Abstract
This edited book of ten chapters is Volume 37 in the series Research in the Sociology of Organizations. The first chapter, written by the two editors, Holmqvist and Spicer, provides an overview of the volume’s topic and main themes and the remaining nine chapters, sole- or co-authored by 18 researchers in organizational studies, explore these themes in greater depth. All the authors and editors are from European universities.
The overarching topic of the volume is the ambidextrous employee. This concept could be interpreted in a variety of ways, such as employees who multi-task or are cross-functionally trained. However, the editors usefully place it within a specific theoretical framework and have authors of each chapter develop their analyses in this context. This organizing strategy gives the volume a fruitful sense of theoretical coherence but is implemented by the editors with sufficient elasticity to allow an interesting diversity in individual chapter topics and perspectives.
The theoretical framework is James March’s model of organizational learning and, in particular, his distinction between exploitation of existing knowledge and exploration of new knowledge. March’s ideas have been presented in a series of papers and books but the seminal contribution is his 1991 paper, ‘Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning’. Holmqvist and Spicer note than this paper is the seventh most cited work in organization studies.
March’s study which is focused on the organization as the unit of analysis, frames the exploitation versus exploration dichotomy as a trade-off between fine-tuning existing routines and competencies and developing new ones, making the optimal combination of the two the managerial decision problem. Exploitation has the advantage of more reliable and immediate gains from more intensive use of existing resources while exploration, although more risky and long-term, has the advantage of leap-frogging the competition with new processes and products.
The interesting twist that Holmqvist and Spicer give to March’s framework is to shift the focus from the organization to the individual employee. That is, the focus of the volume is on how employees experience the trade-off between exploitation and exploration and the methods organizations use to tap their full potential along these dimensions. Thus, the idea of an ambidextrous employee is one who successfully ‘wears two hats’—that is, the employee who knows how to effectively work within a given operational routine and rule structure and, at the same time, knows when to go outside the rules and routines when it promises to benefit the organization.
A common thread to the ten chapters is that in March’s model firms face a trade-off between exploitation and exploration but, as experienced by employees, the reality is a continual and often conflicting demand for more of both, placing workers in what Holmqvist and Spicer call a ‘double-bind’. Of course, students of labour process literature know that since the dawn of capitalism companies have been pushing employees to contribute greater value along numerous dimensions (e.g. effort, hours, attitude). An interesting insight of this volume is showing the same imperative still operates in modern companies when looked at through the lens of exploration versus exploitation, although now implemented and legitimized as part of ‘high performance’ human resource practices. In effect, employees are given greater autonomy so they can become more of a self-managed agent but with the consequence that once well-delimited job duties and ‘eight hours of work for eight hours of pay’ morph into ambiguous ‘do whatever is required’ jobs with a 24/7 call on the worker’s time and physical/emotional resources but typically with only eight hours of pay.
As indicated, Holmqvist and Spicer lay out these themes in their introductory chapter. The second chapter (Kavanagh) provides a review of March’s seminal study and its major findings and implications. The remaining eight chapters explore facets of the exploitation versus exploration dichotomy as it impacts the ambidextrous employee. Several chapters do so for specific work groups. For example, the third chapter (Costa, Amiridis and Crump) examines the labour market for graduate students and concludes they are hired on the basis of who has the greatest potential for exploration and exploitation. Similarly, the fourth chapter (Gherardi and Murgia) examines case studies of flexible knowledge workers, finding they are described by the companies as valuable human resources but treated as disposable commodities. While the seventh chapter (Aaltonen and Kallinikos) looks at contributors to Wikipedia, finding that concerns about article consistency and quality has necessitated a relative shift from exploration to exploitation. A final example is the eighth chapter (Muir, Pedersen and Alvesson) that looks at employees in management consulting firms. The common experience is that they try to balance the demands of exploitation versus exploration but end up with job burn-out and sense of personal failure due to job demands that are irreconcilable.
Other chapters explore the ambidextrous employee topic from various theoretical and ethical dimensions. Two chapters (Fleming and Maravelias, Thanem and Holmqvist, respectively) examine the exploitation versus exploration dynamic from a critical-Marxist perspective. They conclude that high performance resource practices and employee ‘self-management’ are new organizational innovations that increase extraction of labour power for the same or lower rate of pay (in other words, they represent new tools to accomplish classic labour exploitation). Another chapter (Costas and Grey) looks at the ambidextrous employee through the lens of a best-selling book on how to organize your job into a four-hour workweek. The final chapter of the volume (Gay and Vikkelsø) argues that a normative bias in the field of organization studies in favour of innovation, entrepreneurship and self-actualization has caused the literature to drift toward an exploration-centric position.
I found the subject of this volume to be interesting and many of the chapters to be thought-provoking. It highlights both the bright and dark sides of life for the new breed of ambidextrous employees. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in worklife in modern organizations.