A Cultural Quest: A Study of Organizational Use of New Cultural Resources in Strategy Formation

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. A central insight that has emerged from this research is that: individuals' cultural repertoires enable them to conceive diverse strategies of actions to address different situations. Thus, although in a pathdependent and identity-constrained manner, culture provides individuals with a toolkit from which they can select resources to take strategic actions and effect change. This view of culture as a toolkit holds considerable promise for understanding strategic action and change at the organizational level of analysis. A different stream of organizational research has investigated the consequences of the use of cultural resources from outside an organization's industry register. This research emphasizes that the use of such resources is difficult, and potentially detrimental to organizations. Oakes, Townley, and Cooper (1998), for instance, document the tensions arising from the forced introduction of business concepts in the provincial museums and heritage sites of Alberta. Similarly, arts organizations that try to incorporate business concepts into their repertoire to become more commercially focused have been found to experience internal tensions (Fine 1992;Glynn 2000) due to the conflict between commercial considerations and the expressive function of arts (Eikhof and Haunschild 2007;Hirsch 1972). This research similarly suggests that organizations tend to use primarily cultural resources from their industry registers, and that doing otherwise is difficult and costly. Permanent repository link1 Concepts are culturally situated, extra-subjective frames for understanding social reality (Munir and Phillips 2005) that organize knowledge in a particular domain and provide relatively shared schemas guiding actions in a collectivity. 5As a result, whether and how organizations can expand their cultural repertoires with new cultural resources from outside their industry registers and the resulting consequences for their strategies remains poorly understood.To address these questions, we undertook a study of the evolution of the cultural repertoire of Alessi, RESEARCH METHOD Research SettingStrategic change at Alessi. Our study is an inductive inquiry (Glaser and Strauss 1967) carried out through an in-depth, longitudinal analysis of a revelatory case (Yin 1994) that provided an excellent research setting as it engaged in a clearly demarcated strategic change process. In the late 1960s, Alessi was the technological and market leader in the tableware segment of the Italian metal household industry, due to its advanced skills in cold-pressed steel production. In 1970, Alberto Alessi, the founder's grandson, joined the organization and, despite its positive economic performance, he steered it in a radically different directionusing industrial production methods to make art objects in steel. The first attempt in that direction failed, but 6 in the following years, Alessi developed innovative practices i...

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