This article provides a conceptual underpinning for the study of bricolage in organizations. Based on a review of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s original writing, we propose that bricolage involves an ideal-typical configuration of acting (practice), knowing (epistemology) and an underlying world view (metaphysics) and develop the opposed ideal-types of the bricoleur and the engineer. We then explore and propose to distinguish two forms of collective bricolage—familiar and convention-based—depending on the type of interaction and the nature of the conventions employed. Finally, we highlight the tension between ideal-typical bricolage and general organizational norms and standards, and discuss both the bricoleur’s legitimacy and how a bricolage-based arrangement might be embedded into an organizational context.

Although field-configuring events have been highlighted as catalysts of institutional change, scholars still know little about the specific conditions that allow such change to occur. Using data from a longitudinal study of United Nations climate conferences, we analyze how regular and high-stakes events in an event series interacted in producing and preventing institutional change in the transnational climate policy field. We uncover variations in event structures, processes, and outcomes that explain why climate conferences have not led to effective solutions to combat human-induced global warming. Results in particular highlight that growing field complexity and issue multiplication compromise the change potential of a field-configuring event series in favor of field maintenance. Over time, diverse actors find event participation useful for their own purposes, but their activity is not connected to the institutions at the center of the issue-based field. In discussing how events configuring a field are purposefully staged and enacted but also influenced by developments in the field, our study contributes to a more complete understanding of field-configuring events, particularly in contested transnational policy arenas. The worst-case scenario for me is that climate becomes a second World Trade Organization. Copenhagen, for me, is a very clear deadline that I think we need to meet. And I'm afraid that if we don't, then the process will begin to slip. And like in the trade negotiations, one deadline after the other will not be met, and we sort of become the little orchestra on the Titanic. (Y. de Boer, UNFCCC executive secretary, 2008 interview) Less than two years after he made the above statement, the United Nation's (UN's) climate chief Yvo de Boer resigned, taking the blame for the chaos and breakdown for which the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit will go down in history. After almost two decades of transnational policy efforts, the summit ended without the promised new binding agreement to fight global warming. It was one of a series of meetings of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty aiming at transnational solutions to stabilize "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" (article 2, UNFCCC [United Nations, 1992]). A decisive early-1997-UNFCCC

In this paper, we open the black box of effectuation as a process by identifying effectuation process characteristics and patterns and thereby unveiling the heterogeneity of effectuation processes. Based on a multiple case research approach, sequential qualitative analysis is used to contrast similarities and differences in effectuation processes among six high-technology ventures. By theorizing the relationship between effectuation principles and process characteristics, we increase the conceptual clarity of effectuation theory and provide insights into how effectuation may be operationalized for scholars in future research.

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