Abstract
AbstractThis paper deals with a central challenge in organization and management research: to predict the evolution of an organization's adaptive capability. We address both theoretical and methodological gaps in existing research. First, focusing on the largely overlooked external constraints on adaptive capability, we model how ties between an organization and its market audiences curtail adaptive capability as market tenure increases. Second, we address the methodological weakness of conceptualizing the content of organizational change in prior research with a novel approach. Our distance‐based approach sees adaptation as change in an organization's position in a cognitive market space. With position defined, one can measure the speed of movement in that space. An analysis of the UK motorcycle market serves as an empirical illustration for our theoretical prediction and proposed measure.
Highlights
A central challenge in organization and management research is to predict the evolution of adaptive capability, that is an organization’s capability to adapt to environmental changes (Levinthal, 1991; Rosenbloom and Christensen, 1994)
We adopt a conservative approach by fitting producer fixed effect models using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, using only within-firm variation in tenure and speed
This approach deals with the unobserved heterogeneity that results from unmeasured stable differences among observationally equivalent firms that might affect the speed of portfolio changes
Summary
A central challenge in organization and management research is to predict the evolution of adaptive capability, that is an organization’s capability to adapt to environmental changes (Levinthal, 1991; Rosenbloom and Christensen, 1994). Because the environment provides resources necessary for an organization’s operation, We thank the editor, Professor Heiner Evanschitzky, and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments. This paper benefitted from the comments of participants at the Annual Meeting of Organizational Ecologists in 2015 (Istanbul) and the CODES Research Workshop in 2015 at Durham University. We are deeply indebted to the UK Motorcycle Association MCIA (especially Heather Nicholls of the Market Intelligence Department) for their extensive support in providing access to data, conferences and industry experts. We are grateful to Nich Brown, Craig Carey-Clinch, Randal Thomas and Thomas Waterer who have generously shared their valuable insights on the industry with us
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