Strategic Organization, Volume 3, Issue 4

November 2005

Articles

Importation as Innovation: Transposing Managerial Practices Across Fields

Eva Boxenbaum and Julie Battilana

Abstract. This paper examines transposition as a source of innovation. Transposition is the act of applying a practice from one social context to another. We trace how and why three individuals transposed the North American practice of diversity management into Denmark in 2002. The analysis outlines how they came up with the idea to transpose diversity management to Denmark and what motivated them to do so. Based on our analysis, we propose an institutionalist account of innovation in which transposition across fields characterized by different dominant institutional logics plays a prominent role. We identify a number of facilitating conditions for such transposition to occur and we explain how it can subsequently lead to innovation.

The Managerial Revolution Revisited: The Moderating Impact of Top Manager Social Class Position

Donald Palmer and Michael Maher

Abstract. This paper draws on early sociological critiques of the managerialist thesis to develop a new conceptualization of corporate ownership and control. And it uses this conceptualization to inform an analysis of the propensity of large corporations to complete diversifying acquisitions in the 1960s. We categorize firms on the basis of the social class position of their top managers, focusing primarily on three types of firms: those run by established capitalist owners, new capitalist owners, and autonomous professional managers. And we develop theoretical arguments that lead to two sets of predictions. First, we predict that firms run by new capitalist owners and autonomous professional managers exhibited a greater tendency than firms run by established capitalist owners to complete diversifying acquisitions in the 1960s. Second, we predict that the relationship between a firm’s financial, organizational, and managerial capacities to pursue diversifying acquisitions on the one hand and the rate at which it completed such acquisitions on the other, was stronger among firms run by new capitalist owners and autonomous professional managers than among firms run by other types of top managers. Finally, we conduct discrete time event history analyses of the likelihood that firms completed diversifying acquisitions in the 1960s, which generate results that are largely consistent with our predications.

So!apbox: editorial essays

A Configurational Approach to the Integration of Strategy and Organization Research

Charles C. Snow, Raymond E. Miles and Grant Miles

Strategic Organization: A Field in Search of Micro-foundations