Over the past 25 years, scholars have produced a wide variety of organizational improvisation (OI) scholarship from multiple fields that has improved our understanding of the OI phenomenon. However, because of its complexity and the heterogeneity of approaches used to study it, OI remains challenging to grasp. This makes it difficult for scholars to understand the contributions of this literature both in terms of extant findings as well as potential gaps and future areas of inquiry. Accordingly, we take stock of the extant literature by reviewing 186 peer-reviewed scholarly articles on OI primarily from management and related fields such as entrepreneurship and marketing as well as other disciplines such as information systems and communications. We introduce an aggregate framework that emphasizes the sequential process of OI. We also identify specific theoretical and associated empirical gaps in each of the pre-, during, and post-phases of an OI episode. We specifically address questions surrounding the origination and content of initial improvisational actions, conceptual ambiguity regarding the prevalence of OI, and the confounding of causal factors that impact the outcomes following an OI episode.

We extend organizational research on racial-minority social and economic inequality by developing a mixed embeddedness perspective to investigate whether and why certain racial-minority entrepreneurs become discouraged with important entrepreneurial tasks -namely, seeking capital from financial institutions. Concretely, we examine borrowing discouragement among three predominant racial-minority entrepreneur groups in the United States -African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans -using two independent samples from the US Federal Reserve Board. Our findings indicate that African Americans and Hispanic Americans are more likely to be discouraged than White Americans, while Asian Americans are less likely to be discouraged than African Americans. Our theory and findings suggest that for certain racial minorities, socio-historical experiences and shared knowledge of inequalities may influence individual behaviour through increasing discouragement toward important opportunities and entrepreneurial tasks.

No abstract

Organizational learning and organizational improvisation are distinct constructs, but the two processes intertwine in important ways. First, improvisational episodes can lead to long-term group/organizational learning when organizations selectively retain improvised action patterns, or when they learn the process of improvisation itself. Such postimprovisation learning can but also may not generate valid/useful learning. Still, unresolved questions remain, such as when does it lead to unexpected discovery, distinct forms of myopic learning, the emergence of unplanned identities, and improvisational competency traps? This chapter reviews evidence that learning can also occur during improvisational action streams, as when organizations draw on real-time information and long-term organizational memory while they improvise. Finally, this chapter highlights two underexplored learning issues: How does the organization create the nugget or template for the novel part of an improvised design? What is the role of short-term memory during improvisation? The chapter advocates that tackling the intersection of improvisation and learning will advance both areas.