Management and organization research has rediscovered individual agency, innovation and entrepreneurship. As such, there is a risk of overlooking the power of self-reinforcing processes in and among organizations. This volume redirects attention to these processes, including: escalating commitment, organizational imprinting and path dependence.

Knowledge integration-the purposeful combination of specialized and complementary knowledge to achieve specific tasks-is increasingly important for organizations. This book offers a consistent set of ideas, methods and tools useful to interpret, analyze and act upon the processes of knowledge integration across organizational and other boundaries.

Trust in Contemporary Society, by well-known trust researchers, deals with conceptual, theoretical and social interaction analyses, historical data on societies, national surveys or cross-national comparative studies, and methodological issues related to trust. The authors are from a variety of disciplines: psychology, sociology, political science, organizational studies, history, and philosophy, and from Britain, the United States, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, and Japan. They bring their vast knowledge from different historical and cultural backgrounds to illuminate contemporary issues of trust and distrust. The socio-cultural perspective of trust is important and increasingly acknowledged as central to trust research. Accordingly, future directions for comparative trust research are also discussed. Contributors include: Jack Barbalet, John Brehm, Geoffrey Hosking, Robert Marsh, Barbara A. Misztal, Guido Möllering, Bart Nooteboom, Ken J. Rotenberg, Jiří Šafr, Masamichi Sasaki, Meg Savel, Markéta Sedláčková, Jörg Sydow, Piotr Sztompka.

Conceived as the meanings that individuals attach to their selves, a substantial stockpile of theory related to identities accumulated across the arts, social sciences, and humanities over many decades continues to nourish contemporary research on self-identities in organizations. In times which are more reflexive, narcissistic, and fluid, the identities of participants in organizations are increasingly less fixed and less certain, making identity issues both more salient and more interesting. Particular attention has been given to processes of identity construction, often styled 'identity work'. Research has focused on how, why, and when such processes occur, and their implications for organizing and individual, group, and organizational outcomes. This has resulted in a burgeoning stream of research from discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio-cognitive, and psychodynamic perspectives that most often casts individuals' efforts to fabricate identities as intentional, relational, and consequential. Seemingly intractable debates centred on the nature of identities - their relative stability or fluidity, whether they are best regarded as coherent or fractured, positive (or not), and how they are fabricated within relations of power - combined with other conceptual issues continue to invigorate the field. However, these debates have also led to some scepticism regarding the future potential of identities research. Yet as the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate, there are considerable grounds for optimism that identity, as root metaphor, nexus concept, and means to bridge levels of analysis has significant potential to generate multiple compelling streams of theorizing in organization and management studies.

In the current times of more frequent crises and ever shortening innovation cycles, the management of change has become a crucial task of survival. While it is not a new topic in business research, the developments of the last decade have posed many new challenges for the change management of firms and organizations and have thus also raised many new questions for academic research in business administration, which the present book turns to deepen. Its particular focus is on disruptive change including its driving forces as well as effective and sustainable management. This publication constitutes a collection of articles that discuss change and innovation processes across different sectors of the economy (industry, banking, and retail), the role of leadership and corporate governance for the effectiveness and sustainability of organizational change.

A pioneering and innovative analysis of how the social organization of talent and the mobility of talent shape entrepreneurial activity, the spread of organizational innovations, the incidence of mergers and acquisitions and the demise of organizations. A must read for students of organizations, strategy and human resource management. Hayagreeva Rao, Stanford University, US In this book, Pennings and Wezel address a neglected topic in organizational theory: the links between individual behaviors and organizational outcomes. Their study. . . demonstrates how individual careers affect organizational founding, competitiveness, and survival, and provides rich insights on the role of human capital in professional partnerships. It offers a new perspective backed by solid reasoning and evidence. Henrich R. Greve, Norwegian School of Management, Norway The authors of this fascinating and original work contend that by analysing the conduct of organization members, a great deal can be learnt about firm behaviour and about the cooperative and competitive forces that underlie industry evolution. The empirical chapters in this volume are preceded by a conceptual overview of macro-organizational theories that explicitly bring in the role of individual actions. A rich set of studies carried out in the Dutch accounting sector is used to illustrate that changes in competitive positioning and behaviour are triggered by employee actions including advancement and defection to competitors. New insights on entrepreneurship, mergers and acquisitions and organizational dissolution further develop the multi-level focus of the set of studies presented here. The book aims at stimulating intellectual debate on the role of migration of human and social capital through inter-firm mobility and will provide a fascinating read for academics, researchers, students and practitioners with an interest in organizational theory, strategic management and human resource management.

In a world of organizations that are in constant change scholars have long sought to understand and explain how they change. This book introduces research methods that are specifically designed to support the development and evaluation of organizational process theories. The authors are a group of highly regarded experts who have been doing collaborative research on change and development for many years.

Describes the organizational aspects of contemporary society, explaining how organization occurs not only inside formal organizations, but also outside and among them.