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Peter Clark: Organizational Innovations - Book Review

Organization Studies, Oct, 2003 by Jill Shepherd

2002, London: Sage Publications. 226 pages 60 [pounds sterling], ISBN 0761958819 (hbk); 19.99 [pounds sterling], ISBN 0761958827 (pbk)

This book is laden with content. It examines organizational innovations from the perspective of both the currently dominant supplier and the potentially gullible, far more silent user, taking into consideration the broader global context of varying national innovation policies and large companies whose innovations span many countries. Viewing organizational innovations as part of a theoretical agenda provides most of the material. The agenda is shown to be moving from structural to processual solutions, held within an 'electronic embrace' (ICT), and part of a new political economy. Lost already? As 'icing on the cake', the book also embraces the concepts of power and knowledge in association with information technology. There is inevitably far more content than can be summarized here, or rather to summarize the content would do the book an injustice, so what follows is more of an indication of the type of content included in its pages.

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As regards the 'old agenda' versus the 'new agenda', the book describes, analyses and comments upon the move away from the 'structure of technological innovation' to the 'processes of technological innovation'. This process orientation highlights meta-frameworks (issues and dilemmas to do with structure and agency as well as innovation and efficiency), and different rates of change, and downplays universal laws and deterministic theory. These processes are viewed in terms of political economy, which is characterized by global competition, multiple forms of capitalism, national systems of innovation and a trend towards mass customization. The new agenda is said to involve viewing the firm not only in context, but as part of a system created by it and which it creates, with a networked structure of clusters and webs.

The discussion of this new agenda is extended to include knowledge, power and technology. The notion of technology as an artefact and hence technological determinism, as well as innovation in terms of the duality of technology and social organization as artefacts of each other, are considered as passe. These views are replaced by a broader sphere of investigation which includes national systems of innovation and international transfer of innovations, change in the form of institutional theory and the role of fashions, social constructions as ever more durable, electronically embraced networks, and, last but not least, the question of what knowledge is. Power is seen as operating within organizations and between research programmes.

Associated with this trend towards a processual, knowledge-based agenda, the author includes chapters on space and time as well as multi-level analysis. Organizational innovations occupy space in terms of degree of adoption, and time in terms of duration of adoption. Space-time becomes commodified and colonized as innovations are adopted and are stretched or condensed according to cognitive factors, ICT and geographic dimensions. Thus a more complex view of innovation is promoted by advocating that the past, present and future, developments in terms of continuity, surprise and changing contingencies, and rate of change, are all taken into consideration.

As soon as time is taken into consideration, it seems logical to also work at multiple levels, examining stasis and transformation at each level and between these levels, considering organizational innovations as originating and operating within a system, rather than the innovation or individuals being separated from the system. As an extension of space-time, the analysis of organizational innovations is placed in the context of event cycles that implicate outcomes. Attention is directed towards pace, fundamental principles, and how those principles operate in certain instances, looking at adaptation and selection and analysing whether the system dynamics are sustainable.

The book then moves to the more specific area of national and global contexts of innovation. An analytical framework is developed which incorporates national systems composed of natural resources and ideas, the role of institutions in promoting isomorphism or not, and organizational choice within that context of institutions and nations. The emphasis is placed on organizations working within broader systems made up of other national systems and institutions and, in the case of global companies, becoming to some degree those broader systems.

The diffusion of innovations is then taken more overtly into the realms of market and consumption. Attention is drawn towards the conventions of markets such as the role of the media, knowledge as a foundation of capitalism, and theatres of consumption whereby markets are developed. Coordinating roles of markets with production are discussed in terms of risk, uncertainty, the basis for competition and quality. Coordination and consumption are linked to notions of efficiency, professional norms, mass customization and mass standardization.

Peter Clark: Organizational Innovations - Book Review

Organization Studies, Oct, 2003 by Jill Shepherd

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