Markets and organizations are often contrasted with each other and are sometimes even treated as opposites. But they share at least one characteristic: They are both organized. Many markets have been created by organization, and virtually all markets are organized to a greater or lesser extent; for markets to function according to the normative ideals of economists, a high degree of organization is necessary. In this chapter, the organization of markets is contrasted to other ways by which markets are formed – mutual adaptation among sellers and buyers and institutions. Organization adds substantially to the uncertainty that has been seen as a typical trait of markets. The chapter describes how different combinations of organizational elements are used in different markets. In addition to sellers and buyers, there are two types of market organizers: ‘profiteers’, who organize in order to benefit their own business; and ‘others’, who claim that they organize for the benefit of other people or of everyone. Market organization is the basis for a form of democracy on the global level – a form other than that tied to a formal organization, such as a state.

In this chapter we discuss standards as forms of partial organization. Standards are defined as decided rules for common and voluntary use. Taking the example of CSR and corporate governance standards, we show that the degree of partiality of standards can vary widely – ranging from a single element of organization, i.e. decided rules, to all five elements of organization, i.e. decided rules, hierarchies, membership, monitoring and sanctioning. We demonstrate that in some cases partiality is the result of restrictions in the design of standards, while in other cases it is the result of an explicit choice. We also demonstrate that the degree of partiality of standards can change over time, as there are often pressures for standards to adopt additional organizational elements. Furthermore, we discuss the dispersed nature of many standards, showing how different actors often provide different organizational elements of standards without any central coordination. We close with an outline of an agenda for future research.

The formation of queues is an institution: it is created and managed largely by the emergent norms of those in the queue. Research on queues has demonstrated that it is more and more common for organizations to intervene in the ordering of queues. In this chapter we investigate why and how queues are organized and the tensions that arise when a strong institution becomes the subject of partial organization. As an institution, the idea of how to form a queue has strong legitimacy resting on commonly accepted values of equality and fairness. The fact that a queue is organized with one or several organizational elements does not necessarily mean that the queue as an institution is replaced by organization; on the contrary, organizational decisions may support the queue as an institution. In other cases, however, organization is a challenge to the legitimacy of the queue; instead it is the organization that uses its power to further its own interest in selecting the preferred customers from a larger number of people standing in a line. When an organization decides the order in which people are admitted, little remains of the institution of the queue.

The modern world is highly organized. Much organization occurs within formal organizations, to the extent that the extensive study of formal organizations has overshadowed other forms of organization. But organization happens not only within, but also outside the context of formal organizations. We define ‘organization’ as a decided order, and we see some decisions as more fundamental than others and have dubbed these decisions ‘organizational elements’. We distinguish five such elements: membership, rules, monitoring, sanctions, and hierarchy. Individuals or organizations can use organizational elements to organize other individuals or organizations, even if they do not belong to the same organization. But organizers do not necessarily use all elements, and all settings are not organized by all elements. In fact, many social settings are only partially organized – even formal organizations. We use the concepts of social relationships and formal organization to specify what we mean by organization and organizational elements, and compare organizational elements with other ways in which social relationships develop. We describe the differences between organization and other origins of social order such as institutions and networks. The chapter ends with an overview of the following chapters.

Two facets are all but universally present in current works on Open Strategy. First, while being aware of and addressing challenges and dilemmas associated with openness in strategy making (Hautz et al., 2017), increasing openness is mostly perceived as normatively good, as an ideal that should be achieved. Generally speaking, studies on openness in strategy making focus on different forms and degrees of collaboration with newly invited actors and on the potential benefits of Open Strategy by generating more and more suitable ideas (Whittington et al., 2011; Stieger et al., 2012; Aten & Thomas, 2016). Even when tensions and dilemmas of greater openness such as “compromising speed,” “undermining competitiveness,” or “burdening wider audiences with the pressures of strategy” (all taken from the overview in Hautz et al., 2017: 302) are discussed, these are considered limitations or hurdles to be overcome for achieving the desired greater openness.

Management studies is not in a unique position. Unfortunately, ‘questionable research practices’ (QRPs) and outright fraud are attracting increased attention across the physical sciences and social sciences, and also within the humanities.

In this chapter we argue that the key to an understanding of international governmental organizations (IGOs) is to conceptualize them not as standard forms of organizations with individuals as their members, but as meta-organizations comprising organized actors as members. Meta-organizations are paradoxical constructions: autonomous actors with autonomous actors as members. Organizational elements cannot be considered in isolation in meta-organizations; their combination are key factors; therefore meta-organizations are often partially organized. IGOs are permanently competing for actorhood with their member states and this competition has far-reaching implications for to what extent they can make use of all organizational elements. Using one element may require the avoidance of other elements or certain forms of decision-making. This helps to explain why IGOs have problems achieving co-ordinated organizational action and why they are less powerful actors than standard organizations are. Yet IGOs are strong in other respects. The most important organizational element in IGOs is membership. The strengths of IGOs can be understood in relation to their creation, their expansion, and their long-term influence on their members.

Practice theories have an obvious appeal for Open Strategy research. The major trend towards more openness in strategy making gives rise to new strategy practices that afford internal and external actors greater strategic transparency and/or inclusion (Whittington et al., 2011). Committing to the primacy of practice in social life (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki et al., 2001), practice theories offer a particularly suitable perspective for studying both the emergence of these new Open Strategy practices and the complex dynamics of their application in real-life settings. Accordingly, many studies on Open Strategy already refer to practice theories to identify the new practices associated with Open Strategy, such as strategy jamming, strategy blogging, or interorganizational strategy making.

In Chapter 4, I discussed the nature of questionable research practices (QRPs) and fraud within academia generally. Now it is time to turn attention closer to home. To do so I look at retractions within management studies, analyse the reasons provided for them, and consider what they imply about the overall state of our research. I also draw on interview data from four editors who had retracted papers, and two co-authors of papers retracted because of fraud perpetrated by another author. To encourage candour, the confidentiality of the editors and co-authors has been maintained. This was important because if the editors’ identities were known, so would the retractions they discuss, and authors’ identities would then be revealed. This could raise legal issues, and would certainly have inhibited the interviewees. Co-authors had similar concerns. In addition, I interviewed a former academic guilty of research fraud. He is Diederik Stapel, mentioned briefly in Chapter 4. His fifty-eight retractions include three in management journals. Given the intense scrutiny of Stapel’s activities, and his authorship of a freely-available online book detailing his actions, issues of confidentiality do not arise.

Recent studies have raised participation as one of the key issues of Open Strategy (Luedicke et al., 2017; Mack & Szulanski, 2017). However, participation has a longer tradition in strategy research (Laine & Vaara, 2015; Mantere & Vaara, 2008) from which Open Strategy could learn from and contribute to. In this chapter, we review research on participation in strategy and discuss its implications for Open Strategy and vice versa. Participation is a dynamic and multifaceted phenomenon, the nature and effects of which are not easy to pin down in strategy making. Participation can generate engagement and create commitment to strategy and similarly improve the quality of decision making (Floyd & Wooldridge, 2000). In contrast, limiting participation through secrecy and exclusion may result in ineffective implementation (Mintzberg, 1994), and from a critical perspective, exacerbate organizational inequality (Knights & Morgan, 1991; McCabe, 2010). However, participation can also slow down decision making and constrain the strategy process (Collier et al., 2004; Anderson, 2004). Moreover, widespread participation can create expectations that are then not satisfied, particularly where the decision might be contrary to the advice given by participants (Kornberger & Clegg, 2011).

Many organizations – large and small – have begun to implement enterprise social media for use among employees and senior leadership. According to Leonardi, Huysman, and Steinfield (2013: 2), enterprise social media allow workers to: (1) communicate messages with specific coworkers or broadcast messages to everyone in the organization; (2) explicitly indicate or implicitly reveal particular coworkers as communication partners; (3) post, edit, and sort text and files linked to themselves or others; and (4) view the messages, connections, text, and files communicated, posted, edited, and sorted by anyone else in the organization at any time of their choosing. The broad family of social media technologies used in organizations today includes social networking sites, blog platforms, microblogging tools, wikis, and social tagging tools (Leonardi & Vaast, 2017). Today’s popular examples include Slack, Yammer, Workplace, Chatter, and Jive – with new entrants sure to displace some of those in the future. What do these new tools, which have traditionally been thought of as platforms for employees’ social interaction, have to do with strategy?

Open Strategy is a process that engages internal and external stakeholders in various degrees of transparency and inclusion (Whittington et al., 2011). It presupposes at minimum episodic information transfer among the parties involved, and for more meaningful inclusion, continuing dialogue (Heracleous et al., 2018). Dialogue, as an ongoing process of communication among actors who pursue a particular goal or set of goals, is integral to Open Strategy processes. As a way of linking an organization with its stakeholders, an effective dialogic process can provide generative diversity to the ideas that inform strategy and contribute to a strategic direction that has stakeholder and market relevance. There are costs, however, as dialogue can also fuel the undesirable side of the dilemmas outlined by Hautz, Seidl, and Whittington (2017) and various types of tensions noted by other authors (e.g., Baptista et al., 2017; Heracleous et al., 2018). Ongoing dialogue with little hierarchical, ideational, or temporal constraints, for example, can lead to conflict, inefficient decision making, wasteful use of resources, and pursuit of personal agendas, as pointed out by the dilemma of process (Hautz et al., 2017) and illustrated by ethnographies of a dialogical organization par excellence, Wikimedia (Jemielniak, 2014, 2016).

The two main exogenous drivers that have been examined in the environmental strategy literature are institutional and stakeholder influences. Drawing upon the institutional theory, organizations and natural environment and the family business literature the chapter develops insights into institutional influences and logics driving strategy in family firms. Drawing upon our primary data from the winery industry, it examines whether or not institutional forces will have a different influence on environmental sustainability strategies of family-owned firms as compared to non-family firms. Next, beginning with the foundational arguments of stakeholder theory including classification of stakeholders and their influences on a firms’ environmental strategy, the chapter argues that noticeably absent from the environmental sustainability strategy literature is a key stakeholder for family firms- the family. Based on this literature review and insights from our primary data, the chapter developd arguments about the influence of different stakeholders on family versus non-family firms, and how these influences are likely to impact the environmental sustainability strategy of these firms.

In order to build theory on the role of family firms in investing patient capital for long-term sustainability strategies, we supplemented the literature review with empirical case studies to generate a thicker description of the phenomenon and to embed the arguments in practice. In subsequent chapters of this monograph, discussions and theory development is illustrated with examples drawn from these case studies. In order to generate an understanding of the core phenomenon, the cases were selected to allow comparison between family and non-family controlled firms operating in similar institutional, legal, political, and societal environments. To control for exogenous influences, the winery industry was chosen due to similararity in products, services, activities, supply chains, markets, industry standards, and similar institutional contexts across regions in Canada, France, and Chile represented in both New World and Old World wineries. The winery industry exhibits a range of governance structures from corporate wineries to multi-generational firms to first generation and lifestyle firms, allowing comparisons on the core concepts examined.

In this chapter, we analyse prizes as forms of partial organization, particularly focusing on prizes as one way to organize approval procedures. A basis for this view is that prizes are based on decisions and thus constitute a sanctioning mechanism to actors. Our aim is to explore the characteristics and potential effects of prizes as partial organization. We use prizes in the fields of science and sports as empirical examples to answer these questions. Based on our definition of prizes as publicly communicated decisions of approval, we explore three ways in which prizes vary: the uses of rules; membership; and communication of prizes and prize decisions. From this, two main strategies for prize giving are identified: one more organized and the other more ‘mystical’. The first uses elements of formal organization to formulate rules or membership criteria, and to communicate them to both the potential prize recipients and the audience. The second lacks these elements, which engulf prizes in an aura of mystery. From this finding, we explore some potential and observed effects of prizes on actors’ behaviours, on status and status positions in fields in which the actors operate, and on prize givers themselves.