History and the micro‐foundations of dynamic capabilities

Abstract

Research Summary The capacity to manage history is an important but undertheorized component of dynamic capabilities. We argue that the capacity to manage the interpretation of the past, in the present for the future, is a critical ability that informs a firm's ability to successfully enact changes needed to adapt to disruptive technology. We identify and elaborate three specific cognitive interpretations of history—history as objective fact, history as interpretive rhetoric, and history as imaginative future‐perfect thinking—and demonstrate how these different views of history can be mobilized by managers to sense, seize, and reconfigure around opportunities made available by understanding the invisible thread of technology. Managerial Summary History is typically understood to be a constraint on a manager's ability to effect change. A firm's past is assumed to create inertia in routines and structures that compromise a firm's ability to change. We show how acquiring a broader understanding of the role of history can improve a manager's ability to enact organizational change. Studying the evolution of technology over time and across products allows managers to sense opportunities created by technological change. Using different narrations of the past as continuous or disruptive can improve a manager's ability to motivate or resist change. Using the past to construct convincing scenarios of the future, managers can enroll key stakeholders in the industry to support a strategic direction that advances the firm's strategic goals.

Managing Traditions: A Critical Capability for Family Business Success

“…We do so here, by drawing on emergent theorizing on rhetorical history (Suddaby et al, 2010), which suggests both a much more fluid and bidirectional interaction between past, present, and future in which the processes of interpreting the past, in the present, for the future make traditions more subjective and malleable than current theorization permits. And by placing the creation, curation, and alteration of traditions in the realm of interpretive agency, we can better see how the interpretation of traditions might serve as a critical capability (Suddaby, Coraiola, et al, 2020) that mediates how family businesses deal with their essential tensions.…”

“…As we elaborate in the balance of this section, the interpretive aspect of traditions gives agency to the heritor generation by granting them the authority to reinterpret the intent, purpose, and meaning of the founder (family)'s vision in the context of current and anticipated future environmental conditions. The capacity to manage the past by reinterpreting traditions is a capability of successful family businesses (Suddaby, Coraiola, et al, 2020).…”

Talk, talk, talk: exploring idea conversations and the micro-level foundations of knowledge sharing for innovation

“…We therefore suggest that it is important to consider the micro-level instances of knowledge sharing by studying the actual conversations people have in the course of developing and refining new ideas. Recently, scholars in other fields, including dynamic capabilities (Suddaby et al, 2020), institutional theory (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006), strategy (Vaara & Whittington, 2012), or corporate social responsibility (Gond & Moser, 2019), have rediscovered the importance of focusing on the micro-foundations as well. With this study, we take a first step in exploring the micro-foundations of knowledge sharing for innovation.…”

Call for Papers for the 2023 Family Business Review (FBR) Special Issue on History-informed Family Business Research

“…While researchers thus recognize the paradoxical nature of the family business as an organization that can be burdened or empowered by history, theory on how history actually ties into family business’ tradition, change, and aspiration remains scarce (De Massis, Frattini, Kotlar, Messeni Petruzzelli, & Wright, 2016; Erdogan et al, 2020; Sinha et al, 2020; Suddaby, Coraiola, Harvey, & Foster, 2020; Suddaby & Jaskiewicz, 2020). One reason for this unsatisfactory status quo is the weak connection between history and family business scholarship that has limited current understanding of what family business scholars can learn from the wealth of history and historical research, and how they can integrate related learnings in the study of family business (e.g., Colli, 2003; Colli & Fernandez Perez, 2020).…”

“…Considering the rapidly growing interest in studying the link between history and family businesses, we believe that it is warranted and timely to build a strong foundation for a history-informed approach to the study of family businesses, by which we refer to family business research that draws on historical research methods and/or leverages history as a key component (or variable) of theory or empirical analysis (Argyres et al, 2020; Sasaki et al, 2020; Sinha et al, 2020; Suddaby & Foster, 2017; Suddaby et al, 2020).…”