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In this paper, we examine grassroots-level employees' (hereafter grassroots) co-strategizing practices in the context of a business crisis--the U.S.-China trade war in 2019. Based on an in-depth case study of ITCorp's grassroots undertaking open strategy practices, we show how they co-strategized with multiple stakeholders and helped the company bypass the 25% high tariffs imposed on Chinese-made products by the U.S. government. Our findings uncover five open strategy practices, including (a) scrabbling strategy directions with the management team, (b) setting boundaries for idea development, (d) developing choice points through a disproval approach, (d) noise reduction, and (e) simultaneously formulating and implementing a strategy. We also develop a conceptual process model that foregrounds the open strategy practices of how grassroots co-strategize with multiple stakeholders in the face of a crisis. With these findings, we contribute to open strategy and strategy-as-practice literature by advancing our understanding of grassroots' strategizing practices and their multifaceted roles throughout the co-strategizing process, from advice-seekers to strategists and strategy implementation facilitators. We also contribute to the strategy-implementation literature by revealing the dynamic and iterative strategy formulation and implementation process for a more granular and actionable strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of organizational identity, using the philosophical perspective known as embodied realism to characterize the creation of a group identity as a process involving embodied metaphors. The epistemological and ontological advantages of this perspective, as opposed to those of social constructionism or essentialism, are discussed. Examples of the application of this theory are drawn from a case study involving a management workshop for executives from the cellular telephone industry.

We present a novel metaphorical approach to organization development (OD), the use of embodied metaphors, and in doing so we extend current understandings and uses of metaphor in OD. In terms of understandings of metaphor, we go beyond the dominant semantic-cognitive dimension to address the spatial and embodied dimensions. In terms of uses of metaphor, we discuss an intervention technology based on embodied metaphors, which emphasizes induced rather than naturally occurring metaphors, builds on a developed theoretical base of collaborative diagnostic technologies, and can be employed in a targeted manner for issue diagnosis and intervention. Implications for the use of embodied metaphors in OD are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a conceptualization of organizational discourse as situated symbolic action which is then illustrated through analysis of an episode of negotiated order accessed through an organization development intervention. Implications of this perspective include: responding to some of the key challenges facing organizational discourse analysis; encouraging a more holistic understanding of empirical contexts; and offering a discursive framework for diagnosis and intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global economy is becoming more functionally integrated and interdependent, facilitated by information and communication technologies, and the operations of multi-national enterprises. Global protagonists suggest that increased economic integration as well as the rapid, unhindered global movement of capital render the world "borderless" and, in so doing, challenge or invalidate national boundaries and localities. We discuss this view of globalization, along with other key issues and current debates. Although there is a growing body of literature that has developed as an antithesis to the more populist account of a "borderless world", there remains a dearth of empirical work that seeks to understand the complex process of globalization. We adopt an interpretive perspective which draws on Giddens's (1984, 1990, 1991) recent theoretical developments on structuration and the globalizing nature of modernity to develop a conceptualization of globalization as a complex dialectic between the local and the global, mediated by agents' interpretive schemes and actions. This theoretical position underlied the key empirical research focus of an in-depth longitudinal study conducted in the London Insurance Market over a five year period. Analysis of the case study reveals a number of implications, including the view that globalization is not an abstract idea disembedded from agents' interpretations and actions and posing deterministic structural imperatives on local contexts. Rather, it is a process which is intimately interrelated with and shaped by such contexts, interpretation and actions, and which can impose non-deterministic structural constraints open to the local interpretations and influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This symposium will assess whether the popularity of organizational discourse analysis is in decline, what problem this decline might raise, and what can be done to address it. Panelists will offer insights into how discourse analysis can address concerns about parochialism and how it can engage materiality and socio-materiality to address social constructivist and critical realist concerns simultaneously. It will also explore multi-modal and mixed method approaches and show how these methods could contribute to organizational discourse analysis. In addition, panelists will explore validity criteria for evaluating discourse work and ways to integrate distinct theoretical perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frequent strategic change in industries with long research and development as well as implementation timelines can negatively impact organizational performance, since products may never reach their maturity phase and enter the market. Through an in- depth case study of NASA's long-term human exploration activities, which frequently face uncertainty and strategic change, we reveal how the Johnson Space Center built a new capability for managing temporal tensions over a 60 year timeframe. Building on this, we develop a process model that shows how temporal practices in settings of long-term strategic change initiatives are subject to temporal and strategic fit assessments that determine whether the outcomes of these initiatives are facilitated or inhibited. Implications for the literature on strategic management and time are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the organizational dysfunctions that can interfere with the implementation of structural ambidexterity as a dynamic capability. We find that these dysfunctions give rise to competency traps characterized by interlinked cognitive, organizational and behavioral dimensions, that can compromise structural ambidexterity. Further, from the perspective of network ambidexterity, we also find that the inventions of the explorative unit can be treated as external to the focal organization, mirroring the dynamics of portfolio resources found in the context of strategic alliances. Our findings extend understanding of organizational ambidexterity as a dynamic capability, in particular how competency traps can severely compromise ambidexterity; and how network-like effects can adversely shape intra-firm dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We combine Lefebvre and Speech Act Theory to analyse the state's response to large-scale public disorder across English cities in August 2011. Drawing on parliamentary debate, Select Committee testimony, and interviews with police officers, we extend Lefebvre's account by detailing how crisis can lead to the state having to work on space quickly and in real time, rather than through forces of history and gradual colonization. Our contributions are to describe and analyse how this crisis required the state to produce space contemporaneously at different levels. At street level, this involved the reassertion of sovereignty through territorial struggles by the police. At the level of abstract space, our focus, Speech Act theory helps us to show how Members of Parliament framed the disorder and participants in ways that supported the re-establishment of norms; principally through homogenization, in a process we describe as 'tidying'. This has implications for understanding state responses to crisis, providing a contextual, power-sensitive and processual account of the production of space in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]