This thesis uses a socio-cognitive lens to explore managerial responses to novel and competing demands. The dissertation is structured around three chapters, each exploring the mechanisms through which managers understand, make sense of, and process competing demands1. Each chapter focuses on a context in which competing demands emerge from a change in the normal practices and expectations, specifically: industry disruption (Paper 1), planned organizational change (Paper 2), or the implementation of? institutionally complex working practices (Paper 3). In each case, our concern is with the heterogeneity of perspectives that exist amongst managers, the way in which these divergent perspectives interact, and the process through which they influence organizational responses. In doing so, the paper draws on the notions of framing, sensemaking, paradox, temporal structures, and temporal work. While these chapters exist as stand-alone studies, they have mutually influenced each other.

The first paper in this collection – ‘Exploring Multiplexed Framing in Incumbent Responses to Digital Disruption’ – addresses the nature and role of framing in managerial responses to disruptive innovation2. Much of the research that applies a framing lens to incumbent responses to disruptive innovation fails to account for intra-firm heterogeneity. To explore the processes involved, we conducted a case exploration of the response of a multinational insurance group to a digitally-led disruption: the rise of online aggregator platforms between 2002 and 2007. Our analysis mapped managerial frames across three dimensions: Challenge Type, Response Urgency and Firm Heritage. This paper introduces the notion of multiplexed framing – accommodating multiple, non-binary frames – and propose that these are holographically distributed through the organization – such that conflicting frames can be held by members of the same organizational department or group. The combination of these two characteristics generates an ambiguity within organizational subunits which allows managers to achieve an equifinal resolution of conflict: selecting the same responses for different reasons. This enables the organization to rapidly trial and shift between different strategic responses.

The second paper – ‘The Future is Now: Temporal Work, Sensemaking and Agency during Planned Change’ – explores the process through which competing temporal orientations are reconciled during planned organisational change3. Planned change can trigger substantial uncertainty as managers deal with competing understandings of how to act in the present while changing in expectation of the future. Left unreconciled, these competing accounts can lead to conflict and breakdowns in the change process as managers prioritise present demands. While ‘temporal work’ to develop coherent links between the past, present and future may help to overcome these tensions, such an approach can be hard to achieve in contexts where the disparity between the present and future is sufficiently large. This paper draws on a participant-observation study of Fincorp – a multinational organization undergoing substantial strategic change – to explore how managers address this challenge. We find that managers overcome tensions between the present and future by engaging in what we call ‘Temporal Reconstrual’ – a kind of “mental time travel” – in which managers make decisions about the present from the perspective of the future, by adjusting their orientation in time. Drawing on literature from temporal sensemaking, neuroscience and cognitive theory, we show how such a process utilizes ‘hindsight bias’ to discount the value of immediate demands. This in turn helps managers progress with change initiatives in spite of irreconcilable tensions between the present and future.

This focus on the role of temporality during periods of change and novelty is continued in the third paper of this thesis: ‘Navigating paradoxical tensions through the interplay of temporal structures’. This paper focuses on the interplay of distinct temporal structures amongst managers in a new organization at the boundary of two institutional fields. In these contexts, managers are often required to meet contradictory but interrelated demands. While transcendence – accepting both sets of demands as necessary and complementary – has been shown to be an important response to such paradoxes, achieving it places significant cognitive strain on managers. This is particularly problematic in cases where fulfilling opposing institutional demands is required for the survival of the organization. In these cases, there is little empirical research into the practices that managers resort to when initial efforts to achieve transcendence break down. This paper draws on a longitudinal study of the early phases of operation of a joint-venture spanning two institutional fields. We argue that ‘zooming in’ to focus on the interplay of their underlying temporal structures can unveil novel and surprising sensemaking processes amongst managers navigating paradoxes. Through our analysis, we show that managers deconstructed the opposing poles of the paradox into their respective temporal depth – defined as the span into the past and future that they typically consider – and temporal horizons – measured by the frequency of milestones within this span. Through a process of temporal work, managers on both sides of the institutional divide were able to negotiate a new, shared temporal depth that accommodated the temporal horizons of both sides. We show that this process provided a structure within which to consider the demands on both sides as necessary and complimentary, which was not previously possible.