The power literature’s focus on criticizing power relations comes at the cost of deliberate attempts to improve organizational practices. How can critical performativity and other scholars address ...power as an enabling force, thereby also allowing for more engagement with practitioners? We integrate the literature on power in and around organizations with studies of organizational change and behavior. By focusing on enabling instead of restrictive power, we draw attention to the potentially pivotal role of key actors—managers, other practitioners, and scholars—in fostering empowerment and emancipation within organizations. Our review points at four social mechanisms that drive enabling power: formal authority, language-shaping-action, community formation, and the dynamics of safety and trust. Furthermore, we identify various types of actions that can trigger these mechanisms that, in turn, may give rise to outcomes such as empowerment and emancipation. The main contribution of this article involves an integrated framework of power as an enabling force. By synthesizing various separate discourses, this framework extends prior reviews focusing on power-over, resulting in a systemic understanding of enabling power and thereby creating novel avenues for research on power. The integrative framework also provides a foundation for an intervention-oriented body of knowledge on enabling power.
In this study, we explore how empowerment initiatives can be understood by drawing on key notions from the power literature. By conceptualizing empowerment as the transformation toward ‘power to’ by ...actively using ‘power over’, we uncover power-related dynamics and tensions arising from empowerment initiatives in ways that go beyond prior work. Our in-depth case study of an empowerment initiative in a military organization highlights the complex challenges that powerful actors face when attempting to enhance the power to act elsewhere in the organization. Our findings demonstrate how power-related tensions arise between and within actors, as actors combine and shift between different power practices. We find that power tensions are not merely relational in nature (i.e. between actors), but also arise when individual cognition differs from action. By showing how the interplay of different power practices may result in major tensions, our findings provide a new perspective on why organizational empowerment initiatives may produce unintended outcomes or even completely fail. Moreover, while power-over, power-to and transformative power practices are typically explored separately, this study is one of the first to shed light on the complex relation between these power practices, thereby examining them together. Finally, this study demonstrates how cross-fertilization between the empowerment and power discourses may advance both fields.
Technology licensing officers play an important role in the creation of university spinoffs. Anecdotal data suggests that licensing officers make use of the representativeness heuristic when deciding ...which inventors’ technologies should (not) be commercialized through the founding of new companies. In this context, use of the representativeness heuristic implies that licensing officers favor for spinoff creation the inventions of academics that “fit” the profile of a typical inventor-entrepreneur. To examine this possibility, we conduct a randomized experiment with more than 200 technology licensing officers at U.S. universities and find evidence consistent with the use of the representativeness heuristic.
Previous studies of the effects of resource slack and constraints on creativity and performance offer contradictory findings. To resolve this debate, some authors operationalize resource slack and ...constraints in ways that actually may have concealed their underlying complexity and dynamics. This study seeks to demonstrate how perceived resource positions influence entrepreneurial decision making and creativity by drawing on in-depth case studies of three high-tech start-ups. The authors show that resource positions are perceived, relative, transient and multidimensional; that is, they reflect the entrepreneur’s perception of available resources relative to demand. Moreover, perceived resource positions are not static but change over time, and entrepreneurs can experience different types of resource constraints and slack simultaneously. The influence of perceived resource positions on decision making in turn depends on individual, temporal and resource position dynamics. These findings link perceptions of resources to the emergence of organizational ingenuity, by explaining how perceived resource positions influence decision making.
This study examines the influence of inventor appearance on how technology licensing officers perceive the commercial potential of new university inventions. An experiment with technology licensing ...officers at Carnegie I research universities in the United States serves to manipulate inventor appearance in otherwise identical invention disclosures. The experiment reveals that licensing officers perceive inventions by more attractive inventors (inventors with a professional appearance) to have more commercial potential. These findings have several critical implications for university technology commercialization.
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