Page 217 - The Resilient Organization

Postcard No. 4 from Woodside, California 203

Beyond any such assisted fact-finding or interchange (Warner, 1984), a
higher standard still would be to charge management research with a
mission to innovate, not merely document and analyze existing practice (cf.
Mintzberg, 1979). An analogue from engineering sciences may be helpful
here in describing the occasional invention stemming from long-term
research efforts. According to an excerpt of transistor history:

During one experiment [with germanium], [a Bell Lab scientist
Walter] Brattain observed that a germanium crystal that was set in
contact with two wires two-thousandths of an inch apart was ampli-
fying. After exclaiming, “Eureka! This thing’s got current gain!” he
informed his colleagues that many years of research by many Bell
Labs scientists finally paid off. They had invented the first semicon-
ductor device that could do the work of a vacuum tube: the transistor.
(www.lucent.com/minds/transistor/history.html)

Yet such a generative dance (Cook & Brown, 1999) between “years of
research” and a novel tangible application has not become a welcome norm
in management research (for example, Griffin & Kacmar, 1991), the way it
3
has done so in engineering where there are many labs for experimental
research, and the students and faculty frequently cross academic boundaries
to start companies and work in the industry. For example, at Dartmouth
College, students regularly “build something,” to prototype their idea or
invention, as part of their class work. 4
Similarly, tools, contexts, and activities or the very management
processes and structures in which individual managers find themselves and
their actions situated (see, for example, Oakes, Townley, & Cooper, 1998)
can be innovated. Yet most potent implications may come when the man-
agement principles that govern organizations are themselves rethought.
Barley and Kunda (2001) wonder about a postbureaucratic organization.
The answer might call for management innovation—for example, experi-
mentation around alternatives to an organizing principle like division of
labor or a management principle such as hierarchical decision making. 5
There might be a need for inventing practices to embed “mindfulness” in an
organization (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001) or developing approaches to strate-
gic planning that have a democratizing rather than stratifying impact