Abstract
John Joseph, Paul Merage School of Business, University of California Irvine (
Daniella Laureiro-Martinez, ETH Zürich (
Amit Nigam, The Business School (formerly Cass), City, University of London, (
Claus Rerup, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management (
The attention-based view (ABV) of the firm (Ocasio, 1997; Ocasio and Joseph, 2005) has emerged as a core theoretical perspective in research on strategic organizations. The ABV develops three core principles that together theorize strategic behavior as an outcome of the focusing and channeling of attention. It highlights that decision-makers’ focus of attention impacts strategic choices and outcomes, that this attention is contextually situated, and that this situated attention is socially structured. The ABV has generated influential research in a wide variety of topic areas including, but not limited to, institutional change (Nigam and Ocasio, 2010; Ocasio and Radoynovska, 2016), top-management teams (Cho and Hambrick, 2006), multinational strategy (Bouquet and Birkinshaw, 2008), routinization and decision-making (Laureiro-Martinez, 2014), technology strategy (Eggers and Kaplan, 2009), organizational learning (Miller and Martignoni, 2016; Rerup, 2009), strategic adaptation (Joseph and Ocasio, 2012), corporate governance (Tuggle et al., 2010), and stakeholder theory (Crilly and Sloan, 2014). Research on ABV has been the central focus of Strategic Management Society workshops by the Behavioral Strategy, Strategy as Practice, and Strategy Process Interest Groups during recent years, illustrating its continuing import.
ABV was built on the Carnegie School perspective (March and Simon, 1958; Simon, 1947) and the post-Carnegie work of March and his collaborators (Cohen et al., 1972; March and Olsen, 1979). Subsequent work employing ABV has also directly engaged with other perspectives including institutional theory (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999), managerial cognition (Nadkarni and Barr, 2008), emotions (Huy and Vuori, 2016), managerial capabilities (Joseph and Wilson, 2018), social networks (Rhee and Leonardi, 2018), and information processing (Banerjee et al., 2019; Joseph and Gaba, 2020). The interrelationships between the ABV and complementary perspectives in organization theory remain a fertile ground for additional research development (Vuori and Huy, 2016; Joseph and Gaba, 2020).
Despite its broad influence, or perhaps precisely because it has been adopted within diverse research communities, there are many unanswered questions on the relationship between organizational attention and strategic organization.
The first principle of ABV (Ocasio, 1997) that decision-makers’ selective focus of attention directly influences strategic behavior and outcomes in organizations is well established empirically, although important questions remain regarding varieties and dimensions of attention. While attention was originally defined in ABV as noticing, encoding, interpreting, and focusing of time and effort on both environmental and organizational stimuli as well as action alternatives (Ocasio, 1997: 189), subsequent work has identified a multiplicity of additional dimensions of attention. This includes research drawing a distinctions between attentional orientation, attentional vigilance, and attentional control (or executive attention; Ocasio, 2011), the quality versus the quantity of organizational attention (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006), the interaction of bottom-up and top-down attentional processes (Laureiro-Martinez, 2014; Shepherd et al., 2017), and attentional breadth versus depth (Eklund and Mannor, 2020).
The second principle that attention is situated has been principally examined in terms of contextual factors shaping organizational attention writ large (Chen and Miller, 2007; Piezunka and Dahlander, 2015; Sullivan, 2010), but less emphasis has been directed at how attention is situated in the organization’s communication channels. Recent theoretical developments have emphasized that what matters is not just that communication flows through channels, but the content and process, and practices, by which communication takes place (Ocasio et al., 2018). Research on this topic and the theoretical insights that come from high quality empirical work remain nascent.
Research on the third principle on the structural distribution of attention has proceeded in a piecemeal fashion, with less research on the overall views of organizations as systems of distributed attention, and how the degree of attentional differentiation and integration is sustained. While considering top managers the central actors in organizations, early work focused on how attention to issues naturally integrated in the C-suite (Ocasio and Joseph, 2005). A progression from this work was to incorporate how actors distributed across the entire chain of command attended to cues and issues. This pivot opened possibilities for studying how attention to the same issues varied across positions and departments, and how organizations developed structural mechanisms to coherently align attention across the chain of command to critical issues such as regulatory compliance (Rerup, 2009).
Inspired by the continued development of the literature on organizational attention, its determinants and consequences, this special issue seeks to highlight developments at the research frontier that (a) address theoretical and empirical controversies and tensions in the existing literature on ABV and strategic organizations, (b) examine theoretical issues that have been identified but not empirically addressed, or (c) develop new paths on organizational attention and strategy that have not yet been identified, much less rigorously studied. The scope of the special issue is therefore broad, but we identify five topics where new research is particularly needed, while also encouraging other important research questions not explicitly identified here. Promising research topics for the special issue include the following.
Varieties and dimensions of managerial and organizational attention
Research in strategy and organization has begun to consider the effects of varieties of attention. At the individual level of analysis, three types of attention have been identified through various techniques, including selective attention, attentional vigilance, and executive attention (Ocasio, 2011: 1287). Selective attention emphasizes that due to cognitive limitations, individuals cannot attend to all cues and issues. Attentional vigilance is concerned with how individuals sustain attention to a particular cue or issue over time. Executive attention involves allocating limited attentional resources to cues that are inconsistent with established schema-based knowledge. While more research on these important varieties of attention are important at the individual level, work is especially needed to understand how they play out at more collective levels. When and how do these varieties influence attentional processes and outcomes in organizations? For instance, how do distributed actors coordinate their selective attention so they do not miss emerging opportunities and threats? How do top-management teams sustain attention to peripheral topics?
New methods on the attention-based view
Theoretical developments on the ABV and on organizational attention more generally have been more extensive than empirical research, leaving many theoretical questions empirically unaddressed. We welcome both empirical and methodological contributions that fill these existing research gaps. We will consider a variety of qualitative, archival, experimental methods, measures, and designs, including, but by no means limited to neuroimaging, event tracking, field experiments, natural language processing, ethnography, computer simulations, and computational methods. Given the increased interest in causal identification in strategic management research, we are also interested in studies that provide novel ways to identify the causal effects of organizational attention on strategic behavior, change, and outcomes.
The dynamics of organizational attention
The original formulations of ABV, while recognizing the situated nature of organizational attention, did not explicitly account for situational dynamics or the dynamic nature of attentional structures themselves. While recent theoretical developments now highlight how attentional dynamics are shaped by communicative practices and political dynamics, more empirical testing and theoretical development of these ideas is needed. Further research is also needed on how technological, institutional, and market dynamics shape the frequency and variability of change in organizational structures of attention. In addition, more research is needed to highlight how attention oscillates between different goals, as well as how attentional differentiation and integration is sustained across organizations, industries, and institutional fields.
Attention, crisis management, and organizational resilience
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore a recurrent problem of organizations—responding to crisis and unexpected events, both large and small, and its effect on organizational attention and inattention to both disruptive events and ongoing grand challenges. In these situations, attentional flexibility is needed (Laureiro-Martínez and Brusoni, 2018). How does organizational attention respond to major external challenges, including those of high frequency of change, high variability or both? If attention to weak cues signaling the onset of crisis and unexpected events depends on the hierarchical position from which they are viewed, how do organizations acknowledge this disparity and structure themselves to make sense of emerging problems? Moreover, what is the role of selective attention, attentional vigilance, and executive attention in these processes?
The changing nature of organizations and organizing
Driven by societal level changes, including but not limited to the proliferation of data, information, and algorithms, the practice of strategic organizations has changed significantly since the original publication of the ABV in 1997. The Chandlerian model of the vertically integrated, multi-business, multi-divisional firm is in decline, with increasing emphasis on firms that exploit their distinctive capabilities and increase their interorganizational relations with their supply chains, strategic alliances, and ecosystems. The continuing information technology revolution, rise of social media, and the harvesting and monetization of data has exacerbated problems of information overload, and made the initial insights of the ABV more relevant, while simultaneously changing the nature of how attention is structured (Haas et al., 2014). These changes have led, among other things, to business model innovations and an emphasis on ambidexterity and the higher cognitive demands imposed on organizational members (Laureiro-Martínez et al., 2015). Organizations are becoming less bureaucratic with more emphasis on organizational agility. The shareholder value orientation has become increasingly challenged with greater attention to other stakeholders, sustainability, diversity, and environmental concerns. All these changes require organizations to attend to multiple and sometimes conflicting goals (Gaba and Greve, 2019; Salvato and Rerup, 2018). How have changes in organizations in the last quarter century led to significant changes in the structural distribution of attention, its determinants, and consequences?
Timeline and submission instructions
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