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Claus Jacobs
Former Member
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Prof. Ph.D.
Last Name
Jacobs
First name
Claus
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1 - 10 of 74
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PublicationEnabling Effective Social Impact: Towards a Model for Impact Scaling Agreements.Scaling is a critical organizational phase for social organizations: their upfront financial needs increase dramatically. This paper responds—on the basis of initial research on capacity, up-, and deep scaling strategies—to the need for integrated knowledge on financing processes within the context of social organizations’ impact scaling phase. An exploration of a market leader’s processes uncovered both strengths and struggles, which in turn enabled new levels of understanding related to the research question, “How can impact scaling agreements enable effective social impact?” The fact that the financial provider examined in this empirical study lacked alignment in its scaling approach, goals, and reporting processes over time hampered its effectiveness and sustainability. The findings from this qualitative inter-temporal content analysis enable the development of a model for impact scaling agreements. This shows ongoing flows between the provider and recipient of financial and nonfinancial resources and impact information, as well as decision-making and reporting processes. The outcome of researching the question “how can impact scaling agreements enable effective social impact?” was the identification of three success enhancers for effective social impact scaling agreements to enable social impact: (1) Financial provider alignment pre- and per-engagement in terms of expectations with regard to scaling approach and goals; (2) Scaling approach coherence in terms of understanding and acting upon the inter-relatedness and, in fact, mutual dependency between capacity, up-, and deep scaling; (3) Impact reporting alignment of the target group with the financial recipient and the financial provider. This research makes a twofold contribution to the literature. First, the pivotal role of internal alignment between mission, strategy, reporting, and decision-making processes is explored; second, the three scaling strategies of capacity, up-, and deep scaling are established as interrelated dimensions of the same phenomenon.Type: journal articleJournal: Sustainability - Sustainable Financial MarketsVolume: 10Issue: 12
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PublicationHow Entrepreneurs Become Skilled Cultural OperatorsCultural entrepreneurship and symbolic management perspectives portray entrepreneurs as skilled cultural operators and often assume them to be capable from the outset to purposefully use ‘cultural resources' in order to motivate resource-holding audiences to support their new ventures. We problematize this premise and develop a model of how entrepreneurs become skilful cultural operators and develop the cultural competences necessary for creating and growing their ventures. The model is grounded in a case study of an entrepreneur who set up shop and sought to acquire resources in a culturally unfamiliar setting. Our model proposes that two adaptive sensemaking processes - approval-driven sensemaking and autonomy-driven sensemaking - jointly facilitate the gradual development of cultural competences. These processes jointly enable entrepreneurs to gain cultural awareness and calibrate their symbolic enactments. Specifically, while approval-driven sensemaking facilitates recognizing cultural resources to symbolically couple a venture's identity claims more tightly with the cultural frames of targeted audiences and gain legitimate distinctiveness, autonomy-driven sensemaking enables recognizing cultural constraints and more effective symbolic decoupling to shield the venture from constraining cultural frames and defend the venture's autonomy and resources. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the theoretical implications of our study for cultural entrepreneurship and symbolic management research.Type: journal articleJournal: Organization StudiesVolume: 36Issue: 7
Scopus© Citations 29 -
PublicationPlacing Strategy Discourse in Context : Sociomateriality, Sensemaking, and Power(Wiley-Blackwell, 2014-03)
Scopus© Citations 197 -
PublicationBeyond belief : Strategic taboos and organizational identity in strategic agenda settingA comprehensive strategic agenda matters for fundamental strategic change. Our study seeks to explore and theorize how organizational identity beliefs influence the judgment of strategic actors when setting an organization's strategic agenda. We offer the notion of "strategic taboo" as those strategic options initially disqualified and deemed inconsistent with the organizational identity beliefs of strategic actors. Our study is concerned with how strategic actors confront strategic taboos in the process of setting an organization's strategic agenda. Based on a revelatory inductive case study, we find that strategic actors engage in assessing the concordance of the strategic taboos with organizational identity beliefs and, more specifically, that they focus on key identity elements (philosophy; priorities; practices) when doing so. We develop a typology of three reinterpretation practices that are each concerned with a key identity element. While contextualizing assesses the potential concordance of a strategic taboo with an organization's overall philosophy and purpose, instrumentalizing assesses such concordance with respect to what actors deem an organization's priorities to be. Finally, normalizing explores concordance with respect to compatibility and fit with the organization's practices. We suggest that assessing concordance of a strategic taboo with identity elements consists in reinterpreting collective identity beliefs in ways that make them consistent with what organizational actors deem the right course of action. This article discusses the implications for theory and research on strategic agenda setting, strategic change, a practice-based perspective on strategy, and on organizational identity.Type: journal articleJournal: Strategic OrganizationVolume: 12Issue: 4
Scopus© Citations 14 -
PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Academy of Management Best Paper ProceedingsVolume: 2013Issue: 1
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PublicationDiagnosing Organizational Identity Beliefs by Eliciting Complex, Multi-Modal MetaphorsThe purpose of this article is to extend the organizational development diagnostics repertoire by advancing an approach that surfaces organizational identity beliefs through the elicitation of complex, multimodal metaphors by organizational members. We illustrate the use of such "Type IV" metaphors in a postmerger context, in which individuals sought to make sense of the implications of the merger process for the identity of their organization. This approach contributes to both constructive and discursive new organizational development approaches; and offers a multimodal way of researching organizational identity that goes beyond the dominant, mainly textual modality.Type: journal articleJournal: Journal of Applied Behavioral ScienceVolume: 49Issue: 4
Scopus© Citations 17 -
PublicationAnticipating intended users - Prospective sensemaking in technology developmentHow do developers and designers of a new technology make sense of intended users? The critical groundwork for user-centred technology development begins not by involving actual users' exposure to the technological artefact but much earlier, with designers' and developers' vision of future users. Thus, anticipating intended users is critical to technology uptake. We conceptualise the anticipation of intended users as a form of prospective sensemaking in technology development. Employing a narrative analytical approach and drawing on four key communities in the development of Grid computing, we reconstruct how each community anticipated the intended Grid user. Based on our findings, we conceptualise user anticipation in Terms of two key dimensions, namely the intended possibility to inscribe user needs into the technological artefact as well as the intended scope of the application domain. In turn, these dimensions allow us to develop an initial typology of intended user concepts that in turn might provide a key building block towards a generic typology of intended users.Type: journal articleJournal: Technology Analysis & Strategic ManagementVolume: 25Issue: 9
Scopus© Citations 10 -
PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Academy of Management Best Paper ProceedingsIssue: 1
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PublicationBalancing Control and Coaching in CSO Governance : A Paradox Perspective on Board BehaviorHow can governance of civil society organizations be conceptualized more adequately by accounting for the dual and simultaneous requirements of controlling and coaching in board behavior? Empirically, we seem to agree that effective governance of a civil society organization is crucial to its sustained viability. Conceptually, however, we observe a lack of consensus on how to best conceptualize CSO governance. By critically juxtaposing two major theoretical lenses to conceptualize governance, namely agency and stewardship theory, we identify a number of challenges conceptualizing board-management relations that deserve our attention. While agency theory privileges controlling behavior, stewardship theory emphasizes the coaching behavior of boards. The purpose of this paper is to offer a concept of governance that is informed by a paradox perspective advancing a subtler, more adequate conceptualization of board governance that accounts for the often conflicting demands on CSO governance. Drawing on a longitudinal interpretive case study, we exemplify our propositions empirically. The paper concludes with discussing the implications of our argument for CSO governance research and practice.Type: journal articleJournal: VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit OrganizationsVolume: 22Issue: 4
Scopus© Citations 29 -
PublicationSerious Play as a Practice of ParadoxA recent stream of organizational research has used the term serious play to describe situations in which people engage in playful behaviors deliberately with the intention to achieve serious, work-related objectives. In this article, the authors reflect on the ambiguity of this term, and reframe serious play as a practice characterized by the paradox of intentionality (when actors engage deliberately in a fun, intrinsically motivating activity as a means to achieve a serious, extrinsically motivated work objective). This reframing not only extends the explanatory power of the concept of serious play but also helps bridge the concerns of scholars and practitioners: first, by enabling us to understand a variety of activities in organizations as serious play, which can help practitioners address specific organizational challenges; second, by recognizing the potential for emergent serious play, and the creation of the conditions to foster this emergence; third, by pointing toward specific, individual or group-level outcomes associated with the practice; and finally, by uncovering its ethical dimensions and encouraging the understanding of the role of serious play on ethical decision making.Type: journal articleJournal: Journal of Applied Behavioral ScienceVolume: 47Issue: 2
Scopus© Citations 79