Discussion: View Thread

The attention-based view of the firm (ABV) (Ocasio, 1997; Ocasio & Joseph, 2005) has emerged as a core theoretical perspective in research on strategic organizations. The attention-based view develops three core principles that together theorize strategic behavior as an outcome of the focusing and channeling of attention. It highlights that decision-makers' focus of attention impacts strategic choices and outcomes, that this attention is contextually situated, and that this situated attention is socially structured. The attention-based view has generated influential research in a wide variety of topic areas including, but not limited to, institutional change (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010; Ocasio & Radoynovska, 2016), top management teams (Cho & Hambrick, 2006),  multinational strategy (Bouquet & Birkinshaw, 2008), routinization and decision-making (Laureiro-Martinez, 2014), technology strategy (Eggers & Kaplan, 2009), organizational learning (Rerup, 2009; Miller & Martignoni. 2015), strategic adaptation (Joseph & Ocasio, 2012), corporate governance (Tuggle, Sirmon, Reutzel & Bierman, 2010), and stakeholder  theory (Crilly & Sloan, 2014). Research on ABV has been the central focus of Strategic Management Society workshops by the Behavioral Strategy, Strategy as Practice, and Strategy Process Interest Groups during recent years, illustrating its continuing import.

Inspired by the continued development of the literature on organizational attention, its determinants and consequences, this special issue seeks to highlight developments at the research frontier that (a) address theoretical and empirical controversies and tensions in the existing literature on ABV and strategic organizations, (b) examine theoretical issues that have been identified but not empirically addressed, or (c) develop new paths on organizational attention and strategy that have not yet been identified, much less rigorously studied. The scope of the special issue is therefore broad, but we identify five topics where new research is particularly needed, while also encouraging other important research questions not explicitly identified here. Promising research topics for the special issue include:

Varieties and Dimensions of Managerial and Organizational Attention

Research in strategy and organization has begun to consider the effects of varieties of attention. At the individual level of analysis, three types of attention have been identified through various techniques, including selective attention, attentional vigilance, and executive attention (Ocasio, 2011: 1287). Selective attention emphasizes that due to cognitive limitations, individuals cannot attend to all cues and issues. Attentional vigilance is concerned with how individuals sustain attention to a particular cue or issue over time. Executive attention involves allocating limited attentional resources to cues that are inconsistent with established schema-based knowledge. While more research on these important varieties of attention are important at the individual level, work is especially needed to understand how they play out at more collective levels. When and how do these varieties influence attentional processes and outcomes in organizations? For instance, how do distributed actors coordinate their selective attention so they don't miss emerging opportunities and threats? How do top-management teams sustain attention to peripheral topics?

New Methods on the Attention-Based View

Theoretical developments on the attention-based view and on organizational attention more generally have been more extensive than empirical research, leaving many theoretical questions empirically unaddressed. We welcome both empirical and methodological contributions that fill these existing research gaps.  We will consider a variety of qualitative, archival, experimental methods, measures, and designs, including, but by no means limited to neuroimaging, event tracking, field experiments, natural language processing, ethnography, computer simulations, and computational methods. Given the increased interest in causal identification in strategic management research, we are also interested in studies that provide novel ways to identify the causal effects of organizational attention on strategic behavior, change, and outcomes.

The Dynamics of Organizational Attention

The original formulations of ABV, while recognizing the situated nature of organizational attention, did not explicitly account for situational dynamics or the dynamic nature of attentional structures themselves. While recent theoretical developments now highlight how attentional dynamics are shaped by communicative practices and political dynamics, more empirical testing and theoretical development of these ideas is needed. Further research is also needed on how technological, institutional, and market dynamics shape the frequency and variability of change in organizational structures of attention. In addition, more research is needed to highlight how attention oscillates between different goals, as well as how attentional differentiation and integration is sustained across organizations, industries, and institutional fields.

Attention, Crisis Management, and Organizational Resilience

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore a recurrent problem of organizations-responding to crisis and unexpected events, both large and small, and its effect on organizational attention and inattention to both disruptive events and ongoing grand challenges. In these situations, attentional flexibility is needed (Laureiro and Brusoni, 2018). How does organizational attention respond to major external challenges, including those of high frequency of change, high variability or both? If attention to weak cues signaling the onset of crisis and unexpected events depends on the hierarchical position from which they are viewed, how do organizations acknowledge this disparity and structure themselves to make sense of emerging problems?  Moreover, what is the role of selective attention, attentional vigilance, and executive attention in these processes?

The Changing Nature of Organizations and Organizing

Driven by societal level changes, including but not limited to the proliferation of data, information, and algorithms, the practice of strategic organizations has changed significantly since the original publication of the attention-based view in 1997. The Chandlerian model of the vertically integrated, multi-business, multi-divisional firm is in decline, with increasing emphasis on firms that exploit their distinctive capabilities and increase their interorganizational relations with their supply chains, strategic alliances, and ecosystems. The continuing information technology revolution, rise of social media, and the harvesting and monetization of data has exacerbated problems of information overload, and made the initial insights of the ABV more relevant, while simultaneously changing the nature of how attention is structured (Haas, Criscuolo & George, 2014). These changes have led, among other things, to business model innovations and an emphasis on ambidexterity and the higher cognitive demands imposed on organizational members (Laureiro-Martinez, Brusoni, Canessa & Zollo, 2015). Organizations are becoming less bureaucratic with more emphasis on organizational agility. The shareholder value orientation has become increasingly challenged with greater attention to other stakeholders, sustainability, diversity, and environmental concerns. All these changes require organizations to attend to multiple and sometimes conflicting goals (Gaba & Greve 2019, Salvato & Rerup 2018). How have changes in organizations in the last quarter century led to significant changes in the structural distribution of attention, its determinants, and consequences?

Timeline and submission instructions

All submissions should be uploaded to the Manuscript Central/ Scholar One website: http:// mc.manuscriptcentral.com/so between January 1 and January 31, 2022. Once you have created your account (if you do not already have one) and you are ready to submit your paper, you will need to choose this particular Special Issue from the drop-down menu that is provided for the type of submission. Contributions should follow the directions for manuscript submission described on Call for Papers on the SO webpage: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/soq. For queries about submissions, contact SO!'s editorial office at strategic.organization@hec.ca.  For questions regarding the content of this special issue, contact one of the guest editors.