Heterogeneity and change in management concepts: The case of agility

Ryu, Jinah

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/127426 Copy

Description

Title

Heterogeneity and change in management concepts: The case of agility

Author(s)

Ryu, Jinah

Issue Date

2024-08-05

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Love, Geoffrey

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Love, Geoffrey

Committee Member(s)

• Ocasio, William
• Kraatz, Matthew
• Benton, Richard

Department of Study

Business Administration

Discipline

Business Administration

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• management concepts
• diffusion
• organizational change

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with assessing and explaining patterns in firm’s deployment (i.e., strategic usage) of management concepts with a particular focus on how these can vary and change over time. Management concepts provide overarching managerial guidelines and often have significant implications for a firm's practices and behaviors (Bodrožić & Adler, 2018). Prominent examples are quality, organizational culture, and more recently agility. As they come on the scene, management concepts can trigger interest among the practitioner community, who can see them as potential solutions to strategic issues and thus seek ways to integrate and employ these concepts within their management strategies (Birkinshaw, Hamel, & Mol, 2008). However, despite prior studies, our understanding of the nature and antecedents of patterns of organizational deployment of these concepts over time remains limited. This dissertation presents two studies, each in a chapter, that share an overarching concern with assessing and explaining patterns in how firms deploy management concepts over time. Each chapter focuses on corporate utilization of the agility concept in strategic communication as its empirical setting (Höllerer, Jancsary, Barberio, & Meyer, 2020). Together, the chapters work to explain field-level heterogeneity as well as firm-level changes in usage over time. The first chapter specifically focuses on assessing the over-time patterns themselves, focusing on heterogeneity in deployment of the management concept – that is, it examines differences in use of the concept across firms and over time. It empirically examines these with a distinctive joint focus on firm and field level patterns of deployment over time. Notably, the chapter works to explain how firm-level patterns drive field level ones. The chapter theoretically compares observed patterns at both levels of analysis to those that prior theory in diffusion research might lead us to expect. At the same time, it makes a theoretical contribution by developing conceptual explanations for the observed patterns, which have not been directly assessed in the dynamic and fine-grained way used here. The second chapter is specifically focused on explaining antecedents of changes in firm deployment. It develops a theoretical framework that explains how firm-specific contingencies drive changes in deployment of management concepts to varying extents at different times, different than prior work that has emphasized collective shifts. In explicating firm-level mechanisms underlying changes, I use the theoretical lens of culture as toolkit (Swidler, 1986) and attention-based view (Ocasio, 1997). The chapter’s framework and findings thus offer a novel alternative way to think about management concepts as serving as tools within firms. I empirically examine the two core issues just highlighted–heterogeneity and changing deployments–by assessing how companies communicate different issues and agendas associated with the concept of agility in their strategic communication. I take abductive and deductive approaches in the two chapters, respectively. I utilize Natural Language Processing models to analyze a rich, extensive dataset of corporate quarterly earnings calls from Standard and Poor’s 500 companies spanning from 2002 to 2022. In the first chapter, I find that at the field level the strategic issues and agendas that organizations attach to the agility concept tend to become more heterogeneous over time. Underneath this field-level heterogeneity, I also find that companies exhibit varying patterns of utilizing the concept, with some firms employing a mode I label “adaptive response” in which their use of the concept is driven by specific environmental contingencies and thus changes over time, while others employ a mode I label “strategic commitment” wherein their consistent, localized applications are connected to the ideas of competitive advantage, culture, and identity. I suggest that these two modes constitute a previously underrecognized (or at least underappreciated) source of heterogeneity at the field level. In the second chapter, I find that firms change their use of management concepts depending on firm-specific situational and structural contingencies. I propose that management concepts–in association with a distinct set of organizational issues–serve as a toolkit for addressing enacted contexts, and that firms change the distinctly configured toolkit depending on attentional mechanisms. These findings, underpinned by the culture-as-toolkit and attention-based views, provide a novel and systematic explanation for firm-level variation in deployment of management concepts. This dissertation contributes to research on management concepts in at least two ways. First, it elucidates how the diffusion of management concepts is associated with markedly increasing heterogeneity across organizations over time. Second, it develops a systematic explanation of why individual firms change their deployments of management concepts to varying extents and at different times. In understanding both heterogeneity and changes in deployment of management concepts, it suggests a broad shift from existing ways of thinking: 1) from a simplified model of assessing heterogeneity in diffusion in binary terms or through a static view at the time of initial adoption to a nuanced approach that considers variations in usage at both firm and field levels over time; and 2) from a collective-shift approach to understanding changes in management concepts to an agentic approach that attributes changing deployments of management concepts to organizations’ strategic choices and responses.

Graduation Semester

2024-12

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/127426

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Jinah Ryu

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