Swiss Watchmaking Research Articles

How Leaders with Divergent Visions Generate Novel Strategy: Navigating the Paradox of Preservation and Modernization in Swiss Watchmaking

How do leaders with divergent visions for their organization come together to create a novel strategy? This paper employs paradox as a lens to investigate how leader-dyads can integrate opposing st...

Time Machines: The Relationship between Technology and Temporality

The purpose of this symposium is to explore the relationship between time and technology in our processes of work and organizing. We wish to deepen our theoretical understanding about this relationship by investigating it across multiple levels of analysis and in various contexts and conditions. Our symposium does so by drawing on fascinating studies that span different contexts, including technology hackathons, artificial intelligence for music, the Swiss watchmaking industry, virtual teams during the COVID-19 pandemic, and hotel management. By drawing on this empirical research and making connections across contexts, this symposium offers insights into how members of today’s workplaces relate to the technologies that constitute their everyday lives, whether and how they accept them and their consequences as a legitimate part of what their world should look like, and which temporalities – be it excitement for modernization or profound wistfulness for a bygone age – therein win out. At stake is the shape of our shared future: not only what worlds we will build, but also how we in turn will find ways to live within these worlds of our own making. Sustained paradox for strategic reorientation: Preserving the past and modernizing for the future Presenter: Ryan L. Raffaelli; Harvard U. Presenter: Richard DeJordy; California State U., Fresno Presenter: Rory Morgan McDonald; Harvard U. Augmenting or automating? Breathing life into the uncertain promise of artificial intelligence Presenter: Kevin Woojin Lee; New York U. Minimal and adaptive coordination: How hackathons’ projects accelerate innovation without killing it Presenter: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf; New York U. Presenter: Sarah Lebovitz; U. of Virginia Presenter: Lior Zalmanson; Tel Aviv U. Experimenting with virtual teamwork: Learnings from how teams adapted their activities during COVID Presenter: Ashley Whillans; Harvard Business School Presenter: Aurora Turek; - Presenter: Leslie Perlow; Harvard U. Temporal burdening and temporal commitment: How technology and time serve Ideal Workers Presenter: Melissa Mazmanian; U. of California, Irvine Presenter: Christine Beckman; U. of Southern California

Institutional Resilience and the Role of Entrepreneurship and Guardianship in Swiss Watchmaking

This study examines how influential actors in the Swiss watch industry employed history as a strategic resource in response to the introduction of quartz watch technology. Using qualitative data from 136 in-depth interviews with leading industry executives, collectors, auction house operators, and other actors, we examine how institutional entrepreneurs and guardians both influenced the resurgence of Swiss watchmaking. We find that the interaction of actors adopting prospector and defender strategic orientations toward history created a complementarity of technical and symbolic resources. In addition, we identify how mechanisms of technology approbation and creative abrasion resolved inherent tensions between entrepreneurs and guardians, and thus, facilitated institutional resilience and industry adaptation.

Turbulence in the Watchmaking Field: A Socioecological Approach to Strategizing

The Swiss Watchmaking Field is again entering a period of turbulence (Emery and Trist 1965) due to regulatory changes, the emergence of connected devices, volatile consumer behavior, currency changes, and relations among these factors that may challenge the capabilities for adaptation of key firms. Ramirez and Selsky (2014) suggested that in turbulent environments, a socio-ecological strategy approach emphasizing collaboration at a field level rather than competition is advisable. Based on multiple case study research, we empirically examine the application of contrasting strategic stances and principles comparing competitive strategy with the socio-ecological approach. We assess the presence of the transition, heterogeneity and subjectivity principles and how a coopetition strategic stance fares in the context of the Swiss Watchmaking Industry. We conclude by exploring new research venues.

A REPUBLIC OF CUCKOO CLOCKS: SWITZERLAND AND THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY

The history of Swiss republicanism was memorably summed up by Orson Welles in the classic filmThe Third Man(1949): whereas the tumultuous and tyrannical politics of the Italian Renaissance produced a great cultural flourishing, Welles observed, “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Suggestive as it may be, Welles's contrast is as misleading as it is memorable. The Swiss were a fearsome military power at the beginning of the sixteenth century, admired by no less a Florentine than Niccolò Machiavelli, but by the eighteenth century they were no longer capable of defending themselves, and they were summarily occupied by the armies of revolutionary France in 1798. The nature of Swiss democracy was long contested, and in 1847 the Swiss fought a civil war over it. Finally, it must be said, cuckoo clocks were invented in the Black Forest region, on the other side of the Alps. As we shall see, the success of the Swiss watchmaking industry does in fact deserve a place in the history of liberty, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau turns out to be a more helpful guide for understanding its significance.

Identity Ambidexterity During Periods of Technology Change and Instability: Swiss Watchmaking

This comparative case analysis of eight watchmaking firms examines how each managed the tension between preservation and change during the re-emergence of the Swiss watch industry from 1983 to 2008. I focus on firms’ management of technology uncertainty, instability, embedded competencies, entrenched cultures, routinized processes, and especially, their identities. I find that while successful firms adopted a variety of different identity management strategies, they exploited elements associated with their old identity (e.g., heritage, craftsmanship) while paradoxically appending new identity elements (e.g., status, fashion, luxury) to redefine their identity. Building on recent work that explores ambidexterity as a dynamic capability, I extend this line of research to the processes of managing organizational identity during periods of environmental change. I introduce the notion of identity ambidexterity, i.e., an organization’s ability to exploit past and present identities while simultaneously integrating elements of a new organizational identity, by delving into the strategic positioning and re-positioning of firms in the wake of institutional change and field transformation.

Staging experience, valuing authenticity: Towards a market perspective on territorial development

Drawing on particular socio-economic theories, this paper discusses the implications for regional studies of the experience economy approach through the broader question of market valuation. Different forms of market construction are identified and compared with regard to distinct models of regional development. It is observed that most of established territorial innovation models give prominence to a technical form of market valuation driven by technological change, by localized innovative production and by the mobility of goods and services. Conversely, experiential valuation primarily points to alternative models of development focusing on the local capacity to set attractive and engaging stages and to exploit consumer mobility. While the former models have mainly been applied to export-based manufacturing, the latter have essentially been applied to leisure, entertainment and tourism activities. The second part of the paper discusses the limits of technical as well as experiential market valuation in the case of the Swiss watchmaking industry. In such a case, experience in consumption and technology in production appears as strategic economic resources but what is primarily valued is authentic watchmaking. Authenticity is regarded as a third possible form of market valuation revealing specific socio-economic and territorial dynamics. The paper finally argues that market valuation should be considered as a key issue for future understandings of economic and territorial development.

Mechanisms of Technology Re-Emergence and Identity Change in a Mature Field: Swiss Watchmaking

I examine the processes and mechanisms whereby market demand for a “dying” technology re-emerges at a later date. In 1983, fourteen years after the introduction of the first quartz watch, mechanical watches, along with the Swiss Jura community of watchmakers who built them, were thought to be “dead” (Landes, 1983). Unexpectedly, however, by 2008 the Swiss mechanical watchmaking industry had re-emerged as the world’s leading exporter (in monetary value) of watches. Using qualitative and quantitative analysis, which I apply to a wealth of data, I show how changes in product, organizational, and community identities associated with a legacy technology can be reconstituted to reconfigure a field. My findings highlight that three mechanisms – identity claims, leadership, and framing (i.e., temporal, linguistic, value) – are core to explaining field re-emergence. Although new or discontinuous technologies tend to displace older ones, legacy technologies that are seemingly “dead” can re-emerge, thrive, and even ...

Favorites of Fortune: Technology, Growth, and Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution

David S. Landes Introduction: On Technology and Growth I. Technology Robert W. Fogel The Conquest of High Mortality and Hunger in Europe and America: Timing and Mechanisms Paul A. David The Hero and the Herd in Technological History: Reflections on Thomas Edison and the Battle of the Systems Rudolf Braun The Docile Body as an Economic-Industrial Growth Factor Wolfram Fischer The Choice of Technique: Entrepreneurial Decisions in the Nineteenth-Century European Cotton and Steel Industries Paul Bairoch The City and Technological Innovation Joel Mokyr Dear Labor, Cheap Labor, and the Industrial Revolution II. Entrepreneurialism Robert C. Allen Entrepreneurship, Total Factor Productivity, and Economic Efficiency: Landes, Solow, and Farrell Thirty Years Later Francois Crouzet The Huguenots and the English Financial Revolution William Lazonick What Happened to the Theory of Economic Development? Jonathan Hughes Public Sector Entrepreneurship Francois Jequier Employment Strategies and Production Structures in the Swiss Watchmaking Industry Peter Temin Entrepreneurs and Managers III. Paths of Economic Growth Jeffrey G. Williamson Did England's Cities Grow Too Fast during the Industrial Revolution? W. W. Rostow Technology and the Economic Theorist: Past, Present, and Future Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Creating Competitive Capability: Innovation and Investment in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany from the 1870s to World War I Anne O. Krueger Benefits and Costs of Late Development Irma Adelman Prometheus Unbound and Developing Countries Claudia Goldin Marriage Bars: Discrimination against Married Women Workers from the 1920s to the 1950s Contributors Index

Swiss Watch-Making Industry

Swiss Watch-Making Industry