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In this study, we examined 82 accounts of "issue selling" to better understand managers' implicit theories for successfully shaping change from below by directing the attention of top management. The study reveals the importance of various issue-selling moves, including packaging, involvement, and timing. Managerial accounts uncover three kinds of contextual knowledge that are critical to the execution of issue-selling moves. The study shows managers actively shaping the issue-selling microprocesses that contribute to organizational change.
Scholars often portray change as a discrete event-- a system is unfrozen, moved, and refrozen (Lewin, 1951). But in reality, organizations are a cacophony of complementary and competing change attempts, with managers at all levels joining the fray and pushing for issues of particular importance to themselves. Indeed, it may be most accurate to portray an organization as a pluralistic marketplace of ideas in which issues are "sold" via the persuasive efforts of managers and "bought" by top managers who set the firm's strategic direction. Effective management in this second portrayal of change is of critical importance to the increasing number of firms that must compete in high-velocity environments through a process of continuous change (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997). Effective management begins with an understanding of a key component process, issue selling.
Issue selling is the process by which individuals affect others' attention to and understanding of the events, developments, and trends that have implications for organizational performance (Ansoff, 1980; Dutton & Ashford, 1993). Because no issue is inherently important or strategic, individuals' claims about what matters (that is, their issue selling) determine, in part, which change initiatives get activated (Dutton & Ashford, 1993; Floyd & Wooldridge, 1996). Issue selling shapes an organization's investment of time and attention and thereby shapes, in part, the actions and changes that ensue. Issue sellers are "players" (Ocasio, 1997) who use a repertoire of moves to sell issues and affect toplevel decision makers' attention. By moves, we mean the behaviors that constitute an interaction (Goffman, 1981; Pentland, 1992). In this study, we gained insight into managers' implicit theories of issue selling-their sense of what works and doesn't work in this process-by asking them to describe issue-selling episodes. From a qualitative, systematic examination of these descriptions, we extracted lessons about the elements thought to be...