Publikationen

Despite the economic relevance of services research on entrepreneurial activities to internationalise services is comparably rare. One aspect that requires more attention is the question which barriers hinder service providers to benefit from business opportunities in other countries. In order to investigate specific barriers to the internationalisation of services this paper addresses service type and uncertainty avoidance to explore barriers for sourcing services from abroad. In line with prior research, the paper differentiates between capital-intensive and knowledge-intensive services. In lack of existing empirical studies, this paper employs secondary data on service transactions across European countries. Findings suggest that uncertainty avoidance can hamper purchasing international services. Furthermore, findings support our assumption that uncertainty avoidance is more relevant for knowledge-intensive than for capital-intensive services. The paper concludes on implications and future research directions and an epilogue on sourcing services internationally from a buyer perspective during the corona 2020 lockdown in Germany.

The past is a central element in crafting an organizational identity. However, the past is interpreted subjectively, resulting in ambiguity and multiplicity of interpretations. This study investigates the use of rhetorical history in crafting an organizational identity by analyzing differences between an organization as an actor and organizational members in applying rhetorical history. Our analysis is grounded on the self-representations of 28 watchmaking firms located in two watchmaking clusters in Germany based on their Web pages and interviews with 75 current and former members of watchmaking firms in these two clusters. Our results reveal that there are differences between the organization as an actor and its members not only regarding which claims of rhetorical history they emphasized but also with respect to the temporal and content-wise past to which they refer. While they share a pattern in terms of temporal structure, the organization as an actor emphasizes both near and distant history, creating a kind of "valley of oblivion," while the members of the organization show a stronger focus on near-history aspects. Our findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of rhetorical history, showing that the use of rhetorical history is strongly influenced by rhetoricians of the past. With a focus on the importance of rhetorical history for crafting an organizational identity, our findings also allow us to draw conclusions about sources of multiple identities and how such identities can emerge - namely, through differentiated rhetorical interpretations of the past by groups of actors.

Organizational identity research emphasizes that multiple identities can coexist in an organization. With a qualitative study of four firms in the German watchmaking industry, we analyze how and why multiple identities emerge. Our findings show that the orchestration of organizational identity claims differs regarding the organization as a social actor and the organizational members. Moreover, we find that differences in the conceptualization of identity claims by both levels of actors are less competing but rather have a symbiotic relationship in the sense of reinforcing the firm's uniqueness. Exploring this finding in more detail, we observe that rhetorical history is not only applied by incorporating different episodes but also that episodes are emphasized differently with respect to the rhetorician.

The rise in popularity of post-bureaucratic organizational models challenges the role and relevance of middle management. Consequently, middle managers frequently find themselves in the paradoxical situation of being responsible for implementing structures and procedures that aim to make the institution of middle management redundant. We study middle managers' behavior in such a situation and ask why they choose particular reactions. Findings of a qualitative 32-month process study in a medium-sized family business show that middle managers react to change aiming to make them redundant with five distinct reactions. Inspired by theory on institutional entrepreneurship, we show that middle managers' intra-organizational social position determines their reactions over time, making them either victims or institutional entrepreneurs of the change process. Our findings contribute to a better understanding how new models of organization are implemented and legitimized as well as to research on the changing role and function of middle managers.

The mirroring hypothesis highlights the correspondence of design characteristics across different architectural levels and in this paper, we consider how mirroring may impact the distribution of national and international innovation activities of firms. We identify incremental and modular innovations (as product architecture reinforcing innovations) along with architectural and radical innovations (as innovations that overturn the existing product architecture) to consider how and when innovation activities may adopt an international dimension. Our study of the bicycle industry highlights that international collaboration is most likely to occur in respect of incremental and modular innovation on the basis of the embedded coordination that modular designs offer. However, even in these circumstances, international collaboration was limited, on the basis that cross-national collaboration created higher levels of complexity and uncertainty; thereby being an attractive option only when the capabilities of the international partner far exceeded what was available either internally, or within national boundaries.