhetorical terms the imaginative agreements involve pathos, or feelings. In fact, the imaginative agreement uses emotional categories to build the agreement. As argued above, aesthetic categories are perhaps most prominent in building imaginative agreements, but it is of course possible to think of other, emotionally laden, categories beside aesthetic. The characterizations of the four categories of agreements are summarized in Table 6.1, capturing their essence in six different dimensions. The first dimension captures the key element in the different agreements; for instance, the regulative agreement is rooted in the exchange between two parties (say in the form of a written contract). Each category of agreement is then connected to a certain ‘sphere’ of influence dominating each form. The regulative agreement is, for instance, closely connected to a legal form Table 6.1

A typology of agreements Regulative agreement

Cognitive agreement

Moral agreement

Imaginative agreement

Rooted in

Exchange/ reduction

Representation

Value-base

Transcendence

Power

Legal

Analytical

Legitimate

Emotional

Preferred outcome (example)

Compliance

Consistency

Adherence to values

Adherence to images

Outcome with no agreement (example)

Dispute Dissatisfaction

Confusion

Legitimacy Crisis Moral dispute

Lack of commitment

Expression (example)

Contract

Decisions

Valuejudgments

Symbols and expressions

Dichotomy (example)

Useful/ Useless

True/False

Right/ wrong

Beautiful/ ugly


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of power. Each category of agreement tends to produce/favor certain outcomes, ranging from a focus on compliance in the regulative agreement to a focus on adherence in the moral and imaginative agreements. The agreements can furthermore be developed by asking what happens if an agreement is not reached. Each category of agreement tends to trigger different reactions to disagreement (or absence of agreement, to stress that it does not have to be a conflict). There is also a certain ‘symbolism’ connected to each form of agreement, where, for instance, regulative agreements produce written evidence in the forms of contracts, rules and standards, in comparison to the more abstract expressions of the imaginative agreements. Table 6.1 concludes with a set of dichotomies commonly found in each category. Table 6.1 summarizes the preceding discussion on four categories of agreements, with examples of dimensions to use to depict them. It is empirically tested on a number of cases presented in this book, even though the dimensions are not analytically exhaustive, and it should be read as exemplifying the categories. One major problem with any attempt to categorize a complex empirical field is how to classify empirical observations in the different analytical dimensions. In many cases the examples do not fit neatly in just one of the dimensions. Indeed, many agreements get their strength from combining two or more categories. Think, for instance, of a regulative agreement with a strong moral underpinning, or an experience-based, cognitive agreement expressed and legitimized by a regulative agreement. There is also a complex interplay between the four categories of agreement, making it less important to be able to classify a single agreement in unambiguous terms. It should also be mentioned that an agreement can be differently understood by the parties involved, who may stress different aspects of it even though they basically conform to it. In hermeneutic terms the challenge of agreement is to establish a bridge between different horizons of understanding (Gadamer, 1975), to create a common ground for understanding and acting together, and perhaps misunderstanding is as common as understanding. In this connection we can also mention the situation where one actor acts upon what he believes is an agreement. As we shall argue below, the analysis of agreement must be contextualized. We need to understand the specific time and place of a relation where an agreement is formed. We also need to understand the political positions and interests of the parties involved and how these link to rhetoric. Table 6.2 is a generic tool to analyze community building with agreements. We shall now turn back to the two cases of Cisco/Qeyton and Intel/PlanetLab and use the typology to further analyze the community building. Table 6.2 highlights a number of components in the agreements we touched upon earlier in this chapter. A more thorough analysis would

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Table 6.2 Agreement building in the Cisco/Qeyton and Intel/PlanetLab cases

Regulative Cognitive

Moral Imaginative

Cisco/Qeyton

Intel/PlanetLab

Due diligence and formal contract Good match from the perspective of Cisco

A formalized decision process and formal rules of conduct Agreements on mutual benefits for all parties involved A shared belief in open source ideas High metaphorical content and rich in imagination

Trust from the perspective of the Qeyton people Few examples

show that there are many different agreements in play over time, and they would interact in a complex way (for a further analysis of this, see the concluding section of the chapter); the examples given in the table only hint at this complexity. They nevertheless suffice to show the usefulness of the agreement concept and the four categories of agreements. It is obvious from Table 6.2 that the two cases are very different in how they manage to build agreement. It seems as if the Cisco/Qeyton case is driven very much by the different actors’ self-interest, and the set of moral and cognitive elements coincided and enabled a fairly smooth merger process. As long as the Qeyton people kept a sense of trust in Cisco and as long as the department in Sweden was productive according to the overall strategic planning of Cisco, the agreement could be made. The agreements in the Intel/PlanetLab case are different in that they rely much more on shared moral, cognitive and imaginative elements. The loosely coupled form of organizing seems to require a different kind of agreement compared to the integrated form, one that comes closer to the ideal of classical rhetoric – creating a meeting among free men.

THE WORKING OF AGREEMENTS – BUILDING STABLE CONSTRUCTS The four categories of agreements give us the tools to discuss and understand the basic building-blocks of agreements: they make up the content of agreements and illustrate the complexity involved in coordinating activities in time and space. The discussion so far might give the impression that people are constantly involved in negotiations to agree upon small and


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Table 6.3 Examples of agreements exemplifying hierarchy and bureaucracy Regulative agreements

Formally sanctioned coordinating tools: • Rules and regulations • Employment contracts

Cognitive agreements

Shared experience and knowledge: • Standard operating procedures

Moral agreements

Culturally established norms: • Asymmetric distribution of power

Imaginative agreements

Cultural artifacts: • Status symbols expressing the hierarchic relations

large matters. But, as argued by institutional theory, we often rely on agreements ‘already in place’, that is, institutionalized patterns of understandings that prescribe behavior and that we tend to take for granted (March and Olsen, 1989). It can thus be claimed that the coordination of activities is simplified by constructs that are already established and on which we can draw. Many activities are organized in an archetypical way where individual actions are linked to a collective activity, leaving little scope for the individual. Put in our terminology, the imagined communities that are driving many activities forward are part of a historically situated heritage. We thus share the view from activity theory that there is a dynamic interplay between individual (subject) and activity (Engeström et al., 1999). The hierarchic and bureaucratic organization is one established thoughtfigure that provides us with some assistance in coordinating activities. The hierarchy/bureaucracy can be described and understood in terms of agreements that people share and that, retroductively, construct the hierarchic/bureaucratic organization. By agreeing on certain principles and ideas people can act as if there is something like a hierarchy, and this connection between agreement and action justifies the ontological claim that hierarchies and bureaucracies in fact exist. The general frame of reference, with its four basic groups of agreements, is not detailed enough to capture the wealth of agreements involved in any attempt at organizing activities. Obviously, each of the four groups can take on many forms and be expressed in numerous ways. Table 6.3 exemplifies a number of agreements in each category that are often connected to the hierarchic and bureaucratic mode of organizing, some of which are highly institutionalized and taken for granted by the very actors that adhere to the agreements.

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The hiearchic/bureaucratic organization draws, for instance, on a number of regulative agreements that formally sanction certain coordinating tools, e.g. rules and regulations. Any such organization also depends on contracts and established arenas and forms for decision making. The hierarchy is also based on a moral assumption that people have different rights in the context of the hierarchy in a specified company; that is, people take on and accept different roles in the hierarchy. Among the many cognitive agreements related to the notion of hierarchy/bureaucracy, we find standardized procedures and processes that are considered useful and effective. Some of these cognitive agreements are institutionalized and codified in university education and accreditation by professional associations. Finally, the hierarchy/bureaucracy depends on cultural artifacts that express its underlying rationale, where symbols, for instance, are used to express the asymmetric distribution of power (status symbols). These few examples concerning the hierarchy and bureaucracy suffice to show that a very elaborate cultural net can be woven, with intricate relations between the four forms of agreements. The notion of constructing is important, however. It was claimed in Chapter 2 that organizations are peculiar creatures, and that it takes a great deal of human imagination to develop the constructs that are acted on (retroductively). This is an insight shared with a number of fields, including social constructionism (Sjöstrand et al., 2001), cultural theory (Alvesson, 2002; Martin, 2002), rhetoric (Watson, 1995), narrative theory (Czarniawska, 2001), and metaphor analysis (Palmer and Dunford, 1996). When constructing the principles of organizing, abstract ideas are joined with highly concrete manifestations. The abstract idea of a hierarchy spelling out different rights (asymmetric distribution of power) is expressed in numerous ways, by artifacts (size and location of high executives’ offices), rituals (board meetings and negotiations with trade unions) and corporate story-telling. The ability to move between the ideational and material levels constitutes important elements in any leader’s toolbox. And there is no question about it – it is a matter of rhetorical skill. It can then be argued that different ways of organizing require different constructions, different agreements to coordinate activities. Imagine a knowledge-intensive, project-based organization, geographically dispersed and with few formal hierarchic levels. As in Table 6.3 above, this form can be illustrated with a number of agreements that could be expected in that type of organization (Table 6.4). Any form of organizing is dependent on regulative agreements, and the project-based structure is no exception to this. A number of examples of formally sanctioned coordinating tools can be found, such as contracts with customers and labor legislation. The general legal framework for companies


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Table 6.4 Examples of agreements filling a project-based structure with content Regulative agreements

Formally sanctioned coordinating tools: • Contracts with the customer • Labor legislation

Cognitive agreements

Shared experience and knowledge: • Schedules • Product specifications

Moral agreements

Culturally established norms: • High pay means high commitment • We expect you to work overtime

Imaginative agreements

Cultural artifacts: • Flexible office space • Corporate visions

is no different for the project-based compared to the hierarchic/bureaucratic organization. Internally, however, the project-based organization relies less on formal tools to coordinate activities. The typical knowledge-intensive company is characterized by a number of moral agreements that, for instance, guide what could be expected from employees. It seems that a work ethic can develop in this type of organization to guide the behavior and expectations of the employees. The project-based structure is also characterized by an established toolbox, where, for instance, all the large professional organizations in the field of project management certify project managers. Examples of cultural artifacts forming imaginative agreements are, for instance, flexible ways of organizing office spaces and rhetorical expressions of corporate visions. From these two examples, it is obvious that different forms of organizing need to be constructed, and that agreements play a crucial role in these constructions. From a managerial point of view, this assertion carries with it a number of challenges. Any abstract construct – a virtual corporation, a network organization or a multidivisional form – must be translated into a large number of concrete agreements, a set of agreed-upon ideas and actions. In this process of translation it is a mistake to focus just on the ready constructs, whether a specific structural form (ABB was a matrix under the Barnevik regime and GM is a multidivisional form) or a description of certain aspects of the organization (SAS Institute is highly decentralized and Hilti is a communicative organization). Some constructs are stable enough, but the question arises under what circumstances a set of agreements is overthrown. More fundamental questions

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need to be asked concerning both the processes of developing the constructs and the processes of upholding and subsequently tearing them down. Going back to Tables 6.3 and 6.4, it can be asked how people come to share these agreements. It is also the case that agreements can take different forms, and coordinated activities can be the result of varying degrees of commitment to certain agreements. The different interactions between the four groups of agreements can produce a very large number of possible outcomes. A further factor that complicates the understanding of agreement formation is the political game involved, with different actors competing for attention and promoting different viewpoints. It is obviously a question of who sends a message to whom, and with what underlying motives. A political, or rhetorical perspective, as it was labeled in Chapter 4, puts the focus on how different actors try to influence others, and the tools and tactics they use.

CONTEXTUALIZING AGREEMENTS It is obvious that agreements can take many forms, and not all agreements are equally important in organizing activities. This section discusses factors that can explain the possible success of a set of agreements. A number of observations can be made concerning the actual working of agreements and the need for a contextual understanding of them. The first, and perhaps most obvious, observation states that agreements do not work alone; they come in complexes. This works in two different ways. First, distinct agreements can relate to other distinct agreements to the mutual benefit of both. Second, a single agreement can draw on more than one of the four forms. An agreement can develop even though different actors adhere to different elements of it, as was shown in the Cisco/Qeyton case above. There are usually strong complementarities between agreements/ elements of agreements that can mutually support the organizing of an activity. For example, we have noticed that there are strong complementarities between the regulative and moral elements, where the moral underpinning of a regulative agreement can increase the probability of successful adherence. A set of agreements that is not only perceived to be advantageous, in the calculative sense of a regulative agreement, but also right and good in the moral sense, is potentially more powerful than a regulative agreement without a moral underpinning. The complementarities argument leads us to emphasize sets of agreements or elements of agreements rather than the single, isolated agreement. The set of agreements involved in activities, even simple ones, shows complementarities in two dimensions – space and time. In the space dimension, different agreements/elements of


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agreements relate to each other to support or counteract an activity. In the time dimension, previous agreements relate to subsequent ones. In the Cisco/Qeyton and Intel/PlanetLab cases a number of observations can be made concerning the complementarities. The Cisco/Qeyton case is marked by the asymmetric relation between Cisco and the Qeyton people, and this creates a situation where the agreement was built on different elements – for the Qeyton people the agreement was primarily a question of trust (moral) and calculated interests (cognitive), whereas Cisco was driven more by a global logic concerning the usefulness of Qeyton (cognitive). For a period of two years these elements supported the agreement, but the decision to close down the department in Stockholm brought the agreement to an end. Compared to the Cisco/Qeyton case, the Intel/PlanetLab is marked by a wider set of elements working together to support an agreement. The agreement set in this case draws its strength from three major elements. It is based on a moral agreement concerning the belief in the open source movement. It is furthermore based on the imaginative ideas concerning the future of PlanetLab – eventually a new foundation for the Internet. The moral and imaginative elements are also supported by belief in the mutual benefits of being a part of PlanetLab. The complementarities and dependencies in a set of agreements lead us to a second observation; agreements differ in terms of their reach and endurance. Some agreements are very private, or local, in character and they only reach a few people, with the smallest involving only two. Other agreements have a global reach and transcend both space and time. With the advances in information technology, telecommunication and other related technology areas, global agreements have grown more common. The endurance of an agreement captures its lifespan, ranging from agreements that are instantly consumed and disposed of to agreements that are highly institutionalized and have been in existence for a long time. Combining reach and endurance, we arrive at Figure 6.1. In the first square we find agreements that, typically, only concern a few people and they make an agreement to coordinate a well-specified interaction. Two actors can, for instance, agree upon who should meet with the important customer this afternoon. The agreement, in this case, is very local and concerns only three people (including the customer), and is only valid for this event. Even though this category is restricted in both reach and endurance, it is very important. In organizing complex nets of activities, people need to meet on a daily basis in order to reach such agreements. In fact, the micro level of organizing is filled with such local and instant agreements. In terms of the classification into four forms of agreement, we note that the example above would, in many cases, be based on a cognitive agreement, with a mutual understanding of who does what. It can be further strenghtened if the agreement also draws on a moral basis, for

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Local agreements

Global agreements

Instant agreements

1

2

Institutionalized agreements

3

4

Figure 6.1

The reach and endurance of agreements

instance in terms of finding a fair distribution of work between the two actors. In the second square, we find agreements that affect many people but are still instant, that is, formed for a specified occasion. Think of a TV commercial for MacDonalds that offers a special price on the new MacTurkey until the end of the month. The commercial is probably broadcast in a number of countries but the short-term agreement only lasts as long as the offer in the commercial. It might, of course, have more longterm effects, in terms of building brand loyalty and affection, but we are only concerned with the direct agreement based on the advertisement. A MacDonalds commercial often involves all four forms of agreement, where the imaginative form is not least prevalent. The third square is a local agreement, but here the endurance is higher and is institutionalized. Think of an agreement between two individuals that forms the basis for their interaction over a number of years. The typical example of this is the marriage between two individuals – local but enduring. And even if the marriage is a very special form of agreement, with a strong moral underpinning, we find numerous examples of such agreements in business life. The trust-based relations that grew over time between Permanova and Rofin-Sinar (as described above) definitely fall into this category. The final square describes an agreement that is global in reach and institutionalized. This is the typical situation described by neo-institutional theory, with the agreement being shared by a large number of people and lasting for a long time. Any society is highly dependent on such agreements


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being established and followed. Moral, regulative and cognitive pillars of the legal framework are an example of this. Even though new laws are passed on a daily basis, the founding pillars of the framework are often very stable and mutually accepted by the members of that society. The discussion on reach and endurance of agreements can be connected to the discussion on coordinating activities in space and time. The reach of an agreement corresponds to the space dimensions as described in Chapter 2, and endurance corresponds to the time dimension. It is important to note that we discuss our four forms in relation to the activity-based view we established in Chapter 2, and the reach and endurance categories explicitly relate to this view. Turning now to our two cases, the question is where they should be placed in Figure 6.1. A crucial difference between the Cisco/Qeyton case and the Intel/PlanetLab case is the reach of the agreement. The agreement between Cisco and Qeyton was clearly local – it was mainly a concern of the people actually involved in the acquisition, and once Cisco shifted its interest away from Qeyton the agreement was broken. In the Intel/PlanetLab case the aim was to form a truly global community, and even though there is a hard core in Intel, the agreement transcends this small group of scientists. In both cases the endurance is fairly short, but not instant. In both cases the process takes a couple of years, without in either case reaching the level of being institutionalized. There are, in the Cisco/Qeyton case, some elements of ‘this-is-how-we-do-it’, at least when it comes to the merger/acquisition procedures in Cisco – a formalized process based on many years’ experience. In line with the discussion on rhetoric in Chapter 4, we further note that agreements can differ in terms of their intensity, with some agreements displaying a higher rhetorical energy than others. The endurance category discussed above is, in fact, neutral when it comes to the intensity of the agreement. The fact that an agreement lasts for a long time does not necessarily mean that it is more intensive than an instant one. Why, then, is intensity an important dimension? One reason has to do with the problem of gaining people’s commitment to an activity. A higher intensity of an agreement can, potentially, raise the commitment, which connects to our discussion on rhetoric in Chapter 4. In the Cisco/Qeyton case the intensity was very high when the deal was closed between the two firms. In our interviews in Stockholm (done at the beginning of 2002), we saw that the agreement was very much alive. There was a firm belief that the Stockholm unit was prioritized by Cisco and that they formed an important part of Cisco’s global networked model. The intensity, however, was necessarily lower after the acquisition. In the Intel/PlanetLab case we find a more mixed story. On the one hand PlanetLab, forming a global ambition, is involved on an abstract level

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Table 6.5


Summarizing the four contextual factors

Complementarities Reach Endurance Intensity

Related agreements Global Institutionalized High rhetorical energy

Unrelated agreements Local Instant Low rhetorical energy

marked by a low-interaction setting. On the other hand, the rhetoric concerning PlanetLab vision is very much alive and shows high rhetorical intensity. This case reveals that two entities can build a high-intensity agreement without necessarily being in contact with each other. And maybe this is the very core of our imagined community argument – it enables us to transcend the boundaries of space and time, and organize in/for a boundary-less world. We now have four contextual factors that help us understand the real complexities in organizing activities, and the impact of agreements. Complementarities, reach, endurance and intensity all combine to show that agreements must be understood as being related to each other and to the actors involved in them. Table 6.5 summarizes the four contextual factors and presents them in a stylized fashion as four dichotomies, which, of course, is an oversimplification. In this section we have so far only discussed the ‘positive’ aspects of agreements, that is, when they support the performance of an activity. But a discussion of organizing would not be complete without considering the case of disorganized activities. Agreements are instrumental in two ways in producing disorganizing. In the first instance we find agreements that change a prevalent agreement/set of agreements, a phenomenon we might label counter-agreements. The outcome of this ‘opposing’ agreement can certainly be positive, even though it acts to overthrow an existing order. A second instance is when there is an open conflict or lack of agreement that may hinder the effective continuation of the activitity. Any activity is characterized by a set of agreements that change over time as the activity proceeds. It is inevitable that there will be lack of agreement at least in some parts of the activity – people do not agree to everything all the time. In Table 6.1, the fourth row highlights some of the direct consequences or outcomes of disagreement. Lack of agreement in the four categories produces very different outcomes and each is important in understanding the complete game of agreement formation. A highly relevant question, then, is when, and under what circumstances, the lack of agreement reaches such proportions that it is detrimental to the activity.

7. The activity–community model of organizing BRINGING THINGS TOGETHER The organizing of activities in time and space takes very complex forms, as do the tools and measurements for coordination. To analyze the core and essence of organizing we have taken two parallel routes. The first, outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, defined the basic building-blocks of organizing processes – activities – and how they are situated in the time/space dimension. Organizing, in the first sense, can thus be characterized as deliberate attempts at coordinating activities in space and time. We have used the four forms of coordination, capturing four fundamentally different activity situations, to explain organizing in this sense. This formal framework is theoretically derived, but we have found it very useful for describing and understanding empirical examples. At the same time it is obvious to us that the coordination types are not enough to capture the complexity and variety of how activities are organized. This leaves us with the second route, outlined in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, which showed how agreements on action are formed based on underlying identity and influence processes. This is the basis of what we have labeled communities. The language of communities is somewhat different from the framework of Chapters 2 and 3, in the sense that we don’t arrive at a number of specific types or forms of communities, even though Chapter 6 specified four basic forms of agreements. The two chapters on influence and identity present us rather with two basic perspectives for understanding the community dimension of organizing. Activities and communities provide essential insights into the nature of organizing processes from two different angles. The first one defines what is done, where and when (activities), and the second describes how actions are kept together and made coherent and meaningful (community) to the people involved. Activities and communities, and the underlying concepts and frameworks that have been discussed at length in previous chapters, make up the two fundamental concepts in the new grammar of organizing. It should be noted, again, these concepts are not developed based on traditional management or organizational structure theory or concepts 139

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therein. Nevertheless, we have used examples and illustrations from the corporate world throughout the book to emphasize our points. Even though this might strike the reader as illogical, it is not. Formulating a new grammar of organizing is, in the end, a quest to re-establish the foundations on which organized life is built. Thus, having provided the fundamental concepts of activities and communities, this chapter will take the analysis one step further by combining our notions into a comprehensive analysis of the management situation at the heart of the new grammar of organizing. The new grammar is not based on the narrow preconceptions of time and space provided by legal organizational structures; nor is it built on naïve beliefs in the importance of the ‘great charismatic leader’ of the corporation. It is time to bring things together and make statements of relevance for management practices and managers! The first step is taken in this chapter, and it consists of combining the activity and community concepts into a coherent framework – the activity–community (A–C) model of organizing. The second step is to discuss the concrete managerial implications, or challenges, that are inherent in the A–C model, and this is done in the concluding chapter.

FORMING ACTIVITY COMMUNITIES As discussed in the previous chapters on influence and identity, political and cultural processes simultaneously pull people together and tear them apart. The ultimate aim of any attempt at influencing others is to gain adherence for your views, but the net result may very well be highly politicized processes with incompatible interpretations and even open conflict. With identity the ultimate aim is to create belongingness, but the result can likewise be multiplicity, changing and even irreconcilable identities. We can think of these as tensions that always have to be dealt with in organizing. The issue raised in Chapter 6 was how to deal with the inherent tensions in organizing, appreciating the insights gained from the discussions on influence and identity in Chapters 4 and 5. We were looking for a mechanism, beyond the discussion on coordination in Chapter 3, that could help us understand and deal with these tensions. Despite the abundance of political and cultural processes that ‘destabilize’ relations between people, agreements were introduced as a factor ‘counterbalancing’ destabilizing forces. Counterbalancing through agreements was shown to be easily achieved when processes of influence and identity harmonize, when influence attempts are well received and people adhere, and when a sense of belongingness is created. But perhaps more interesting is that agreements provide insight into all the instances in which people are able to act in a coordinated

The activity–community model

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way even though the processes of influence and identity are pulling them in many different directions. Agreements, thus, are the glue of organizing, closely related to the activities being performed. Agreements, and the relation between agreements and the underlying influence and identity processes, shape the landscape in which activities are performed. The basis for an agreement is not necessarily informed and independent decisions taken by individuals. As has been pointed out several times, a number of reasons may contribute to the creation of an agreement. Agreements can emerge from a desire to belong to a certain group or from a heavily regulated environment where no options are available. Agreements are not isolated to a certain person or a single activity. They are linked to each other and have a specific reach, endurance and intensity. The contextual dependency of agreements was briefly introduced in Chapter 6; here we will take this argument further by defining the contextualization of agreements in terms of a community. ‘Communities of practice’ is a conceptual framework where similar arguments as those we have presented are used to analyze the interdependence between, for example, identity, meaning and work. Wenger (1998) points out that communities of practice are everywhere and that everybody belongs to a number of communities: in their families, workplaces and schools, and while engaging in hobbies or sports. Communities of practice is referred to as a mid-level concept: it is neither a local and narrow account of daily activities, nor an aggregate with an abstract history attached to it. In other words, neither the close account of a conversation, a meeting or a detailed description of a work process nor an analysis of a country, an organization or a profession is sufficient to define such a community. But, according to Wenger, the presence of mutual engagement, a negotiated enterprise and a repertoire of negotiable resources forms a community of practice. A community of practice can thus be formed, and analyzed, around a certain subgroup in an office belonging to the same profession, using the same tools for their job and having a tendency to support each others’ interpretations of the world. Joint and mutual actions are needed to uphold the community. The knowledge domain is an important defining feature of a community of practice. Wenger et al. (2002) point out that a domain is what brings people together: it defines the issues and is defined by the knowledge content of the community. The practice refers to the framework used, its ideas, styles etc., that are more specific in terms of things that are done and how they are conducted. Communities of practice are not the same as functional departments, units or project teams; neither are they the same as interest groups, neighborhood communities or networks. Communities of practice are held together by the shared knowledge, the people involved and

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the common practices used. In more profound terms such communities are held together by a passion for a subject and the ongoing interaction. It can be a street gang, a number of engineers working on a joint product or a group of artists with a common agenda. Communities of practice are essential for learning processes and are needed to foster knowledge development. Thus the community concept is an important part of an organization’s development as well as for knowledge management systems (Wenger, 1998), and it can be cultivated, developed and kept effective through different management measures, e.g. providing platforms for knowledge development in the organization (Büchel and Raub, 2002; Wenger et al., 2002). This holds true even though participants in communites of practice are self-selected and the community is self-regulated. Following the arguments above is the notion that knowledge also tends to leak more or less easily (Bengtsson and Eriksson, 2002) between different communities. Thus, in the long run corporate effectiveness is not only dependent on the communities for knowledge development. How different communities communicate or relate to each other (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Dougherty, 2001) over time and how well an organization takes care of the potential in existing communities of practice is also crucial. So far we have shown that communities can be of different types. Sometimes a community is a quite robust and a mostly local phenomenon with a clear knowledge base and simple relations attached to it while, in other cases, it can be a complex web of relations where the knowledge is vague and the shared practices are variable. The community concept can serve as a contextual concept to which agreements, as discussed in previous chapters, can be attached. Agreements serve as a lubricant to facilitate coordinated action, community creation and maintenance. Thus we would like to claim that different types of communities are built by different combinations of agreements. However, the four categories of agreements outlined in Chapter 6 also include a number of aspects of influence and identity, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Consequently, if we can link agreements to communities, we are also using identity and influence arguments to identify them. Figure 7.1 shows the connections between the concepts. In many ways the concepts used to introduce and develop the influence and identity perspectives are closely connected to the different components in agreements. The most obvious connections are the two first dimensions in Table 6.1 – the roots of the four components in agreements and the different forms of power usually found in each of them. We argue that identity processes are differently shaped depending on whether they are rooted in exchange, representation, value-base or transcendence. It is claimed that

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Reflexive identity processes

Calculative identity processes

Exchange

Representation

Value-base

Transcendence

REGULATIVE

COGNITIVE

MORAL

IMAGINATIVE

Legal

Analytical

Legtimate

Compliance-based influence processes

Emotional

Adherence-based influence processes

Figure 7.1 Types of influence and identity, and corresponding agreement categories the identity process, in the context of organizing, will be different depending on which agreement component is predominant. With exchange and representation as the major roots of agreement, the corresponding identity process will be based on regulative and cognitive components, and we refer to this as a calculative identity process. In the case of agreements rooted in value-base and transcendence we envision something we call a reflexive identity process. In much the same way we can see different influence forms and tactics depending on the form of power in each category (legal, legitimate, analytical and emotional). A major message from Chapter 4 was the clear movement towards forms of influence inspired by the classical rhetorical emphasis on mutual respect and acceptance, what we refered to as adherence-based influence processes. This would be very much in line with the legitimate and emotional power inherent in the moral and imaginative components of agreements. To the left of Figure 7.1 we find compliance-based influence processes, and they are accordingly based on legal and analytical forms of power. The discussion has so far been particularistic, emphasizing the components in a single agreement. We are now, however, more interested in how agreements are integrated and how communities are shaped. With the basis in a single activity we can observe patterns of agreements that create a more elaborate form of organizing. They, in a sense, create the foundation for building communities. Figure 7.1 illustrates how the community building/creation

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is affected by the relative weight of the four components of agreements. The basic idea is that communities that are firmly rooted on the right of the figure are very different from communities founded on the left. Based on our empirical studies, it seems as if organizing usually lays emphasis on a specific category of agreements, which locates them somewhere in the figure. It should be stressed that this is an archetypical reasoning; in real life this is rather a continuum in which a specific organizing process can be located between categories and, for instance, share characteristics from both ends of the continuum. To the left of the figure we find communities that rely primarily on the regulative and cognitive forms of agreements. If we link this to our discussions on identity and influence, we can describe the identity processes as calculative and the influence processes as compliance-based. To the right of the figure we find communities that lean more toward moral and imaginative agreements, and the corresponding identity and influence concepts are reflexive identity and adherence-based influence. It is worthwhile repeating the important observation that even though it is easy to find examples of all four agreement categories in most activities, they nevertheless seem to have a tendency to be either to the left or to the right of the figure. Following that idea, and going back to Table 6.1, we can see that the Cisco/Qeyton case has a strong emphasis on regulative and cognitive agreements, and that the Intel/PlanetLab case is focused more on moral and imaginative agreements. It is no coincidence that they also make use of fundamentally different forms of organizing. By combining the community concept with agreement (and thus with identity and influence) we have reached an understanding of different contexts or ‘neighborhoods’ in which organizing takes place and where management action needs to be targeted. The right-hand side of Figure 7.1 indicates a situation characterized by reflection, imagination and adherence. Here ideas are more important than rules, willingness to belong is more important than the pay received, and values and consideration are perhaps stronger than obedience and competition. Taken together we choose to label this end the idea-based form of organizing. The left-hand side of Figure 7.1 denotes a community where calculations, compliance and regulation are involved. Conformity and obedience are more important than commitment and the sharing of values. Altogether this takes us to a situation where the interest at hand, rather than the ideas involved, forms the community and, thus, we label the lefthand side the interest-based form of organizing. However, communities are not only agreements, identity and influence. They are also ‘action’ taking place. In the traditional interpretation of communities, action was seen as practice or the way of doing things in the


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context of community. We would like to take this a bit further, along similar lines as discussed by Ekstedt et al. (1999). Basically, the local environment where people interact frequently and jointly conform their ideas into a domain defines a community. However, several authors highlight that communities of practice can also be virtual or distributed (see e.g. Kimble and Hildreth, 2005; Blunt, 2003; Wenger et al., 2002). Wenger et al. (2002) claim that true globalization requires communities. Product development and product deliveries, for example, are often organized across geographical and unit borders and will not be possible without the creation and maintenance of strong communities among members in different places. It is not enough for a community to be linked only through practice in general if we discard the necessity of a community being locally defined. If it is distributed, it can be assumed that the practice keeping the community together needs to be a little bit more elaborate or relevant to the participants (Bengtsson and Söderholm, 2002). This is where activities come into the picture. An activity is defined by the common meaning people ascribe to a line of dependent actions. We have discussed several examples of activities in previous chapters, such as product development, distribution, mergers, software development etc. Activities are different from each other and thus contribute to the creation of different communities. The two dimensions of activity labeling and activity context discussed in Chapter 2 capture important elements of organizing in terms of whether they are integrated or loosely coupled. This is shown in Figure 7.2. This figure offers a slightly different way of visualizing the ideas from Chapter 2 and Figure 2.4. Instead of using the two-bytwo matrix to capture the difference between the four activity types, we use a field where there are many more possible positions than just the four positions in Figure 2.4. Figure 7.2 is drawn to illustrate a movement from the lower left corner of the figure towards the upper right corner. The four activity types are positioned in a successive movement upwards and to the right in the figure, and we conclude that this captures an important dimension in organizing. This dimension is referred to as integrated versus loosely coupled form of organizing. The precise positioning of a single empirical example can obviously differ and the positioning pictured serves merely to illustrate the point that the typical positioning of the four types follows a general trend towards the upper right corner. In sequencing, the predesigned linear time coordination and the local standardized and distinct space coordination both point in the direction of an integrated form of organizing. In networking, we see a movement towards a more loosely coupled form, which is most evident in the space dimension with the boundary-spanning and standardized coordination. In the time dimension, networking is still characterized as integrated. Consequently, it is

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Ambiguous labels

Loosely coupled form of organizing

VIRTUALIZING

TASK FORCING

Clear labels

SEQUENCING

Integrated form of organizing

Figure 7.2

NETWORKING

Simple context

Complex context

Types of time and space and corresponding activity categories

the space dimension that creates the movement towards a more loosely coupled form compared to sequencing. Within task forcing it is rather the time dimension, with the flexible time coordination, that drives the activity toward a more loosely coupled form. The most complex activity, virtualizing, is characterized as the most loosely coupled of the four, with space and time dimensions being ambiguous and complex. In the typical form the four activity types indicate an integrated form of organizing on the lower left-hand side in Figure 7.2. This is when time is linear and easily planned or scheduled, and where the local distinct factory setting dominates the context of the activities. Things go as planned or can easily be adjusted to fit with an expected course of action. On the other hand, at the upper right-hand side of the figure is a loosely coupled form of organizing where time needs to be coordinated continuously and boundary spanning happens in an entrepreneurial pattern. Challenges, possibilities and problems occur persistently and are impossible to avoid, but need to be attended to as they influence the course of action. So far we have argued that communities and activities can be classified in two broad dimensions. The first dimension captures the community aspects of organizing, and is broadly defined as idea- versus interest-based form of organizing. The second dimension deals with the activity-related


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aspects of organizing, and it is defined as integrated versus loosely coupled form of organizing. And with this we have the basic building-blocks of the activity–community model of organizing, and in the following section we put them together.

THE ACTIVITY–COMMUNITY MODEL OF ORGANIZING The two dimensions discussed at the beginning of the chapter both point at some important features of the organizing of activities, and they both enforce the need to find some reconciling mechanism between processes of influence and identity. With the activity concept we argue that the nature of the specific activity creates a context for organizing that needs to be understood. In Chapter 2 we introduced the activity concept by deliberately taking a constructionist viewpoint, the basic argument being that activities are defined through a process called labeling. With the community concept we take this analysis one step further. The labeling is, in fact, just one part of the construction of activities. In the midst of the interacting processes of influence and identity people are constantly joining/building imagined communities around the activities. By combining the two dimensions we arrive at a visual presentation of the activity–community model of organizing (Figure 7.3). Taken together, the activity and community dimensions provide a setting where organized and coordinated activities can be placed and further analyzed. A first step is to relate the activity–community model to the four activity types presented and discussed in Chapter 3. They have already been discussed in relation to the activity dimension (see Figure 7.2). Thus it is appropriate to add the community dimension to the classification scheme (see Figure 7.4). The way sequencing was defined in Chapter 2 makes it reasonable to place it more to left of the horizontal dimension and at the bottom of the vertical dimension. Virtualizing is very much the opposite to sequencing and we accordingly place it to the right, towards the idea-based form of organizing. Task forcing and networking are placed in between the other two. On a theoretical level we would expect to find more elements of an idea-based form of organizing in virtualizing than in the other three forms, even though it is perfectly possible also to find elements of an interest-based form. By placing the four activity types in the matrix, we have arrived at a description of how different activities differ from each other in terms of their activity and community characteristics. Several empirical examples have been given throughout the book to illustrate our argument. Two of

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Interest-based form of organizing

Idea-based form of organizing

Integrated form of organizing

Figure 7.3

The Activity–Community model of organizing

those are Cisco/Qeyton and Intel/PlanetLab, discussed in Chapter 6 to introduce the agreement concept. We will review these cases again and place them in the A–C model to provide an example of fundamental differences between different positions in the model. In the community dimension the two cases differ on a number of fundamental issues. The Cisco/Qeyton merger was firmly based on a mix of regulative and cognitive agreements, and we thus place it at the left end of the horizontal axis as more interest-based (see Figure 7.5). The Intel/PlanetLab case is, on the other hand, more oriented towards moral and imaginative agreements, and can be placed toward the right end of the horizontal axis. In the second dimension the focus is on the degree of integration in the activity, and this can take many different forms. In the Cisco/Qeyton case it is obvious that the whole acquisition process must be understood in the context of Cisco and Cisco’s growth and innovation strategy. It is highly integrated in the sense that the influence process was asymmetric and very much driven/dictated by Cisco. Qeyton was also rapidly subsumed into the Cisco organization. When acquiring a company, Cisco allows it to finish

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VIRTUALIZING NETWORKING Interest-based form of organizing

Idea-based form of organizing TASK FORCING SEQUENCING Integrated form of organizing

Figure 7.4

Classifying the coordination types in the A–C model Loosely coupled form of organizing

Intel/PlanetLab Interest-based form of organizing

Idea-based form o organizing Cisco/Qeyton

Integrated form of organizing Figure 7.5

Placing the Cisco and Intel cases in the A–C model

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developing its product. This product is then integrated into the next generation of products. After completing development of the product, the company is integrated into other development processes, depending on the business unit for which the knowledge is suitable. The integrative strategy taken in the Cisco/Qeyton case stands in stark contrast to the Intel/ PlanetLab case, where the ambition was to avoid building a hierarchy and to remain faithful to the open source ideology. In Figure 7.5, we have contrasted the integrated form of organizating with a loosely coupled form of organizing. PlanetLab is described by the participants as a self-organizing system of researchers, where participation is voluntary and all actors involved are expected to share their research results. In Figure 7.5 we classify it as a loosely coupled form of organizing. From the Intel perspective this kind of collaboration project is interesting since it leaves the integrated control mechanisms available to you when performing research in house, to join a process where you, in a sense, lack control. All in all the two cases illustrate clearly our two ‘extreme’ activity situations. The Cisco case is, as described in Chapter 6, a sequencing type of situation and the Intel case without doubt illustrates virtualizing. If we view the two cases over time, some interesting movements can be observed, especially in the Intel/PlanetLab case. When the project started in March 2002 it was characterized as an idea-based and loosely coupled type of activity, involving just a few participants. It rapidly transformed into a low-interaction setting once it went public and started to grow. The subsequent process is interesting because the movement is towards a higher degree of integration, through the forming of the consortium and with rules of conduct issued for the project. It is moving down the vertical dimension over time, and it would not be surprising if the future were to show that more interest-based elements are introduced. The Cisco/Qeyton case is more stable and the classification as an interest-based and integrated form of organizing has not changed over time during the acquisition and integration activity. From the example it is apparent that management challenges, organizing issues and coordination problems in the two cases differ a great deal. Cisco/Qeyton and Intel/PlanetLab face fundamentally different issues when dealing with management and leadership as well as with organizing and coordination. Also, as conditions change and activities move from one position to another, so will the management challenges. At this point, we would like to emphasize the strength of the A–C model as it is able to capture and present what such differences are based on: a completely different set-up of the activity, as well as different community relations.


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UNDERSTANDING THE ACTIVITY–COMMUNITY MODEL It is important to note that the A–C model should not be understood as a static description – its true value is shown when it is used to capture movements and relations. This is very much aligned with the activity focus applied in this book – to focus on the process of doing things and how such processes are organized rather than on organizational structures and hierarchies. Activities change as they unfold or as a result of purposeful management decisions. Thus, as a consequence, the same activity may move from one position in the A–C framework to another one, as discussed above in considering Cisco and Intel. The movement and different positions of activities indicate that the activity and community concepts are fundamental issues in a constant and complex interplay. The activity concept points to the factual practices of organizing, and it directs our attention to the ‘what’ of organizing – what we are doing and how this is described (labeling) and coordinated. But it is the community aspects that make our activities clear and (it is hoped) interesting – how and why we are doing things jointly in an organized setting. It is necessary, however, to avoid simple dichotomies of behavior and cognition. The activity concept is not synonymous with behavior, and neither is community synonymous with cognition. A similar pitfall is to treat activities just as the practice, the things we are doing, without considering the constructive aspects of activities, and consequently to treat community as the organizing without linking it to the activities. The two concepts should not be treated as two separate entities that can be found ‘out there’. The activity–community model of organizing is first and foremost an analytical tool developed to enhance our capacity to analyze and understand complex patterns of organizing. The model relies on a step-wise process of gradually higher complexity in the analysis. The model starts with identifying activities. An activity is a robust concept, also possible to identify in an empirical context. Activities are present as they are made subjects for management attention, and as people talk about them and identify themselves with them. Activities are, thus, manifest empirical instances. Once an activity is observed, it can be classified according to the conceptual tools developed in Chapter 2. Thus an answer will be provided considering the generic activity type to which a specific activity belongs. Based on this, activity coordination issues can be addressed more thoroughly. Community issues are triggered as soon as people start interacting. This gives rise to a complex set of parallel processes, creating what has been labeled imagined communities. Influence and identity concepts have been

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used in this book to capture and explain the complexity. Basically, the community concept indicates a fundamental difference between the building of an imagined community as compared to the design of a formal organization. An imagined community could, of course, rely on a formal organization, but it is nevertheless not the same. Communities are not a result of formal organizational structures. On the other hand, formal organizations will be dependent on communities for issues of general organizational commitment, organizational culture and workplace atmosphere. The analysis based on Figure 7.5 raises important questions concerning the mechanisms for ‘linking’ people together – the actual forming of imagined communities. By using the concept of agreements we have underlined the crucial insight that getting engaged in activities is not value-free; it reflects interests. We become involved in activities together with other actors to promote certain interests, and this is why any organizing process is dependent on agreements. Agreements are, then, negotiated in political processes. Thus agreement (and organizing) is linked to concepts of negotiation and compromise found in theories of influence and politics. The political tactics were perhaps most open and evident in the Cisco/Qeyton case. The activity was deliberately driven by key actors towards the ‘end’, officially marked by the closing of the development department in Sweden. Both the Qeyton founders and the Cisco representatives were clearly driven by a mutual self-interest that lasted for nearly three years. The A–C model also links to the ideas on identity presented in Chapter 5. In the Cisco/Qeyton case there were two obvious occasions that deeply affected the identity of the Qeyton people. The first occasion was when the Cisco offer was made, and Qeyton founders were offered $800 million for the company. It was surely with a great sense of pride that the offer was accepted. The second occasion, when Cisco decided to close the operation in Sweden, was less joyful for the Qeyton people. This raises interesting questions concerning how important events, positive and negative, affect identity processes. The case shows that activities, over time, contain events and processes that have a deep influence on the identity processes, and that, therefore, are crucial to the outcome of the processes of organizing. The Intel/PlanetLab case is strikingly different from the identity perspective. The identity processes are very much directed towards an idea, using a great deal of imagination to build a comprehensive image of PlanetLab. The identification is captured by the attractiveness of the ideas – PlanetLab strikes us as a very exciting prospect and it has obviously given rise to much activity at universities all over the world. A couple of well-known corporations are also commited to subsidizing the hardware in PlanetLab. A second source of identity stems from the open source movement, from which PlanetLab draws a great deal of legitimacy. Going back to the A–C model


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again, implications of identity and political issues may be very different depending on where the activity is on the idea–interest dimension. What may cause major delays and lack of commitment in an idea-based activity may be much better anticipated and easily dealt with in an interest-based community, and vice versa. Events, management actions and interactions will have different impact depending on the kind of activity. Finally, it would be appropriate to recall the starting-point in Chapter 1, where the quest for an alternative to the static, bureaucratic and ‘noun’based descriptions of organizations was formulated. As argued, it has been necessary to make a fresh start, to avoid being (again) captured by boxes, arrows, hierarchies and structural representations of organizations. Instead, we took the actions as the starting-point and, after defining activities, we added the cultural, political and identity dimensions, thus ending with the activity–community model. The model is an alternative to structural models of organizations. It highlights that organizing is a question of activities and agreements and much space in this book has been spent in outlining these concepts, their origin, content and consequences. Our argument is that, consequently, organizations can be understood as bundles of activities organized in different ways in terms of how they relate to the coordination issue and agreement issue. The lower left corner of Figure 7.4 is where traditional structural organization theories reside, but we firmly believe that organizations only rarely organize the most integrated and interest-based activities. It is more common to find that a mix of activities is present and, furthermore, that these activities change over time.

8.

Four challenges of organizing

The activity–community model creates a language to understand organizing, and the theoretical arguments for the perspective are, it is hoped, reasonably clear by now. But what about the world of management out there? What potential has the A–C model to enlighten the choices of practicing managers? Can the model be used to guide decision making in real-life situations? While the discussion in Chapter 7 has developed the theoretical content of the model, the question still remains – what can the A–C model tell us about the managerial challenges of organizing? The A–C model raises a number of pressing challenges for managers. In this final chapter we will highlight four challenges that have caught our attention. In doing so we take a slightly different stand than usual in the business press. It is common to take the perspective of top management when presenting managerial implications. However, we believe that important challenges reside within the realm of middle managers rather than top managers. And consistent with our active focus on organizing, we shift the focus from the position as middle manager towards the performing of middle managing. The notion of middle managing indicates that middle managers (and related managerial positions) take on a more active role in activities, which is also in line with our shift away from formal organizations to activities. Middle managing also implies that middle managers (and similar positions) are highly active in building, developing and changing agreements and thereby forming communities. In the A–C model (Figure 8.1) we have indicated the four challenges as movements (arrows). The four challenges are based on the assumption that within one activity the endpoints of each axis are mutually exclusive. This means that moving toward a more loosely coupled form of organizing automatically means moving away from an integrated form. This is an obvious simplification, and we will conclude the chapter by discussing the possibilities of combining endpoints. The simplification, however, indicates important elements of any middle manager’s reality, and if we are aware of the complications, the simplification should not be too problematic. The exact position of the arrows in the figure is, to some extent, arbitrary. The rhetoric and formalization challenges, for instance, can be placed anywhere on the vertical axis. The same goes for the network and consolidation challenges on the horizontal axis. The arrows indicate a 154

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Four challenges of organizing Loosely coupled form of organizing

Network challenge Rhetoric challenge Interest-based

Idea-based

Formalization challenge

Consolidation challenge Integrated form of organizing

Figure 8.1

Four challenges in the activity–community model of organizing

temporal process of change where the starting-point for an activity can be anywhere in the model. What is important in this discussion is rather the direction of the arrows, the moving towards any of the endpoints in the two dimensions. The Network Challenge It is assumed in much recent theorizing that companies need to move toward more open forms of organizing, whether this takes the form of joining strategic alliances, building virtual corporations or any other design type recently suggested. We have labeled this movement the network challenge, and placed it in the right part of the model to indicate that it often leans toward idea-based forms of organizing (even though we isolate the vertical dimension in the discussion below). Emphasizing the loosely coupled form of organizing inevitably means crossing boundaries. Many activities, and a growing number of them, are dispersed in space and time, and through the process of labeling they are delimited and differentiated from other activities. It is therefore inherent in the very concept of activities that they create boundaries. On the other hand activities are also ‘on the move’, and by focusing our attention on them we see a great deal of boundary crossing. We share Klein’s dual focus on both the formation and

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crossing of boundaries. ‘At this historical point, however, the interactions and reorganizations that boundary crossing creates are as central to the production and organization of knowledge as boundary formation and maintenance’ (Klein, 1996: 2). Klein’s analysis deals with the growth of knowledge and how academic disciplinary boundaries inhibit knowledge production and knowledge integration. A similar type of argument is put forward in the more normative management literature. With titles such as ‘The new organization’, ‘The boundaryless organization’ or ‘The collaborative enterprise’, a strong case is made for more boundary crossing and more collaboration between different organizations, and between hierarchic levels. The discussion is not new – even Fayol recognized the need for lateral linkages (Fayol’s bridge) within the hierarchy. With Galbraith (1973), Fayol’s ideas got a more modern formulation in his claim for more lateral relations in the form of communication and joint decision-making processes, still, however, within the boundaries of the single corporation. Following the example of Galbraith we find an exploding wave of literature on the multidivisional form and the challenges of globalization in the 1980s and 1990s. In Ghoshal and Bartlett (1998) and Nohria and Ghoshal (1997), among others, the boundaries of space, and not least national boundaries, are discussed in detail. The focus is still on the single corporation but boundaries are becoming more fuzzy, and boundary crossing is an integrated part of day-to-day activities. Similar arguments also come from the literature on knowledge management and learning. Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) proposed the middle-updown model of knowledge creation to capture the iterative processes of knowledge creation that involves middle managers in the intersection between horizontal and vertical flows of information within companies. Important managerial questions can be asked concerning how to enable middle managers to take on this new, boundary-crossing, role. More recently the focus has shifted from within the single corporation to the intersection between companies (and other constellations). Gibbons et al. (1994) talk about hybridization to capture tasks that are accomplished at the boundaries and in the spaces between systems and subsystems. In their mode 2, knowledge production is characterized by transdisciplinarity and heterogeneity. More specifically they describe mode 2 in terms of: An increase in the number of potential sites where knowledge can be created . . . The linking together of sites in a variety of ways . . . The simultaneous differentiation, at these sites, of fields and areas of study into finer and finer specialities . . . (Gibbons et al., 1994: 6)

This is also acknowledged in the learning literature. The notions of organizational learning and learning organizations imply a focus on learning as


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something taking place within the frames of the single corporation, between actors inside the boundaries. In the more recent literature on learning the focus has started to change, with the learning taking place between organizations, and in other boundary-crossing situations (Oliver, 2001; Powell et al., 1996). Few attempts have been made to integrate intra- and inter-organizational perspectives on learning to understand the full complexity of boundary crossing. Müllern and Östergren (1997) use the concept of sensemaking to capture the inherent dynamics between intraand inter-organizational learning. The intra-organizational dimension is referred to as internal sensemaking and the inter-organizational is called field-related sensemaking. A basic argument is that important aspects of learning take place between organizations and not only within them. The learning perspective is interesting since it put the focus on the actors in boundary crossing. Learning can be understood as a continuous conversation between different actors in many different positions, and it is clearly an important task in the middle-managing perspective introduced above. To summarize, there are a number of related calls for opening up the integrated form of organizing, and thus moving organizations toward more loosely coupled forms. We find this within the configurational approach, in the constant search for ‘new’ ways of designing organizations. The ideas with loosely coupled forms of organizing are evident in epithets such as virtual organizations, cellular organizations, network organizations. As discussed above, this is also evident in the knowledge and learning literature, where it is acknowledged that important processes of learning take place between rather than within organizations. Where do these changes leave middle managers, and what are the more specific issues that arise within the network challenge? One issue emerges as a consequence of boundary crossing – middle managers move from stable positions defined by the internal hierarchy to dynamic positions defined by the inter-organizational relations activated by the activities they become involved in. This raises questions concerning the identity and formal authority of individuals taking on middle-managing roles in the loosely coupled forms. One evident outcome of this is the proliferation of projects and project managers. Maybe the project manager is the (post)modern counterpart to the vertically defined middle manager. If so, project-based organizations need to be more sensitive to the specific capabilities required in those situations, as proposed by Davies and Hobday (2005). It is important to remember that even though the network challenge points to a more loosely coupled organizational setting, it may be the contrary when looking at the activities performed. Single activities, as discussed in Chapter 2, may be boundary spanning – thus creating loosely coupled organizations – but at the same time well integrated in terms of an activity process for the time during

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which the action is carried out. Projects are one way to meet this challenge coherently for many modern corporations. In any case, the network challenge presents the single middle manager with a need to redefine that very role. With the active form – middle managing – we emphasize the need to work actively with the role and continuously ask where the role is heading, and what organizational issues need to be resolved as the role changes. In the traditional middle management literature it is assumed that middle managers are ‘in-betweens’ in a hierarchic sense – they are stuck between expectations from above and below. With the network challenge the situation is complicated and they turn into ‘in-betweens’ also in a horizontal sense. They are in between their own organization and other organizations, and this requires a whole new definition of what it means to be a middle manager. Traditional middle management conceptions are, thus, built on obsolete assumptions about the working behavior of managers as well as the fundamentals on which succesful organizations are built. A second issue emerging from boundary crossing in the loosely coupled forms is the need to build relations in other constellations than the home organization. This is partially an issue for our next major challenge – building relations through rhetoric. But it is also a part of the network challenge. In a network the emphasis is on building lateral relations. That is far more interesting than building vertical relations mainly defined by hierarchical authority. The four forms of agreements discussed in previous chapters give some indication of the multitude of instruments available to build and sustain such lateral relations. The cultural processes that link people to each other (or form communities, as it is labeled in this book) take on different forms compared to the integrated form when we move towards more loosely coupled forms of organizing. We move, evidently, towards more democratic ways of organizing. This was an important observation in Chapter 6 in the discussion concerning agreements, and more specifically in Tables 6.3 and 6.4, where the hierarchy (integrated form) was compared with a project-based form (loosely coupled). The cultural artifacts, for instance, that we find in the two types are fundamentally different and the examples indicate very different cultural processes. An important aspect of middle managing is to understand and deal with these cultural processes, and do so within the scope of more open-ended forms of organizing rather than within an integrated form. The Rhetoric Challenge The second arrow in Figure 8.1 is labeled the rhetoric challenge and it captures the movement towards more idea-based forms of organizing. Many of the ideas that were discussed in the influence and identity chapters are


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relevant to understanding the movement towards more idea-based forms of organizing. In a very general sense it is evident that value creation, in and around corporations, increasingly depends on the ability to evoke feelings and make people identify with core values emphasized by (top management in) a company. It is no coincidence that branding is increasingly becoming a top management priority. But it is a mistake to treat branding, and all the efforts to create a brand identity (brand adherence), as only a top management issue. It is first and foremost a middle-managing task! It has been argued within many streams of research that organizing is mastered by creating shared patterns of understanding. The exploding literature on corporate culture, corporate identity, corporate branding, values-based management, visionary leadership, charismatic leadership, communities of practice, ethical management, makes a strong case for a more idea-based approach to organizing and managing. This seems to reflect a growing dissatisfaction with traditional autocratic models of organizing, which we have labeled as interest-based. The rhetoric challenge has two interrelated aspects, highlighting the tension between the influence and identity perspectives. Moving towards more idea-based forms of organizing means that managers need to develop their capacities in two respects. The first is directly connected to the influence perspective and it captures the need for rhetorical skills to master the challenges of reaching and moving customers, suppliers, cooperators, government officials and many others. When middle managers get engaged in more project-based and loosely coupled forms of organizing, they often find themselves in situations where they need to explain, motivate, engage and ‘sell’ ideas to others. This is not just an information role, where the middle manager transmits a message. It is rather a rhetorical role, where he/she is much more active in the actual creation of the message – it is a dialogue rather than a monologue. But it is also, increasingly, a meeting among free people, rather than a meeting among people in hierarchically defined positions as superiors and subordinates. We find the traditional information metaphor useless to capture the challenges of the dynamic branding situation many companies, and managers, are facing. Corporate identity is not created by skillful marketing involving the marketing people in the company, where the company sends a message to the market. It is rather created in a constant and dynamic conversation engaging many people in and around the company. This is clearly a rhetorical task and middle managers need to train themselves to take on this persuading role. But rhetoric is also linked to identity, and this leads us to the second aspect of the rhetoric challenge. The increased importance of cognitive and imaginative agreements, the moving towards more idea-based forms of

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organizing, also means a moving toward a different way of understanding business life. It is an understanding not only based on commercial/analytical considerations, but also on ethical and aesthetic ones. Corporate effectiveness, doing the right thing, is not only measured in terms of the direct link to the balance sheet. Doing the right thing also means doing good things (ethics) and doing things that we can take a pride in (aesthetics). The rhetoric challenge therefore needs to focus not only how we communicate the ideas, visions and values agreed upon internally, but also on the very process where they are apprehended, accepted/rejected and modified. This is a constant moving between the related identity aspects of identity regulation and self-identity (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Wåhlin, 2006), between finding your own identity, understanding the identity of your co-workers, and expressing the desired identity of the company (top management). In the middle management literature it is widely acknowledged that taking on a middle-managing role can lead to identity conflicts in the stream of demands from different interest groups in the hierarchy but also from external groups. The rhetoric challenge makes identity a more explicit issue to deal with in daily middle managing. The democratic ideal inherent in the rhetoric challenge is very much in line with modern leadership theory, where it is frequently argued that the leadership process is reciprocal, and where influence is connected with the manager’s ability to create dialogue. This is emphasized in recent work on both charismatic and transformational leadership, where the relation between manager and co-worker is stressed. The Consolidation Challenge The first two challenges discussed above are clearly connected to current management ideology in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Companies are expected to open up their boundaries and engage in strategic alliances, form virtual organizations, outsource, and ‘destroy’ the internal hierarchy. They are at the same time expected to develop a more idea-based form of organizing. Available research also supports the proclaimed changes. We know that companies outsource; we know that they engage in strategic alliances; we know that project-based organizing is increasing. We also know that managers are more aware of ethical issues and that they more deliberately use rhetoric. But the changes should not be exaggerated; there is also evidence that companies move in other directions. One such movement is indicated by the third arrow in Figure 8.1 – the consolidation challenge. There are many risks involved in moving toward loosely coupled forms of organizing. One such risk has to do with control over activities – companies might find themselves in a situation where it is necessary to move back


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toward an integrated form of organizing, or to counterbalance movements towards more loosely coupled organizational solutions with consolidation and integration of other parts of the firm. The obvious example is when a process of outsourcing is followed by attempts by the company to ‘insource’ the services again – to bring them back in more tight control or when more elaborate control and monitoring sytems follow after the outsourcing. The challenges inherent in this strategy are many. Outsourcing strategies often means that the company gets rid of important competences and facilities, and it is both expensive and difficult to re-establish them within the company. The following press release from Teliasonera, Sweden’s largest telephone operator, illustrates this strategy: Teliasonera buys the product portfolio and operations for customer placed equipment from Flextronics Network Services. It mainly concerns office switches and LAN-equipment. Teliasonera have previously accounted for 80% of the sales in FNS and the purchase is done to integrate the product portfolio in the rest of Teliasoneras product range. (7 May 2004)

In our empirical studies we have also found a tendency for activities to follow a path where in the early phases they move toward loosely coupled forms, and then enter phases where they move back toward a more integrated form. Virtual corporations, for instance, sometimes start to build larger headquarters and an internal hierarchy evolves. In the Intel/ PlanetLab case, which was described in Chapter 6, there were some tendencies to reintegrate certain activities within the activity community. Moving toward the integrated form of organization is usually a measure taken when a need arises for a clearer internal structure. Adding hierarchic layers is an obvious step to be taken when a company grows. Increased size forces the company to deal with increased internal complexity, and developing the internal structure is one way of doing that. Considering the limitations of the ability of single managers to control a growing number of employees, adding hierarchic layers is often a first measure taken to keep the control span on a manageable level. It is evident that a one-eyed focus on loose coupling runs the risk of loosening the grip of the company. It is increasingly acknowledged that freedom and control need not be opposites. It is perfectly possible, and often desirable, to balance a strategy of loose coupling with some means of integration. The integrated form of organizing has some strong arguments working in its favor, and control is probably the most important one. Following in Fayol’s vein, it can be argued that a more developed hierarchic structure, within the company, facilitates communication and creates a desirable order. The disadvantages, however, are obvious and important – lack of flexibility and demotivating.

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The parallel search for loose coupling and consolidation is also consistent with the ‘core competence movement’, arguing that companies should concentrate on what they do best, where they outperform competitors, and look for other, related competences in their network or through partners in the value chain. Thus, while some parts of the firm will be separated off, other parts (which build what is believed to be the core competence) will be much more integrated, consolidated and closely monitored to ensure that the core competence of the firm prevails and prospers. Normally, a company would be less willing to share its core competences with partners if this can be avoided. That, too, would point to consolidation of parts of the firm as a normal consequence of a core competence analysis. Several of the cases presented in previous chapters, such as that from the laser industry in Chapter 2, represent this. In the laser case, the company organized boundary-spanning activities to connect its core technology to other companies’ technology, thus creating a commercial offer. On the other hand, it would safeguard the core technology development on which its contributions were based. The Formalization Challenge In a similar fashion to the consolidation challenge, activities can also move from a more idea-based to an interest-based form of organizing. We have labeled this the formalization challenge. There are some strong arguments for an activity to move towards a more interest-based form of organizing. At this endpoint of the dimension we found a stronger reliance on regulative and cognitive agreements, and we also connected it to a more compliance-based type of influence and a form of identity labeled calculative. This could be understood as a call for tighter control mechanisms, and also a more direct form of control as compared to the indirect control found in the idea-based form. The specific measures taken to increase the interest base depend a great deal on whether a specific activity is moving upwards or downwards in Figure 8.1. The instruments used in a loosely coupled form are therefore expected to be different from the ones found in a more integrated form. In the first case we could expect to find a larger reliance on formal contracts, agreed-upon rules and regulations, and similar instruments suitable for the kind of lateral relations that were discussed in the network challenge. There is a wide range of mechanisms that can be used to formalize network relations and it is often of crucial importance to have these in place in order to meet firms’ monitor and control requirements. New information and communication technology would normally be of major importance to achieve the control that is deemed necessary, along with contracts and agreed-upon


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rules for interaction. In a more integrated form we could expect also to find internal control systems, performance measures and other bureaucratic tools, basically fulfilling the same needs for monitoring and control as in the network-based situation. Formalization within a bureaucracy would be more aligned with traditional industrial organizations. This includes a wide range of instruments, such as job description, internal reporting, codes of behavior, organizational routines and supervision procedures. The formalization challenge also occurs as a consequence of attempts to reduce the number of hierarchic layers in the company. In order to deal with the widened control span, managers need to rely on other tools for control, and building more elaborate systems for financial control is one such step that moves the company towards the interest-based form of organizing. Again, new ICT instruments are effective in meeting such needs. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it can also be argued that a higher degree of loose coupling can create a need for formalization. Think of the role of a market contract in regulating the relations between independent actors. The need for more interest-based forms of organizing can thus be a consequence of a simultaneous movement upwards in the A–C model. In order to deal with a dispersed set of colleagues, a formerly idea-based community might need to introduce some interest-based measures. We saw some element of this in the Intel/PlanetLab case presented in Chapter 6. Managing Dualities – Finding Ways to Dissolve Dichotomies The four challenges were presented to indicate movement in two directions. The network and rhetoric challenges pointed toward the upper right corner, and the consolidation and formalization challenges toward the lower left corner. This diagonal movement captures the assumed changes in today’s business life, where a polarization is created between the traditional hierarchy, being integrated and interest-based, and the network, being loosely coupled and idea-based. It also seems as if the network is viewed as a more positive alternative than the hierarchy. But closer inspection of this dichotomy shows that this view is highly simplified. There is a more radical strategy that makes a more imaginative interpretation of Figure 8.1. What if we consider the endpoints of each dimension not as mutually exclusive but rather as something that can be combined? There might be important complementarities in combining an interest- and idea-based community as well as combining a loosely coupled and integrated form of organizing. The questions are where, when and how. In this case the argument is that you can combine new and old features. This strategy was already implied in Chapter 1, in the discussion concerning the demands put on companies, and the need for incorporating different orientations to

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capture the complexity of today’s activity systems. The strategy has also been briefly indicated in the previous discussion on the four challenges. This strategy is in many ways more challenging, primarily because it demands a more skillful approach to managing the inherent tensions involved in combining seemingly inconsistent directions. It is based on the conviction that is not a contradiction to simultaneously call for more freedom and control; for more decentralization and centralization; for a clear corporate structure and more boundary crossing; for a clear corporate identity and multiple identities. The list can be long, and it reflects a growing recognition of the need for organizing for dualities and tensions. In the literature on new and innovative forms of organizing we find some theoretical arguments for taking a more holistic view of organizing. Based on Milgrom and Roberts’s (1990, 1995) concept of complementarities in action, we argue that there are some strong theoretical and practical arguments for trying to combine different endpoints in the activity and community dimensions, rather than isolating them. This is partially due to the inherent complexity and dynamics within and around many activity systems, which require a much more holistic approach. The complementarities notion emphasizes the interrelated nature of many activity systems, with strong dependencies between different parts of the system. Piecemeal changes in one part of the system run the risk of neglecting these interdependencies and thus making the change effort less useful. The inherent argument in the complementarities notion is the need for creating a fit between different design variables, and this is well in line with a long tradition within organization theory. It extends arguments from both contingency theory and the configurational approach (Whittington and Pettigrew, 2003). According to Milgrom and Roberts (1995), activities are so-called Edgeworth complements if doing (more of) any of them increases the returns to doing (more of) the others. The point about finding this fit between the different endpoints in the A–C model is that it essentially makes the company more competitive by being more difficult to copy, and this is both an advantage and the major drawback. Even if it is possible to observe some spectacular characteristics of successful companies, the underlying mechanisms which make interactions outstandingly successful and profitable are much more hidden and difficult to identify and even more difficult to implement. (Massini and Pettigrew, 2003: 134)

We take the complementarities notion relating to the interaction between strategy, structure and internal managerial processes one step further, to also include the spectrum of concepts involved in the A–C model of organizing. The underlying argument is essentially the same, namely that any


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attempt at organizing needs to keep an eye on both the activity and the community aspects. The strategy brings us back once more to the ideas of middle managing. Any strategy pursued by top management needs to be effectuated by numerous actors in and around the company. Ideas are always transferred, translated and transmitted by actors who use different tools and techniques to make ideas travel, and we argue that middle managers are important actors in the constant conversation that brings this strategy to life. The dualities and tensions to some extent disappear if we shift the focus more toward activities as the object of organizing. It can be argued that different activities require different modes of organizing. Many organizations incorporate all four of the activity types from Chapter 2 and they need to work intensively with organizing sequencing types of activities at the same time as they become involved in virtualizing types. Intel is an excellent example of this need for learning to deal with multiple types of activities. Different parts of Intel work in very factory-like settings at the same time as other parts are engaged in very virtual settings. On one level it can thus be argued that organizations on a daily basis decouple different parts of their operations and organize them in different ways. The tensions reappear, however, with the observation that there are often interrelations between these different parts – there is a need for organizing between them. It is also evident that there are functions and activities that cut across many activities. This is particularly true for many managerial activities – hence our focus on middle managing. Decoupling is a poor strategy in today’s managerial world – a world characterized by strong interdependencies, complexities and dynamics – something middle managers need to understand and incorporate in their leadership efforts. The basis for our argument is the simple observation that middle managers are instrumental in translating ideas, and not least internally in formal organizations. Put another way, many agreements are made that involve middle managers. It should be reasonably clear from this book that much ‘middle managing’ is done in other fora than within the single, hierarchic structure. Any attempt at understanding the roles and tasks of middle managers must widen the scope from formal positions defined by the internal hierarchy (permanent forms of organizing) to also incorporate positions and assignments that do not formally ‘belong’ to one hierarchy but where communities are still built. By following activities rather than organizations, these patterns of middle managing become visible. The forming of agreements in other constellations than the formal organization requires a much more active role taking of middle managers. But this is not a one-way relation – the open and boundary-crossing forms of organizing we envision are also driven by new identities and values among

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middle managers. Young people today value working in temporary constellations, e.g. projects, and this ‘forces’ companies to develop such forms of organizing. At the same time companies are under strong pressure to deliver short-term results that satisfy the financial markets, and this forces the companies to exert tighter control – the trick is to combine these different orientations. The individual middle manager, engaging in middle managing, is faced with a number of crucial issues. Tensions emerge, for instance, when middle managers are confronted with conflicting demands within and between activities. How can leadership be developed to master these tensions? Important questions need to be asked concerning how middle managers build relations and how they contribute to forming agreements, internally and externally. Middle managers are faced with numerous boundary-crossing situations when the company is trying to combine the different endpoints. This is perhaps most evident in the dimension of loosely coupled and integrated forms of organizing. Think of the middle managing required to make Cisco’s global networked model function. On the one hand Cisco emphasizes the deliberate utilization of a global network of companies associated with it, at the same time as it builds strong capabilities internally. The best of both worlds? Yes, but it is also a question of how middle managers within the company, but also middle managers in all the associated companies, constantly struggle to deal with these two orientations. It is well documented in the literature on middle managers that they often face a dual role in their own organization, trying to remain loyal both upwards and downwards. With the trend toward strategic decentralization, middle managers cross boundaries to learn the name of the game of top management. It is noted by, for instance, Floyd and Wooldridge (1994, 2000) and Westley (1990) that middle managers to an increasing degree take part in strategic change processes and decision making. Middle managers are increasingly seen as key to successful strategic change, both in the implementation phase but also in the design and planning phases (Harrington and Williams, 2004). Middle managers are faced with some startling challenges when it comes to combining the interest-based and idea-based communities. This is perhaps most evident in the struggle to build strong brand names. Branding can be viewed as a strategy of infusing the corporate logo, and all the product brands, with values that employees as well as customers/suppliers can identify with. Strong brands are thus moving towards a more ideabased form of organizing. But in the best of worlds this is not done at the expense of calculative interests. It could thus be done at the same time as the company search for an interest-based form of organizing. For a sales


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manager responsible for the operations in the USA the challenge is both to report the sales operations of his salesforce upwards in the hierarchy (probably using a great many formalized measures and systems) at the same time as engaging in the rhetorical task of communicating core values to the employees, to the customers and to other actors. Closely linked to the ‘projectification’ of organizational life is another marked trend – the proliferation of external partnerships. With the deemphasis on the single corporation as the locus of investment and innovation, the role of middle managers changes. Middle managers today take a more active part in negotiating and cooperating with actors in numerous locations outside their own organization. They take on more active roles as linchpins in the continuous processes of organizing. The A–C model is drawn in a two-dimensional way to isolate the different concepts we have used to discuss activities and communities. A logical consequence of this is that we tend to place our object of interest (an activity, an organization or any other organized setting) in one location in the model – we think of the model as a field where you can only be at one place at a time. The complementarities argument presented above requires a more imaginative interpretation of the model, and we need to turn away from the field interpretation. A promising way to escape the field implications is to think of the different endpoints in the model as perspectives rather than existing design types. Each of the four perspectives then contains a number of different possibilities to choose from in a concrete situation. The managerial challenge then turns from choosing a direction and location in the model to combining from within and between different perspectives. Partly this is a question of at what level of magnification we look – what might look like a clear design type on one level (for instance classified as loosely coupled and idea-based) may on closer examination show many features from the other two endpoints. From the complementarities argument it follows that the endpoints in the A–C model can support each other and that it often pays to combine them. In Chapter 6 we discussed the complementarities between the four components in agreements, and we concluded that many agreements draw on more than one component. By combining different components a potentially stronger agreement can be reached. Flexibility means a capacity to draw upon the different endpoints in Figure 8.1 at the same time. We will conclude this chapter, and, in fact, the whole book by pointing to some crucial aspects of making Figure 8.1 more dynamic and utilizing the complementarities to their full potential. The first aspect has to do with the fact that the different orientations (in the two dimensions of the A–C model) occur at the same time – they are

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concurrent. Companies of today are idea-based and interest-based – at the same time – and it is not a good strategy to decouple in time. At the same time the different orientations are also connected to each other – they are related. This follows the complementarities argument above that changes in one part of the system increase the return of making changes in other parts. The concurrency and relatedness make it highly necessary to take a holistic view of organizing. But this is not the end of the story – based on the discussion on time in Chapter 2 we need to emphasize that the pace, rhythm and sheer speed of today’s business climate makes it necessary to take on a whole new conception of time, where activities are assumed to be fast-moving. We would like to end this book by stating that these three aspects – concurrency and relatedness of management challenges and speedy changes – are at the core of the management agenda, together with the four challenges previously discussed. Taken together, these show how and in what direction the management agenda is developing in organizations of today. It is not enough to be better and better as a functional manager in increasingly large organizations. Thus, instead of delving into the functions of the bureaucracy to find appropriate answers to management challenges of today, the agenda has been expanded into other organizing issues highlighted by the activity–community framework developed in this book. While things happen fast, parallel and highly interconnected with other issues, there is a need to find and develop other organizing principles than those offered by traditional organization theory. By starting with activities, agreements and identity, we have developed such a framework. Maybe the most important advantage of the framework is that it offers an alternative set of concepts to highlight what is on the management agenda today. Moreover, it offers a stable ‘map’ of a fast-moving, concurrent and related ocean of activities, organizations and actors. It is, in this respect, a new navigation tool to be used by modern managers at the top as well as at the middle management level. The three aspects of concurrency, relatedness and speed add to the complexity of the A–C model. Concurrency makes us aware that many things can occur at the same time; relatedness forces us to see the interdependencies between these things; and the fast-moving aspect shows us that there is usually a shortage of time to deal with complicated matters. Concurrent events can be dealt with sequentially, ceteris paribus, but if they are also related and fast-moving, problems immediately arise. It can then be argued that complementarities become more important the more concurrency, relatedness and fast-moving aspect we see. Speed and relatedness have been assumed to drive a need for more open forms of organizing, and it is not a coincidence that we link these factors to the network challenge in Figure 8.1. But what factors drive the other three challenges?


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The rhetoric challenge is partly connected to the cry for more democracy at the workplace and the need for motivating and engaging people. Both customers and employees want companies to stand for something – values are important. On a macro level it can be argued that the search for legitimacy forces companies to deal with the rhetoric challenge. This is done at the same time as companies are dealing with the three factors discussed above. And here comes the challenging part! While companies are busy dealing with the problems of speed, relatedness, legitimacy and so on, they also experience strong demands for control (formalization challenge) and structure. The consolidation challenge is partly driven by increased size and the need to find internal structures that keep the company in order. The formalization challenge is also a reply to complicated market relations and a need to introduce some elements of bureaucracy to create order.

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Index ABB Robiotics 45–6 A–C (activity–community) model 6–9, 61, 62, 77, 79, 139–53, 164, 167–8 and bringing things together 139–40 and forming activity communities 140–47 understanding the 151–3 Achtenhagen, Leona 63–4, 74 activities as basis/object of organizing 3, 13 activities as result of construction process 14–15 activities in time and space (and) 11–35 see also space; time four types of 33–5, 145–6, 147 framework for labeling 34–5 institutionalized time as frame of reference 19–27 labeling 13–19, 34–5, 62, 145, 145, 151 social constructing of 22–7 activity, ambiguous 17–18 activity communities, reflexive position in 99–101 activity theory 13, 15 activity–community (A–C) model of organizing see A–C (activity–community) model aesthetic reflexivity 95 agreements, four elements of 117–30, 142–3, 144 cognitive 123–5 imaginative 127–30 moral 125–7 regulative 120–23, 132 typology of 128 agreements 111–38 and building imagined communities 117–30 see also agreements, four elements of and building stable constructs – working of agreements 130–34

building trust through 112–15, 129–30 see also Cisco/Qeyton contextualizing 134–8 coordinating a virtual community through 115–17, 129–30 see also Intel/PlanetLab exemplifying hierarchy and bureaucracy 131–2 reach and endurance of 135–8 typology of 128 Ahuja, G. 54 Albert, Stuart 95, 97, 103, 104 Alexander, E.R. 40, 117 Alvater, E. 28 Alvesson, Mats 65–6, 105, 132, 160 Anderson, Benedict 7, 76 Annan, Kofi 91 Aquino, K. 126 Argyle, Michael 64 Aristotle 71, 74, 75, 77, 84 Art of Rhetoric, The 71, 75 Arthur, Michael B. 4 Ashby, Ross W. 104 Bacon, Francis 79 Bartlett, Christopher A. 156 Bauman, Zygmunt 101 Beck, Ulrich 95 Bengtsson, M. 5, 142, 145 Bennis, Warren G. 67, 126 Berg, Per-Olof 65–6, 126 Berger, Peter 96 Beyond the Hype 9 Biesecker, Barbara A. 76 Billing, Yvonne D. 105 Björkman, Ivar 103 Blunt, Rick 145 Boisot, M. 30–31 Bolland, E.J. 54 boundary crossing 155–7, 164, 165–6 boundary spanning 32–3 Bower, Gordon H. 123

183

184


brands/branding 95, 166–7 Brickman, R. 37, 117 Brown, J.S. 49, 54, 142 Bruner, Jerome 127 Brunsson, Nils 41 Büchel, B. 142 Burt, R.S. 38 Burke, Kenneth 10, 68, 73, 76–7, 78, 81, 83 Butler, R. 23 Carlzon, Jan 80 Castells, Manuell 101, 102 ‘Cathedral and the Bazaar, The’ 85 challenges of organizing 154–69 and A–C model 154–5 consolidation challenge 160–62 formalization challenge 162–3 and managing dualities: ways to dissolve dichotomies 163–9 network challenge 155–8 rhetoric challenge 158–60 Cheney, George 95 Chia, R. 3 Child, J. 30–31 Cialdini, Robert B. 64 Cicero 77, 84 Cisco Systems 1, 2, 41–3, 148–50, 166 Cisco/Qeyton 93, 112–15, 129–30, 134–5, 137, 144–5, 148, 152 and A–C model 149 Clark, K. 49 Clark, P.A. 22, 23 Clarke, Leslie F. 124 Coase, Ronald H. 121 community/ies and activities 146 issues 151–2 of practice 141–2 compliance 65, 69 compliance-based influence process 143 concepts of grammar 9–10 organizing 9–10 contingency theory 164 Cook, S.D.N. 48–9 Coombs, R. 30 coordination 36–60 organizing as 37–9

through networking 44–50 see also networking through sequencing 39–44 see also sequencing through task forcing 57–60 see also task forcing through virtualizing 50–57 see also virtualizing Corbett, Edward P.J. 81 core competence(s) 2, 162 corporate identity 159, 164 Creating Value in the Network Economy 82 Crowston, K. 37, 52 Cyert, Richard M. 59 Czarniawska, Barbara 29, 37, 132 Daft, R.L. 124 Davidow, William H. 4 Davies, Andrew 157 De Man, Paul 68 definition(s) of agreements 118 influence 64 leadership 63 rhetoric 78 Dell Computers 69–70 Dell, Michael 69–70 dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology 1 Dewey 15 DiMaggio, P.J. 119 Dorsch, M. 126 Dougherty, D. 142 Duguid, P. 7, 54, 142 Dunford, R. 132 Eccles, Robert 4, 9 Edgeworth complements 164 Eisenhart, K.M. 49 Ekstedt, Eskil 5, 145 Elias, Norbert 19 Engeström, Yrjö 15, 131 Engwall, M. 58 Ericsson 94–5, 103, 106, 107–9, 112 see also Sony Ericsson Eriksson, Jessica 142 European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) 93

Index Fairclough, Norman 120 FALL: focusing, animating, labeling and loading 83 Fayol 156, 161 Fayol’s bridge 156 Ferrarotti, F. 22 Festinger, Leon 64 Flaherty, Michael G. 23, 25 flexible manufacturing system (FMS) 45, 47 YAG laser technology 45 Floyd, S.W. 166 Fontes, M. 30 Ford, Henry 39–40, 43 Foreman, P.O. 104 Friar, J. 30 Funky Business 82 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 129 Galambos, James 124 Galbraith, Jay 59, 156 Galunic, C. 49 Gardet, Louis 23 Georgiou, P. 5 Gergen, Kenneth J. 105, 127 Gerstner, Lou 82, 84 Gertler, M.S. 29, 31 Ghoshal, Sumantra 156 Gibbons, Michael 156 Giddens, Anthony 5, 43, 96, 105 Godfrey, Paul C. 96 Graesser, Arthur C. 124 grammar as analogy 10 concept of 9–10 Grandori, A. 36, 37, 39, 46, 117 Granovetter, M.S. 38 Grant, R.M. 51 Gripen project/JAS Gripen 11–12, 46 Gross, Richard 64 Grove, Andy 71 Gurvitch, Georges 23 Hannerz, Ulf 66 Harrington, D. 166 Hauptman, R. 48, 55 Hedberg, Bo 5 Heidegger, Martin 71–2 Heirich, M. 25 Henderson, R. 49

185

Hennart, J.-F. 39 Hewlett Packard (HP) 1, 115, 117 see also Intel Hildreth, P. 145 Hilgard, Ernest R. 123 Hill, C.W.L. 4 Hirji, K.K. 48, 55 Hobday, Michael 157 Hofer, C.W. 54 Horwitch, M. 30 House, R.J. 65 IBM 82, 85 idea-based form of organizing 144 identities, multiple 164 identity 8, 159–60 identity construction (and) 90–110 boundary crossing and boundary demarcation: leadership challenge 102–4 bridging duality beyond dichotomizing: a reflexive position 99–101 calculative identity process 143 critical dimensions in 99 dynamics, understanding 105–7 flexible solutions and multi-voiced dialogues 104–5 identity plurality and identity synergy 97–9 in activity communities 91–4 reflexive 100, 143 reflexive journey outwards and inwards 107–9 single and multiple identities, tensions between 94–7 spaces of flows 100, 101 through presence and transcendance in activity communities 109–10 identity theory 96–7 imagined community/ies 66, 152 see also rhetoric and imagined communities; Sun Microsystems: forming of an imagined community influence (and) 61–89 see also rhetoric and imagined communities as adherence/adherence-based 65, 69, 143 as compliance 69

186


behavioral change 66–7, 69 communication 67–8 compliance 69 considerations of 63–9 direct 66 establishing rhetorical dialogue 69–77 see also rhetorical dialogue indirect 65–6, 67–8 social 66 Sun Microsystems: forming of an imagined community see main entry information technology (IT) 74, 77, 82, 86, 163 Intel 1, 2, 71, 115, 117, 150, 165 and HP collaboration 115 see also Intel/PlanetLab; PlanetLab Intel/PlanetLab 115–17, 129–30, 135, 137–8, 144–5, 148–50, 161, 163 and A–C model 149 International Standards Organization 41 International System of Units (SI) 21 Internet 1–2, 22, 77, 86, 101 Internet-based test bed 47 interplay between organizing and organization 4–6 Jacobsson, Bengt 41 Janssens, M. 96 Jarillo, J.C. 38–9 Java 86, 87, 88, 89 Jenkins, Richard 106 Jini technology 86, 87–9 Jiro platform 86–7 Joerges, Bernward 29 Johansson, Jan 38, 122 Johnson, Mark 81 Jönsson, S. 124 Kastely, James L. 71 Kelly, S. 126 Kennedy, George A. 77 Kimble, C. 145 Klein, Julie T. 155–6 Klein, Naomi 95, 104 knowledge management and learning 156 Kock, S. 5

Koehn, Nancy F. 69 Kreiner, Kristian 48, 54 Kuka Roboter GmbH 45 Lakoff, George 81 Latour, Bruno 37, 100 Lauer, Robert H. 22, 24, 25 leadership 63–5 values-based 67 Leblebici, H. 122 Leont’ev 13 Liebeskind, J. 54, 126 Lindgren, Monica 4, 96, 104 Lipnack, J. 55 Litwak, E. 37, 117 logic of appropriateness 7 loose coupling 161–2, 163 Lorentzon, Lars 124 Løwendahl, B.R. 5 Luckmann, Thomas 96 Lundin, R.A. 49 Lynn, L.H. 29 M-form organizations 2 McIlveen, Rob 64 Mahoney, J.T. 48 Malone, Michael S. 4 management/middle management 2–3, 154, 156–60, 165–7 Managing in the New Economy 82 March, James G. 5, 7, 53, 59, 131 Markus, H. 126 Martin, Joanne 97, 132 Martinez, J.I. 38–9 Massini, Silvia 164 Mattsson, Lars-Gunnar 38, 122 Matusik, S.F. 4 Mead, George H. 14, 15, 95 Medical Products Agency (MPA) 41 MedicProducts Ltd 51–6 Melin, Leif 74 metaphors 7, 67, 80–85 Meyer, H.J. 37, 117 Microsoft 84, 85, 86 Miles, R.E. 81 Milgrom, P.R. 164 Mitchell, W. 122 Moore, Wilbert E. 24, 25 Morgan, Gareth 80 Mosakowski, E. 4

Index Müllern, Tomas 66, 68, 157 Munn, Nancy D. 19, 21, 23 Nagarajan, A. 122 Nanus, Burt 67, 126 Nelson, Richard R. 53 networking 44–50, 55, 145 examples of 45–6 spatial separation and local integration 47–9 system dependencies/focal firm control 46–7 and task forcing 147 time bracketing 49–50 new approaches 2–9 see also A–C (activity–community) model; grammar interplay between organizing and organization 4–6 No Logo 104 Nohria, Nitin 156 Nokia 70, 83, 94, 103 Nonaka, Ikujiro 156 Noorderhaven, Nils G. 36 Normann, Richard 4, 45, 104 Oliver, A.L. 157 Olsen, Johan P. 7, 131 Only the Paranoid Survive 71 organizational identity 97–8 organizational learning/learning organizations 156–7 organizing, four challenges of see challenges of organizing organizing, interest-based form of 144 organizing activities in space 27–33 see also space boundary spanning 32–3 local activities 33 organizing activities in time 19–27 see also time organizing and organization, interplay between 4–6 organizing and research 4 orientation of activities in time and space see activities in time and space Orlikowski, Wanda J. 94 Östergren, Katarina 157 Ouchi, William G. 122

187

Palmer, I. 132 Papadopoulos, Greg 86 Pentland, B.T. 9–10, 53 Perelman, Chaim 66, 68, 73, 75–6, 77, 78, 120 Permanova Lasersystems AB 45, 59, 50–51, 52, 55, 118, 122–3, 124–5, 126–7, 136 see also Rofin-Sinar Laser GmbH and Spectra Physics Group 122–3 Peterson, Larry 116 Pettigrew, Andrew M. 96, 164 Pfeffer, Jeffrey 64 PlanetLab 1, 46–7, 49, 115–17, 152 see also Intel/PlanetLab Design Notes (PDNs) 116 Polanyi, Michael 51 Porter, Michael E. 42 Post, H.A. 48 Powell, W.W. 31, 119, 157 Power in Organizations 64 Pratt, M.G. 104 Qeyton Systems 1, 42, 43, 112–15, 135 see also Cisco Systems; Cisco/Qeyton; Ericsson and Metropolitan Dense Wave Division Multiplexing 112 Ramírez, Rafael 45 Raub, S. 142 Raymond, Eric 85 Raymond, Lee R. 68 reflexive identity construction 100, 143 research and development (R&D) 1, 4, 115 Reuter, H.H. 9–10, 53 Revang, O. 5 rhetoric 61–2, 67–85 challenge 154, 158–60, 169 defined as communication 75 and identity 159–60 new 68–9 rhetoric and imagined communities 77–85 see also metaphors animating 84 focusing 83 labeling 84 loading 84–5

188


and metaphorical understanding of reality 79–83 Rhetoric of Motives, A 76 rhetorical dialogue 69–77 and establishing relation with audience 72–7 and need for perspective 69–72 rhetorical toolbox 77 Roberts, J. 164 Rofin-Sinar Laser GmbH 50–51, 55, 118, 123, 124–5, 126–7 see also Permanova Lasersystems AB Rousseau, Denise M. 4 Saab Ltd 11, 13, 48 Sahlin-Andersson, Kerstin 93 Salais, Robert 39 Salzer, Miriam 104 Sanchez, R. 48 Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS) 80 Scherer, Frederic M. 38 Schleicher, H. 37, 117 Schmalensee, Rickard 38 Schoenenberger, E. 27 Schultz, Majken 4, 54, 95, 97, 101 Scott, Richard W. 16, 38, 96–7, 119–20, 122, 123 self-responsibility 95 Sennett, Richard 101 sequencing 24, 25, 34, 39–44, 48, 61, 83, 145, 147 see also synchronization examples of 39–42 and linear dependencies 42 and standards and task separation 42–3 and time schedules 43–4 Sevón, Guje 93 Shotter, John 9, 68 Siemens Industrial Solutions and Services (I&S) 89 Silverman, David 38 Simon, Herbert A. 53 Singh, K. 122 Sjöstrand, Sven-Erik 132 Smith, S. 39 Social Psychology of Organizing, The 3 social time 23–4

Söderholm, A. 49, 145 Sony 1–2, 94–5, 102–3, 106, 107–9 Sony Europe GmbH (Sony Style Imaging) 1–2, 102 Sony Music Entertainment Inc. 1, 102 Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. 1, 102 Sony Ericsson 1–2, 102–3, 106, 107–8 space 27–35 functional distance in 29–30 global 28–9, 31–2 institutional distance in 30–31 local 31 multidimensional distances in 31 physical distance in 28 and time and corresponding activity categories 146 Spender, J.-C. 124 Stamps, J. 55 Stein, Johan 66, 68 Steyaert, C. 96 Storper, Michael 39 Strati, A. 118 Sun Microsystems: forming of an imagined community 85–9 comments on 89 development through communities 87–9 from hardware producer to network enabler 85–7 iForce Initiative/Centers 88–9 Java 86, 87, 89 Java Center Organization/Community 88 Jini Community 87–9 Jini technology 86, 87–8 Jiro platform 86–7 N1 architecture 86–7, 89 Sutcliffe, Kathleen M. 57–8 Svensson, C. 58 synchronization 24–6 Takeuchi, Hirotaka 156 task forcing 57–60 examples of 58 and expertise, commitment and entrepreneurialism 58–9 and networking 147 and time levelers 59–60

Index TCP/IP – Tranmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol 86 Thompson, James D. 21, 44, 103 time 19–27 and clocks 21–2, 24 coordination 59–60 dimensions of 23–6 and Greenwich Mean Time 20 institutionalized 19–27 reckoning systems 19–20, 22 social 23–4 social construction of 22–7 and space and corresponding activity categories 146 standardization of 22 timekeeping 21–2 time-zones, international 20 Tirole, Jean 38, 122 Tomicic, Marie 64, 114, 118 Townsend, A.M. 55 Trevino, L.K. 126 Tsoukas, H. 3 Turkle, Sherry 101 Twells, Henry 22 United Nations Global Compact 91, 93 Vaara, E. 103 value creation 4, 5 value-chain(s) 5 Vickers, Brian 80 virtualizing 50–57, 146

189

and checkpoint synchronization 55–7 examples of 50–52 and linking of practice 53–5 and reciprocal expertise 52–3 von Wright, Georg H. 14 Vygotsky 13 Wardy, Robert 79 Watson, T.J. 68–9, 132 Weaver, Richard 78 Weber, Max 14, 38, 121 Weick, Karl E. 3, 6, 9–10, 57–8, 114, 118, 124 Wenger, Etienne 7, 92, 141, 142, 145 Westley, F.R. 166 Whetten, David A. 95, 96, 97, 103, 104 Whittington, Richard 164 Whyte, William H. 126 Williams, B. 166 Williamson, Oliver E. 121, 122 Willig, Robert 38 Willmott, H. 160 Winter, Sidney G. 53 Wooldridge, B. 166 Wåhlin, Nils 160 Yates, B.W. 30 Yukl, Gary 63 Zajonc, R.B. 126 Zerubavel, Eviatar 20 Zerzan, John 44

A Grammar Of Organizing

A Grammar Of Organizing

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