By Author: Markus Becker (University of Southern Denmark)
Interviewers: Vishal Rituraj (Foster School of Business, University of Washington); Benjamin Moon (HEC Montréal)
Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241295929
Could you walk us through the origins of how this paper came to be? What got you interested in studying imprinting as a phenomenon?
My main research interest is in how organizations adapt, focusing on how mechanisms driving persistence and stability over time interact with mechanisms driving for adaptation. This focus derives from a fascination with empirical findings indicating that the past – e.g., when you learn from experience – contributes to shaping what people do, how they do work in organizations, or the organizations we observe. Such empirical findings raise the question how mechanisms driving persistence interact with drivers for adaptation in shaping organizations, both their structure and the processes by which work is being done in those organizations. Theory on the underlying mechanisms – such as different forms of experiential learning – indicates that the answer is not simply that drivers of persistence block adaptation. For instance, persistence can foster learning by providing a baseline to compare against, thus contributing to adaptation.
“Persistence can foster learning by providing a baseline to compare against, thus contributing to adaptation.”
With this research interest, I wanted to study an organization over a very long period, focusing on how it adapted over time, and what stayed the same over substantial periods. I was envisioning an in-depth case study because many organizational details are often not available in large-scale datasets, and an in-depth understanding of the organization seemed to be beneficial.
Looking for a firm that had a suitably long history, a corporate archive, and some elements of persistence and adaptation that I could discern and trace over time, I came across the Zeiss firm. I had read Kogut and Zander’s (2000) paper on Zeiss, which might have inspired me to think of Zeiss. In their paper, Kogut and Zander found strong correlations between the technology areas Zeiss had patented in across decades, indicating strong persistence in some organizational variables (competences) across time. Comparing the East German and West German Zeiss firms that were split in 1945, they also showed strong correlations between the technology areas the two firms patented in, even despite being embedded in two completely different environments (market vs. planned economy) for decades.
“The most salient aspect of the Zeiss case was clearly that it had some organizational features that were remarkably persistent.”
When reading up on the Zeiss firm, it became increasingly evident that the most salient aspect of the Zeiss case was clearly that it had some organizational features that were remarkably persistent. The Zeiss case thus provided a good opportunity to shed more light on the mechanisms driving persistence of these organizational features. When looking for theories on that, I came across organizational imprinting, including two somewhat recent review papers on the topic. Considering the definitions of imprinting and how they were operationalized, this seemed exactly what Zeiss was a very clear case of. I decided to apply an imprinting perspective and in this paper, focus on shedding light on what made some organizational features persist and contributing to organizational imprinting theory.
How did the paper develop and transform through the review process?
The paper benefited a lot from the reviews. In every round, they were extremely helpful, constructive, and developmental. Through their reviews, the review team helped me substantially reduce the paper in length, to focus the paper more, and to shed a lot of baggage that was not central to the main point. At the same time, the reviewers and the editor also raised issues I had not considered before, challenged me to go in depth with aspects I had not considered central before, to simplify, clarify, and bring out certain aspects of the argument more clearly. Several times, the review team raised challenging questions that led me to go much in depth with certain aspects. This always turned out to be extremely productive in terms of learning and strengthening the paper. It also inspired new figures and ways of organizing the paper. To make a long story short, the paper benefited greatly from the excellent reviews and review process, both regarding focus and coherence, as well as depth and nuance of content.
“The review team helped me substantially reduce the paper in length, to focus the paper more, and to shed a lot of baggage that was not central to the main point.”
Where do you think your mechanisms are most likely to fail? For example, what kinds of shocks, leadership transitions, or governance arrangements would make blueprint-based imprints less persistent?
Concerning organizational imprinting by blueprints for how to do tasks specifically, some boundary conditions for the mechanisms I show are as follows: there need to be different ways for doing the central tasks of the organization, they need to be clearly identifiable to the people involved, and they should consider them meaningfully different. Reading other imprinting studies and firm histories, this is not always the case. Furthermore, where imprinting takes place, it can also take place in other dimensions, such as organization structure or employment models (as in the studies by Baron, Burton and Hannan). Organizational imprinting by blueprints for how to do tasks might fail where new developments, such as technological developments, lead to step changes in the performance of different ways of doing tasks – or change other elements in very drastic ways – so that maintaining the old way is not possible anymore. Moreover, I have shown several mechanisms that reinforce each other. One might hypothesize that the strength of the imprinting effect – the persistence of the imprinted features – depends on the interaction between those mechanisms. For instance, if there is not a clear role model, teaching might also have a weaker effect regarding the persistence of imprinted features.
7Your study draws on a wide range of historical materials across multiple archives and document types, including hundreds of internal company documents (Table 1). How did you get access to these archives and internal materials, and once you had access, what were your biggest practical takeaways for managing and analyzing such a large, heterogeneous corpus—especially how you organized it, decided what to prioritize, and kept the analysis coherent?
Although I used multiple archives (Zeiss and Schott), they share the same origin and founder, some of the top managers and key people, the same product (microscopes and microscope lenses, initially), and some of their history. This helped because there was a common “backbone” and shared history, and thus, a shared structure. The two archives are accessible and well-structured. The latter point makes a huge difference because you can search contents systematically. They both have company historians, which were extremely helpful in navigating the classification system and understanding where to find certain kinds of data and what were the local, firm-specific terms for the constructs I was looking for. The latter point was very helpful.
The first practical takeaway is that acquiring some context knowledge and understanding of the firm was very important, especially for a research question that focused on what persists and what changed. This also included reading up on the technology and the firm’s products and mapping the genealogy of the firm’s products. I drew much on this mapping of the generations of products and knowledge of the local (German) and historical (1846-1990) context in which the development of the organization was embedded to organize and manage the data. For instance, I juxtaposed the development of the societal and technological context, the organization, and its products chronologically, structuring in periods defined by discontinuities in these dimensions. This comprised discontinuities in the environment (incl. technology) but also in the development of the firm (e.g., different product generations, discontinuous innovations, different top managers, changes to organization structure such as new departments, headcount, etc.). I embedded the development of the firm in the development of the society it was situated in, and of the technological landscape. This provided a temporal structure for the analysis and was very useful in the analysis.
Second, within that temporal structure that united several dimensions, I zoomed in on processes: what the founder and his business partner did; how they did it; and how they organized to do it. I then traced how the organization changed over time, using the chronological structure that juxtaposed the different dimensions. In doing so, I tried to collect as much data on different dimensions of the organization as possible. Third, prioritization on the one hand came from the initial findings that turned out to be most salient. For instance, the founder put lots of efforts into making sure he and his employees accomplished their central tasks in particular ways. On the other hand, it also came from the definition of imprinting, which defined what data were most important when it came to the impact of the founder’s actions on the organization. The two imprinting reviews were very helpful here, also for providing coherence.
Your paper addresses the “need for the development of micro-level theories and explanations of imprinting” – imprinting being a firm outcome. What advice would you suggest for researchers interested in looking at micro-level processes underlying firm outcomes?
First, the paper shows that processes for doing key tasks of the organization are a productive focus for contributing to theory on micro-level theories and explanations of imprinting that contribute to firm outcomes. For the purpose of micro-level explanations of imprinting, making decisions on how to do these tasks, how to structure the organization to enable tasks to be done in this way, etc. is an important object of agent’s efforts and opportunity for expressing agency – these are decisions that founders, entrepreneurs and other individuals often have to make, and where they potentially imprint the organization when they make them. Thus, a focus on the processes for doing the key tasks of the organization is suited for capturing agency in imprinting.
Second, such a focus also zooms straight in on what is at the heart of the recursive relation between organization structure and processes, which in turn encompasses an important opportunity for key actors to express their agency. This relation shapes the aggregation of individual actions to firm-level outcomes. It therefore has potential for contributing to micro-level theories and explanations of firm-level outcomes. The paper zooms in on one interaction between processes and organization structure, how particular ways of doing tasks shaped organization structure; because the way of doing the task came first, it shaped organization structure in lasting ways. Another case that would also seem interesting and fruitful to explore is when an organization structure precedes a process for doing the central task of the organization. Possibly, this is the case when an organization is set up to solve a certain task, and only once set up decisions are made about how to do it. An organization set up to respond to a certain situation or provide a certain service might be an example, where resources are committed, a hierarchy of command and organization structure is put in place, and the people assigned to or hired by the organization then decide how to go about solving the task.
“External forces pushing for adaptation have increased so much — some of them even directly targeting the processes for how to do tasks in organizations, such as generative AI.”
Then there are the recursive relations between the two over time, organization structures shaping how tasks are done and vice versa, from one time period to the next. Some of the recent research in organizational imprinting has started to look into some of that. There are still many exciting research opportunities for contributing to the development of micro-level theories and explanations of organization imprinting, however, even by focusing on processes for how to do central tasks in an organization, and even along these lines. I hope the paper can inspire further studies on organizational imprinting, and ultimately, on how the persistence it injects in different dimensions of organizations interacts with drivers pushing for adaptation of organizations. This is an exciting question that is only becoming more important now that external forces pushing for adaptation have increased so much – some of them even directly targeting the processes for how to do tasks in organizations, such as generative AI.
Interviewer Bios:
Vishal Rituraj is a third-year doctoral candidate in strategic management at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington. His research examines the political strategies of firms, with a focus on how market forces shape corporate political activity. One stream investigates when and why firms adopt partisan versus bipartisan contribution strategies as a means of managing political uncertainty. A second asks why some organizations develop systematic ideological skews in their political behavior over time. His dissertation extends these questions, exploring how strategic diversification shapes firms’ political engagement.
Benjamin Moon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in HEC Montréal. His main research stream investigates reputation and identity in organizations. In particular, most of his postdoctoral research investigates their motives among strategic leaders (e.g., CEOs, Entrepreneurs) and how they shape learning and innovation. He also currently works on research that investigates learning and innovation more broadly. Finally, Ben’s second research stream investigates how personality shapes outcomes in organizations.
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