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The purpose of this paper is to study two aspects of new product development (NPD) success – the impact of learning and the impact of structure – are studied.

A multiple case study method within a single setting consisting of in-depth interviews of two teams that developed successful, award-winning products and two teams that developed unsuccessful products.

Case 1: flexibility and expertise permitted learning and radical redefinition of the product mid-project and commercial success. Case 2: flexibility enabled adding expertise which was instrumental in success, iterating permitted optimizing pricing. Case 3: flexibility led to focusing on technical issues to the exclusion of commercial viability. Case 4: flexibility led to skipping market definition and partnering with a particular customer whose situation was idiosyncratic. Cross-case analysis: flexibility in teams with both technical and commercial expertise yielded success. Flexibility permitted teams consisting of narrow experts to invest development resources in products with insufficient market.

This paper argues that the right balance between structure and flexibility is dependent on the level of expertise of the members of the NPD project teams. However, getting this balance right is not a sufficient condition for NPD success. The cases were theoretically blocked to develop theoretical insight, but additional cases are needed for a strong test of theory.

The more experienced team members are, the more the project benefits from flexibility. Conversely, an inexperienced team will benefit from a more structured process. Projects require iteration. The dichotomy between structure and flexibility is false: the most expert teams benefit from some structure. The most inexperienced teams must employ flexibility to learn.

The analysis combines the virtues of the stage-gate school and the flexibility school previously thought mutually exclusive.

Business process re‐engineering (BPR) promises to transform organizations by fundamentally altering their core processes, thereby achieving radical improvements in performance. As the number of actual re‐engineering projects increases, the rhetoric surrounding BPR has shifted to reflect greater cynicism and discomfort over its claims. In the absence of compelling and trustworthy evidence about the success of BPR projects, critics have exposed logical contradictions within BPR’s “manifesto” for revolutionary change and insinuated that BPR’s utopian rhetoric masks political motives. This paper contributes to this discussion in three ways. First we examine two difficulties affecting the evaluation of BPR programmes: defining what process re‐engineering really is, and determining whether BPR has been applied successfully. Second, we examine four fundamental contradictions inherent in BPR’s analysis of organizations: the fallacy of its “clean‐slate” assumption, the paradox of information technology’s role as an enabler of organizational change, the hypocrisy of employee empowerment, and the irony of employee commitment. Third we propose that such contradictions be addressed in both research and practice by employing theoretical perspectives that are prepared to accommodate contradictory phenomena, in contrast to the simplistic, deterministic logic guiding current investigations of BPR’s effectiveness. We suggest theories of organizational learning and organizational politics to understand and resolve the contradictions embedded within BPR.

Discusses the role of theory in applied research. Applies several theoretical perspectives from organizational science to the subject of organisational support for end‐user computing. Concludes that a variety of theoretical perspectives gives a richer understanding of the phenomenon, a source of testable propositions, and a possibility to integrate and combine models. States the purpose of the paper is to stimulate researchers to understand and use existing theory.

The purpose of this article is to examine the structures and business models of electronic metals exchanges between 1995 and 2003.

A dialectical institutional analysis is applied to understand the exchanges’ responses to competing pressures for efficiency and legitimacy.

Although efficiency is enabled by internet technologies that provide greater information transparency and access, public metals exchanges exhibited less ability to survive than private exchanges. It is argued that private exchanges survived because traders regarded them as more legitimate. Private exchange models allowed existing traditional relationships involving trust and privacy to continue, whereas public exchanges did not.

The institutional analysis complements economic analyses of the role and structure of intermediaries in B2B electronic commerce.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that mobile technologies play in mobile workers’ efforts to manage the boundaries between work and non-work domains. Previous theories of work-life boundary management frame boundary management strategies as a range between the segmentation and integration of work-life domains, but fail to provide a satisfactory account of technology’s role.

The authors apply the concept of affordances, defined as the relationship between users’ abilities and features of mobile technology, in two field studies of a total of 25 mobile workers who used a variety of mobile devices and services.

The results demonstrate that the material features of mobile technologies offer five specific affordances that mobile workers use in managing work-life boundaries: mobility, connectedness, interoperability, identifiability and personalization. These affordances persist in their influence across time, despite their connection to different technology features.

The author found that mobile workers’ boundary management strategies do not fit comfortably along a linear segmentation-integration continuum. Rather, mobile workers establish a variety of personalized boundary management practices to match their particular situations. The authors speculate that mobile technology has core material properties that endure over time. The authors surmise that these material properties provide opportunities for users to interact with them in a manner to make the five affordances possible. Therefore, in the future, actors interacting with mobile devices to manage their work-life boundaries may experience affordances similar to those the authors observed because of the presence of the core material properties.

Much research on information technology (IT) emphasizes the rational aspects of IT use. However, cultural analyses have considered IT as a symbolic artifact open to social interpretation. This article presents findings from ethnographic studies of two large insurance organizations to illustrate how cultural assumptions about IT are implicated in IT management. We employ the metaphor of magic as an interpretive lens to generate five archetypes of IT culture: the revered, controlled, demystified, integrated, and fearful IT cultures. Each of these archetypal cultural patterns reflects different assumptions about the “magic” of IT and the “wizards” who control its powers. These patterns are similar to social responses to the unknown that have been found in human cultures for hundreds of years. The metaphor itself was drawn from the language of the two organizations. All five archetypes were manifest in both of the companies studied, suggesting that organizations do not necessarily develop unified symbolic meanings of IT. Although separately each archetype invites novel insights into the management of IT in organizations, together they reveal even deeper interpretations consistent with contemporary theories of cultural differentiation and fragmentation.

This research suggests that strategic thinking can be measured depending on cognitive logic. By developing Jung’s model, we can reach a new model, which consists of five thinking types of human beings. The strategic thinking type stands at the central part of this model. This is due to the fact that this type of thinking, which has become essential to every modern manager, is the function of all other types of thinking. A strategic thinker is the main changing agent in every organization. The cognitive approach applied refers to thinking as a bridge between the environment and observed behavior. Behavior is a direct reflection of thinking. It is not just a reflection of environment and its stimulus, as behaviorists believe. Strategic process matches cognitive logic much more than behavior logic does. Depending on (Z) test, we can statistically define the area of the type of strategic thinking. This area shows that strategic thinking is a unique type of thinking which can be measured through a combination of attitudes measurement and thinking process measurement. The validity of this model is checked by the strategic change attitudes of the respondents. The result shows that the measurement of strategic thinking suggested by our model is valid. Nevertheless, the researchers believe that this result can not be fullproof unless more research tests their claims.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how digital innovation processes emerge and evolve in organizational settings, and how serendipitous and unbounded digital innovations affect organizations’ overall digital directions.

The authors draw on an interpretive case study of the Church of Sweden, tracing in detail the design, deployment and governance of an interactive website for digital prayer, the Prayer Web (PW).

The findings show how the site came about in a serendipitous manner, created by an advertising agency as part of a marketing campaign. In turn, the unbounded nature of digital innovation was revealed as the wide and rapid adoption of the PW raised issues concerning the church’s overall digital direction linked to centralized control, as well as the nature and role of pastors, prayer and communities, as the site allowed people to post prayers and spread their messages (initially with no moderation).

The authors explore the serendipitous and unbounded ways in which digital innovation emerged and evolved in a traditional organization with a long legacy as an important societal institution. The paper contributes by generating rich insights on the role of the distinct aspects of digital technology in serendipitous and unbounded digital innovation. It particularly highlights how the editability and reprogrammability of digital artifacts triggered unexpected new behaviors and governance requirements in the organization under study. The authors encourage further research into the interrelationship between multiple unbounded and serendipitous digital innovations in an organization over time.

Although research has suggested that enterprise system (ES) implementations have major impacts on employee job characteristics and outcomes, there has been limited research that has examined the impacts of ES implementations on interpersonal relationships over time. Building on and extending recent studies that have examined changes in employee job characteristics and outcomes during an ES implementation, this research examined the nature, extent, determinants and outcomes of changes in an important interpersonal relationship construct—coworker exchange (CWX)—following an ES implementation. CWX is considered a critical aspect of employees' job and an important determinant of their success in the workplace. Drawing on social exchange theory (SET), the authors theorize that employees will perceive a change in CWX following an ES implementation.

A longitudinal field study over a period of 6 months among 249 employees was conducted. Latent growth modeling was used to analyze the data.

The authors found that employees' work process characteristics, namely perceived process complexity, perceived process rigidity and perceived process radicalness, significantly explained change, i.e. decline in our case, in CWX during the shakedown phase of an ES implementation. The decreasing trajectory of change in CWX led to declining job performance and job satisfaction.

The role of CWX and its importance in the context of ES implementations is a key novel element of this work.