We believe that the field of organization theory is adrift. In sailing jargon, we are “in irons” — stalled and making little headway toward understanding organizations and their place in our lives. We first attempt to diagnose our maladies and then, in this light, offer three broad...

The organizational change literature contains diverse characterizations of change processes with contradictory implications for strategic managers. Many inconsistencies are resolved by classifying models of organizational change according to the primary mode of change (continuous or...

Organizational fields undergo upheavals. Shifting industry boundaries, new network forms, emerging sectors, and volatile ecosystems have become the stuff of everyday organizational life. Curiously, profound changes of this sort receive scant attention in organization theory and research....

We draw on complexity theory to explain the emergence of a new organizational collective, and we provide a much-needed empirical test of the theory at the collective level of analysis. Taking a case study approach, we use four dynamics of emergence posited by complexity theory’s dissipative...