In this paper we discuss the role of managerial agency in creating and shaping dynamic capabilities. We argue that dynamic capability is a phenomenon that enables a deviation to take place from the knowledge that otherwise would have arisen cumulatively from experiential learning. In addition we argue that to create major changes in patterns of knowledge accumulation managers need to be purposefully and creatively engaged. Such agency is identifiable in two cognitive processes we call creative search and strategic sense-making. We show how these processes differ in respect to their temporal orientation and relationship to uncertainty and by adopting a process perspective we demonstrate how creative search, strategic sense-making and experiential learning are complementary. This notion of complementarity implies that these processes, notwithstanding their contrasting characteristics, coexist together and serve to offer an explanation for how knowledge progresses at a firm level. Variance is introduced into the framework proposed through the identification of factors that influence the coexistence of creative search and strategic sense-making. The argument developed is illustrated through the use of an emergent technology context.

The purpose and nature of management scholarship is contested, evidenced by debates about the 'academic-practitioner divide' and attendant remedies for addressing it, including mode 2 and mode 3 research, engaged scholarship, evidence-based management and design science. In this paper the authors argue that, without a culture of dialogical encounter, management scholarship will never be able to emerge from its adolescence, and management will not develop into the profession that it should and can become. The central proposition is that the highly fragmented landscape of management (practice and scholarship) lacks sufficient capability for dialogue among the plurality of actors situated across that landscape. Developing the dialogical capability ultimately required to break this fundamental impasse demands, first, a shared sense of purpose and responsibility (akin to the Hippocratic Oath in medicine) and, second, institutional entrepreneurship to establish more and better 'trading zones'. Drawing on the philosophy of pragmatism, the authors further this endeavour by identifying and proposing key elements of a statement of shared purpose and responsibility. Finally, they explore the nature and characteristics of successful trading zones, highlighting particular examples that have already been created in management studies.

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The identity of management as a field of study is frequently challenged on the basis of its relevance to practice. This paper engages with the concept of a design science as it is considered to offer some answers to this enduring debate. The paper goes on to conclude, rather sceptically, that design science may not offer such a distinct perspective on management as a field of study. Our scepticism is based on the design science scholars' rather arbitrary use of Simon's intellectual legacy, particularly the superficial differentiation between explanatory‐based and prescriptive‐based social sciences, and the promises such a comparison holds for prescriptive outcomes in management. The paper contributes to the design science debate in management by identifying three different types of design, each based on different ways artefacts emerge. These identified differences have profound consequences for understanding design science as an explicitly organized and systematic approach to design. We conclude that later conceptualizations of design science do have a place, but offer only a particular perspective – one that is relevant for a narrow set of organizational phenomena. Finally, we argue that the design analogy is an important one in the current debate about the nature of management studies if it highlights the creation of novelty and disruption of stability. It also offers a way of thinking about the exposition of uncertainty, in contrast to highlighting rules and principles that offer a prescriptive promise to guide the design of social artefacts.

The resource-based view (RBV) and the dynamic-capabilities approach (DCA) have emerged as two important frameworks in strategic management that seek to explain why firms are different. In recent years operations management scholars have sought to integrate both RBV and DCA within the field's epistemological orientation to provide normative frameworks for practising managers. This paper argues that the structure of resources and capabilities are such that they present impediments to normative prescriptions. Using ideas from complex systems it argues that any framework for thinking about resource accumulation and capability development must take account of uncertainty and knowledge imperfections in the system. The paper contends that the real options framework is an appropriate heuristic for managing the process of capability development and a case study of a manufacturing operation is used to illustrate our ideas. Introduction and overviewThe resource-based view (RBV) and the dynamic-capabilities approach (DCA) constitute two separate yet highly related streams of research in the strategic-management literature. A fundamental question in the field of strategic management is how do firms create and sustain a competitive advantage (Rumelt et al., 1991). The resource-based view and the dynamic-capability-based approach have addressed this question in different ways. According to the RBV, competitive advantage and durable performance differences between firms are accounted for by asymmetric resource endowments with differential productivities (Wernerfelt