• Be able to identify patterns and formulate theories (based on logical reasoning) for organizations operating in ambiguous, uncertain, and unpredictable environments.
• Be able to anticipate and reflect on the potential performative effects (intended and unintended) of your identified theories.
• Be able to identify organizational dilemmas related to the development and implementation of your identified theories and reflect on opportunities to manage these dilemmas in a complex organizational context.
• Be able to connect theories for organizations, their organizational implications, and the managerial challenges and opportunities they introduce in a coherent argument.
• Be able to use precise academic language to articulate your theories and their anticipated implications.

In the face of considerable uncertainty, ambiguity, and unpredictability, the goal of this course is to develop the students’ capabilities for decision-making, value creation, and effective management in a complex environment and organizational context with multiple decision makers and competing objectives. This goal is accomplished by providing the students with an understanding of how managers as theorists can develop strategies for their firms and, simultaneously, recognize the performative effects of their strategies and respond effectively to the organizational dilemmas they may create.

The course will focus on the crucial elements in developing strategy and understanding organizational implementation. We will examine these elements across sectors and organizational forms and draw on both classic and state-of-the-art management scholarship within strategy and organization. The course emphasizes the development of the students’ critical thinking through the application of concepts and discussion of their premises and relevance across contexts.

Course activities

At the end of the course, the students will hand in a 5-page essay in which they formulate a theory for a self-selected firm/organization and reflect on the potential performative effects of their theory, organizational dilemmas associated with implementing it in a complex organizational context, and suggestions for how to manage these dilemmas. The students will submit their hand-in to Peergrade, give and receive feedback from their student peers. Then the students will participate in a feedback session with the teachers in which the students will give an oral presentation of their essay and their reflections on their peer feedback and the teachers will give additional feedback.

Course format

The course will be delivered through lectures, workshops, and feedback sessions. The lectures will be face-to-face live and introduce the students to the main ideas of strategy development and organizational implication. The workshops and feedback sessions will also be face-to-face live and give the students an opportunity to test their application of the course’s concepts, models, and theories on cases, and receive feedback from the teachers.

A list of relevant literature will be provided in class. Below please find an indicative literature:

1. Argyres, N., & Zenger, T. (2022). Oliver Williamson and the strategic theory of the firm. Journal of Institutional Economics, 18(2), 209-217.
2. Felin, T., & Zenger, T. R. (2017). The Theory-Based View: Economic Actors as Theorists. Strategy Science, 2(4), 258-271.
3. Felin, T., & Zenger, T. (2018). What sets breakthrough strategies apart. MIT Sloan Management Review, 59(2), 86-88.
4. Jarzabkowski, P., & Kaplan, S. (2015). Strategy tools-in-use: A framework for understanding “technologies of rationality” in practice. Strategic Management Journal, 36(4), 537-558.
5. Luger, J. (2022). Re-conceptualizing a corporate foresight capability: A theory-based view on market vs. organization foresight. Working Paper, Copenhagen Business School.
6. Putnam, L. L., Fairhurst, G. T., & Banghart, S. (2016). Contradictions, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizations: A Constitutive Approach. Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 65-171.
7. Vedel, J. B., & Geraldi, J. (2022). How Managers Respond to Paradoxical Control-Trust Dynamics in Interorganizational Relationships over Time: A Constitutive Approach. Journal of Management Studies.
8. Vedel, J. B., & Kokshagina, O. (2021). How firms undertake organizational changes to shift to more-exploratory strategies: A process perspective. Research Policy, 50(1), 104118.
9. Visnjic, I., Jovanovic, M., & Raisch, S. (2022). Managing the transition to a dual business model: tradeoff, paradox, and routinized practices. Organization Science, 33(5), 1964-1989.