2018

April - Melbourne

Cultural Entrepreneurship: A New Agenda for the Study of Entrepreneurial Processes and Possibilities

Mike Lounsbury (University of Alberta, Canada) presented his book manuscript on cultural entrepreneurship, co-authored with Mary Ann Glynn (Boston College). The book builds on their seminal paper (published in the Strategic Management Journal in 2001) on cultural entrepreneurship which they defined as "the process of storytelling that mediates between extant stocks of entrepreneurial resources and subsequent capital acquisition and wealth creation." Their work drew scholarly attention to the deployment of cultural resources by entrepreneurs to legitimate their new ideas and ventures. Their book sketches an agenda for future research in that important area.

May - Melbourne

Paper Development Workshop

Participants presented their work in progress to ICRODSC members and visitors Steve Maguire and Doug Creed. Franz Wohlgezogen presented his paper with Ed Zajac on Countering stigma threat: retrospective and prospective sense-giving efforts in corporate bankruptcy restructuring. Paul Finn presented findings from his doctoral thesis on Creativity and power: an ethnographic study of a creative space. Hari Bapuji and Sneha Chrispal presented their work on Understanding economic inequality through the lens of caste. Erica Coslor presented research she is conducting with Brett Crawford and Andrew Leyshon on ‘Good collectors’ and ‘good investors’: gatekeeper use of valorous categories in the art market. Graham Sewell, Joeri Mol and Eric Quintane presented their paper on Uptown top ranking: riddims, genres and social networks in the Jamaican music industry since independence in 1962.

May - Sydney

Institutional Aesthetics: Embodied Ways of Knowing and Institutional Processes

Douglas Creed (University of Rhode Island, USA) delivered a seminar addressing the role of institutional processes of sensory and evaluative forms of knowledge from a cross-level theory perspective. The cognitive turn in institutional theory has led to the systematic neglect of persons' sensory capacities. This presentation offers a cross-level theory of the role in institutional processes of the sensory and evaluative forms of knowledge. Referred to here as the aesthetic mode, this way of knowing combines humans' innate sensory capacity to engage the world with their learned capacity to evaluate what they encounter. We argue that persons evaluate the world's natural, social, and spiritual phenomena through the lenses of a personal aesthetic, each person's distinct internalization of the institutional aesthetic codes of the communities in which they are in embedded. The personal aesthetic informs and animates persons' internal conversations as they evaluate the social arrangements they encounter and deliberate over how they should participate in the institutional processes of maintaining, disrupting, or creating social arrangements. Attending to persons' sensory capacities and aesthetic ways of knowing allows for a fuller explanation of socially embedded action. It changes our understanding of action formation in ways that have implications for understanding institutional work, reflexivity, institutional biography, and of how people experience institutional disruption and re-creation.

June - Sydney

If multimedia communication of a strategy enables more effective learning, why don’t more organizations do it?

Stephen Cummings (Victoria University, New Zealand) delivered a seminar about the learning benefits of multimedia communication of strategy. For over three decades claims have been made about the learning benefits of communicating organizations’ strategies in multi-media picture plus text formats, rather than conventional mono-media text only formats. However, there is little theorization of these claimed benefits, empirical evidence provided to support these claims is weak, and very few organizations communicate strategy using pictures and words. This manuscript reports on a study that used Cognitive Load Theory to develop hypotheses related to the learning effects of picture plus text versus text-only presentations of a strategy, and an experiment that tested these effects across nine countries. The results support the claims that the incorporation of pictures greatly aids learning as it related to recall. However, other findings suggest that the learning benefits are not universal and that incorporating pictures may even decrease some subject’s confidence to act on a strategy. We outline how we can use these results of our study to teach strategy more effectively, in different ways depending on the nature of the stakeholder group and the benefits sought.