Abstract
Ignorance has only received scant attention in organization and management studies. This paper focuses on ignorance in an organizational context by presenting and analysing the lived experience of three managers who attempted to manage creativity. The analysis of the empirical material with the help of a detailed agency framework illustrates how the managers’ clearly articulated visions contradicted their practices and how they also stuck to their visions even when they were confronted with or had the possibility to collect information that would challenge those visions. I suggest, based on these observations, that the managers deliberately and actively avoided using or collecting relevant information that could potentially lead to transformative practices, which engendered what I call ‘wilful managerial ignorance’. I further suggest that ‘symbolic work’, which refers to the active and continuous separation of verbal activity (symbol) and concrete practices (objective referent), is a determining factor in wilful managerial ignorance. Since wilful managerial ignorance and symbolic work prevent the productive and transformative integration of different institutional contexts it is possible to link it to the concept of ‘decoupling’. As a result, I propose that wilful managerial ignorance and symbolic work are micro-determinants which facilitate the decoupling of organizationally relevant institutional contexts.
Introduction
Ignorance is a topic that, ironically, most organization and management scholars tend to ignore. Nearly sixty years ago, Moore and Tumin (1949, p. 787) claimed that knowledge ‘has become elevated in many lay and professional circles to the status of a panacea for all of man’s ills’. The authors foretold the now widespread elevation of the knowledge economy (see Alvesson & Thompson, 2005). Similarly, Smithson (2008, p. 216) argued that ignorance is commonly perceived as ‘blindness; to know is to see’. Witte, Crown, Bernas and Witte (2008, p. 252) also point to the positive connotations of knowledge and remark rather drily that ignorance is commonly perceived as ‘a synonym of stupidity and, thus, an insult’. Speculating on the scant attention ignorance has received, McGoey (2012, p. 3) argues that it ‘might stem from, at best, a disciplinary instinct for self-preservation or, at worse, from a sort of self-induced myopia’. Whatever the motive, today knowledge seems to reign supreme. Ignorance, on the other hand, is largely ‘neglected in management studies’ (Roberts, 2013, p. 1), with few exceptions (e.g., Harvey, Novicevic, Buckley, & Ferris, 2001; Knudsen, 2011; Roberts, 2013; Roberts & Armitage, 2008).
The existing studies of ignorance in fields such as psychology, sociology and management studies are mainly theoretical (e.g. Croissant, 2014; Harvey et al., 2001; Moore & Tumin, 1949; Roberts, 2013; Smithson, 1989). Few link ignorance to ‘concrete examples or data’ (Gross, 2007, p. 744). However, scholars have recently begun to systematically and empirically explore the complex manifestations of ignorance in various contexts (e.g. Davies & McGoey, 2012; Gigerenzer & Garcia-Retamero, 2017; Heimer, 2012; Knudsen, 2011; McGoey, 2007; Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008; Witte et al., 2008). These empirical studies have mainly focused on what Smithson (1989, p. 7) calls ‘active ignoring’. For example, McGoey (2007) examined enquiries into the risk of suicide linked to antidepressants in the United Kingdom and found that the regulatory agency involved showed a ‘will-to-ignorance’. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, the ‘will-to-ignorance’ according to McGoey (2007) is the purposeful tactic to disregard knowledge and obfuscate information. Ultimately, a ‘will-to-ignorance’ served to protect the existing bureaucratic structure of the organization she studied. In a study on the production of technology for quality control in the Danish healthcare sector, Knudsen (2011) similarly showed that, during the production process, organizations systematically ignored important information that might disrupt the process.
In this paper, I will explore and present an in-depth empirical case study which illustrates such ‘will-to-ignorance’. Specifically, I empirically explore how three individual managers employ various practices that facilitate creativity and how the design and evaluation of these practices engendered what I refer to as ‘wilful managerial ignorance’. The resulting analysis contributes to the literature on ignorance in particular and to organization studies in general in three main ways. First, building on the work of Emirbayer and Mische (1998), I apply an elaborate concept of agency that provides an ‘analytical space within which reflective and morally responsible action might be said to unfold’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 1012). This framework highlights imagination as an important but rarely studied dimension of managerial work (for exceptions, see Costas & Grey, 2014; Gabriel, 1995). Second, I put forward the concept of ‘wilful managerial ignorance’ to describe the active avoidance of gaining and using information that can potentially lead to transformative individual and organizational practices. The concept links to ‘symbolic work’ (e.g. Brown, 1994; Edelman, 1964; Feldman & March, 1981; Goffman, 1959), i.e. the continuous process of separating the display of competence from its actualization and the subsequent process of maintaining the separation between symbol and referent (Edelman, 1964). Third, I discuss how the individual manifestations of wilful managerial ignorance and symbolic work separate institutions and prevents their transformative integration. This separation is closely related to the concept of ‘decoupling’ (Bromley & Powell, 2012; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). More specifically, I will argue that wilful managerial ignorance and symbolic work are micro-level determinants of decoupling processes.
I begin the paper with a discussion of ignorance. Following that, I present the analytical framework I applied and discuss how its three dimensions – habits, judgement and imagination – are linked to ignorance. I then go on to discuss the methodology I employed and to present the empirical material. On the basis of the analytical framework and the empirical material, I develop the concept of ‘wilful managerial ignorance’ and subsequently link this concept to ‘symbolic work’ and ‘decoupling’. In the final section I discuss the theoretical implications for organization and management studies and conclude the paper.
Ignorance and Managerial Agency
Various scholars have discussed ignorance (e.g. Gross, 2007; Moore & Tumin, 1949; Roberts, 2013; Smithson, 1989; Vitek & Jackson, 2008). Smithson (1989, p. 7) argues that ‘the most important distinctions … are those which refer to different kinds of ignorance,’ and distinguishes between ‘being ignorant’ and ‘ignoring’. Being ignorant refers to having incomplete or a lack of knowledge. In contrast, ignoring refers to ‘deliberate inattention’ (Smithson, 1989, p. 7). Roberts (2013, p. 217) summarizes these distinctions in her definition of ignorance, which I follow in this paper: ‘Ignorance is then defined in relation to either the absence of, or the failure to understand or refusal to recognize, knowledge.’
Many scholars argue that ignorance is unwanted in organizations since ‘knowledge has emerged as the most strategically-significant resource of the firm’ (Grant, 1996, p. 110; see also Brown & Duguid, 2001). Ignorance appears to be dysfunctional for organizations in their quest to use knowledge for their competitive advantage. Implicit in such positive view on knowledge is the belief in an ‘absolutist epistemology which holds that there is always only one correct way to think of anything’ (Smithson, 1985, p. 151). Gigerenzer and Garcia-Retamero (2017, p. 179) have similarly argued that ‘much of philosophy and psychology has assigned categorically positive value to the power of knowing and predicting the future’. Ignorance is therefore not considered a ‘socially accepted way of reasoning’ but rather an ‘aberration from the norm’ (Davies & McGoey, 2012, p. 80).
Other scholars display a more positive attitude towards a lack of knowledge in the context of science (Merton, 1987), society (Moore & Tumin, 1949) and organizations (Harvey et al., 2001). Merton (1987, p. 6) explained that ‘efforts to understand how science develops have largely centred on the modes of replacing ignorance by knowledge, with little attention to the formation of a useful kind of ignorance, as distinct from the manifestly dysfunctional.’ Similarly, this type of ‘useful’ ignorance can help identify problems and thus facilitate creativity and innovation in organizations (see Bernstein, 2012; Frost & Egri, 1990).
Other scholars have drawn attention to the political and active dimension of ignorance. Following Roberts’ (2013, p. 217) definition, ignorance might involve an active ‘refusal to recognize knowledge’. Myers refers to such understanding of ignorance as ‘ignore-ance?’ (1995, p. 358). Ignorance here entails an ‘act of ignoring what is known’ (Moore & Tumin, 1949, p. 788) and is ‘deliberate’ (Gigerenzer & Garcia-Retamero, 2017, p. 180) or involves ‘inattentiveness’ (Knudsen, 2011). In that view, ignorance is what individuals create. This view gives ignorance a strategic and political dimension (McGoey, 2007), which centres on what Proctor (2008, p. 8) refers to as ‘agnogenesis’, or how ignorance is ‘made, maintained and manipulated by means of certain arts and sciences’. This relationship between ignoring and knowledge and its strategic, political and ambivalent nature has been explored empirically in a number of studies (e.g. Davies & McGoey, 2012; Knudsen, 2011; McGoey, 2007; Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008). My own empirical study and analysis will connect to these understandings of ignorance as deliberate and intentional.
In the context of organizations, if we accept that ignorance can be intentional, then its relationship to agency and action becomes significant, especially if individuals are indeed the ‘prime movers of organizational knowledge creation’ (Nonaka, 1994, p. 17). Emirbayer and Mische defined human agency as
[the] temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environments – the temporal relational contexts of action – which, through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment, both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 970; emphasis added)
Following Emirbayer and Mische, ‘habit’, ‘imagination’ and ‘judgment’ can be regarded as the key dimensions of managerial agency. Habits are akin to routines, which can be understood as ‘repeated patterns of behaviour that are bound by rules and customs and that do not change very much from one iteration to another’ (Feldman, 2000, p. 611). According to Emirbayer and Mische (1998, p. 971), the function of habits or routines is to sustain ‘identities, interactions and institutions over time’. Habits keep managerial practices stable and predictable, as pre-established knowledge in the form of ready-made distinctions can be used to sustain previous managerial behaviour. In organizations, habits that foster predictability – the hallmarks of a rational bureaucracy – are the chief element of efficiency. Even in non-bureaucratic organizations, bureaucratic elements still play an important role (Kärreman, Sveningsson, & Alvesson, 2002). Routines, however, may create what Alvesson and Spicer (2012) refer to as ‘functionally stupid’ organizations in that they create strict rules for standardized behaviour that exclude alternatives. The exclusion of alternatives leads to ignorance. According to the authors, routines inhibit critical judgement and demands for justification. In other words, routines may create ignorance about issues that are not directly related to the routines as such.
Imagination can be described as taking a step back from habits and engaging with possibilities. Imagination is a capacity which enables individuals to attach significance and purpose to something that may be physically absent from immediate sensory experience but mentally present (Sokolowski, 2000). According to Emirbayer and Mische (1998, p. 989), actors ‘playfully insert themselves into a variety of possible trajectories and spin out alternative means–ends sequences, thereby expanding their flexible response to a given field of action’. While organizational actors use stable patterns of habits, they envisage different patterns and circumstances and experiment with alternatives, i.e. imagined views and concepts (Costas & Grey, 2014). In these imagined views and concepts ‘structures of thought and action may be creatively reconfigured in relation to actors’ hopes, fears, and desires for the future’ (Emirbayer & Mische 1998, p. 971). The products of imagination are akin to actors’ visions or beliefs. Visions can be understood as imaginative schemes based on actors’ anticipation. Visions foster ignorance because actors might become so attached to them that they intentionally disregard disconfirming information and thus willingly perpetuate their ignorance (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956).
However, actors may confront and evaluate their actual circumstances, which might lead them to debunk their visions and routines and possibly reduce their ignorance. This form of judgement is the third dimension of Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) framework. Judgement refers to how the ‘problematization of experience in response to emergent situations … calls for increasingly reflective and interpretive work on the part of social actors’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 994). Individuals exert judgement when they reflect on their actions in the face of possible problems or even breakdowns (for a detailed discussion, see Schön, 1983). Many scholars assume that when individuals experience breakdowns in their routines, they will be prompted to exercise their judgement, reflect, learn and finally create new knowledge, which eradicates ignorance (e.g. Schön, 1983; Nonaka, 1994). These studies, however, do not explicitly consider the role of imagination in the process that links routines, breakdown and transformative actions, which I will discuss in more detail in relation to my empirical material later on.
Methodology
This research project began in 2009. My initial focus was on exploring the ‘phenomenology of innovation’ in a high-technology organization based in Sweden; however, in order to remain open to insights not narrowly related to my main focus, I kept the initial research design loosely structured, basing my methodology on the idea of Mills (1959), that we should reject ‘off-the-shelf’ methodology and work more dynamically with the empirical voices and methods that are at our disposal (see also Alvesson & Gabriel, 2013).
While conducting a first round of interviews, I stumbled upon various ‘mysteries’. A mystery is a startling empirical observation that challenges or even breaks down the researcher’s pre-existing understandings and sets in motion the desire to resolve it (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2007). In my case, it seemed startling that the managers I studied would talk about their views on innovation and creativity and then more or less openly contradict them in practice. Moreover, counterintuitively they assessed their creativity initiatives as successful even though they obviously did not work. To make sense of these mysteries, I perused the relevant literature on creativity, knowledge and ignorance. The literature provided me with a refined understanding of the empirical phenomenon but also raised more questions, which I pursued in further empirical work.
This methodological approach to understanding experience and meaning-making in the context of an actor’s social surroundings was inspired from both the interpretive phenomenological tradition (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) and the abductive mode of inference (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009). More specifically, I assumed that organizational actors – in this case, managers – relate their thoughts, actions and evaluations to meaningful collective frames of reference (Weick, 1995), which reflect the articulation of the actor’s motives (Mills, 1940). As a consequence, individuals interpret their social contexts through their interpretation of a multitude of collective frames of reference and their own individual experiences of those (Mills, 1959; Sewell, 1992).
To explore these issues in depth empirically, it is necessary to use a small sample and bring together individuals ‘who share a certain lived experience’ (Gill, 2014, p. 128). Moreover, a small sample size facilitates investigating what Knudsen (2011, p. 968) identifies as the main challenge when studying ‘inattentiveness’; namely, how people know about issues that are known but neglected.
My empirical study comprised 49 participants, with whom I conducted a total of 63 semi-structured interviews of 45–90 minutes in length. In addition, I observed ten meetings of a team of highly skilled engineers, who were known among staff as the ‘knowledge incubator’. The team met regularly every week to discuss findings and share knowledge, and I was present at ten of those meetings. Furthermore, I had lunch or dinner with some of the interviewees on several occasions, during which I discussed informally some of the content of the interviews. Occasionally, I fed back statements an interviewee had made during an interview in order to critically evaluate the source. During and after some of the interviews, the participants sent me documentation or clarified some of their statements by email. I was thus able to collect additional material that elucidated and added to the interview content, helping me improve the trustworthiness of my sources (Schaefer & Alvesson, 2017). All interviews were conducted in English with non-native speakers of English.
In line with recommendations for phenomenological research (Gill, 2014), my interview design focused mainly on the three managers who were my main source of empirical material. I will refer to these three managers as Chris, John and Sean (not their real names). I scheduled follow-up interviews and informal meetings, and kept contact by email with these three managers in order to gain insight into the consistency and variance of their statements. I see this as the most important aspect of field work, because prolonged contact is essential in order to find out whether the participants already knew about certain aspects of a specific issue and whether they viewed these differently.
To examine the managers’ embeddedness in their social context, I complemented the interviews with further interviews with what I call ‘peripheral interviewees’. In what I refer to as the ‘first periphery’, I conducted interviews with people involved in the organization’s creativity initiatives to complement the managers’ accounts of their own experiences and practices. The ‘second periphery’ consisted of managers from the R&D department and from other departments such as Marketing and HR.
This sampling strategy served two purposes. First, it provided a comprehensive understanding of the social and organizational context of each interviewee (Mills, 1959). Second, it enabled me to use peripheral interviews to cross-check and corroborate the three main interviewees’ statements. Validating the sources is a vital component of sound empirical studies, as interviewees are prone to bias, impression management and political influences (Schaefer & Alvesson, 2017). For instance, I would have taken the managers’ claim that their creativity initiatives had been successful at face value had I not talked to others who expressed different opinions. This process enabled me to establish the contradictions that led to the concept of wilful managerial ignorance.
To analyse my empirical material I referred to multiple sources such as Smith et al. (2009), Kvale and Brinkmann (2009) and their tripartite process of analysing interview texts, and the constructed grounded theory approach of Charmaz (2006). I did not code the textual documents line by line, but aimed to separate logical sequences in the text as units for analysis (Charmaz, 2006). The themes that emerged from the empirical material were sometimes based on the categories I had defined as part of my ‘interpretative repertoire’ (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2007, p. 1268); in other cases, I used in-vivo codes. Using these themes enabled me to derive theoretical implications from my empirical material. The empirical cases and their analysis are presented in the following section.
The Software Factory
The company I studied, which I will refer to as Technovator, develops, designs and sells licences for high-technology solutions in the form of various hardware and software components. The software sector is not very innovative, as Chris, one of the three managers I interviewed, points out:
I would still say [that] from my point of view, we are not very innovative. We are ruled strongly by the projects, and there is very little time and space for actually doing new thinking and innovation work.
According to Chris, work on customer projects leaves little room for innovation because project work means fulfilling requirements that have been pushed down in the development chain:
We follow the more traditional model. We have customers – they say, ‘You have to do this.’ We translate that into requirements, and then we try to implement the requirements into software.
According to John, the company culture is based on achieving a maximum degree of efficiency and competition:
You must always provide better performance, more functionality, at lower costs. So, the entire culture in the company, from the top level down to the engineer and the processes and requirements we have in place, is very much [influenced] by that fact. … [The] time to market and the window of opportunity that you have is very narrow, and you must find the right time, regarding functionality and performance, at the right price. [This] drives the entire company toward that as a common goal.
As these views show, Technovator’s main focus is not on developing radically new products but on achieving efficiency and the objectives of specific projects. The chief technology officer (CTO) confirmed this, stressing that it was necessary to avoid uncertainty. As a result, the CTO and other top managers did not prioritize novel and perhaps so-called ‘crazy’ ideas, even though they were not against them.
Because, I mean, when we develop products … we have really tight schedules and deadlines and deliverables, etc. I mean, there are contracts in place and so on.
These products, the CTO pointed out, do not benefit from uncertainty. In general, Technovator had no formal strategy for innovation and creativity.
No, we don’t have a formal ‘crazy idea’ box [laughs]. Maybe we should have! Maybe we should have. (CTO)
A strong operational culture dominated the work in the software sector and interviewees often referred to it as the ‘software factory’. However, surprisingly, the managers I interviewed talked about the need to be innovative and creative and all three pursued creativity initiatives although they were not obliged to do so.
Creativity Initiatives
The managers at Technovator were clear about the importance of creativity, as this remark from Sean shows:
I don’t hear much talk now about innovation. I think it is the responsibility of every manager, so it should not be necessary for [my division manager] to tell me, ‘Now you must innovate.’ I need to know this myself!
John also talked about how creativity and innovation were not the company’s primary goal and referred to case studies he had read on creativity:
I read some, you know, Harvard Business Review case studies …. I remember one of them especially – I think, on Harley Davidson, which has an innovation policy. Harley Davidson, the brand, it rings a bell [laughs]. But it was well thought-through, and they sort of analyzed the entire company …. But, for me, that has never been that visible in this company. So, innovation is fragmented – it goes on in the lower parts. There is no sort of consistency from the top management, even though …, including me, we speak a lot of the importance of that, and that we should be driven by this.
Chris talked about how software development was a creative pursuit almost comparable to that of an artist:
I would just like to make one thing clear. To me, software development … is a very, very creative activity. I mean, I may sound far-out here, but I compare it almost to being creative like an artist, like doing a painting or music or whatever. It is a bit more structured, but it is still very, very creative.
They also spoke about their notion of ‘creativity management’. In relation to this, Sean compares himself to a gardener:
I think my role as a manager is perhaps not to come up with the bright ideas …, but rather to be the gardener who creates the environment or the forest or whatever that can lead to innovation.
Similarly, Chris used the metaphor of farming to describe his idea of facilitating creativity:
I want to be active and structured in nurturing ideas … and I want to harvest ideas that can be of value. I kind of become the farmer of the idea field.
John pointed out explicitly the difference between facilitating creativity and what he referred to as ‘traditional management’:
The thing is that you need to allow yourself, as a line manager, to loosen some of your control, your grip, and not [get] nervous about it; [as in], ‘it is my money – what are they doing?’ No. You need to have some kind of trust, and you also need to have a different type of leadership [saying,] ‘This is where I want us to be, and now it is your job to find out how to get us there.’ Remove obstacles. It is more sponsorship-leadership than, you know, traditional management.
All three managers, despite the lack of top management support, felt the need to do something about creativity and articulated their ideas of what it meant to manage creativity. In total, they organized five creativity initiatives that involved different objectives and processes. John implemented an ‘agile’ method of developing software and managed a group of highly specialized engineers who were required to incubate new ideas. Chris ran an ‘ideas workshop’ and made sure that ideas within his department were collected continuously, while Sean established an initiative that involved giving feedback on patent applications. Both Sean and Chris were assisted by so-called ‘specialists’. A specialist was assigned to a specific department and provided his or her expertise in a specific area. Table 1 provides an overview of the persons, objectives and processes involved in each of the five initiatives.
Overview of creativity initiatives at Technovator.
Agile
The idea behind Agile was that software development would be made more short-term and flexible so that new ideas could be implemented immediately. Agile teams worked autonomously for specified periods called ‘sprints’. During a sprint, a software feature had to be developed, but precisely how and when was left up to the team. In John’s view, it is crucial for Agile teams to take time for creative purposes during a sprint:
The vision behind the idea is that, ‘Eight weeks from now, I need this feature. How you do it is up to you,’ and then they come back and say, ‘Well, we did that in four weeks instead, and by the way, in the additional four weeks we added this as well,’ which is some sort of value-adding, cool feature, or ‘we corrected a number of errors,’ or ‘we increased the performance.’
John’s idea was that the self-organizing teams would manage their work in a way that allowed them to gain extra time to be creative, e.g. by adding new features or increasing performance. John’s vision was based on his idea that engineers are intrinsically motivated and keen to work harder than required. In his view, micro-management, which involves being ‘very controlling’, as he put it, obstructs innovation and creativity and thus success. Nevertheless, John monitored the group’s behaviour closely and collected information about their work process.
I asked to be on the appropriate mailing list and be invited to meetings so [that] I can just go there and find out more information. The problem is, if I go there as a third-level manager, they will start [asking], ‘Why are you [here]? Have I done something wrong?’ So, I told them, basically, [that] I just want to be the fly on the wall there. Just to see them. As they get used to that, then I can observe them as a group.
However, John’s vision for Agile did not pan out, according to the engineers involved in the team, as they were never able to put aside time to pursue creative projects.
Then you don’t get free time because you have new stuff to develop. [The management] always put new features in to implement. So, it’s not like if we have finished in three weeks, we can do whatever we want. That’s the idea, but it never happened; never, ever, ever happened in our team. (Software Division, John’s Division)
Moreover, Agile was abandoned after only one year of operation. However, John was not ready to dismiss his vision:
For me, the reality is much more complex. There are most likely things that have been mismanaged, or people did the wrong things, and so on, and there are things where it absolutely worked according to the vision, and perhaps it never was noticed there. You usually get noticed when things don’t work, and not when [they do] work, you know [laughs]. As in many parts of life, when you do heroic work and it’s according to expectations, no one tends to tell you about that.
John still believed that Agile had worked and refused to dismiss it as a failure. Although he acknowledged that there had been some problems, he only saw its successes. John did not seem to want to let go of his vision of Agile, even though he was clearly aware of the project’s problems and why it was eventually abandoned.
Knowledge incubator
After the software division in the company was reorganized, John was assigned a new task – managing a group of experts. His specific mandate was to manage the group to develop new ideas. The group met every week to discuss ideas and new concepts. However, as John explained, his group was met with suspicion by the rest of the organization.
They don’t state it as bluntly as this, but, you know, ‘You are five senior guys, probably well paid, within the company. Where is the value? What do you do? [Can] I be sure that you’re not fooling around drinking coffee and costing the company money?’ In the end, you understand [that] it’s the operational line managers’ point of view.
John envisioned a roadmap as a specific outcome of his group’s work. The basic outline of the roadmap would show the different products of Technovator projected on a timescale, and possible market developments would be forecast in relation to the development of these products. The projected developments could then be connected to requirements for software and other technical specifications, bringing to the fore possible areas of development. This enabled the group to focus their projects accordingly. John envisaged the roadmap as a model of how the work would evolve and indicated that he believed in this vision.
I want it to be more. I wanted the roadmap to be more visionary and so on and reach a broader number of people [who can] use it in their daily work. But sometimes your wishes tend to be dreams.
In reality, both the content and the form of the roadmap were a constant source of contention within the group. The form that John envisioned was not accepted by his group, as the following two excerpts illustrate.
John talks about a new possible trend, using slides from another project manager who is not a member of the group but had presented a roadmap at a meeting John [had] attended. The PowerPoint slide looks very impressive, full of arrows and technical details. John smiles and remarks that all the arrows that the project manager has drawn on the slide must have been a hell of a lot of work, but [John will] use the same timelines and arrows [by] incorporating them into his own version of the roadmap. Rick frowns as usual and asks John questions about the roadmap and its relationship to some new technical releases. John seems at a loss, stares at his roadmap slide for a moment, and then shrugs. Rick waits for an answer. John eventually admits that there are still some unresolved issues regarding the roadmap and promises to look into it. (field notes, team meeting)
John was constantly challenged by Rick, one of the team members who questioned his approach. John at some point realized that he had still not figured out a definite format of the roadmap that the group would accept. He promised to think about it and moved on to another topic. At another meeting about a month later, John told the group that he had studied how a competitor has structured a technological tool that relates to his roadmap and that he had finally written down how he intended to structure his own roadmap. During that meeting Rick implicitly criticized John for envisaging a decision-making tool, although making decisions was generally avoided in the company, in Rick’s view. As John agreed, it became obvious that creating a roadmap to everyone’s satisfaction would be a constant struggle. Nevertheless, John used the roadmap as tangible evidence to present the group’s work to the rest of the organization:
[If] I [can] show some clear evidence or signs that, yes, this group is working – it’s producing – and we’re holding it accountable for this, then I can find my position within the pack [laughs].
The ‘pack’ refers to the rest of the management team, which had been suspicious of the group’s work.
Creativity workshops
Chris strongly disapproved of using patents as the only way to think of innovation. During a feedback workshop where I presented some of my preliminary empirical findings, an animated debate on innovative and creative outputs erupted among the participants. While some defended the use of patents, others strongly argued against them as a measure of creativity and innovation. Chris was among those managers who passionately argued against patents as creative outcomes during this discussion, because, as he explained later in an interview, they limited the scope for creativity.
I am very much against the notion of innovation as something that is strictly coupled to a patent because [this offers] limited scope for innovation. … I think that what I hear when people talk about innovation is a lot about patents. I am really tired of that stuff because [innovation] is so much more. [A] good idea doesn’t [necessarily] lead to a patent, but can save millions of dollars.
Chris assumed that engineers are all intrinsically motivated and that a manager’s job should be to merely reap their ideas. The innovation workshop he had in mind was designed to formalize, present and discuss proposed ideas. A jury would then select the best proposal. The feedback from the participants was overwhelmingly positive: the engineers enjoyed the workshop and the atmosphere it created. However, Chris rather dramatically called it a ‘fiasco’:
I think that the sum of it all was, ‘Ah, it was a fun afternoon or day that we spent. The food was good, but now I go back to my work, and I do what I do.’ The disappointment of this workshop was that it didn’t have a lasting effect on how people [think].
Sean also thought that the focus should not be solely on patents:
I think an innovation is much bigger than a patent, and I think that we usually [fall] into the trap that, for us as a company, it is really important to have a large patent portfolio. [However,] sometimes I think we stress the importance of patents too much, which in turn, kills a lot of innovation because … innovation could be something else.
Although both managers agreed that focusing on patents means possibly missing out on the untapped potential of other forms of innovation that can generate new ideas, as the overview of the initiatives in Table 1 indicates, both managers endorsed the existing focus on patents. Interestingly, despite his obvious dislike of patents, Chris’s application for his workshop initiative included as its sole objective ‘an invention disclosure’, which is the official name for a patent. Even in his subsequent innovation workgroups, he wrote that he intended ‘to increase the number of innovations and invention disclosures within Core software’. Sean’s initiatives, which were organized by two experts in his group, also focused explicitly on patents.
So, what [the experts] did was that they collected all the patents we [produced] last year and had a session where they described what had been done just to spread the knowledge about the nice [ideas] that eventually became patents or were in the process of being filed as patents.
The experts provided the participants with feedback on the latter’s ideas and helped with the application process for a patent and the review of the application. All non-patentable ideas were discarded.
These two episodes show that although two of the managers, Chris and Sean, thought that creative output should not be limited to patents, they both focused on patents as a specific outcome of their initiatives. Patents represent tangible creative output and were an important indicator of success and accountability (key performance indicators) within the software division of Technovator, as John’s attempts to manage his group with a roadmap similarly show.
In addition to those initiatives, the managers engaged in further attempts to facilitate creativity. However, despite the positive evaluations, Chris changed his approach:
It is a classic [situation]. You can’t say, as a manager, to people, ‘Innovate’, and then a lot of ideas pop up. That is impossible. So, I dumped the idea of a collective workshop. Although I tried to make it as nice as possible, it didn’t work.
Innovation workgroups
Chris’s new idea was to introduce an ‘innovation workgroup’. The main responsibility of the innovation workgroup would be to hold regular meetings with the department’s engineers to discuss their ideas. Chris explained that these workshops were linked to the regular evaluation of every employee’s performance:
… as managers, [we] steer the performance of the employees. So, every manager is required to have three talks every year with every employee. You talk about this year’s goals and how you achieve them and [so on] – to put some pressure … ehm, [set] goals to my managers [points to a document]. I am anonymized in this text, but you can see how I structured it and how I want [the group] to push and drive the engineers forward. These guys are closest to the field, and [I] want them to harvest the [innovative ideas]. This document shows how I steer this process. (Chris)
People would be allotted time to work on good ideas. Chris deemed his innovation workgroups highly successful, even though he had no means of measuring success, as he admitted:
I didn’t just see ideas popping up, but I actively kind of [structured] idea-harvesting. And this is really successful. We have got a lot of good ideas and a lot of good work [has been] done on these ideas and sometimes it has been really successful. … I think we are coming with an offering, and we also offer appreciation and that has been positively received, but I have no [figures]. I don’t even know how to measure it, and what I would be interested in is measuring the amount of innovation with a non-structured approach and the amount of innovation with a structured approach. I don’t know how to measure that.
While Chris deemed his initiative a success – despite his inability to measure it – the participants were of a different opinion. As one participant explained, they were meant to run mini-projects to explore some idea or other further.
But that never really took off in the company and [the workshop] just died off. (software engineer, Chris’s department)
Interest was generally low. Another expert told me about the few proposals they had received:
There were only two proposals handed in, unfortunately. Today, [the workshop] doesn’t exist anymore. (software engineer, Chris’s department)
To find out more about how other participants perceived the initiative, during a feedback workshop I inquired whether it had been successful. The consensus among the participants was that they did not consider it a success and that there should be other ways of organizing creativity initiatives.
In the case of Sean’s initiative, the participants praised it and evaluated it positively, as they had done in the case of Chris’s initiative. Sean should have been highly content with his initiative, yet when I talked to him about it, he remarked,
I’ve been aware of the journey of the idea, as such, but I haven’t followed it up that way. (Sean)
Sean recalled the basics of the workshops that he had previously explained to me but seemed completely indifferent to their outcomes. He was informed that they took place, but the results did not interest him. Nevertheless, the participants thought that the workshops had been successful.
Wilful Managerial Ignorance and Symbolic Work
The empirical material shows how John articulated his vision that engineers would take the time they needed for creativity by working harder. However, his practices involved introducing new requirements that the group would have to meet and controlling their work processes so that they were on the right track. There was thus an obvious contradiction between providing autonomy, as he envisaged, and his routines of (micro-)controlling work groups. In his knowledge incubator team, John wanted the roadmap to be a vision of future achievements – a plan that would reach a broader group. The roadmap he designed, however, was intended to serve as evidence of the outcomes that Technovator’s operational routines produced, instead of being the tool he had imagined. Sean clearly stated that, for him, creativity went beyond patents, yet he gave the mandate to his specialists to organize workshops designed to discuss patents. Likewise, Chris believed patents did not express creativity, yet he designed his workshops so that the participants would come up with a patent proposal. In his innovation workgroups, Chris attempted to ‘reap all the good ideas’ that his subordinates would submit and argued that innovation on demand ‘did not work’. However, his innovation workshops were closely linked to evaluating the performance of his subordinates, which related to whether they met the demands for a certain level of innovation.
These empirical observations illustrate that the managers articulated clearly and emphatically how they imagined creativity (‘something beyond patents’) and how the management of creativity should be approached (‘controlling creativity does not work’) but did not integrate these visions with their routines. It appears that the managers simply ignored their visions, which they had so explicitly and fervently articulated. In other words, the managers were aware of the contradictions but their actions showed that they did not take these contradictions into account: they disregarded what they knew about creativity and their attitude contained an element of wilfulness.
The empirical material further shows that the managers evaluated their initiatives rather unusually. John judged Agile to be a success even though he and the top management abandoned it after only one year and the engineers involved did not consider it successful. If John had made an effort to talk to the Agile groups, he would have most likely realized that the participants had not been able to claim the time they needed. Yet he clung to his vision that engineers would appropriate time to be more creative. The members of his knowledge incubator team constantly challenged the concept of his roadmap. John, however, did not use their feedback, but instead kept using his version of the roadmap to show that his group was working according to the dominant operational culture of Technovator. Sean did not seem interested in the outcomes of his patent workshops. Chris simply did not make an effort to acknowledge the positive feedback from the participants in his workshop and evaluated the workshops as a ‘fiasco’. In the case of his innovation workgroups, Chris evaluated the outcome as positive, even though he acknowledged that he did not have the means to measure its success and although the people involved neither appreciated it nor thought it successful.
These empirical episodes show that the managers did not reflect on their initiatives, acknowledge the information that was there, or try to gather more information. Instead, they stuck to their visions, which they were unwilling to challenge. Had the managers made an effort to gather more feedback on their initiatives, they might have found out that, for instance the vision of self-autonomous teams had not really worked, that participants in the workshops thought that patents are a good measure of creativity or that the innovation workgroups were not successful. The crucial point here is that such information might have not fully elucidated outcomes and processes but it is telling that the managers did not acknowledge or make an effort to gather further information that could have made a difference and potentially challenge their visions.
The analytical framework of managerial agency outlined earlier further helps analyse these empirical observations systematically. Emirbayer and Mische argued that managerial agency
extend[s] Goffman’s imagery by suggesting that it is possible to be (primarily) iterational in one frame, projective in another, and practical-evaluative in yet a third. Moreover, a switch in frames can reveal apparent contradictions in the reproductive or transformative consequences of action. (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 1088; emphasis added)
Two of these ‘moments of contradiction’ are discernible in the empirical material: the contradiction between iterational frames (routines) and projective frames (visions) and between projective frames (visions) and evaluative frames (judgement). These contradictions show the managers’ ‘will to ignorance’ (McGoey, 2007) which means that they intentionally disregarded their visions in their initiatives and/or clung to them when they evaluated their initiatives. The consequences of such actions are an intentionally produced state of ignorance: ‘wilful managerial ignorance’. Wilful managerial ignorance results when managers deliberately and actively avoid using or collecting relevant information that could potentially lead to ‘transformative consequences in their actions’ (Emirbayer & Mische 1998, p. 1088; see also Grossman & van der Weele, 2017). Wilful managerial ignorance emphasizes the importance of information and our imaginative capacity, which gives it a symbolic dimension.
Wilful ignorance and symbolic work
Information can have different purposes. Feldman and March (1981) criticized the dominant view that information-processing forms a basis for rational decision-making and asserted that gathering information ‘is a representation of competence and a reaffirmation of social virtue’ (Feldman & March, 1981, p. 177). According to the authors, organizational members collect information to appear informed and knowledgeable. However, information can also be perceived as unpleasant or even threatening. Golman, Hagmann and Loewenstein (2017, p. 129) argue that individuals ‘often avoid information simply because the information would make them feel bad – because information carries direct, and often negative, utility’. Knudsen (2011, p. 977) pointed out that on a systemic level ‘a potentially destructive subject [can be] actualized’ through information, but individuals can prevent this by taking certain kinds of action.
At Technovator, the managers verbalized affirmative information based on their visions (e.g. ‘creativity is more than patents’), avoided being confronted with disconfirming information (e.g. ‘I did not follow it up’) and based their practices on tried and tested routines.
Drawing on the work of Swedish sociologist Ulf Himmelstrand, Edelman (1964, p. 10) argued that through verbal activity individuals can avoid being confronted with certain topics while nonverbal activity, such as action, in contrast provides opportunities for being confronted with ‘the things about which he [sic] talks’ which makes ‘constructive or creative transformation’ more likely. If an actor emphasizes verbal activity instead of action, we may speak of ‘symbolic acts’. According to Edelman (1964, p. 6, my emphasis), a ‘symbol stands for something other than itself and it also evokes an attitude, a set of impressions or a pattern of events, associated through time, through space, through logic or through imagination with the symbol’. Symbolic acts thus aim to arouse certain meaningful impressions or attitudes beyond ‘their substantive impact’ (Brown, 1994, p. 863). If these symbolic acts must be continuous to maintain their force, then we may speak of ‘symbolic work’ (see also Goffman, 1959).
Continuous symbolic work is a crucial and determining element in engendering wilful managerial ignorance. At Technovator the managers verbalized their visions yet did not act on or evaluated their visions, which could have led to creative transformations of previous routines. Symbolic work prevents disconfirming information from confronting the products of imagination such as visions and beliefs and enables managers to maintain the necessary distance from objective referents. Keeping visions and practices apart produced an intentional lack of (new) knowledge, which also appears to be an essential element in maintaining decoupled organizational structures.
Decoupling and Wilful Managerial Ignorance
The analysis of the empirical material in this paper illustrates how wilful managerial ignorance and symbolic work are socially contingent, multilevel and complex phenomena that connect managerial agency with different institutional contexts. Emirbayer and Mische (1998, p. 963; emphasis added) argue that agency is linked to ‘different structural contexts of action’. Although Emirbayer and Mische (1998, p. 970) predominantly focus on the concept of agency, they propose (in a footnote) the distinction between ‘three interpenetrating categories’ of structural contexts: cultural, social-structural and social-psychological. According to Sewell, a conclusive definition of structure is not possible, even though scholars have long struggled to create one. Yet he delivers some clues on how to make sense of the concept. He claims that ‘structures empower what they designate’ (Sewell, 1992, p. 2). This notion of structures is similar to a common understanding of institutions as objectified systems of ideals, knowledge and techniques, which typify and control social behaviour (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Hasselbladh & Kallinikos, 2000). Sewell further argues that structural contexts are fragmented and expose individuals to competing logics and a ‘multiplicity of structures’ (Sewell, 1992, p. 16). Thus, rather than facing uniform and monolithic rationalized structures which are adopted by the organizations, actors are exposed to diverse structures within, and importantly, beyond the organization. Abdelnour, Hasselbladh, and Kallinikos (2017) call those structures ‘patchwork institutions’.
The empirical material illustrates two patchwork institutions, which influence managerial agency at Technovator. First, ‘creativity management’, which includes individual responsibility for creativity and being inspired by others as well as a focus on autonomy in social relationships and the idea that the managers should refrain from traditional management approaches. Second, the institution, which I label the ‘software factory’, comprises the rationalization of processes and focuses on control and accountability to the rest of the organization. The empirical material showed that there was an obvious incongruence between the ideals and visions of the creative management institution, that the managers articulated in the interviews and their techniques of managing the factory floor. Wilful managerial ignorance and symbolic work illustrate how managers do not productively integrate these relevant institutions – creativity management and the factory floor – but rather work to keep them apart.
The apparent incongruence that may occur between different organizational elements is commonly known in the literature as ‘loose coupling’ (Orton & Weick, 1990) or ‘decoupling’ (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). In their seminal contribution, Meyer and Rowan (1977, p. 346) argue that organizations ‘are dramatic enactments of the rationalized myths pervading modern societies’. According to Meyer and Rowan, adopting rationalized myths (such as structural charts, safety regulations or HR policies) and being efficient are necessary for an organization to gain legitimacy and resources and ensure its survival. However, the ceremonial adoption of rationalized myths and the necessity of being efficient create tensions, as ‘the organization must struggle to link the requirements of ceremonial elements to technical activities’ (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 356). Thus, the core notion of decoupling is that organizations ceremonially adopt formal policies to gain legitimacy, but, in order to be efficient, they use practices that deviate from those policies (for an overview see Bromley & Powell, 2012). For example, in their overview of extant research, Bromley and Powell observe that studies on decoupling ‘identify the actions and interests of individuals as a central determinant of decoupling’ (Bromley & Powell, 2012, p. 10; emphasis added). Meyer and Rowan (1977, p. 361) wonder whether managers ‘tend to become inattentive to evaluation’, insinuating that managers might have to be wilfully ignorant to navigate decoupled environments. This view suggests that symbolic work and wilful managerial ignorance may be essential to managing decoupled organizational environments and gaining legitimacy.
Indeed the socially embedded actors at Technovator appeared to play a crucial role in the ‘decoupling’ of visions for creativity management and management practices and so I suggest that symbolic work and the production of wilful ignorance helped managers to buffer, navigate and cope with their embeddedness in decoupled institutionalized structural contexts that were relevant to their work. In fact, wilful managerial ignorance and symbolic work were essential micro-determinants that helped separate different institutional contexts and therefore maintain a decoupled organizational context.
Discussion
The concept of wilful managerial ignorance complements extant conceptualizations of ignorance in organizations by drawing attention to the observation that managers’ ‘will-to-ignorance’ (McGoey, 2007) might lead to an intentionally produced state of ignorance in an organization. The empirical observations of the managers’ ‘lived experience’ that this study presents supplement existing empirical studies on the production of ignorance on an organizational and field level (e.g. Knudsen, 2011; McGoey, 2007). Witte et al. (2008; see also Gross, 2007; Smithson, 1989) enumerate what they call ‘lands of ignorance’ which comprise
all the things we know we don’t know (known unknowns); things we don’t know we don’t know (unknown unknowns); things we think we know but don’t (errors); things we don’t know we know (tacit knowns); taboos (‘forbidden’ knowledge) and denials. (Witte et al., 2008, p. 253)
This study on wilful managerial ignorance lends empirical support to what Roberts (2013, p. 4) refers to as ‘knowable known unknowns’ and relates it explicitly to managerial work. Knowable known unknowns are all the things we could know more about but choose not to (Congleton, 2001). This, as my study suggests, leads to wilful managerial ignorance.
One interesting question to explore further is whether wilful managerial ignorance plays a functional or dysfunctional role in organizations. As the literature review illustrates, many scholars perceive ignorance as dysfunctional and advocate that it should be eradicated. In many cases, the obliteration of ignorance and the creation of knowledge is indeed desirable, especially when it concerns the well-being of individuals and society (see the various case studies in Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008). However, the complexity, ambiguity and social contingency of ignorance make it difficult to conclude that it is necessarily dysfunctional. Ignorance is a double-edged sword. Wilful managerial ignorance facilitates the smooth operation of the organization, especially when ‘too much’ creativity might interrupt established routines; however, it also hinders the emergence of new ideas that might improve the viability of the organization. Wilful managerial ignorance is ambivalent, so its evaluation should always relate to context, use and effect as well as its relationship to the (dys)functionality of knowledge.
While this paper provides novel empirical and conceptual insights, it naturally leaves certain questions unanswered, which, however, can stimulate further research. Future studies could use the general concept of wilful managerial ignorance as a point of departure to systematically explore its manifestation in other contexts. The dynamics of wilful managerial ignorance are also a topic worth exploring further. Feldman and March (1981) argued that information does not remain symbolic, but will eventually influence practices and thus converge with its referent, so it would be interesting to examine what triggers the convergence of symbol and referent and the erosion of wilful managerial ignorance. The concept of managerial agency, as it has been applied in this paper, can also serve as the basis for a ‘fine-grained view’ of individual managerial actions embedded in ‘patchwork institutions’. As Abdelnour, Hasselbladh and Kallinikos (2017, p. 3) state, Emirbayer and Mische’s conceptualization of agency is ‘powerful work’ that can provide interesting insights into the interplay between imagination, reflection, ignorance, creative transformation and routines. Applying this framework to other research contexts might be fruitful.
Another interesting topic for further research is the relationship between wilful managerial ignorance and image and identity (e.g. Grossman & van der Weele, 2017). Knudsen (2011, p. 967; emphasis added) argues that ‘information is destructive if it damages the image of the possessor’. Osborne (2003, p. 509) echoes this observation and maintains that ‘according to the logic of what we might call the entrepreneurialization of business and economic life, managers are required to demonstrate their creative talents’. To explore how wilful managerial ignorance and symbolic work are related to the projection of favourable images (see e.g. Alvesson, 2013) can thus be a productive and current research area. In his scathing critique of Florida’s (2012) concept of the creative economy, Peck draws attention to our sense of self and writes that ‘a new generation of entrepreneurializing subjects is formed, as the disciplines of creative productionism are extended to every aspect of self and soul…’ (Peck (2005, p. 767; emphasis added) .If we assume that identity is an impermanent construction of selves that are produced, chosen, navigated and reproduced in social interactions (Costas & Grey, 2014; Watson, 2009), then another interesting exploration could be how wilful ignorance and symbolic work relate to identity or the process of ‘identity work’ (Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003).
Conclusion
In this paper, I presented and discussed a comprehensive empirical study on how managers describe, practise and reflect on their efforts to manage creativity. I applied the agency framework of Emirbayer and Mische (1998) to analyse my empirical material and argued that managers wilfully disregarded information they both articulated and could have gathered. Furthermore, I contended that disregarding visions and evaluations of their initiatives produced an intentional lack of knowledge, which I referred to as wilful managerial ignorance. Wilful managerial ignorance means that managers thwarted the transformative integration of their practices and their articulated visions and thus limited any effort to learn from them and become more knowledgeable. I also argued that wilful managerial ignorance stems from an ongoing process of symbolic work, which reflects the activity of separating symbol and referent. Moreover, I suggested that the embeddedness of managerial agency in various patchwork institutions renders individual wilful managerial ignorance and symbolic work a means for maintaining the decoupling of institutionalized environments. Last, I discussed how wilful managerial ignorance could be further explored. In conclusion, this paper urges scholars in organization studies to not ‘ignore ignorance’. Ignorance is as vital as knowledge to our understanding of organizations, if not more so.
Footnotes
Funding
The author was partly funded by Jan Wallanders & Tom Hedelius Research Foundation.