Unfit to Learn? How Long View Organizations Adapt to Environmental Jolts

Pursey Heugens and Stelios Zyglidopoulos

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: Long view organizations have a technical core combining high levels of Woodwardian (1958) technological complexity and Thompsonian (1967) technological intensity. This significantly diminishes their capacity for operational flexibility and strategic adaptation. Little is known about how such organizations manage to learn from rare events. We shed light on this issue by reporting a thirteen-year longitudinal study of a major oil company, tracing its experiences with a socio-political crisis from original preparations to learnings that did not fully materialize until years after the event. We use three alternate templates to interpret the organization’s struggle to maintain its technical core under conditions of fierce contestation by changing constituent groups and dwindling public support: (1) a stakeholder template mapping shifts in the salience of constituent groups that punctuate long-standing negotiated equilibria; (2) a legitimacy template showing migration towards new forms of legitimacy while old forms crumble; and (3) a capability template highlighting how pre-existing stocks of capabilities hinder learning before being supplanted by new ones. These templates are tied together in a set of integrative propositions stating how long view organizations learn from rare events.

Keywords: Alternate templates; Environmental jolts; Institutional theory; Oil industry; Organizational learning; Resource-based view; Stakeholder theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F23 M M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-03-28
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