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Brokerage Work in Competitive Markets: Reinsurance Brokers as Self- interested Organizations
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Author: Konstantinos Chalkias, Cass Business School, City U. London
Author: Paula Jarzabkowski, City U. London
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This study examines the practices of brokerage work in competitive markets. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the two largest brokerage organizations in the global reinsurance industry, we show the practices through which brokers enact the complex and contradictory work of both bringing parties with conflicting interests together to enable market exchange and setting them apart in order to maintain the brokerage role of intermediating the market. We find that fluid iterations of four brokers’ practices - rationalizing, humanizing, expertizing and intervening - are performed interchangeably, enabling the duality of two contradictory brokerage approaches – ‘tertius iungens’ of bringing together and ‘tertius gaudens’ of setting apart. We show that this duality is critical to brokerage in a competitive market, enabling brokers maintain their role as self-interested organizations who must counteract competitive threats by: (1) retaining indirect relationships; (2) eroding direct relationships; and (3) competing with other brokers. Bringing these elements of our findings together into a conceptual framework we extend the organizational literature on brokers to account for the duality of practices in brokerage work and the dynamic relationship of the brokerage approaches of tertius iungens and tertius gaudens. Through this understanding, we illuminate brokers as self-interested organizations in competitive markets, an element which existing studies on brokers have not yet examined.
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Search Terms: practices | brokers | markets
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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The Differential Becoming of Business
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Author: Thomas Preetzmann, Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences
Author: Lars Esbjerg, Aarhus U.
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In this detailed longitudinal study, we explore how business areas emerge and evolve. By zooming in on specific business areas of two different firms operating in similar environments, but subject to different circumstances, we unfold and discuss how and why different outcomes were achieved. Our cases have different aspirational setups and colloquial enactment: one business area was originally wanted, but has an ‘undesirable’ becoming, while the other was unwanted, but has a ‘desirable’ becoming. By addressing the specific intra-active (re)configurings through which causality of phenomena emerges, we train agential realism by applying agential cuts in understanding how iterative intra-activity produces and reproduces the becoming of the matters in question. Our units of analysis are phenomena including managerial practices and doings distributed in time and space. By considering such phenomena and causality as the building blocks in the becoming of reality, we develop an interpretation of how configurations and reconfigurations constitutes the managerial reality of the two firms studied. Research- wise, we contribute to developing a better understanding of the role that matter plays for strategy and business development by applying a socio-material lens on a practical setting. For managers, we develop an approach for analysing strategic coming and becoming.
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Search Terms: Strategy-as-practice | Becoming | Agential realism
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Conscious Uncoupling: The difficulty of establishing and enforcing new organizational boundaries
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Author: Rene Wiedner, Warwick Business School
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This paper examines how managers struggled to implement the mandated separation of a unit from its parent organization within the English National Health Service (NHS) and how their attempts shaped subsequent inter-organizational dynamics. It demonstrates that enacting organizational separation, and thus aligning behavior with newly defined boundaries, involves potentially complex and interrelated forms of boundary work. Specifically, a qualitative analysis of this case suggests that attempts to separate stakeholders by limiting interaction across formal boundaries may unintentionally maintain connections and thus, paradoxically, counteract organizational separation. At the same time, attempts to establish connections may facilitate the organizational separation process by allowing stakeholders to negotiate and accept a new division of roles and responsibilities. Hence, I find that boundary spanning may be a useful strategy not only in the context of organizational integration but also in enabling organizational separation by inhibiting boundary-breaching attempts and facilitating boundary closure. The findings contribute to theories of organizational boundaries and boundary work and provide an enhanced understanding of the increasingly important, and yet understudied, phenomenon of organizational separation.
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Search Terms: boundary work | divestiture | healthcare
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Disentangling Social Influence in Strategic Decision Making Practice
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Author: Richard DeJordy, California State U., Fresno
Author: Cheryl Mitteness, Northeastern U.
Author: Melissa Smith Baucus, Texas State U.
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This research extends our understanding of how the practice of making strategic decisions in organizations is affected by various forms of social influence. Using social network analysis, we model three sources of social influence identified in the literature (direct contact, group affiliation, and structural equivalence) across three common forms of interpersonal relations (advice, friendship, and adversarial ties). We compare the relative effectiveness of each paired combination of source and form on the felt influence leading to a decision to take or not take an action when the decision involves high uncertainty and high strategic importance. The results show that the impact of social influence varies depending on the type of interpersonal relation (advice, friendship and adversarial relations) and whether the felt influence was directed toward taking or not taking action. Our findings offer new insights into the social influence dynamics at play in strategic decision- making activities inside organizations, and have important practical implications for the practices of high impact decision makers, including top management teams, boards of directors, new product development teams, venture firms and angel groups.
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Search Terms: decision making | social influence | social networks
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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