The Janus Face of Organizational Knowing

Abstract

This article challenges our current understanding of the role of knowing for organizational participation by discussing how, and under which circumstances, knowing hinders participation instead of fostering it. Drawing upon 18 months of fieldwork at a social impact accelerator, I first show that showing that the knowing emerging from collective practices and interactions generates disengagement among actors. Second, I illuminate the role of the social relations for actors to imbue their experience of new meanings and, third, develop a model of “meaningful reengagement” explaining how they retain their participation beyond the negative implication of knowing for participation. This article advances existing knowing research by bringing to the fore the role of relational patterns for participation, strengthening its relational but underdeveloped ambition, and providing insights for research on business accelerators and practitioners alike.

Introduction

How to sustain participation in organizations when tensions shape collective action? Existing theory points to organizational knowing, namely the shared and tacit understanding of the action actors gain through situated practices and interactions (e.g., Orlikowski 2002; Gherardi, Nicolini and Strati 2007; Amin and Roberts 2008). Accordingly, organizational knowing provides an ongoing understanding about what to do, and how to do it, which is constructed collectively and enables actors to work together (e.g., Nicolini 2010; Pyrko, Dörfler, and Eden 2019). It is a social accomplishment emerging when actors engage the world in practice consequential from the collective performance of interconnected activities (e.g., Nicolini 2010; Gherardi, Nicolini and Strati 2007). It fosters collaboration in organizational activities because actors understand how to work together which, in turn, helps them to retain their participation when tensions arise (e.g., Hydle and Hopwood 2019; Pyrko, Dörfler, and Eden 2017).

However, I find otherwise, during my fieldwork at a social impact accelerator, a novel form of organization helping entrepreneurs to develop their start-ups (e.g., Cohen et al. 2019; Wright and Drori 2018). At the accelerator (hereafter “Das”), employees train entrepreneurs during a 3-month program for them to refine their idea, select and implement a business model, test their product, access the market, and grow their start-up. Das receives fundings from local and national corporations, what I name “partners.” Attracted by the promise to establish partnerships with social entrepreneurs, these partners actively participate in the selection of start-ups and the training of the entrepreneurs. They embark into a new experience because they have limited knowledge of early stage social entrepreneurship. They also have different interests and expertise; some are even competing on the same market. Nevertheless, they must collaborate to select entrepreneurs and help them develop their start-ups.

This ethnographic account documents the struggles, tensions, and learnings, experienced by these partners as they find ways to work together. Specifically, I examine how the organizational knowing produced by their interactions and practices shapes their involvement in the day-to-day activities and, more broadly, their participation to Das. I show that most of them gradually realize that their original goal of signing partnerships with entrepreneurs has limited chance to be achieved, given the partial results of Das to initiate and sustain these partnerships. In this context, I propose that the organizational knowing resulting from their interactions shapes participation in two distinctive ways. While some partners increasingly jumped off the boat by cutting their funding and stopping their participation, others forged meaningful bonds during this process, enabling them to imbue new meanings into their experience and to retain their participation.

I name this implication the “Janus Face” of organizational knowing in reference to the contrasted faces of Janus, a god in Ancient Rome, and argue that organizational knowing can also hinder participation by making it meaningless. I build my argument by structuring my account around the three main moments shaping the experience of partners. The first moment is one of struggles and tensions as they start working together because of their heterogeneous interests and expectations but have a novice understanding of the action. Because of these tensions, the second moment is characterized by a progressive disengagement alongside partners who develop a better and shared understanding of the action, its limitations, and of the other actors involved. Finally, I document a third moment when the accelerator creates new activities generating novel social relations among partners, supporting reengagement by enabling the remaining partners to make sense of their participation differently. Organizational knowing emerges through the succession of these moments, revealing that when knowing hinders participation social relations are crucial for reversing this effect.

I believe that describing and analyzing ethnographically these three moments raise useful insights for explaining collective work in emergent, small-scale, organizational contexts. In these contexts, if actors may participate because of a common goal, they often have heterogeneous expertise and interests, and a novice understanding of the action. So far, most knowing research has centered on large scale, stable, organizations, where the values, roles, and expectations, of organizational members are clearly defined. However, examining this process at early stages of organizational development reveals that the emergence of shared understandings of organizational values and practices can threaten participation. This is particularly the case in organizations where multiple values and expertise collide, such as for non-profit and social enterprises, and where alignment between the values of the organization and those of organizational members is critical to make participation meaningful (e.g., Battilana and Dorado 2010; Mitzinneck and Besharov 2019; Ramus and Vaccaro 2017).

This article contributes to knowing research by integrating the interrelations among practices, interactions, and meanings to offer an alternative explanation of how actors experience and navigate organizational participation when tensions shape collective action. Accordingly, this article extends research on organizational knowing by highlighting its ambivalent implication for participation—the Janus face of organizational knowing—and by identifying enabling circumstances for this effect to unfold. It also contributes to research exploring the changing nature of organizational participation in groups experiencing tensions. It does so by providing a processual explanation revolving around three main moments and that captures the role and implications of social relations for actors to make their experience meaningful. In addition, this article provides novel insights for research on accelerators by approaching them as sites of critical importance for actors to learn about and integrate entrepreneurial ecosystems. In closing, I propose practical recommendations for organizations to better understand the ambivalent implications of organizational knowing.

The Role of Knowing for Organizational Participation

The concept of organizational knowing seeks to capture how much collective work in organizations requires the elaboration of a shared and tacit understanding of “the ways of doing things” to sustain participation. While research has long assumed that actors merely build upon their previous knowledge to guide their action in organizational settings, research on organizational knowing treats knowledge as a process instead of an entity existing out there (e.g., Hydle and Hopwood 2019; Nicolini 2010; Nicolini and Meznar 1995; Rennstam and Ashcraft 2013). Under this view, the possibilities for collective work are intimately tied to the capability of a group of actors to develop a shared and tacit understanding of what to do, how to do it, and with whom (Orlikowski 2002; Pyrko, Dörfler, and Eden 2017). Moreover, in enabling collective work beyond different expertise and interests (e.g., Amin and Roberts 2008; Hong and O 2009), these practices and interactions are central for actors to imbue and enact meanings in their experience (Nicolini 2009).

To explain how actors develop knowing, scholars have primarily focused on their situated, collective, and ongoing practices, in the setting offered by large scale traditional firms. For instance, Orlikowski (2002) explained how the employees of a large software firm based in the Netherlands operated across 15 locations worldwide by approaching effective distributed organization as an enacted capability emerging from everyday practices. In other terms, she shifted the focus towards the ongoing, situated, and collective practices of widespread actors as they engaged in the world surrounding them. Accordingly, she theorized a repertoire of practices constituting knowing in practice and, more specifically, showed that actors enacted a collective competence making collective work possible. This outlines that knowing is intertwined with relationality, as these different actors are connected and exchange information (Amin and Roberts 2008), but also that a “site of knowing” emerges because practices are interconnected (Nicolini 2010).

One important implication of this insight is that studying knowing requires investigating “what actors do” and “how they do it.” This involves paying attention to the role of collective learning for knowing to emerge or, more specifically, of learning in practice (e.g., Gherardi 2000). For instance, building on a study taking place with managers in various hospitals across Scotland, Pyrko, Dörfler, and Edenand (2017) proposed the concept of “thinking together” to capture the process by which actors learn, generate, and circulate knowledge, mutually guiding each other through their understanding of the same problem. What is under scrutiny here is the mutual engagement among actors as they generate knowing by learning collectively across different practices, albeit under non-routine problematic circumstances. Consequential of this process is the creation of learning partnerships and a sense of community. Thus, thinking together helps to navigate the challenges of collective work by providing an understanding of actors’ commitment, skills, and expertise, turning others into valuable assets when help is needed to get the work done.

If learning together enables collective work it also raises tensions because existing differences in goals, interests, or values (e.g., Bechky 2003; Carlile 2004). For instance, by studying a renewable energy cooperative, Mitzinneck and Besharov (2019) showed that, although actors shared an ideal of pursuing community, economic, and environmental objectives, different value’s priorities emerged during collective action. These divergences became increasingly problematic to sustaining participation, pressing the cooperative to develop compromise strategies to retain actors. When studying the Silver Academy—a large group of ex-executives aiming to develop their business venture—Gray and Gabriel (2018) unearthed complex power dynamics among actors hindering their participation over time because of a lack of alignment among group members. Thus, whether knowing can enable collaboration and sustain participation, these studies suggest that we must account for the divergence in interests, goals, and skills, of the actors involved because they raise tensions and influence this process (e.g., Contu 2014; Hong and O 2009).

Crucial in this context is that learning from each other is as important as learning about each other. This requires building alignment across heterogeneous interests and values to share expertise and skills (e.g., Amin and Roberts 2008; Gray and Gabriel 2018). The role of learning about each other brings us to an aspect that is, I suggest, overlooked by previous research, namely the social relations actors emerging in interaction. Interactions, however, play a core role for actors to imbue meaning in what they do (Blumer 1969). While most knowing research focuses on traditional, large scale, organizations, this might be particularly the case in smaller organizations. In such context, the values, expertise, interests, and role of actors are not clearly defined, and the motivation underpinning their participation varies from traditional employees (e.g., Battilana and Dorado 2010; Mitzinneck and Besharov 2019). This raises the question of how the social relations resulting from the production of organizational knowing shape participation and its meaningful dimension.

Methodology

Context and Field Site

During the last decade, Barcelona has gained momentum as one of the European hot spots for start-ups and the capital of global tech events as the Mobile World Congress (MWC) and the Four Years from Now (4YFN). At the inception of my fieldwork in April 2017, the city has put entrepreneurship on its agenda, promoting high growth technological start-ups as a key asset to foster the local economy and widely communicating on a limited number of success stories, such as Privalia, Infojobs, Cabify, and Odigeo and, more recently, Wallapop and Glovo. In this wave of interest, training programs for entrepreneurs are launched by public institutions, alongside business accelerators, co-working spaces, and incubators. Corporations, then, demonstrate a growing interest in identifying start-ups and building partnerships to refine and foster traditional processes of internal innovation. To achieve this goal, they start turning their gaze to the intermediary organizations populating this ecosystem and, more specifically, business accelerators.

Das is launched in 2013. At that time, the focus on start-ups with both a social and commercial goal—social enterprises—is relatively unique in the country, and is structured around three different programs with a sectoral focus and 15 partners provide funding. Each lab is managed by one program manager and one assistant and supervised by one co-founder. They provide 3–6 months of training to three cohorts of entrepreneurs per year and perform much behind-the-scenes work to support entrepreneurs in developing and managing, but also securing funding, for their project. Executives from partners—mainly directors of innovation and marketing directors—are involved in the decision-making process during the selection committees, workshops, and mentoring activities. These committees are the final assessment for shortlisted entrepreneurs to pitch their start-up and enter the program. Their start-up must fit the sectoral orientation of Das and demonstrate problem-solving potential aligned with the innovation goals of the partners. Entrepreneurs have 5 minutes to pitch before taking questions for 10–15 minutes. Finally, individual evaluations are done with the aim to select two or three start-ups.

Data Collection

I observed and participated in the day-to-day running for 4–5 days a week for an 18-month period. My role progressed from being a silent observer to gradually taking participation in the activities that I was studying. I was provided with a desk in the main office and attended meetings with the acceleration team, the management team, the advisory board, and funders; training and educational sessions provided to the cohorts; and meetings between start-ups and mentors, investors, and partners, among other events. In this article, I focus more specifically on my observations of the selection committees, the pre-acceleration workshops gathering partners and short-listed entrepreneurs, the workshops designed for each partner, and the 1-day workshop during which partners discussed and agreed on the strategic trends of their respective sectors to guide start-ups’ search and selection. Early in the fieldwork, one of the co-founders introduced me to partners as a researcher interested in studying the accelerator. My participation ranged from being assigned a seat at the back of the room, together with the scouting officer and with no active participation in the roundtable interactions during selection committees, to gradually being actively involved in the design of specific events for partners.

I also conducted semi-structured interviews with 68 research participants. Interviews lasted between 60 and 90 minutes and were systematically recorded and transcribed. Interviewing was particularly useful to complement my participant observation data by addressing specific topics in-depth. I interviewed employees of Das, representatives from the partners, investors, entrepreneurs, and mentors. I started interviewing representatives from partners after 6 months of observing the committees, and structured my interview guides around three sections: goals and expectations related to participation, past and present experience at Das, and their relationships with the start-ups. Through participant observation, I had collected prior information about each partner and used this prior knowledge to prepare each interview. This provided me with enough information to reflect individual differences but also to identify general patterns.

Data Analysis

The analysis was iterative, overlapped with data collection, and involved the constant comparison of emerging data.

I first began by working from the basic question, “How do partners select start-ups for the accelerator?” This question allowed me, first, to search my interview data about the selection criteria used by committee members. I found that these criteria were unclear for partners, as nicely summarized Luc: “We don’t know exactly what to look for.” Accordingly, I searched my field notes to identify the selection criteria as they emerged in their interactions, which revealed their tacit understanding by committee members. I uncovered these criteria by tracing the aspects of the start-ups and entrepreneurs that were evaluated constantly through committees. By comparing, revising, and refining my coding of these aspects, I identified five criteria: problem-solving capability, maturity, innovation, social impact, and networking capability.

Second, I analyzed the tensions raised by the limited skills of the partners, their heterogeneous goals, and plural understandings of social impact. I found that the design of the selection process fostered these tensions because of the limited information available on the start-ups and the variation in the preparedness of the entrepreneurs. The longitudinal nature of the fieldwork, then, allowed me to observe how committee members progressively developed situated knowing about the start-ups’ environment and challenges as well as about the perspective and interests of the other participants and the “development expertise” of the accelerator. By looking for patterns of change across committees in my field notes and by further searching my interview data for descriptions of how partners experimented with their participation through time, I was able to unpack the knowing emerging from their interactions and to account of their progressive disengagement.

Finally, I examined how knowing shaped the selection process and the interactions among partners. By the end of the fieldwork, I had accounted for salient changes in the design of the selection process and resulting into more interactions among partners. Hence, I searched for relationships between these organizational changes and the tensions at committees. I was able to relate a set of changes implemented by the accelerator to address the tensions generated by the micro-dynamics of the selection process. Not only did partners learn about social entrepreneurship but they also developed new social relationships. These new relational patterns progressively gained in importance during the interaction and were reflected by participants in interviews and formal and informal conversations. Moreover, the team was taking stock of these dynamics and incorporating these insights into the selection process by creating new activities to foster the participation. These changes offered a new experience of participation and supported their reengagement, as I present in the final section of the findings.

From this analysis, I developed an analytical description revolving around the three main moments by which actors developed knowing and new supportive social relationships, with implications for the meaningful nature of their experience and the value proposition of the organization. For those who stayed, these changes had a positive effect on the engagement that became infused with new meanings—a process I theorize as meaningful reengagement.

The Janus Face of Organizational Knowing: A Model of Meaningful Reengagement

My account describes and analyzes the experience of partners by uncovering three main moments shaping participation. I start with an examination of the tensions raised by their heterogeneous skills, expertise, and interest at the inception of their participation. Second, I show how the emergence of knowing generated disengagement as partners acknowledged the limitation of their endeavor. Finally, I examine how novel activities created social relations, supporting reengagement by enabling partners to imbue different meanings in their participation.

Engagement: The Tensions and Struggle of Participation

My fieldwork began at a time when the accelerator was structuring its offer to entrepreneurs and hiring program managers to lead the acceleration programs in health care, climate, and social issues. In fact, on my first day, I participated in the weekly meeting that gathered program managers and the management team and where Matt, Das’s co-founder, set the tone for the months to come by reminding that: “[At Das] our everyday concern are the start-ups . . . because we created Das to help social entrepreneurs.”

Partners provided funding and participated to a lab according to their industry preference. Many had been approached and recruited through the extensive network of Matt with leading national corporations. They expected to sign partnerships with entrepreneurs and to communicate about their commitment to social entrepreneurship, sometimes as part of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative of the corporation and, more broadly, for marketing purposes. In the words of Lucia, who cofounded Das with Matt, “Partners want to work with us because they are interested in innovation, they need start-ups to improve . . . internal innovation is a challenge for them.”

Despite their interest in social entrepreneurship, partners walked into a new experience. They had to learn the ropes of business acceleration through learning-by-doing, mostly by the performance of collective practices described as central for the emergence of knowing (e.g., Orlikowski 2002; Gherardi 2000). In particular, they were unaware of the tenets of new venture development. Lisa, director of innovation at one of the partner firms, expressed this point to me as we discussed after the selection committee:

I know which products we need in my industry, that’s my job, but I don’t know how the process works for entrepreneurs. I mean I know what a start-up is, but from there to assess whether entrepreneurs will make it . . . or not . . . I have no clue . . . and to be fair we have little guidance [from the employees at Das] about which criteria we should use.

Beyond the learning opportunities provided by selection committees through interacting with entrepreneurs, mentors, and the team, this novice understanding raised multiple challenges. One was to gauge adequately the maturity of the start-ups, as evidenced one day at a committee when David, the Marketing Director of a health care corporation, asked about the entrepreneurial team: “These guys are green, very green, aren’t they?” The reigning silence in the room testified to the fact that while partners were aware that entrepreneurs operated at a different pace than their own, the speed at which they would grow their start-up was unknown.

Das, however, focused explicitly on early stage ventures, as Maria, a program manager, explained to me when acknowledging my surprise at the rejection of a very promising and investment-ready start-up judged too advanced: “Here entrepreneurs looking for funding don’t fit, we don’t want ventures in invest-ready stage, or almost ready, because what we do is helping them to develop their venture, not fund it.” Nevertheless, most partners were disconcerted by what the “ideal development stage” entailed and often found the start-ups not developed enough to envision a partnership. For instance, Marc, a marketing director, confessed to me after one committee: “Some of these ideas are great, but what we do is sending them back home, we ask them to work further and to present again in three months. I mean, if they enter the program now, I can’t see how to work with them.”

Another challenging aspect was the preparedness of entrepreneurs, which generated doubts among partners about their capability to develop the venture. Marc, explained to me once as we discussed about the start-ups presented at the morning’s committee: “Sometimes I also wonder whether they know what they talk about . . . I mean, they know their stuff but when it comes to how they will make it work . . . big question mark!” Our conversation also revealed that Marc ignored the benefits of the acceleration training for entrepreneurs. I observed this issue multiple times, as when Tomas, one of the program managers, was strongly advocating for selecting a start-up named Cicleo, by highlighting the transformative value of the accelerator’s training for entrepreneurs: “The business model isn’t very well defined, I agree, but this is something entrepreneurs will improve during the acceleration . . . We will spend time with them and provide mentors to make sure they develop their business model.” In the stairway, he later explained this event to me: “Partners aren’t very familiar with what we do . . . They have been told about it again and again . . . It seems very hard for them to acknowledge what we can bring to start-ups . . . how they will grow during the program.”

Partners also had specific innovation challenges and a clear social dynamic of cohesion and mutual understanding was missing. This tension manifested, for instance, in the considerable amount of time spent at committees talking in technical terms about the alignment between the product offered by the entrepreneurs and the specific innovation challenge of each partner, instead of carefully evaluating the contribution of the entrepreneurs to the program. Consistent with previous research (e.g., Contu 2014, Gray and Gabriel 2018), I found that the different areas of expertise were an asset to evaluate the innovative nature of the product, but the plural expectations of the partners about problem-solving capability of the start-ups clashed.

I observed, with consistency, heated debates about how specific start-up only deserved the goals of a limited number of partners. For instance, at one committee, Ricardo, a marketing director, loudly expressed his disagreement with the selection of a start-up by explaining that:

If I take the product alone, how should I use it to solve my needs? It’s a great product, yes, but it is not unique at all. I know that the product is interesting for you guys [committee members], but what I am supposed to do with it?

Everyone around him looked annoyed, but Ricardo continued by reminding that consensus had to be found beyond individual interest, thus building on the collective dimension of their engagement to make his voice heard. Often, Das’s program managers helped overcoming this tension. In this case, Lucia stepped in:

We all agree with you [Ricardo], this start-up is not very interesting to you . . . but it’s a great project, what these guys do is new in the sector, and there is a great market for that type of solution . . . they know what they talk about, and their social impact is impressive, thus why not give them a chance?

Ricardo’s struggle made a compelling case for Lucia to shift the debate to the intrinsic qualities of the start-up and generate agreement among partners because of a common cause instead of their individual interest. In similar situations, the team also facilitated interactions between partners and some of the start-ups that were not selected to overcome the complaint about the shortage of start-ups matching partners’ expectations.

The coexistence of plural interests was not surprising because partners faced different innovation challenges. Yet, their diverging views about the definition of social impact was. When asked, they systematically expressed a strong interest in the social impact, which was also partly how Das’s employees explained to me their participation. They explained that identifying business opportunities with a social impact was critical for their participation to be meaningful. For instance, Jessica, director of innovation, detailed her motivation to select a start-up we listened the same morning:

These guys will help us to provide our consumers with a device to regulate their use of water, to make it more efficient, of course. But we don’t want to sell this product; we don’t want to make money out of it. Our focus here is not on the business . . . It’s a bit more social: we want this to benefit society.

Nevertheless, my analysis of the group dynamics revealed different levels of priority given to social impact, raising frustration and tensions among partners. For instance, consider the following event between Junka, an innovation director, and the other committee members. Junka explained to the room, in a frustrated tone, why he disagreed with the selection of a start-up named Hotuk:

To me there is something wrong here . . . We should not forget that our aim [as committee members] is not to make money but to foster global transformations in the health sector. We aim to change our patients’ lives . . . This is fundamental. We mustn’t forget that.

Hotuk offered a new early-stage heart attack detection device but, for Junka, its social impact was limited. By contrast, other participants argued that Hotuk had a clear social impact because it was related to the health care industry. This view was problematic for Junka who believed that Hotuk was “one of those typical medical devices to be sold for profit.” It was only during an interview that he further elaborated on this aspect:

We have been presented with many start-ups that seek to solve health-related issues using technologies, but these guys [entrepreneurs] don’t want to have a social impact . . . Some of these entrepreneurs only focus on growing their business. We take it for granted that they will have a social impact [because they belong to the health care industry]. We did not even define the criteria that we should use [among partners] to evaluate social impact, we did not agree beforehand about what is relevant as social impact.

Committees, thus, often turned into forums where partners discussed and argued about their respective understanding of innovation and social impact. As a result, they felt short to agree about which start-up to select, generating frustration among participants.

Disengagement: The Impact of Organizational Knowing on Participation

When I started interviewing partners, most had been involved in the accelerator for 1–2 years. To prepare for my interviews, I met with Matt. Our meeting took place at a strategic time because the upcoming months would be dedicated to fundraising for the next year. Matt was worried and explained to me:

[Our] Partners are all very committed to Das, but we have reached a time when some are considering leaving . . . This firm [name of the partner], for instance, they have been with us for three years, they were already about to leave last year but I saved the deal. Last week, he [name of the partner’s innovation director] told me: “That’s great Matt, but things aren’t happening as we would like to.” He’s not the only one, I have been told stuff like that many times, like if nothing tangible happens and we can’t see the value in being involved [in] Das, next year we’re gone.

At this stage, the knowing emerging from participating at committees and interacting with entrepreneurs and other partners had driven a reflexive account among several partners. They began questioning the capability of Das to provide solutions to their innovation challenges, understanding the illusive nature of their initial beliefs. This is well illustrated, for instance, by their growing awareness of the limited deal flow. For some, like Paul, a partner from the health care industry who recently stopped funding Das, the reason for the shortage of start-ups was unclear and annoying:

I provided them [the Das team] with clear indications about what I was looking for, but . . . It’s not clear whether they haven’t done the work well or whether this is because of our industry. I know that in other industries it’s quite challenging to find innovative stuff, like for those working in education, but in health [it shouldn’t be that hard].

Increasingly, partners learned that the limited number of start-ups with high problem-solving capability was due primarily to sectoral characteristics. Jenny, the head of global innovation of a firm in the health industry, explained to me how she discovered this aspect by undertaking her own search for start-ups:

The start-ups I am looking for are not Das’ start-ups [emphasis added] . . . at least not the one I have seen . . . when it comes to product, well they don’t make it. But you know what happens? Well, I have been doing my own research during this time, and it’s not easy to find interesting start-ups for me neither.

Partners also learned that identifying start-ups with high problem-solving capability sometimes required moving beyond sectoral boundaries. Joe, the head of innovation at a pharma company, described the reluctance of other partners to select a start-up not belonging to the health care although, under his view, it was promising:

This start-up was rejected by the committee the other day . . . but me and my team saw value in what they do . . . but it was not from our industry they said [at the committee] . . . those guys take chemical products; they turn it into liquid . . . pretty much the same as we do as a pharma company . . . same technologies.

Moreover, in some cases, partners started to doubt whether entrepreneurs were truly interested in partnerships. Jessica explained to me about a team of entrepreneurs she aimed to collaborate with:

I was happy to have them in, I was very interested in the product, but things didn’t work out well. We met only twice, at the very beginning of the program, we were about to test the MVP with our clients, but then nothing . . . Every time I reach[ed] out it took them a few weeks to write back to my emails, they didn’t send me anything, and I had to contact the program manager at DAS to know what they were up to . . . I gave up, I have other things to do.

If multiple factors can explain the failure to initiate a partnership, the broader insight is that partners implicitly learned from these repetitive and negative experiences that signing partnerships was the exception, not the rule. John, the CEO of a firm in the education sector, who had quitted Das a few months after our interview, nicely summarized to me a shared belief among partners: “Collaborating with Das has been a great opportunity to identify new initiatives in our sector. But we’re now aware that most of these start-ups are not viable.” In fact, during my fieldwork, formal partnerships with start-ups were the exception, as Matt reminded me adopting a dramatic tone: “There has been no partnership with a start-up, no partnership, no alliance, no partner who bought a start-up, almost no joint product development, well not many tangible things.”

Partners also expected to learn about social impact measurement. Yet, they encountered a vaguely formalized field and no standardized procedures. Lucas, the director of the CSR department of a firm in the food industry, expressed his frustration about this issue:

Thus, what are the impact criteria? I mean the social impact is not analyzed in-depth at committees, and I hoped this would have been the opportunity for me to learn more about impact; at the end of the day this is also why we signed [and provided funding to Das] . . . but it’s like they say the word “social impact” and automatically there is social impact, that’s it! Well, shouldn’t we examine social impact further?!

Knowing about social impact raised awareness among partners about the dearth of concrete measurement indicators. Likewise, they learned the polysemic nature of the term. For instance, they discovered that social impact could mean making products cheaper and, accordingly, affordable to a larger number of people. Consider this quote from Bob, the director of the communication department of an insurance company, to the other participants of the committee:

This prosthesis will be cheaper [than existing ones]. We all agree on that, but the originals cost about 19,000 euros, which means that the new ones will be around 10,000 euros. Please tell me, who can afford to pay 10,000 euros for a prosthesis? I mean, a lot of people need them, but not everyone can pay that much. Let’s say almost no one. If they don’t lower the production cost and the final price, I won’t buy it.

The diverging views about social impact challenged collective action and raised a shift in the lived experiences of partners. Their knowing about the acceleration process, its outputs, and other partners, increased, but the original meanings they imbued in their participation—primarily signing partnerships with start-ups and measuring social impact—vanished.

This aspect was introduced by Matt’s comment earlier in this section, which also showed that Matt, Lucia, and Berta—the third cofounder—slowly acknowledged the disengagement of partners. For instance, during one of our lunches, Berta explained to me how they came to reconsider ways to offer partners a more meaningful experience:

Well, if I can design a product for partners that is more focused on inspiring and [in] which participate start-ups, I can help both . . . I must design a project [in] which participate the directors of innovation [of partners,] and I must center this project around the entrepreneurs . . . this way it will support the start-ups while fulfilling partners’ needs. If I just focus on partners . . . I don’t help entrepreneurs anymore . . . so [what] we must find [are] activities providing something to partners while being useful in accelerating start-ups.

In fact, as she reconned, their exclusively on “helping entrepreneurs” alongside the belief that partners “wanna work with us because they wanna be part of it” had limited further investigation of the tenets of their participation. Yet, the knowing developed by these partners revealed the limits of their initial goals and 8 out of 15 had decided to leave.

Reengagement: Creating a Sense of Experience and Social Relations

By the end of the fieldwork, I had to take a break for a few weeks. Upon my return, Matt invited me to lunch. On the phone, he sounded excited when explaining that he had “some big news to share.” I had been disconnected from the day-to-day work at the accelerator and he wanted to make sure to keep me up to date. This day, he explained even before we could order our lunch: “We have designed and launched a two-day workshop that will take place before the selection committees in our building! We will invite partners and all the entrepreneurs of the three labs.” Pausing a moment to grab the menu, he continued: “We will have partners and entrepreneurs pitching their idea, tons of face-to-face meetings for them to know each other better, and a few more talks from invited speakers.”

A few weeks later, I joined the first workshop taking place in the building of the accelerator. There, I acknowledged how much an opportunity it was for partners to gain visibility, converse with entrepreneurs, and meet and interact with representatives from other corporations and members of the Das’s team. Until now, their only point of contact had been the program manager supervising each sectoral lab and one co-founder; these new interactions with other team members were highly appreciated. Paul, for instance, described to me in detail the inception of a new relationship with one of the financial analysts working at Das. Excited by this opportunity, he explained: “We [his firm] are not investing, I am not investing, but I am passionate about it and it’s great to have these guys here and ask questions.”

Over the months, they exchanged regularly, and Paul learned about investing before he decided to start his activity as a business angel. Paul’s case is something of an overdrawn example, but it represents a pattern that I observed well during the fieldwork. These emerging social relations also contributed to generate new insights, with implications for the debates at committees. For instance, they helped participants to take decisions, as illustrated by this quote from another partner: “We are here to learn, all of us, I mean in our lab who knows about all this stuff? No one . . . so in a way we all learn together.” This elevates knowing about entrepreneurial development and a shared understanding of the context. More often, they brought some of these insights into their decision-making and used the information they had heard at these events to make their voices heard.

As outlined by the practice of “thinking together” (Pyrko, Dörfler, and Eden 2017), Paul and the other partners were creating collectively a shared and situated understanding of entrepreneurship. My analysis also outlines the importance of learning about each other to overcome tensions. This was particularly visible in the 1-day workshops designed for partners to orientate the scouting of the start-ups. At these events, partners started to share more easily their respective innovation challenges and their internal struggles, before agreeing on a set of general guidelines structuring the search and the work they will perform together. Similar to what Gray and Gabriel (2018) described, this involved a crucial ambiguity as partners were brought together to collectively select start-ups to collaborate with while pursuing their respective innovation goals.

These events helped “to identify where was the win-win situation and to learn how to structure the work during the acceleration training,” as a program manager explained to me. One reason lies in the space they offered for developing close interactions essential for the emergence of the mutual and shared understanding characterizing knowing (e.g., Orlikowski 2002; Nicolini 2010). They fostered the lived experience of being collectively constructing “their” lab and created a powerful sense of belonging. In this process, knowing about each other was key, as reveals the following quotes from Antonio, a marketing director, who explains:

What’s great is that we gotta know each other . . . I mean we already knew each other by names, we already met, we’re all in the same industry. But I realized that we had no clue about what each of us does at the office. I mean, I was having a coffee this morning with Jay and he explained to me how [name of Jay’s firm] tackles this issue. We will pursue this conversation further for sure . . . that’s very interesting to me, we face similar issues.

The emergence of a “group culture” (Fine and Hallett 2014) provided a basis for collective work and these repeated interactions generated relational patterns. For instance, Luc, head of innovation of a health care company, explained to me in an enthusiastic tone: “We created a [WhatsApp] group with other partners, we go for lunch together once a month . . . we all work in innovation . . . we share our best practices and think about how we could do things together.” Two aspects signaled the importance of these relations on-the-making. First, they were pursued beyond the walls of Das, as illustrated in the above example. Second, they eventually enabled new interfirm cooperation.

Das also started addressing the tension raised by the polysemic nature of social impact and the lack of evaluation criteria. One challenge for agreeing on a shared definition of social impact was the preparedness of entrepreneurs. A program manager explained to me once, when discussing about some of the changes implemented in the training for entrepreneurs:

We realized that some entrepreneurs reached the end of the program with little or no idea about (social) impact . . . we now work with them on (social) impact since day one. They must have an impact management plan, they must explain how they will achieve impact, how they will measure and monitor impact by building some indicators, this kind of stuff.

Toward this aim, Das created a “social impact unit” that became key to overcoming the debates and resulting division among partners. When partners disagreed on the social impact of a start-up the social impact manager helped them reach an agreement by clarifying that they would work with entrepreneurs on that aspect at the social impact unit. The unit created a certification, providing a means for Das to stabilize its expertise and to reduce the uncertainty about the social impact of the start-ups while standardizing selection criteria. The evaluation, thus, was not anymore based on the individual understanding of partners. The newly founded social impact committee helped raise and formalize a common sense of priority about the impact of the start-ups alongside answering partners’ expectations to learn about social impact.

Finally, Das created tailored activities enabling partners to gain general knowledge about social entrepreneurship. I had the opportunity to attend several of them, such as one day when Lucia, one program manager, and a few entrepreneurs traveled to the offices of the company to run a workshop about open innovation. In the room, Lucia mixed employees judged as being “the most innovative” with entrepreneurs. Throughout the day, they worked on innovation challenges for employees to learn some of the basics of entrepreneurship. After the workshop, one employee explained to me:

I learned about the challenges of being innovative but with very limited means. Here, we have resources we can ask for, the company is supportive . . . most of these guys have absolutely no resources . . . but they can create some amazing things and are passionate about it! Somehow it helped me put things into perspective and to motivate me!

In fact, partners started viewing Das as contributing to their internal mission of transforming their traditional corporate culture by providing education about social entrepreneurship to selected employees. Resultingly, I found that these partners started treating their participation as meaningful again, albeit in a different way. As the head of an innovation unit of a company in the social sector explained to me in a convinced tone after one of these workshops: “[at these events] our people learn about social impact start-ups, they meet the entrepreneurs and listen to their challenges . . . this is very motivating, especially as they will become themselves mentors or will try to develop new initiatives in-house!”

The creation of these activities during the last months of my fieldwork had raised a new experience of participation. At this stage, the remaining partners developed a new sense of engagement at Das. This director of communication, nicely summarized this finding by explaining to me during an interview: “They [the workshops] bring something back to the company that helps to justify the funding.. . . We are not interested in acceleration that much anymore, we are now interested [in] the methodology and also because [of] all the entrepreneurial gaze they create.” This period of the fieldwork revealed well how Das gradually moved away from its initial and exclusive focus on start-ups alone to develop a new value proposition in which partners and start-ups coexisted in ways different than those originally intended. At the heart of this transition were these four activities. These activities provided an opportunity for reengagement by combining the organizational knowing raised from collective practices with the creation and development of social relations, eventually enabling partners to imbue new meanings into their participation.

Discussion

Organizational knowing emerges from the practices and interactions taking place among organizational members. It is a shared understanding enabling actors to work together while retaining participation against the tensions and conflicts raised by their diverging interests and expertise. In this article, I have suggested that existing scholarship has largely overlooked the ambivalent implication of knowing for participation in organizational contexts. This suggestion was empirically motivated by the findings from 18 months of fieldwork at a social impact accelerator, specifically my work alongside the representatives of the companies funding the organization. By describing and analyzing their experience as they engage in collective action, I showed that the knowing emerging from their practices and interactions can also negatively impact their initial engagement and trigger disengagement. Alternatively, I showed that knowing enabled the development of social relations supporting a novel experience of participation resulting into reengagement, which I theorize as a process of meaningful reengagement.

These findings contribute to the research on the implications of organizational knowing, specifically studies investigating the role of the collective and situated learning for participation (e.g., Pyrko, Dörfler, and Eden 2017; Gherardi 2000; Serrano Velarde 2020). Consistent with their findings, I found the importance of learning from others but also to learning about others (e.g., Contu 2014; Gray and Gabriel 2018). This is, I believe, because actors are new to the phenomenon. However, challenging the suggestion that the knowing produced by collective learning fosters participation (e.g., Hydle and Hopwood 2019; Pyrko, Dörfler, and Eden 2017), I found that knowing is Janus faced and can have negative implications for participation under specific circumstances. First, actors are novel to the field and lack an in-depth understanding of its dynamics. Thus, they cannot rely on learning from other members of the group as they share the same novice status. Second, they receive training at times when their engagement has decreased and when some have left the organization or are seriously considering doing so. Third, the organization lacks an established track record of “success stories” to which actors could rely on to retain their participation against negative results.

I theorize that the ambivalent implication of knowing occurs when the above three enabling circumstances are present, which are most likely to be found in small-scale, emergent organizations where organizational members are not formally employed (e.g., Battilana and Dorado 2010; Mitzinneck and Besharov 2019). Previous knowing research has focused on well-defined organizational contexts such as large corporations and institutions where actors have established, albeit different, expertise in the action being pursued. Nevertheless, by examining a context where such expertise is lacking, when training is unavailable, and when the legitimacy of the focal organization is low, this article demonstrates the importance of broadening the scope of the organizational settings in which to study knowing. Small-scale organizations and, more specifically, contexts where actors have yet to know each other show that social relations can enforce and foster the practice of “thinking together” (e.g., Pyrko, Dörfler, and Eden 2017) and, more broadly, of situated learning (e.g., Gherardi 2000). By bringing to the fore the role as meaning-making activities of the practices and interactions supporting the emergence of knowing, the process of meaningful reengagement helps explaining the iterative nature of organizational participation.

This article also contributes to calls for investigating underlying group dynamics to explain organizational life (e.g., Dorado 2013; Fine and Hallett 2014). In particular, it adds to studies asking how and when organizations can sustain and eventually foster the participation of its members against emerging conflicts and tensions (e.g., Mitzinneck and Besharov 2019; Battilana and Dorado 2010). By looking at the interactions among group members and stressing the role of relational patterns for individual participation and ongoing group dynamics, I offer an alternative perspective for explaining the dynamics of organizational participation in times of tensions. My findings show the role of social relations to overcome the tensions raised by the lack of alignment among organizational members and their growing awareness of the elusive nature of the goals originally motivating their participation. The process of meaningful reengagement allows to focus specifically on the individual experiences in a collective setting, to look at how these individual experiences are generated collectively, and to explain how this context is feeding back these experiences. This, in turn, brings back to the fore the importance of the group dynamics and the need for fully accounting for the social dimension of the action revolving around a mutual understanding and emerging social relations as actors engage in collective practices.

Finally, this article explains the role played by accelerators in offering opportunities for collective and situated learning for entrepreneurship novices. Accelerators have raised a growing scholarly interest (Cohen et al. 2019; Cohen, Bingham, and Hallen 2019; Krishnan et al. 2021), but we have yet to fully understand their role for actors beyond entrepreneurs. My ethnographic study complexifies current descriptions of accelerators as market intermediaries gathering disconnected actors (e.g., Pauwels et al., 2016; Wright and Drori 2018). I reveal how much the practices and interactions among entrepreneurs, partners, and the team of Das produce knowing and illuminate in a processual fashion how it informs action. Moreover, my analysis outlines that this process raises tensions, notably because of the novice status of the participants, their different goals and interests and the need for alignment to “get the work done.” More specifically, the practices of evaluation deployed at Das render more visible the existing differences among actors and their implications for decision-making. In this context, casting new light on their participation is useful for explaining how accelerators create value for sponsors in supporting the emergence of “referential communities” (Fine and Hallett 2014).

Practical Implications

This study holds insights for grasping the experience of actors whose heterogeneous interests and expertise raise tensions that might negatively impact their participation over time. First, for the organization, it reveals the importance of developing an in-depth understanding of the motivation underlying partners’ participation. In this context, one strength of the ethnographic approach is to overcome taken-for-granted assumptions. For instance, the management team believed that partners provided funding for “being there” and overlooked the plural nature of their motivation and the evolution of the experience accordingly to these multiple goals. This was, in part, due to the exclusive focus on the acceleration activities instead of a more holistic approach integrating partners (and to some extent mentors and other collaborators). In addition, the focus on entrepreneurs also limited the opportunity for the management team to acknowledge and integrate the signals provided by partners about the lack of tangible outputs derived from their participation. As a result, Das failed to provide a response to these changes in due time which, in turn, contributed to generating disengagement and a loss of funding. Hence, close monitoring of partners’ experience is essential and must be supported by systematic data collection about stakeholders.

Results also outline that whereas the management team initially understood the motivation of the partner firms as almost exclusively supported by the hopes of developing working collaboration with start-ups, it was inattentive to more peripheral aspects informing participation and funding. Nevertheless, these aspects gradually gained a central role once partners acknowledged that their initial goals were not achieved. One key implication is that an in-depth understanding of individual and group dynamics is of great value to integrate coherently and develop these aspects in the design of a unique value proposition crafted by the focal organization. Moreover, this understanding would have been beneficial to retain partner firms (and thus funding) and to foster participation by offering additional opportunities to contribute to the core activities. For instance, by the end of my fieldwork, Das had developed a portfolio of activities for partners based on these insights. They helped to retain their participation by enhancing their experience and became used as assets to sign additional partnerships.

All business accelerators develop partnerships of plural nature with local and national firms, and this article is useful for managers to identify the valuable activities for funding partners. In addition to providing four examples of what these activities could look like, my findings and the lens of organizational knowing reveal the importance of acknowledging the novice status of these partners about start-ups. Allegedly, partners have no or little experience in entrepreneurship, in addition to being embedded in a very different organizational culture. In this context, it is essential for accelerator’s managers to evaluate this level of understanding of the field, and to design training activities not only for the entrepreneurs but also for the executives of the partners. This understanding can be generated by creating spaces of interactions for partners and entrepreneurs as well as by designing tailored programs during which employees are broadly familiarized with the challenges of entrepreneurship. Moreover, partners have a keen interest in the problem-solving capability of the start-ups, but the diverging nature of this interest is much likely to be problematic. Therefore, building alignment among them is of central importance as long as they are involved in the same sectoral program. This, in turn, facilitates the emergence of social relations and potential partnerships but also collective decision-making.