e-space
Manchester Metropolitan University's Research Repository

    “When Henry Met Fritz”: Rules As Organizational Frameworks For Emergent Strategy Process

    Foss, Nicolai J, McCaffrey, Matthew C and Dorobat, Carmen-Elena ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3343-6786 (2022) “When Henry Met Fritz”: Rules As Organizational Frameworks For Emergent Strategy Process. Journal of Management Inquiry, 31 (2). pp. 135-149. ISSN 1056-4926

    [img]
    Preview
    Published Version
    Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

    Download (183kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    <jats:p> Henry Mintzberg’s celebrated critique of the “design school” argued that strategy is the best thought of as adaptive, bottom-up, and based on dispersed knowledge and learning. Yet Mintzberg’s account lacks a clear and comprehensive theoretical underpinning, especially regarding how to guide emergent strategy in dynamic environments, and leverage it to exploit value creation. We provide this foundation by showing how Mintzberg’s critique of planning and design at the level of organizational strategy is in key ways anticipated by F.A. Hayek’s critique of planning and design at the societal level. Both writers are critical of rationalist epistemology and instead stress experiential knowledge, fallibility, and unanticipated social consequences. Hayek also extends Mintzberg’s work by showing how rules in the firm capture adaptive, experiential, tacit, and dispersed knowledge in the context of dynamic environments. A framework of rules thus creates inimitable and non-substitutable resources that enable the firm to fully exploit its competitive advantage. </jats:p>

    Impact and Reach

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    410Downloads
    6 month trend
    97Hits

    Additional statistics for this dataset are available via IRStats2.

    Altmetric

    Repository staff only

    Edit record Edit record