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Organization change (OC) is increasingly important in today's volatile world. Understanding OC is a growing emphasis of management and organization (M&O) research and the singular focus of OC scholarship and practice. We show how selected M&O theories inform OC at the organization level. These theoretical perspectives diverge on issues central to OC. We explore what these conceptual differences mean for OC study and practice going forward.

This paper deals with the organizing of interactive product development. Developing products in interaction between firms may provide benefits in terms of specialization, increased innovation, and possibilities to perform development activities in parallel. However, the differentiation of product development among a number of firms also implies that various dependencies need to be dealt with across firm boundaries. How dependencies may be dealt with across firms is related to how product development is organized. The purpose of the paper is to explore dependencies and how interactive product development may be organized with regard to these dependencies.

The analytical framework is based on the industrial network approach, and deals with the development of products in terms of adaptation and combination of heterogeneous resources. There are dependencies between resources, that is, they are embedded, implying that no resource can be developed in isolation. The characteristics of and dependencies related to four main categories of resources (products, production facilities, business units and business relationships) provide a basis for analyzing the organizing of interactive product development.

Three in-depth case studies are used to explore the organizing of interactive product development with regard to dependencies. The first two cases are based on the development of the electrical system and the seats for Volvo’s large car platform (P2), performed in interaction with Delphi and Lear respectively. The third case is based on the interaction between Scania and Dayco/DFC Tech for the development of various pipes and hoses for a new truck model.

The analysis is focused on what different dependencies the firms considered and dealt with, and how product development was organized with regard to these dependencies. It is concluded that there is a complex and dynamic pattern of dependencies that reaches far beyond the developed product as well as beyond individual business units. To deal with these dependencies, development may be organized in teams where several business units are represented. This enables interaction between different business units’ resource collections, which is important for resource adaptation as well as for innovation. The delimiting and relating functions of the team boundary are elaborated upon and it is argued that also teams may be regarded as actors. It is also concluded that a modular product structure may entail a modular organization with regard to the teams, though, interaction between business units and teams is needed. A strong connection between the technical structure and the organizational structure is identified and it is concluded that policies regarding the technical structure (e.g. concerning “carry-over”) cannot be separated from the management of the organizational structure (e.g. the supplier structure). The organizing of product development is in itself a complex and dynamic task that needs to be subject to interaction between business units.

This chapter reports on a longitudinal quasi-experimental field study within an organizational design of a global consumer products manufacturer moving toward high-performance work systems (HPWSs) in North America by integrating business centers and self-directed work teams (SDWTs) coupled with 13 other action-levers within an integrated and bundled high-performance organizations (HPOs) re-design. The results of this organizational design effort are assessed using different types and levels of organizational outcomes (hard record data, behavioral, and attitudinal measures) along a 5-year temporal dimension punctuated by multiple time periods (baseline, during, and after). The organization, which was “built to change” (Lawler & Worley, 2006), in this research had already highly superior or “exemplar” (Collins, 2001) levels of organizational performance. Consequently, the real research question becomes: “What effect does state of the art organizational design and development have on an exemplar organization?” The study also calls into question the field's ability to truly assess exemplar organizations with existing measures of organizational change and development.

This paper reports the results of a three-year-long research on business relationships, relying on qualitative data gathered through multiple-case study research of four focal companies operating in Australia. The industry settings are as follows: steel construction, vegetable oils trading, aluminum and steel can manufacture, and imaging solutions. The research analyzes two main aspects of relationships: structure and process. This paper deals with structure describing it by the most desired features of intercompany relationships for each focal company. The primary research data have been coded drawing on extant research into business relationships. The main outcome of this part of the research is a five construct model composed by trust, commitment, bonds, distance, and information sharing that accounts for all informants’ utterances about relationship structure.

This study unpacks how organizational members construct a collective entrepreneurial identity within an organization and attempt to instill entrepreneurial features in the organization's existing identity.

The study draws on the cases of two venturing units, perceived as entrepreneurial groups within their respective parent companies. Semi-structured interviews and secondary data were collected and analyzed inductively and abductively.

The data revealed that organizational members co-constructed a “corporate entrepreneur” role identity to form a collective shared belief and communities of practice around what it meant to act as an entrepreneurial group within their local corporate context and how it differentiated them from others. Members also clustered around the emergent collective entrepreneurial identity through sensegiving efforts to instill entrepreneurial features in the organization's identity, despite the tensions this caused.

Previous studies in corporate entrepreneurship have theorized on the top-down dynamics instilling entrepreneurial features in an organization's identity, but have neglected the role of bottom-up dynamics. This study reveals two bottom-up dynamics that involve organizational members' agentic role in co-constructing and clustering around a collective entrepreneurial identity. This study contributes to the middle-management literature, uncovering champions' identity work in constructing a “corporate entrepreneur” role identity, with implications for followers' engagement in constructing a collective entrepreneurial identity. This study also contributes to the organizational identity literature, showing how tensions around the entrepreneurial group's distinctiveness may hinder the process of instilling entrepreneurial features in an organization's identity.

Projects have high stakes in how they are categorized. The final place of a project within a classification scheme depends on the inclusion or exclusion of certain classification criteria. So far, many researchers and organizations have used a variety classification criteria to construct different project classification schemes. However, most of these classification criteria have been taken for granted and the process of selecting them to categorize projects still remains a black box. The purpose of this paper is to open the black box of classification process and explain how it is reflected in picking the classification criteria.

Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology’s literature, the authors examine the main views of classification process to provide insight into the unknown or implicit reasons that one might have to pick particular attributes as project classification criteria.

The authors argue that classification occurs in the eye of the beholder; it is not only the project’s features per se but also the classifier’s “goals, ideal and preference” or “knowledge of causal relations” that are reflected in the classification criteria.

By elaborating the classification process, the authors brought the project context into the big picture of classification and provide a more rational, and coherent picture of how project classification works. This contributes to a theoretical blind spot, raised by prior researchers, related to the selection of project classification criteria.

Understanding classification processes will reduce the ambiguities, inconsistencies and multiple interpretations of project categories and help practitioners increase their projects’ visibility and legitimacy within an already established classification scheme. These implications help organizations in addressing some of the main obstacles to using categorization in project management practice.

The review of prior work in the category research literature and the insights from this paper will provide project management scholars with a useful toolbox for future research on project classification, which has long been understudied.

Many attempts to integrate technology in Swedish schools have been initiated over the past 30 years with varying success. Although the use of digital tools has increased along with a general technology development, schools have mainly been using IT in administrative support activities. In recent years, school system reforms and developments in the educational technology sector have both required and enabled schools to digitalize. In this chapter, we follow the implementation of two technologies in a benchmark school in order to understand how technology integration is achieved. We suggest four types of embeddedness resulting from different types of activities that are subject to technology integration, as well as the social and material conditions that guide convergence during the postimplementation phase.

An updated version of the original (1985) text, the book covers all aspects of marketing and selling bank services: the role of marketing; behaviour of customers; intelligence, planning and organisation; product decisions; promotion decisions; place decisions; price decisions; achieving sales. Application questions help to focus the readers' minds on key issues affecting practice.

In every industry there are resources. Some are moving, others more fixed; some are technical, others social. People working with the resources, for example, as buyers or sellers, or users or producers, may not make much notice of them. A product sells. A facility functions. The business relationship in which we make our money has “always” been there. However, some times this picture of order is disturbed. A user having purchased a product for decades may “suddenly” say to the producer that s/he does not appreciate the product. And a producer having received an order of a product that s/he thought was well known, may find it impossible to sell it. Such disturbances may be ignored. Or they can be used as a platform for development. In this study we investigate the latter option, theoretically and through real world data. Concerning theory we draw on the industrial network approach. We see industrial actors as part of (industrial) networks. In their activities actors use and produce resources. Moreover, the actors interact − bilaterally and multilaterally. This leads to development of resources and networks. Through “thick” descriptions of two cases we illustrate and try to understand the interactive character of resource development and how actors do business on features of resources. The cases are about a certain type of resource, a product − goat milk. The main message to industrial actors is that they should pay attention to that products can be co-created. Successful co-creation of products, moreover, may require development also of business relationships and their connections (“networking”).

This paper aims to propose a method for the development of quality management systems (QMS) that allows the consultant that undertakes the support of the organisation to take advantage of a corporate memory. The consultant develops a new QMS based on a preliminary draft that is created using suitable reference processes from a library, selected according to the features of the organisation's production system.

The method adopts a taxonomy of production systems, based on a set of features (e.g. degree of the products’ customisation, form of purchasing, etc.) and creates a library of reference processes that satisfy the requirements of the standard and are suitable for each particular type of production system.

The QMS developed according to the proposed method satisfy both the requirements of the standard ISO 9001 and the needs of the organisation in which the QMS is installed in the biggest possible degree. The duration and cost of the project for the new QMS is reduced and the effort is oriented towards the process adaptation and improvement.

The proposed approach is general and can be applied to several types of industries. However, the proposed taxonomy is applicable to manufacturing companies. For other types of organisations specific taxonomies should be developed.

The originality of the paper stems from the development of a QMS based on reference processes rather than the modelling and reviewing of as-is processes.