Talk given at the Routines.Research.Community Workshop, hosted by the 
Institute of Strategic Management 
Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU) September 28-30, 2022

1. Leonhard Dobusch
University of Innsbruck
RRC Workshop Linz
Institute of Strategic Management
Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU)
September 28-30, 2022
OPENNESS AS AN ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE
Open Organizing Routines

2. Openness as an Organizing Principle

3. second coming of openness within the
supposedly already-open society
“
Tkacz, N. (2012, p. 400)

4. 1997

5. 2001

6. 2002

7. 2003

10. How smart companies are
opening up strategic initiatives
to involve front-line employees,
experts, suppliers, customers,
entrepreneurs, and even
competitors.
“

11. Quelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Increasing Openness as a PROGRAM
Tensions such as
“compromising speed” or
“burdening wider audiences
with the pressures of
strategy” (Hautz et al., 2017) as
limitations or hurdles for
achieving greater openness
II
IOpenness as the opposite
of closure, representing two
endpoints of a continuum
from closed to open:
Inviting more actors, sharing
more information >> open++
open++ as a normative ideal

12. Open Organizing Routines

13. ROUTINES
(re)produce patterns of action and social
structures", including "patterns of social equality
and inequality"
“
(Feldman & Pentland, 2022)
>> openness imperatives demand changes to the way
organizations re-produce these patterns

14. OPENNESS AS THE "OTHER" WAY OF ORGANIZING
[S]trategy is traditionally exclusive. […] Opacity is
important to strategy […]. Open strategy challenges both
these orthodoxies[.]
“ (Whittington et al. 2011, p. 535)
Open strategy balances the tenets of traditional business
strategy with the promise of open innovation.
“ (Chesbrough and Appleyard
2007, p. 58)
>> 'openness' as an open (no pun intended) conceptual frame to
evaluate, adapt and/or complement established (clusters of) routines

15. as not “traditional“, “closed“, “exclusive“
NEGATIVE DEFINITION OF OPENNESS
…selective revealing
(Henkel et al. 2014)
…selective inclusion
…"openwashing"
(Heimstädt 2017)
Allows… Routines related to openness:
licensing, (re-)integrating …
soliciting, deliberating, …
auditing, window dressing, …

16. Normative Anchors for Organizing Openness:
Transparency and Inclusion

17. OPENNESS AS TRANSPARENCY
17
openness in terms of transparency, both in
the strategy formulation stage and, more
commonly, in the communication of strategies
once they are formulated.
“
(Whittington et al. 2011,
p. 532)
>> routines of informing, communicating and discussing strategically
relevant information

18. 18
Inclusion refers to participation in an
organization’s ‘strategic conversation’[.]
“ (Whittington et al. 2011,
p. 536)
>> routines of collecting, deliberating, and condensing strategic ideas,
maybe even decision-making routines
OPENNESS AS INCLUSION

19. “Open forms of strategy-making with
more inside and outside
organizations and more of
different actors internally and externally.
Whittington et al. (2011, p. 531)
transparency
inclusion

20. Surveying Dialoguing Rating
Informing
transparency inclusion

21. inclusion inclusion
≠

22. How are openness and inclusion connected?

23. How connected are openness and inclusion?

24. CO
M
M
ERCIAL
BREAK
Dobusch, L. & Dobusch, L. (2019): The
Relation between Openness and Closure
in Open Strategy: Programmatic and
Constitutive Approaches to Openness. In
D. Seidl, G. von Krogh & R Whittington
(eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Open
Strategy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 326-336

25. Routines of Openness Revisited

26. Exclusionary Openness

27. Why is open for "anyone" not open enough?

28. Quelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
If your group has nine helpful
and polite members, and one
rude, sexist, loud member,
most women are going to
continue to stay away because
of that one member
“
Valeria Aurora (2002),
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/
Encourage-Women-Linux-
HOWTO/

29. Quelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Routines of excluding
exclusionary behavior
as a precondition for
openness?

30. How to resolve this dual character of
openess-related routines as
both inclusionary and exclusionary?

31. Quelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Openness and Closure as CONSTITUTIVE
Analyzing the paradoxical
nature of openness (and
closure) by focusing on
legitimate closure routines.
e.g., classifying documents
(as a form of official secrecy
(Costas & Grey 2014)) to enhance
transparency
II
IOpenness and closure as
inextricably linked and
interacting with each other
>> we find examples of
closure in all empirical
studies of open strategy

32. As researchers:
How to investigate the dual character of
openess-related routines as
both inclusionary and exclusionary?
Working GROUPS
> First: 5’ think about example of your own empirical research
> Second: share and discuss examples

33. Leonhard Dobusch
University of Innsbruck
RRC Workshop Linz
Institute of Strategic Management
Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU)
September 28-30, 2022
OPENNESS AS AN ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE
Routines of Open Scholarship

34. HOW OPEN DO YOU WANNA BE?
HOW DO YOU WANNA BE OPEN?

35. HOW OPEN DO YOU WANNA BE?
HOW DO YOU WANNA BE OPEN?

37. First Act: Blogging about a “Revelatory Case”

38. Second Act: Monitoring the Phenomenon
#OpenScience

39. Third Act: Developing Argument in Practitioner Outlet

40. Fourth Act: Refine Argument in Blog Posts

41. Fifth Act: Getting Access to Data via Blog-based Reputation

42. Sixth Act: Preprint of Research Paper

43. Seventh Act: Publication in Peer-Reviewed Journal

44. Seventh Act: Publication in Peer-Reviewed Journal
OPEN ACCESS

45. Eighth Act: Spreading-the-Word via Social Media
#OpenScience

46. Achter Akt: Verbreitung über Social Media
#OpenScience

47. Published: October 22, 2019
Downloads: 1.193
Published: October 22, 2019
Downloads: 327
Eighth Act: Spreading-the-Word via Social Media

48. Ninth Act: Summary in yet Another Blog Post

49. Ninth Act: Summary in yet Another Blog Post

50. Tenth Act: Correspondence Section in Nature

51. Journalism
Bubble
Continuous Exchange

52. Research
specific
General
public
Open / non proprietary
Closed / proprietary
BLOGS

53. HOW OPEN DO YOU WANNA BE?
Working GROUPS
> Where would you want to be more open and why?
> What is holding you back?

54. CONTACT
E-mail:
Leonhard.Dobusch@uibk.ac.at
Twitter / Mastodon:
@leonidobusch // @leonido@chaos.social
Websites:
bit.ly/LD-UIBK // www.dobusch.net
Research blogs:
governancexborders.com // osconjunction.net