Abstract
"This dissertation examines how firms that are designed and managed to run according to hierarchical principles, with highly formalized roles, rules, and routines, may yet have spaces, moments, and interactions in and through which employees learn, innovate, and express themselves. These space, moments, and interactions are often invisible to management. However, they are means through which the work of the organization gets done in a relatively smooth and efficient manner. When employees on the shop floor operate in an innovative and creative manner they do not change the organization but they do alter their skills and experiences at work. I explore this disconnection between what is variously referred to as the structure (Mintzberg, 1993) or culture (Quinn and Cameron, 2006) of an organization, and the operation of an organization, to examine the processes and conditions that support an alternative experience on the shop floor. The first paper, which has received a Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Business Venturing Insights, analyzes the impact of organizational culture (OC) type on the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) of the firm. While the importance of this topic has long been of interest to scholars and practitioners, there remains contradictory results about the impact of OC on EO. Drawing upon the competing value framework (CVF), I conducted a meta- analysis of 70 papers to better understand this relationship. My results highlight first that, contrary to common thinking, there is not only one particular organizational culture that impacts positively EO. Clan, Market and Adhocracy all have a positive impact on EO. Second, even if each of these OC types have a positive impact on EO, the impact on each dimension of EO (Innovativeness, Risk-taking and Proactiveness) may vary. The second paper, under review at Administrative Science Quarterly, studies the ongoing evolution of skill, in an automated factory, after more than thirty years of use of the same technology. Drawing on an ethnographic study of machine operators, develop the concept of epistemic skill. Epistemic skill refers to machine operators' ability to access and manipulate the conceptual materials that designers, programmers, and supervisors use to plan and conceptualize products, and create step-by-step instructions for shop-floor workers. This skill allows machine operators to independently reconceptualize and alter how they do their work, and facilitates the ongoing generation of conceptual knowledge that informs their work. Through the use of epistemic skill the division of conception and execution work is—at least periodically—eroded. While not formally recognized by the organization, epistemic skill is crucial to understanding how automated work proceeds in the face of numerous everyday contingencies that planners cannot anticipate and machines cannot process. The third paper, under review at Human Relations, based on the same ethnographic setting as the second paper, looks at the pervasiveness of craft values in worker's behaviours. This paper introduces John Ruskin and his treatise of mediaeval gothic craftwork as a means to reflect on the moral potential of ‘good labour'. Focusing predominantly on the experiences of shop floor workers, we show that even in coercive organization, workers seek to bring the ‘gothic' values of free craftsmen into their everyday activities. Our findings demonstrate that workers devotion to craft, commitment to collective production and passion for continuous innovation enabled them to create the conditions for self-realization through work. We argue Ruskin's work on gothic offers a means to understand what it is about work that makes us human, that which allows workers in Ruskin’s terms to become ‘men’ rather than remain ‘tools’."