Published Research
Skade, L., Wenzel, M., & Koch, J. (in-press). “Do as We Say and You’ll Be Successful”: Mundane Power in Corporate Entrepreneurship. Journal of Product Innovation Management. (VHB-JQ3 Ranking: A)
Abstract
Corporate entrepreneurship is infused with power. Prior research has begun to shed light on the role of power in innovation contexts. Yet, we know much less about the day-to- day enactment of mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship, which, despite its partial subtlety, is no less consequential regarding decisions on pursuing or abandoning innovative ideas. This article extends the literature on corporate entrepreneurship and power by exploring the discursive practices through which managers and employees of a corporate accelerator disciplined venture founders in the pursuit of innovative ideas. Based on a Foucauldian discourse analysis of ethnographic data, we show how a clash of entrepreneurship discourses invokes the day-to-day performance of three discursive practices—observing, exercising, and punishing—through which the accelerator’s staff ensured that venture founders would adopt a dominant entrepreneurship discourse, with important implications for decisions on pursuing innovative ideas or not. These findings deepen our understanding of enacting mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship as well as the enablers and outcomes of such power enactment. We also outline the practical implications for emerging corporate innovation settings such as accelerators.
Skade, L., Stanske, S., Wenzel, M., & Koch, J. (Forthcoming). Temporary Organizing and Acceleration: On the Plurality of Temporal Structures in Accelerators. Research in the Sociology of Organizations (VHB-JQ3 Ranking: B) – Download the paper here
Abstract
“Acceleration”, i.e., the performance of activities in ever-shorter periods of time, is a distinctive feature of contemporary organizations and societies that is reflected in, and driven by startups’ attempts to scale up their businesses in ever-faster ways. Although prior research has highlighted that temporary organizing is a key way to accelerate the startup process, we know little about how actors do so. Based on a one-year ethnographic study at a startup accelerator, we explore how actors enact temporary organizing to attempt to accelerate the startup process. Our analysis shows that this process involves a plurality of partly conflicting temporal structures. As our study shows, such conflicts invoke tensions that actors live out in their daily activities. We identify three temporal practices—sequencing, freezing, and merging—through which actors engaged in temporary organizing enact acceleration in the startup process by reconciling these temporal structures. Our study has implications for understanding time in the expanding literature on temporary organizing and acceleration.