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Key words: new theory; pioneering research; call to action
This is the second installment of a two-part special issue intended to map out and advance the "Frontiers of Organization Science." We approached this project in the spirit of the journal's founding mission, seeking to broaden the boundaries of inquiry into organizations, and to loosen "the normal science straightjacket" arising from premature convergence on an unchallenged set of intellectual perspectives (Daft and Lewin 1990, p. 2). Our discontent with existing theoretical perspectives echoes that expressed recently by other scholars (March 2005, Scott 2004, Augier et al. 2005). Thus, the Frontiers of Organization Science project aspires to catalyze the formation of a bold new theory that will inspire pioneering empirical research.
Financial support from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Innovation and Organization Change (IOC) Program has made this project possible. We challenged the authors of the papers comprising this two-issue series to envision the kinds of organizational research that NSF ought to support in the future, and to begin the work of erecting the theoretical underpinnings for this sort of research. In keeping with the theme of theoretical rejuvenation, all of those submitting papers for possible publication were asked to include one senior scholar and at least one recently minted scholar as coauthors. In 2003, NSF sponsored a three-day conference at Laguna Beach California, where prospective authors presented, reappraised, combined, and revised the ideas they had been gestating. After traversing Organization Science's rigorous double blind review process, the seven papers that follow were accepted for publication in this second installment of the two-part special issue.
We open Part II of the Frontiers of Organization Science Special Issue with an insightful and thought provoking paper by Alan D. Meyer, Vibha Gaba, and Kenneth A. Colwell, titled "Organizing Far from Equilibrium: Nonlinear Change in Organizational Fields." The impetus for this paper was a series of empirical research projects where a set of discontinuous changes was unexpectedly encountered in the organizational field being studied. Some will recall reading the first report of this phenomenon in a paper about "environmental jolts" in hospitals (Meyer 1982). Over a period of 20 years, three more large-scale studies were interrupted by major "jolts" whose contemplation suggests several questionable assumptions about field-level change. Anchoring...