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Persistent tensions arising from the exploration–exploitation paradox continuously threaten the accomplishment of organizational ambidexterity. Structural, contextual, and sequential solutions designed to alleviate these tensions dominate the ambidexterity literature. None of these adequately explains how top executives implement tension-alleviating managerial initiatives or how they respond in real time to tension-induced organizational perturbations. In this article, through analysis of top management team speeches at Procter & Gamble over a 15-year period, we show how the construction and communication of four innovation narratives—contextualizing, mutualizing, dramatizing, and focalizing—reduced tensions and enhanced organizational ambidexterity. We demonstrate the importance of top management team reflexivity in devising and communicating performative narratives, illustrate the polyphonic model of narrative strategizing, and present a cyclical model suggesting that the accomplishment of organizational ambidexterity is an ongoing dynamic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resource constrained-innovation (RCI) at the so-called ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BOP) in developing countries has attracted the attention of a growing number of scholars, who present different and sometimes conflicting narratives within which such innovation is framed. These variously frame innovation as supporting the opening up of new markets in the BOP (the ‘poor as consumers’) where multi-national companies are key actors, or grassroots, indigenous innovation aimed primarily at social and environmental goals, such as inclusion, empowerment and sustainability. We present the results of an ethnographic study in rural Bangladesh in which we explored the framing and dynamics of RCI. We found that rather than following any one particular narrative presented in the literature, innovation framings merge and co-exist through a process of hybridisation. Our research suggests that further empirical study of such processes of hybridisation in the field could be valuable for understanding RCI and associated social change at the BOP. This may have broader relevance for a world where resource constraint may become an increasingly ubiquitous phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an EU policy agenda, the ?knowledge-based bio-economy? (KBBE) emphasizes bio-technoscience as the means to reconcile environmental and economic sustainability. This frames the sustainability problem as an inefficiency to be overcome through a techno-knowledge fix. Here ecological sustainability means a benign eco-efficient productivity using resources which are renewable, reproducible and therefore sustainable. The KBBE narrative has been elaborated by European Technology Platforms in the agri-food-forestry-biofuels sectors, whose proposals shape research priorities. These inform policy agendas for the neoliberalization of both nature and knowledge, especially through intellectual property. In these ways, the KBBE can be understood as a new political-economic strategy for sustainable capital. This strategy invests great expectations for unlocking the productive potential of natural resources through a techno-knowledge fix. Although eco-efficiency is sometimes equated with biological productivity, commercial success will be dependent upon new combinations of ?living? and ?dead? labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]