Why are some organizations better suited to handling problems than others? Why do some firms seem much more adaptive than others? Phin Upham examines scholarship on these questions and provides some answers.  There are many views in organizational theory which can explain why some firms are better at doing certain things than others, why […]

Organizations seem to be good at things – but how can we understand what it means for an organization to be good at things?  Is it the people or something between them?  A review of a seminal work by Phin Upham.   As the title of their paper Measuring Competence? implies, Rebecca Henderson and Iain Cockburn are […]

In this work Phin Upham takes us through Jeffrey Pfeffer’s provocative propositions on theories of organizations. Are theories of organizations initially observation-driven, do they lose their connection to reality over time? Most good theories, if not all, in OT have their foundation in observation and reflection – no great insight spring straight from phenomena. Great […]

How do organizations learn and evolve? Phin Upham looks at the classic work “Opportunity and Constraint.” In Opportunity and Constraint, Paul Ingram and Joel Baum explore how organizations learn from experience and what sorts of experience they learn from. Their results are counterintuitive and initially confusing – at times finding “own experience” to be helpful […]

Leadership theories in the press often focus on ad hoc discussion such as the charisma or intelligence of the CEO. Phin Upham takes a more rigorous approach and discusses an influential theory by Henry Mitzberg. Henry Mintzberg, in his article Patterns in Strategy Formation, develops a way of looking at strategy that takes serious consideration of not only […]