Transcending adaptation : toward an examination of market-shaping capabilities as a sub-capability of organizational agility

This paper explores and revisits a systematic impediment to the more detailed examination of market-shaping capabilities as a sub-capability of organizational agility. By reconstructing underlying premises about the firm-environment relationship in which much of the extant literature on organizational agility is embedded, we reveal that scholars in this field mostly treat markets as an exogenous, hardly moldable context factor that induces seemingly unescapable adaptation pressures. Based on the "entrepreneurial view" of the firm-environment relationship, we expand the widely-held understanding of organizational agility as an adaptation-oriented set of capabilities by reconceptualizing the firm-environment relationship as one in which firms both adapt their resource base to and shape changes in the environment.