When Incumbents Change Their Mind: Framing Strategic Reorientation in Emerging Fields

Abstract

How actors evaluate the prospects of novel, sustainable technologies is unlikely to remain stable over time. In this paper, we employ a framing lens to study how the five largest German car manufacturers publicly reframed their strategic position on the emerging field around electric vehicles (EVs) in the 25-year period from 1993 to 2018. Based on 125 letters to shareholders and 336 public interviews with CEOs, we find that the car manufacturers maintained ambiguity about their own terms of engagement in this field by framing EVs both as an opportunity and a threat. We discuss temporal maneuvering as a distinct way of temporal framing that enables the maintenance of opposing frames over a sustained period of time. How actors such as incumbents communicate about the prospects of an emerging field and their own role in this field is important because it guides meaning-making and action by other actors. Insights into the question how incumbents handle the phase-out of old technologies and the phase-in of new technologies can support a better understanding of incumbent behavior in sustainability transitions.