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Explores a scenario for how work can be organized in a circular manner. Outlines two tendencies in work relations: a return to authoritarian governance of the workplace, and at the same time, the inevitable and necessary shift towards more participation. Subsequently, explores the possibility of a synthesis of traditional and participative work relationships by organizing work in a circular manner. Circularity implies that, although authority may continue to play an important role in the workplace, an ultimate authority is absent, and each member can participate directly or through representation in decision processes which are organized in circles.

This paper aims to contend that to achieve the resilience needed to thrive long‐term in a dynamic, highly competitive marketplace companies need to commit to continual customer‐focused agility training.

The paper uses “Big Brown Box Inc.”, which is a disguised case about a real company's practices and experiences.

The paper reveals that training for resilience involves mastering three strategic management practices: cultivating foresight, rehearsing non‐routine behaviors and building an experimentation‐oriented community.

The takeaway from the Big Brown Box Inc. example is that all companies need to continually exercise their operational resilience to prepare for setbacks and the maneuvers of rivals.

The paper reveals that the rehearsing and training exercises needed to develop resilience will help an organization learn how to proactively engage in exploration and experimentation.

The organizational learning literature distinguishes different levels of learning (zero learning and single, double and triple loop learning) in order to understand the complexity and dynamics of changes in policies, objectives, mental maps, and structures and strategies for learning. This article explores the case of an emerging new organizational design, the circular organization, in order to understand the role of triple loop learning. The circular model was developed on the basis of ideas about the relationship between organizational structure and behavior taken from theories of dynamic systems. Circular design precepts appear to provide a structural facilitation of single and double loop learning. In this respect, the circular design tends to act as a facilitating infrastructure for triple loop learning, that is, exploring the structural opportunities and key competences people need to participate in making well‐informed choices about policies, objectives and other issues.

The dynamic capability view serves to explain how particular practices ensure the firm's performance and competitiveness within a continuously changing environment. In this paper, the staff induction processes of two small firms in The Netherlands (management consultancy and biotech (BT) start‐up) are examined from a practice‐based view. The authors explore whether the staff induction processes of these firms can be regarded as practices, and if so, whether and how these firms have developed a dynamic capability in staff induction.

Case studies are conducted in the management consultancy and biotechnology sectors to explore the practising of dynamic capability.

The findings suggest small firms can effectively develop and master their staff induction processes (as practices), but do this on the basis of ad hoc problem solving rather than a dynamic capability. If small firms develop any dynamic capability at all, they apparently do so towards specialized resources and processes that are perceived as most critical to the firm's continuity and performance (e.g. product development in the case of the BT firm). As such, this study confirms Winter's hypothesis about the fundamentally different cost structures of dynamic capabilities and ad hoc problem solving, which explains why dynamic capabilities tend to be rare and ad hoc problem solving prevails in many small organizations.

The paper examines the interaction between staff induction practices, dynamic capabilities, learning strategies, and ad hoc problem solving in two small firms. Implications for practitioners are that consciously engaging in learning strategies helps to adapt practices and build a dynamic capability in staff induction.

One of the urgent questions in the field of diversity is the knowledge about effective diversity practices. This paper aims to advance our knowledge on organizational change toward diversity by combining concepts from diversity studies and organizational learning.

By employing a social practice approach to organizational learning, the author will be able to go beyond individual learning experiences of diversity practices but see how members negotiate the diversity knowledge and how they integrate their new knowledge in their day-to-day organizational norms and practices. The analysis draws on data collected during a longitudinal case study in a financial service organization in the Netherlands.

This study showed how collective learning practices took place but were insufficiently anchored in a collective memory. Change agents have the task to build “new” memory on diversity policies and gender inequality as well as to use organizational memory to enable diversity policies and practices to be implemented. The inability to create a community of practice impeded the change agenda.

Future research could expand our knowledge on collective memory of knowledge on diversity further and focus on the way employees make use of this memory while doing diversity.

The current literature often tends to analyze the effectiveness of diversity practices as linear processes, which is insufficient to capture the complexity of a change process characterized with layers of negotiated and politicized forms of access to resources. The author would argue for more future work on nonlinear and process-based perspectives on organizational change.

The contribution is to the literature on diversity practices by showing how the lack of collective memory to “store” individual learning in the organization has proven to be a major problem in the management of diversity.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of strategic human resource management (HRM) practices and knowledge strategies on the performance of a sample of software companies in India.

The sample chosen for this study was software professionals in India; the software companies were chosen based on their listing in the NASSCOM annual report, with financial turnover as the basis for classification. In order to measure the tangible and intangible outcomes, instruments used in this study include financial and non-economic performance.

As per the contingency approach, the fit between strategic HRM practices (staffing, general training, specific training, performance appraisal, performance feedback, reward and compensation and employee development) and knowledge strategy dimensions (consolidator, transformer and co-inventor) was observed and the results revealed that the moderation effect has had a positive impact on the firms’ performance.

Investment in specific developmental programs for high-potential employees and quick learners will make knowledge-intensive firms financially sound in the long run. Through an appropriate reward strategy, employees who are capable of lateral and innovative thinking at work can be engaged in consistently delivering quality projects, which will have a significant positive impact on overall project costs and the financial performance of the firm.

The proposed model in this study can enhance a firm’s performance, provided the firm adopts a specific knowledge strategy and coherently aligns it with strategic HRM practices to achieve a sustained competitive advantage.