How Theories of Organization Inform Transition Studies

Abstract

In historical socio-technical transitions, organizations functioned as the principal drivers of transitions, invented the defining innovations, and created the cognitive and normative rules that led industries to embrace the innovation and associated behavior. Yet, despite their importance, the roles of organizations in transitions and, in particular, the processes that guide and coordinate their behavior, remain under-conceptualized in some transition frameworks, including the Multi-Level Perspective. In this paper we enrich this perspective by reviewing how prominent research traditions in organization science and management conceptualize organizational responses to the environmental changes that trigger transitions. Our review provides two guides for transition studies. Where the various theories agree, at least in a broad sense, we provide a theoretical model for transitions grounded in organization theory. In particular, we derive a transition typology that describes typical pathways depending on the nature of environmental change and the speed at which the transition is unfolding. Where the various theories disagree, the question becomes in which empirical contexts each of the organization theories applies best. Here, we provide a list of conditions and industry characteristics that suggest the use of one theory rather than another. In this way, our results enable more systematic analysis on the role of organizations in transitions and provide input for techniques such as agent-based and econometric modeling of transitions. We also answer to a broader call for input from organizational scholars to clarify the role of actors in transitions and extent recent work on how context leads to different transition typologies.