David Obstfeld

Getting New Things Done

Networks, Brokerage, and the Assembly of Innovative Action

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

David Obstfeld is Associate Professor of Management in The Mihaylo College of Business and Economics at California State University, Fullerton. His research examines knowledge-intensive, network-based social processes that result in organizational change and innovation. Previously, he served as Director of Training and Development at The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. Juli 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 236mm x 156mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 549g
• ISBN-13: 9780804760508
• ISBN-10: 0804760500
• Artikelnr.: 47548795

Autorenporträt

David Obstfeld is Associate Professor of Management in The Mihaylo College of Business and Economics at California State University, Fullerton. His research examines knowledge-intensive, network-based social processes that result in organizational change and innovation. Previously, he served as Director of Training and Development at The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
The Introduction provides an overview of the book's action model. Actors
engage in specific social processes to mobilize networks and knowledge to
drive both organizational innovation and growth, and many other efforts to
get new things done. Innovation takes both more-routine and nonroutine
forms, and a particular form of nonroutine action, the creative project, is
emphasized as an undertheorized source of innovation in the modern world.
Innovation, at the individual level, has four key explanatory variables:
(1) brokerage network structure; (2) brokerage process-the action by which
a strategic actor leverages his or her network; (3) the strategic actor's
stock of knowledge, whether rooted in experience or education; and (4) the
strategic actor's knowledge articulation skill with which he or she
communicates that knowledge for the purposes of engaging or enlisting
others. The BKAP model (Brokerage, Knowledge Articulation, Projects) is
introduced.
1Brokerage in Action
chapter abstract
This chapter addresses social network structure and process to explain how
brokerage functions to get new things done. First, innovative action is
described as often unfolding in triads through brokerage. Second, the
chapter explains how network structure sets the context for action,
emphasizing the distinction between open and closed social network
structures. Third, the chapter distinguishes between brokerage as action
and brokerage as structure. Fourth, the chapter considers the brokerage
process, first by defining it and then by proposing three fundamental
brokerage orientations or behaviors: conduit, tertius gaudens, and tertius
iungens. Finally, the chapter revisits Fligstein's idea of social skill, or
the ability to induce cooperation, to argue that inducing cooperation to
get new things done is achieved by strategically combining the three
brokerage orientations toward action.
2Knowledge Articulation
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the essential role of knowledge articulation in
enabling brokers to mobilize and coordinate others' actions to get new
things done. First, the chapter examine the tacit/explicit
conceptualization of knowledge and its implications for knowledge
articulation. Second, the chapter revisits Carlile's 3T model (knowledge
transfer, knowledge translation, and knowledge transformation) and how it
bridges between brokerage and knowledge articulation. Third, the chapter
focuses on three initially dyadic processes for articulating knowledge:
mutual intelligibility, persuasion, and enlistment. Then the chapter turns
to ethnographic data to illustrate knowledge articulation in terms of five
practices or communicative dimensions: moving between back stage and front
stage; moving between complex and simple; moving among the past, present,
and future; balancing familiarizing and defamiliarizing; and establishing
credibility by laying down markers. Finally, the chapter revisits the
relationship between brokerage processes and knowledge articulation in
getting new things done.
3Creative Projects
chapter abstract
A theory of the creative project-the underexamined, nonroutine trajectory
for getting new things done-is the focus of this chapter. First, the
chapter draws on insights from pragmatist philosophy with respect to the
interplay of routine and nonroutine action. Next, the chapter summarizes
the organizational literature's treatment of routine and nonroutine
innovative action and their expression in the learning-curve construct. The
chapter next introduces a conceptual framework for action trajectories in
project-based and routine-based innovation. The chapter then explores the
role of brokerage and knowledge articulation in creative projects. This is
followed by a brief examination of meta-routines and meta-trajectories.
Next, the chapter provides exploratory criteria for making distinctions
between innovation in creative projects and innovation in organizational
routines. Finally, the chapter concludes with a hypothetical case of the
Apple Watch to illustrate the concepts introduced here.
4Mobilizing for Routine-based Innovation: NewCar's Manual Shifter Redesign
Initiative
chapter abstract
This chapter illustrates the BKAP model with an extended ethnographic case
to show how network and knowledge processes interact to produce
routine-based innovative action over time. The chapter first provides
relevant context for the automotive design process, after which the author
walks through the extended case in three phases of activity and analysis:
the first phase involves disruption of the existing design routine and the
initial challenges experienced by the manual shifter "crunch team" in its
efforts to respond to that disruption; the second and third phases contrast
two pairs of actors (two engineers and two sets of designers) who attempt
to mobilize support for innovation. In both phase two and phase three,
successful innovation advocates mobilized action through brokerage and
knowledge articulation to get new things done.
5Mobilizing to Advance Creative Projects: NewCar's Prototype Parts
Purchasing Activity
chapter abstract
This chapter illustrates the BKAP model through an extended ethnographic
case to show how network and knowledge processes interact to produce
project-based innovation. An ethnographic case study in the same automotive
setting found in Chapter 4 illustrates the emergence of creative projects
launched in pursuit of innovation. Specifically, this chapter depicts how
an automobile manufacturer's prototype parts purchasing routine contrasts
with two creative projects undertaken to redesign it. The chapter
elaborates how trajectory strategy, consisting of the trajectory projection
and scheme, and trajectory management, consisting of knowledge
articulation, brokerage activity, and an additional category emerging from
the author's field data-contingency management-impact the two projects'
adoption. To lay the groundwork for how the two creative projects emerged,
the author describes the "cowboy culture" presented in the Introduction, a
culture imprinted within NewCar that gave rise to behaviors through which
creative projects were pursued.
6A Deeper Examination of Social Skill
chapter abstract
The relational astuteness that underlies brokerage process and knowledge
articulation is the major focus of this chapter. One's ability to encode a
communication has to work hand in hand with the ability to read one's
audience, in order to shape the knowledge that is to be articulated and
manage relationships. The chapter first examines the social astuteness that
underpins a dyadic exchange, drawing on Mead's symbolic interactionist
perspective and the communication practices of role taking, self as object,
imaginative rehearsal, and behavioral adaptation. The chapter then extends
that approach to the triadic perspective emphasized in this book. The
chapter next explores perspective articulation in greater depth and then
turns to riffing-another facet of social skill-where actors draw on the
voice or lived-in experience of another individual or category of
individuals to drive innovation. The chapter concludes with field
observations to capture the influential program manager's social skill.
7Additional Applications and Implications
chapter abstract
This chapter applies the BKAP model of action to a number of important
theoretical and empirical puzzles that have been confronted by organization
theorists in particular and by social scientists more generally.
Specifically, the chapter explores the applicability of the BKAP model to
central issues in artistic movements with a case study of the Ballets
Russes in early twentieth-century France, entrepreneurship theory, and
collective action. The chapter then turns to several other issues related
to organizing and strategy and the individual and firm level, including
dynamic capability, microfoundations of organizing, supply chain
management, sensemaking, ambidexterity, transactive memory systems,
emotional intelligence, and job crafting. From there the chapter turns to
implications for mobilizing action across the analogue-digital divide, and
for education, social inequality, and social mobility. The chapter
concludes by relating the author's approach to de Tocqueville's "science of
association."