Innovative Forms of Organizing
Volume 17, Number 3 Article by Srinivas Gunta September, 2005
Innovative Forms of Organizing : Edited by A M Pettigrew et al, Sage Publications, 2003, pp. 411, Price: £26.99 :
The old joke goes: `Put three economists in a room and you get four opinions'. This could, with equal truth, be applied to academicians from disciplines such as organisational science. Given this, putting together a book with contributions from a galaxy of researchers, each an expert in his own right, that is not only cogent but also path breaking, is indeed a creditable achievement. The book covers a wide variety of issues empirically through a network of researchers spread across three continents, and, more importantly, in collaboration with the industry.
The rapid pace of change in the competitive environment has meant that organisations have had to innovate, not just in terms of product profile or markets served but in even more fundamental ways, such as the mode of organising itself. While there have been several accounts of new forms of organisations in both the popular media and academic circles in the recent past, most of the studies were piecemeal and limited to a single case or a particular set of contingencies such as region or industry; several others did not study the impact of the new structure on performance. In order to separate fact from fiction, provide a deeper perspective and a greater understanding, the INNFORM (Innovative Forms of Organising) programme of research was launched, with the participation of academicians from Europe, US and Japan, as well as industry participation in the form of funding and support from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. This book is a part of the INNFORM research output. It follows the well-received The Innovating Organization by Pettigrew and Fenton in 2000. Innovative Forms of Organizing, as the second and the final part of the series, is aimed at theory building from the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative analysis carried out under the INNFORM programme. While both books aim at disseminating the insights from the research, the former limits itself mainly to the question of the process of evolution of innovative organisational forms through a set of well-written case studies; the latter looks at the performance effects and the processes aiding it in depth. While the first book sets the context, the second book ties up the loose ends to build a cogent theory, enabling a delivery of discourse. Given the enormity of the task as well as the good reception of the first book, Innovative Forms of Organizing had its job cut out. In trying to build a consistent framework, some sort of disciplining seems to have been carried out. Thus while the first book has chapters (i.e., cases) that seemed very loosely connected despite their individual brilliance, the second book is more integrated with a proper structure in place, thus making up for a possible lack of richness. It can be said that Innovative Forms of Organizing does a good job, despite its more ambitious objective when compared to The Innovating Organization.
The book under review has three major themes, which it argues are characteristic of the innovating organisation. They are organising/strategising, complementarities and managing dualities. These themes are developed over the course of the book, with examples from case data as well as the quantitative data obtained from the INNFORM survey.
Literature generally accords a more important status to strategy vis-à-vis organisation. The authors argue how the constructs of organisation and strategy no longer apply, given the fluidity of the environment. They advocate the use of the terms organising and strategising instead, and establish reasons as to why these two should be viewed as parts of a single duality and given equal importance. The theoretical substantiation for this position is provided from a variety of perspectives such as the economics of complementarities, post modernism, practice perspective and structuration theory.
Complementarities are said to exist if doing more of one thing increases the returns of doing more of another. The concepts of fit and mutual reinforcement are embedded in the notion of complementarities. Praiseworthy efforts were employed in bringing out the similarities and differences among closely related concepts such as contingency theory, complimentarity theory and configurational theory. The link between complementarities and performance is firstbackground material. An interesting feature of the book is that the INNFORM survey instrument has been put up on the web as a resource.
The efforts at theory building from the cases seem to be feeble in some respects. Interesting themes with potential have not been treated fully: If network form is suitable for exploration and hierarchy for exploitation, what are the trade-offs involved? An even more interesting question would be the identification of parameters for determination of organisation structure since different organisational actors may perceive the same structure as network or hierarchy. The limits to human adaptability, as evidenced in the reversal of the 3D matrix structure at Hilti, and the feasibility of the Fremap system on a large scale where each employee at the branch level carries out the entire range of administrative and commercial activities are themes that could have been developed. Similarly, a process model of complementarity building developed from the Unilever and BP cases would have been valuable for both academicians and practitioners. The availability of several academicians working on the same programme could have been put to novel use by getting them to analyse the same case with distinct conceptual lenses. The results would have generated a lot of interest and value.
Considering the gravity of questions explored, the amount of knowledge created and the modus operandi of the research programme, it has to be emphasised that the book under review would be an invaluable work for times to come.
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