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Managing Organizational Legitimacy through Modes of Open Strategizing
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Author: Josh Morton, U. of Leeds
Author: Alex Wilson, Loughborough U.
Author: Louise Cooke, Loughborough U.
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Extant literature associates the central purpose of open strategizing with organizations seeking to manage legitimacy (e.g. Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007; Whittington, Cailluet & Yakis Douglas, 2011; Dobusch, Dobusch & Muller-Seitz, 2017). To date, legitimacy has been highlighted as a potential ‘effect’ (Gegenhuber & Dobusch, 2017) or ‘outcome’ (Luedicke, Husemann, Furnari & Ladstaetter, 2017) of strategic openness. Absent has been research attempting to understand open strategy as a process of legitimation (Uberbacher, 2014), and there remains a need to elevate the potential of open strategy for managing legitimacy further. To address this gap, the research presented here adopts a longitudinal, single case analysis to explore a professional association who developed a new four-year strategic plan using an open strategy approach. The findings indicate how open strategy dynamics represent the case organization switching between distinct approaches to legitimation, to manage competing stakeholder demands. The research offers an important contribution by accentuating the principal relevance of organizational legitimacy in open strategizing. This brings open strategy into close alignment with organizational legitimacy literature and its theoretical conceptions (Lawrence, Suddaby & Leca, 2011; Suddaby, Seidl & Le, 2013; Smets, Aristidou & Whittington, 2017), which is imperative for understanding the potential importance of open strategy as a means of managing legitimacy.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Smart Strategy: The Role of Smartphone Technology in Opening Strategy Processes
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Author: Cecilia Varendh Mansson, Oxford U., Saïd Business School
Author: Richard Whittington, U. of Oxford
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This paper examines the impact of smartphone technology on the transparency and inclusiveness of the organizational strategy process. Through a case study of a multi-level marketing organisation in Nigeria, the paper suggests that mobile technology facilitates greater openness in strategy work through feedback loops among different stakeholders throughout the organisation. Smartphones’ ability to reach everyone in an organisation supports the evaluation and acceptance of strategies and initiatives or their rejection and abandonment through a process of human or virtual discussions. This paper identifies smartphones’ different apps as virtual arenas and office spaces where strategy feedback takes place through inclusive practices, and these practices – strategy work in action – create the opportunity for greater strategic openness.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Low-Power, High-Influence: A Case of IT-enabled Open Strategy Formulation
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Author: Matthew Mount, Deakin U.
Author: Krsto Pandza, U. of Leeds
Author: Ann Majchrzak, U. of Southern California
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Despite the advocation for wider participation in strategy formulation, the literature is still dominated by perspectives that emphasize the importance of top and middle managers. In this paper, we focus on the role and potential of low-power actors that reside outside of management positions and influential departments in open strategy formulation. Building on a unique mixed methods study of an IT- enabled open strategy process deployed in a multinational online payments firm, we examine how low-power actors participate and what impact their participation has on the acceptability of ideas generated. Interestingly, low-power actors were more strategically productive than high-power actors, and ideas were most acceptable among the collective when they were solely produced and co- developed by low-power actors and void of any high-power involvement.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Paradoxes of Openness as a Strategy: Open Data in New York, London, and Berlin
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Author: Maximilian Heimstädt, Witten/Herdecke U.
Author: Leonhard Dobusch, U. of Innsbruck
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Carolyn Dexter Award Nominee
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Across forms and fields, organizations increasingly pursue openness as a strategy. However, efforts to make some of their activities more transparent and inclusive lead to various tensions for people that enact these strategies “on the ground”. A particularly salient strategy of openness, mostly found in government agencies, are open data strategies. When implementing open data strategies, civil servants face tensions between demands for information generosity and information parsimony. In our study on the implementation of open data in NYC, London, and Berlin, we adopted a practice-based paradox lens to learn how actors maneuver these tensions in their day-to-day activities. Comparing the cases, we found that actors cope with these tensions by creating arenas of enclosed openness, which locally re-calibrate access to and involvement of various stakeholder groups in organizational processes.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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