Talk given at the Routines.Research.Community Workshop, hosted by the Institute of Strategic Management Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU) September 28-30, 2022
Engler and Prantl system of classification in plant taxonomy
Openness as an Organizing Principle: Open Organizing Routines
1. Leonhard Dobusch
University of Innsbruck
RRC Workshop Linz
Institute of Strategic Management
Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU)
September 28-30, 2022
OPENNESS AS AN ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE
Open Organizing Routines
10. How smart companies are
opening up strategic initiatives
to involve front-line employees,
experts, suppliers, customers,
entrepreneurs, and even
competitors.
“
11. Quelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Increasing Openness as a PROGRAM
Tensions such as
“compromising speed” or
“burdening wider audiences
with the pressures of
strategy” (Hautz et al., 2017) as
limitations or hurdles for
achieving greater openness
II
IOpenness as the opposite
of closure, representing two
endpoints of a continuum
from closed to open:
Inviting more actors, sharing
more information >> open++
open++ as a normative ideal
13. ROUTINES
(re)produce patterns of action and social
structures", including "patterns of social equality
and inequality"
“
(Feldman & Pentland, 2022)
>> openness imperatives demand changes to the way
organizations re-produce these patterns
14. OPENNESS AS THE "OTHER" WAY OF ORGANIZING
[S]trategy is traditionally exclusive. […] Opacity is
important to strategy […]. Open strategy challenges both
these orthodoxies[.]
“ (Whittington et al. 2011, p. 535)
Open strategy balances the tenets of traditional business
strategy with the promise of open innovation.
“ (Chesbrough and Appleyard
2007, p. 58)
>> 'openness' as an open (no pun intended) conceptual frame to
evaluate, adapt and/or complement established (clusters of) routines
15. as not “traditional“, “closed“, “exclusive“
NEGATIVE DEFINITION OF OPENNESS
…selective revealing
(Henkel et al. 2014)
…selective inclusion
…"openwashing"
(Heimstädt 2017)
Allows… Routines related to openness:
licensing, (re-)integrating …
soliciting, deliberating, …
auditing, window dressing, …
17. OPENNESS AS TRANSPARENCY
17
openness in terms of transparency, both in
the strategy formulation stage and, more
commonly, in the communication of strategies
once they are formulated.
“
(Whittington et al. 2011,
p. 532)
>> routines of informing, communicating and discussing strategically
relevant information
18. 18
Inclusion refers to participation in an
organization’s ‘strategic conversation’[.]
“ (Whittington et al. 2011,
p. 536)
>> routines of collecting, deliberating, and condensing strategic ideas,
maybe even decision-making routines
OPENNESS AS INCLUSION
19. “Open forms of strategy-making with
more inside and outside
organizations and more of
different actors internally and externally.
Whittington et al. (2011, p. 531)
transparency
inclusion
24. CO
M
M
ERCIAL
BREAK
Dobusch, L. & Dobusch, L. (2019): The
Relation between Openness and Closure
in Open Strategy: Programmatic and
Constitutive Approaches to Openness. In
D. Seidl, G. von Krogh & R Whittington
(eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Open
Strategy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 326-336
28. Quelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
If your group has nine helpful
and polite members, and one
rude, sexist, loud member,
most women are going to
continue to stay away because
of that one member
“
Valeria Aurora (2002),
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/
Encourage-Women-Linux-
HOWTO/
29. Quelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Routines of excluding
exclusionary behavior
as a precondition for
openness?
30. How to resolve this dual character of
openess-related routines as
both inclusionary and exclusionary?
31. Quelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Openness and Closure as CONSTITUTIVE
Analyzing the paradoxical
nature of openness (and
closure) by focusing on
legitimate closure routines.
e.g., classifying documents
(as a form of official secrecy
(Costas & Grey 2014)) to enhance
transparency
II
IOpenness and closure as
inextricably linked and
interacting with each other
>> we find examples of
closure in all empirical
studies of open strategy
32. As researchers:
How to investigate the dual character of
openess-related routines as
both inclusionary and exclusionary?
Working GROUPS
> First: 5’ think about example of your own empirical research
> Second: share and discuss examples
33. Leonhard Dobusch
University of Innsbruck
RRC Workshop Linz
Institute of Strategic Management
Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU)
September 28-30, 2022
OPENNESS AS AN ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE
Routines of Open Scholarship
34. HOW OPEN DO YOU WANNA BE?
HOW DO YOU WANNA BE OPEN?
35. HOW OPEN DO YOU WANNA BE?
HOW DO YOU WANNA BE OPEN?