ABSTRACT
This innovative volume provides a comprehensive overview of improvisation as a pervasive organizational process, essential in ever-changing business environments.
Exploring theories of organizational action as well as contemporary challenges, it highlights improvisation’s rich potential in theory building and practice. The value and relevance of improvisational capabilities and processes in organizations are more apparent than ever: the global pandemic has forced organizations to reinvent themselves and to adapt to dramatic change on a massive scale. This surge in improvised activity starkly illustrates how the capability to improvise is key to organizational resilience: organizations that are able to improvise effectively are better prepared to bounce back and even thrive.
From the latest thinking on improvisation in organizations to future avenues for research, this volume demonstrates the rich potential for both theory building and practice and provides a valuable resource for researchers and advanced students in organizational strategy, entrepreneurship, product development, information systems, disaster management, and HRM.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |25 pages
Introduction
part 1|65 pages
Conceptual linkages
chapter 1|21 pages
Improvisation and bricolage
part 2|104 pages
Improvisation process
chapter 10|20 pages
Practising strategizing
part 3|102 pages
Improvisation in specific contexts
chapter 12|21 pages
Locating improvisation in public service management
part 4|56 pages
Improvisational theater beyond metaphor
chapter 18|22 pages
Improvisational theater in organizations
part 5|66 pages
Improvisation and new organizational forms
chapter 22|19 pages
Flow with the go
part 6|68 pages
Conceptual expansions and conclusions