Navigators through the storm: A review of organization theories and the behavior of incumbent firms during transitions

By A. Mossel, Frank J. van Rijnsoever, Marko P. Hekkert. 2017

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The literature on socio-technical transitions pays increasing attention to the role of incumbent firms during transitions. These firms have been found to variably further, delay, or to ignore transitions towards a more sustainable society. Yet, it remains unclear which factors cause incumbents to display different modes of behavior during transitions, and which factors affect the transition’s impact on an incumbent’s survival. We engage this issue by reviewing five prominent organization theories. We first discuss how the transitions literature conceptualizes incumbent behavior and relate the open questions to major debates in the organizational literature. We systematically summarize each organization theory’s assumptions and expectations about incumbent behavior, and derive typical modes of behavior. Lastly, we discuss how an incumbent’s characteristics influence its behavior and survival. Overall, our review provides stable footing for researchers seeking to conscientiously judge which theories are most appropriate to understand incumbent behavior in the transition process at hand.

Subfields: Accounting, Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d30af57e91e4b9ba132da202c98e387ef2db8711

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In Accounting

Frank W. Geels

In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Disruption and low-carbon system transformation: Progress and new challenges in socio-technical transitions research and the Multi-Level Perspective (2017, background): “Some scholars provide broad reviews that additionally address the behavioural theory of the firm, resource dependence theory, organizational ecology, and resource-based view [49], as well as economic positioning, corporate political strategy, discursive strategy, issue management, sense-making [50,5”