Abstract
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.
Highlights
Large “socio-technical transitions” are drawing increasing attention from practitioners and scholars in a variety of domains and settings
Spurred by repeated criticisms for the relative lack of agency in the Multi-Level Perspective” (MLP) (Genus and Coles, 2008; Smith et al, 2005), recent studies draw explicit attention to the role of actors in transitions. This shows that the role of incumbent firms, which the MLP sees as important in transitions (Farla et al, 2012; Geels, 2014a; Geels and Schot, 2007), is under-conceptualized
Previous transitions studies have shown that “transitions involve multiple types of agency and causal processes that may alternate. This implies that transition theory needs to accommodate various types of agency” (Geels and Schot, 2007). This is in line with the interpretivistic nature of transition studies (Geels, 2010) that allows researchers to interpret their empirical findings in light of different the mechanisms highlighted in the different theories with which they are familiar
Summary
Large “socio-technical transitions” are drawing increasing attention from practitioners and scholars in a variety of domains and settings. Nature of the transition (Geels and Schot, 2007), but it depends on shared expectations about the future regime (Budde et al, 2012) and on a general dissatisfaction with the current functioning of the system (Kishna et al, 2016) These factors, are a partial explanation for the observed heterogeneity in incumbent behavior. We thereby enrich the MLP, and contribute to a better understanding of the role of incumbent firms as key agents in sustainability or other socio-technical transition processes To this end, we first discuss incumbent firm behavior as it is typically conceptualized in the MLP and relate our two questions to two major debates in the organizational literature that motivate our choice of theories. We derive four modes of incumbent behavior during transitions, and discuss how an incumbent’s characteristics influence its behavior and survival
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