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Abstract

The attention-based view (ABV) offers a foundational perspective on strategy and organizing. Despite its significance, questions persist about the relationship between organizational attention and strategic organization. Inspired by the evolving literature on organizational attention, its determinants, and consequences, this special issue aims to advance theory and research in the ABV realm. It includes eight articles—three empirical and five theoretical—spanning a diverse range of topics. Emerging themes include a shift from viewing attention as individual cognition toward attentional engagement through interactions and social relations within organizations, the temporal and dynamic nature of attention, and an explicit recognition that ABV is not about a fixed quantity of attention but what shapes strategic organizational behavior and adaptation.

Keywords

attentional dynamics attentional engagement attentional perspective communication channels emotions organizational resilience practices

Introduction

The attention-based view (ABV) of the firm (Ocasio, 1997) has become an influential theoretical perspective in research on strategic organization. The ABV defines strategy as the pattern of organizational attention, the distinct focus of time and effort by the firm on a set of issues—problems, opportunities, and threats—and on a particular set of action alternatives—skills, routines, programs, projects, and procedures (Ocasio, 1997: 188). Overall, ABV focuses on the interplay between cognition, structure, and process across levels of analysis to explain strategic behavior.

Established research findings based on ABV include the effects of institutional logics on organizational attention (Dunn and Jones, 2010; Thornton and Ocasio, 1999), the impact of CEO and top management team attention on both strategic adaptation (Cho and Hambrick, 2006) and technological innovation (Eggers and Kaplan, 2009), and how the interplay of formal organizational structures and communication channels shapes strategic agendas (Dutt and Joseph, 2019) and decision-making (Bouquet and Birkinshaw, 2008; Joseph and Ocasio, 2012). Theoretical developments have continued apace, further developing the cognitive (Ocasio, 2011) and communicative (Ocasio et al., 2018) underpinnings of ABV, as well as the effects of organizational attention on recognizing entrepreneurial opportunities (Shepherd et al., 2018) and channeling growth (Joseph and Wilson, 2018). More recently (Ocasio et al., 2023), scholars have called for recognizing how ABV accounts for the changing nature of organizational structures, beyond the traditional Chandlerian firms that were more dominant in the 1990s.

Given the breadth of the ABV, additional advances have ranged from cognitive and neuroscientific foundations of attentional control and managerial exploration versus exploitation (Laureiro-Martinez 2014; Laureiro-Martínez et al., 2015) to attention allocation in networks and the origins of good ideas (Rhee et al., 2019; Rhee and Leonardi, 2018) and, more recently, to managing attention in the joint pursuit of commercial and social goals by board members of social enterprises (Pache et al., 2023). The ABV, by itself, is not a closed research paradigm, but a programmatic theoretical approach that builds on the tradition of March and Simon (1993 [1958]), Weick (1979), and March and Olsen (1983) and views attention to both environmental stimuli and action alternatives as central to understanding organizational interpretation, decision-making, and adaptation.

This special issue of Strategic Organization focuses on further advancing theory and research at the frontiers of ABV, beyond those of established research areas and findings. Our call for articles was broad, encouraging both theoretical and empirical articles employing a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods. We received 46 submissions, and eight articles were accepted and published, each focusing on an area of research on an ABV that is at the research frontier. Three of the articles are empirical: One is qualitative (Plotnikova et al., 2024), and two are quantitative (Boynton, 2024; Mack et al., 2024). Five of the articles are primarily theoretical (Bartel and Rockmann, 2024; Love, 2024; Kudesia and Lang, 2024; Nicolini and Mengis, 2024; Vuori, 2024).

There is a remarkable breadth of topics covered in the articles in this special issue. At the same time, a few themes emerged across them. First was a move away from viewing attention as a property of individual cognition toward a focus on attentional engagement through interactions and social relations within organizations and their practices. The temporal and dynamic nature of attention was the second theme. The final theme was an explicit recognition that the ABV is (or should not be) about a fixed quantity of attention. Instead, what shapes strategic organizational behavior and adaptation is the dimensionality of attention (at times considered the quality of attention)¹ within and across communication channels and practices and over time.

The eight articles in this special issue cover four of the five suggested areas in our call for articles (Ocasio et al., 2021). Three of the articles cover the topic of varieties and dimensions of managerial and organizational attention (see Theme 1). Bartel and Rockmann (2024) analyze the configuration of attention to social relationships, Boynton (2024) studies the temporal dimensions of attention, and Mack et al. (2024) explore the focus and consistency of patterns of attentional engagement over time. All three, in different ways, examine how varieties of attentional perspectives (Ocasio, 2011) across firms shape firm performance and adaptation. These three articles will be discussed in greater depth in the next section of this Editorial Overview.

Two of the other topics in the call for submissions, “attentional dynamics” and “the changing nature of organizing” are both addressed by three articles. All emphasize the decreasing importance of organizational structures for explaining attentional dynamics in changing organizational forms. Kudesia and Lang (2024) developed a practice-based theory of attentional dynamics. Love (2024) develops a theory on attentional control through issue-specific channels. Plotnikova et al. (2024) explore empirically bottom-up adaptations of communication channels previously designed from the top. The three articles will be examined in greater depth in the theme about attentional dynamics and the changing nature of organizing (see Theme 2).

Note that two of the articles covered in two separate themes, Bartel and Rockmann (2024) and Kudesia and Lang (2024), addressed a fifth topic that we suggested in our call: attention, crisis management, and organizational. These two articles address similar empirical phenomena but use different meta-theoretical perspectives. Bartel and Rockmann (2024) more directly embrace a cross-level approach to the ABV while Kudesia and Lang (2024) suggest that a more radical reorientation toward studying organizational crises is needed, at least in the context of the changing nature of organizations and organizing.

Two of the remaining articles (Nicolini and Mengis, 2024; Vuori, 2024), discussed in the theme about theoretical elaborations (see Theme 3), are best understood as theoretical elaborations of previous empirical articles—Nicolini and Korica (2021) and Vuori and Huy (2016); who suggest that ABV should be complemented with practice-based theory and how emotion affects attention, respectively. The article by Vuori and Huy provides a theoretical integration between how attention is shaped by emotions and selective information processing. Nicolini and Korica (2021), building on Schatzki’s (2003) theory of teleoaffective structures and practices, eschew theoretical integration and suggest instead alliances between practice perspectives on attention and more traditional versions of the ABV. Here, Nicolini and Mengis depart from Kudesia and Lang, although both rely on versions of practice theory; the latter article challenges the continuing validity of more traditional, cognitive, and communicative perspectives on ABV. A question for continuing research on ABV is the importance of theoretical pluralism versus theoretical integration.

The final section of this editorial review will examine future research questions provoked by the eight articles. In addition, we will discuss suggested topics in the call for the special issue that were not directly covered including novel methods in and for the ABV. In this final section, we will also reinforce the dynamism of the ABV and highlight other developments that offer rich opportunities for both theory building and empirical work.

Theme 1: varieties and dimensions of managerial and organizational attention

Three articles in this special issue—Bartel and Rockmann (2024), Mack et al. (2024), and Boynton (2024)—advance Ocasio’s (2011) call for more attention to the idea that the ABV does not reflect a unitary process but is better conceived of as a variety of approaches that reflect interconnected cognitive and social processes and mechanisms. These processes, which include attentional engagement (vigilance or stability, e.g. Joseph and Wilson, 2018; Laureiro et al., 2023), attentional coherence (e.g. Rerup, 2009), and attentional perspectives (i.e. cognitive structures) oriented toward temporal horizons (Nadkarni and Chen, 2014), are expanded and examined in greater detail.

First, both Bartel and Rockmann (2024) and Mack et al. (2024) make inroads into the notion of quality of attention, by articulating higher quality as a function of both focus and stability. A common theme is that as the quality of attention improves in an organization, so does an organization’s response to crises and disruptive changes in the environment. Like Boynton (2024), who spotlights longer-term orientation, these authors suggest that focus and stability aid in the interpretation of and response to signals, events, and technologies. Second, all three articles theorize the impact of top management attention on lower levels of the firm, explicitly recognizing the cross-level nature of attentional processes. This is certainly a theme that has been seen in other studies (Nigam and Ocasio, 2010; Rerup, 2009) and one that is elaborated here. Third, they also uniquely examine how different varieties of attention interrelate and interact with other contextual factors—such as interpersonal relationships, firm knowledge, and opportunity costs to shape resilience, growth, and strategic changes. Importantly, this highlights the linkages between attention, learning, relationships, interactions, and adaptive outcomes.

Bartel and Rockmann (2024) examine the impact of attention structures that generate attentional stability—or sustained focus (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006)—and attentional coherence—or aligned attention across the organization (Rerup, 2009)—on the organization’s capacity to deliver resilient responses to crisis situations. They posit that the nature and pattern of interpersonal relationships are essential conduits through which organizations can effectively direct, sustain, and integrate members’ attention in times of crisis. They argue that how attention is directed to relationships and relationship management is evidenced in the structures that top managers create, and unit managers endorse, and serve as a signal to the rest of the organization. They articulate three archetypes of organizational attention to relationships: relational advocacy, relational antipathy, and relational indifference. They recognize that attentional stability and coherence may be compromised if members do not trust one another or do not feel comfortable sharing information. They argue that relational indifference—where managers do not actively direct attention toward or away from interpersonal relationships and relational dynamics—may have significant negative implications for the firm in terms of its inability to overcome disruptive events. The article has important implications in that it highlights interpersonal relationships as an understudied facet of an ABV of firms in crisis.

Mack et al. (2024) elaborated on the process of attentional engagement and how it impacts a firm’s capacity to formulate strategic responses to discontinuous change. They break attentional engagement down into attentional focus and consistency (or stability of attention). They argue that learning and cognitive processes are situated in different attentional engagement structures and can lead to different responses to discontinuous change. Their empirical analysis uses a multi-method approach that examines the US banking industry from 2002 to 2010, which includes the housing-mortgage crisis that emerged at the end of 2006. They examine how different patterns of attentional engagement across banks’ top managers influenced whether they were more likely to formulate strategic responses to the crisis associated with breaking the status quo (reducing exposure to real estate loans). They find that high engagement (high focus and consistency) leads to immersive learning and deliberative reasoning, which provides for better sense-making of strategic changes. As a result, organizations can better respond to the discontinuity by taking actions that break with the status quo. This article advances a theory in that it jointly considers both attentional focus and attentional consistency as factors that enable organizations to respond effectively to discontinuous change and correspondingly conceptualizes the learning and sense-making associated with these attentional processes.

Boynton (2024) studies an important dimension of attentional perspective—that of the temporal attention of top managers. He argues that the temporal orientation of top managers’ attention—the extent to which attention is focused on shorter- vs longer-term goals, issues, and priorities—influences how managers understand and apply new technological resources in support of firm growth. Managers who focus on the longer term have greater appetites for risk and may be more open to applying new technologies derived from broad combinations of technologies to novel opportunities—that is, they are better able to capitalize on the potential benefits of knowledge breadth—which may generate significant long-term value. In his empirical analysis of revenue growth, he examines quarterly earnings call transcripts across public firms from 2003 to 2017 in order to assess top manager temporal orientation. Utilizing a patent-based measure of knowledge breadth, he finds that in firms with high knowledge breadth, top managers with a longer-term attentional perspective are more likely to see that technology channeled into firm growth. Notably this article contributes to the ABV by elaborating the link between attention and growth and highlighting its contingent effects on firm knowledge.

Theme 2: attentional dynamics and the changing nature of organizing

Ocasio (1997) first proposed the ABV, which acknowledged that organizational attention depends on the context but did not consider how the context or the attentional structures themselves change over time. Ocasio et al. (2018) later suggested that communication and power influence attentional dynamics, but these ideas need more empirical and theoretical support to show how attention shifts among different goals, across time (Laureiro et al., 2023), as well as how attentional differentiation and integration can be sustained across communities.

The article by Kudesia and Lang (2024) reveals, for example, how organizational structure has evolved from rigid hierarchies to dynamic patterns of communication, enabling attention rather than just constraining it. Based on an interpretive synthesis of 80 qualitative case studies covering 42 different crises from a total of 132 articles, the authors propose a framework-connecting structure, practice, and attention, updating the original concepts of the ABV to modern-day firms (Ocasio et al., 2023). Building on Rerup’s (2009) original conceptualization, the framework identifies three qualities of attention: stability, vividness, and coherence. Stability involves sustained focus, vividness relates to a rich understanding of events, and coherence pertains to aligned attention among actors. Through their detailed coding, Kudesia and Lang develop new understandings of how different components and modalities of structure influence the three attention qualities.

A focus on attentional dynamics and the three qualities of attention are also at the center of Love’s (2024) conceptual article about attentional control systems. Love argues that the context in which the initial ABV was developed has shifted (Ocasio et al., 2023), giving rise to new challenges such as rapid changes, disruptive technologies, and digital transformations. In response, companies must adjust their approaches, as the traditional organizational structures may lead to fragmented attention. A potential remedy involves implementing more adaptable attentional control systems, specifically in the form of emergent attentional control systems. Central to these systems are communication channels, structural roles, and control methods, all of which are modified from the original ABV to align with the current dynamic landscape. By doing so, companies can achieve a state of high-quality attention characterized by strong attentional coherence, stability, and vividness.

The case study by Plotnikova et al. (2024) on the telecommunication corporation Ericsson before and after a large restructuring shows that attentional channels in organizations are more dynamic than the original formulation of the ABV assumes. These channels can not only be influenced top-down by high-level executives, as Joseph and Ocasio (2012) show, but also bottom-up through “reinvention” and “renewal” strategies. While “reinvention” involves a creative combination of old communication channels with novel elements to create a new channel, “renewal” focuses on selectively reviving channels that were disrupted from the top-down.

In sum, shaping and reshaping an organizational structure to account for attentional dynamics are important targets for future work. The three articles highlight that today communities face the challenge of maintaining coherent attention and sense-making when actors are situated in different social realities in and around organizations (Ocasio et al., 2023).

Theme 3: theoretical elaborations

Two additional conceptual articles offer complementary perspectives on the ABV that emphasize on factors—emotions and practices—that can play important roles in shaping attention in ways that have hitherto not been well recognized in the ABV literature. Both pieces specifically explore questions relating to how attention is situated in social interactions that are organizationally located within communication structures and in material spaces, as well as how situated attention can then shape attentional engagement.

Vuori (2024) focuses on emotions and attention, noting that emotions can be critical drivers of peoples’ attention but have largely not been considered or accounted for in the ABV literature. This article, building on Vuori and Huy (2016), elaborates the conditions under which emotions modify prior research on the role of hierarchical communication channels in information processing and strategic adaptation (e.g. Joseph and Ocasio, 2012). Vuori focuses on attention situated in social interactions, which can generate emotional effects that impact how organizational decision-makers focus their attention. He identifies two sets of mechanisms by which organizational structures and practices might impact emotions in ways that then affect the intensity and duration of attentional engagement. First, he identifies factors that shape how people appraise issues in ways that influence their emotional reactions. These emotional reactions, in turn, drive attentional engagement. For example, he shows that structures and communicative practices can situate people only in their local work environment, or they can describe the broader organizational implication of an issue or initiative. This will shape whether the emotions generated by an issue or initiative will be reflective of its implications for the entire organization and its mission. Vuori further notes that practices that expose people to physical cues and objects can generate more intense emotional reactions, which can then impact subsequent attention.

Second, he identifies factors that shape peoples’ emotional energy. Specifically, structuring interactions to create group physical assembly in ways that are attentive to the physiological context (e.g. fatigue, hunger, and need for caffeine) can generate positive emotional energy that shapes peoples’ openness, curiosity, and engagement with an issue. The key insight of this work is to focus attention on the impact of emotions and to show how people’s emotional reactions to issues and answers can generate effects that are distinct from the effects of structures, communication channels, or language on information processing.

Complementing this piece, Nicolini and Mengis (2024) develop a practice-theoretical view of situated attention in a way that complements ABV’s emphasis on strategic decision-making. This conceptual article builds on prior empirical work by Nicolini and Korica (2021). Adopting the practice as a unit of analysis, one key insight of this approach is that practices, including routinized practices, are associated with a set of attentional priorities that can impact how individuals focus attention in a pre-reflexive, although not unconscious, way. As Nicoli and Mengis note, the “nature, focus, depth, and breadth of attention are already partially built into the fabric of the practices in which [people] participate” (p. 15 in the unformatted manuscript). This contrasts with and complements the emphasis on deliberate attention in the ABV literature. They also point to the teleoaffective structure of practices, which includes normalized or societally structured ends, activities, and tasks to achieve those ends, and a set of emotions associated both with achieving the ends and engaging in activities. Finally, they develop the idea of practice architectures—the discursive elements, material-economic arrangements, socio-political arrangements, histories, and biographies that constitute a practice and can impact how practices can influence attention in a pre-reflexive way. The insights that practices can shape attention and their elaboration on elements of practice architecture focus research attention on the effects of diverse elements (e.g. technologies, forms, situated interactions and emotions that arise in them, institutionalized scripts for engaging in specific practices such as hiring or performance appraisals) on attention in organizations in ways that complement the focus in prior work on structures, communication channels, and language.

Future research in the ABV

In our call for articles, we identified five themes around which ABV research is particularly lacking: varieties of attention, dynamics of attention, attention in crises and resilience, new forms of organizing, and new methodologies. This special issue has made inroads in a few of these areas. As we have said, several articles elaborate the dimensions of managerial and organizational attention. Several consider the dynamics of organizational attention, and a few examine the processes of attention as emerging from interactions and social relations that dynamically evolve over time. In addition, several articles in this special issue took up the charge to examine the role of attention in how organizations respond to unexpected events and crises and discontinues change.

Given the state of the world, these insights are particularly useful to managers and decision-makers. When we wrote the call for articles in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had just made central the topic of how organizations respond to unexpected events. Since then, the war in Ukraine, multiple environmental disasters related to climate change and political shifts, and right now, a war in the Middle East have started. How organizations respond to crises seems more important than ever. Three articles tackle head-on the importance of attention in crisis management. Two do so empirically: Mack et al. studying the housing market crisis, and Kudesia and Lang reviewing 42 different crises. Bartel and Rockmann (2024) conceptually study how relational systems emerge and their impact on an organization’s capacity to deliver resilient responses in a crisis. Of course, we would like to see more studies on how attention triangulation (Rerup, 2009) and cognitive flexibility (Laureiro-Martínez and Brusoni, 2018) can be deployed in these situations. Relatedly, we would like to better understand how the three qualities of attention (stability, vividness, and coherence) can be better managed to cope with crises.

There were also topics which received only minimal attention or were not addressed at all. For example, we still need more work to understand how organizations balance multiple demands on attention, an increasingly prevalent problem in modern firms. While a decade ago, organizations could prioritize profitability, this is no longer the case. More and more organizations are expected to generate profit in ways that are compatible with their employees, communities, environments, and other stakeholders. This means that organizations need to pay attention to multiple goals (Joseph and Gaba, 2020; Levinthal and Rerup, 2021), some of which can sometimes conflict (Gaba and Greve, 2019; Salvato and Rerup, 2018). The breadth of goals that require attention, including those set internally and those imposed externally, suggests further research is needed on the mechanisms that underpin the simultaneous allocation of attention toward diverse objectives. It is urgent that we understand how changes in goal prioritization affect the structural distribution of attention, its determinants, and consequences. How do organizations manage the cognitive load arising from the need to juggle multiple, sometimes paradoxical, goals? Is there a threshold beyond which attending to a multiplicity of objectives compromises efficiency or effectiveness? How do organizational structures and cultures mediate or moderate the translation of broad attention scopes into concrete actions? And crucially, how do the interplays between these structures, cultures, and attention influence long-term organizational resilience and adaptability? Addressing these questions will not only be academically enriching but also pivotal for organizations navigating the complex landscape of contemporary institutional, competitive, and technological pressures.

A second area which needs further research is that of the changing nature of organizations and organizing. Economic, technological, and societal changes have introduced new organizational forms. In addition to large hierarchical multibusiness firms, we are seeing growth in alternative forms of organizing: platforms, ecosystems, and online communities (cf., Altman et al., 2022). We know little about how attentional processes operate in these settings or how attention is structured. Much of the emphasis in large hierarchies is on vertical channels of communication, although this is changing toward a growing emphasis on agile teams, holocracy, and flat organizational structures. Yet we have little understanding of how the ABV—its cognitive and structural aspects—are applied in these contexts. For example, to what extent do platforms affect the collective attention span and how does this impact organizational outcomes? How does spatial and temporal flexibility influence the dispersion and focus of attention within ecosystems? How do online communities balance the need for fluidity and adaptability with the requisite need to channel attention toward strategic objectives? Such questions extend to what recent trends in job design, remote work, and demands for flexible work arrangements mean from an attention point of view and how organizational choices concerning structure and purpose can meet these challenges (Ocasio et al., 2023).

A third area is how new technologies such as generative AI are going to impact managerial and organizational attention. With AI, humans may no longer be constrained by limits on information processing capacity or by the need to simplify decision-making or problem-solving. AI has the potential to transcend existing human limits to attention and to address complex interdependencies that humans may not envisage. Researchers have begun to document AI’s impact on organizational structures and decision-making (e.g. Lebovitz et al., 2022), but our understanding of its impact on organizational attention is lacking. Will new forms of artificial intelligence make it easier or harder to focus and sustain attention? What does generative AI mean for the structural distribution of attention? Given that access to such technology is no longer reserved for a handful of highly trained technical specialists but is available broadly to all organizational members, will we see greater or diminished attentional coherence?

In addition, the information technology revolution has exacerbated the demands that we impose on our own attention. As the lines between professional and personal spaces blur, and with the increase in devices through which individuals communicate, how will the allocation of individual attention be altered? Information overload has long existed, but is it more pressing now? How can managers’ attention and their capacity to process information under the active focus of their attention (i.e. working memory) be better controlled in our times (Laureiro-Martínez et al., 2019)? Can we find ways to foster attention and working memory abilities? Are there structural solutions in place that we could envision as ways to facilitate attentional processing?

Finally, none of the articles in this special issue took up the charge to expand ABV methodologically. We were pleased that the accepted empirical articles demonstrated a variety of empirical approaches. Articles in this special issue used an in-depth case study relying on interviews, memos, CEO letters, annual reports, a quantitative study that relies on transcripts of earnings conferences from calls between 2002 and 2010, as well as accounting and loan portfolios that were collected, an interpretive synthesis of 80 qualitative case studies covering 42 different crises, and a quantitative study relying on panel data of 327 US firms of different sizes and industries from 2003 till 2017.

However, we still seek more novel ways to measure attention, within and between levels of analysis, and identify the causal effects of organizational attention on strategic behavior, change, and outcomes. Effective measurement and linking the ideas of the ABV to data are critical in expanding our understanding of both the antecedents of organizational and managerial attention as well as its consequences. Of course, one potentially fruitful approach is to leverage the growing alternatives for text analysis. Prior work, including articles in this issue, has already established a relationship between written texts—or communication more generally (Ocasio et al., 2018), and the attention of top managers. For example, studies have used word frequencies (e.g. Eggers and Kaplan, 2009), open coding (e.g. Nigam and Ocasio, 2010), and topic modeling (e.g. Joseph and Wilson, 2018) of texts to understand attention. Others have employed the application of software programs such as LIWC to understand changes in attention through dictionaries (e.g. Joseph et al., 2023). To improve the semantic meaning of texts, scholars are turning to large language models or unsupervised deep learning models for text data. This includes embedding models used in GPT3.5 and GPT4.0 which are based on the transformer, or self-attention, architecture first introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017). Certainly, the wide availability of these models for quantitative text analysis would be particularly useful for examining the content of organizational communication, what is attended to, by whom, where, when, why, and how.

In addition to a focus on written language, we also look forward to more studies of attention in organizations that go beyond mere verbal interactions and consider other means of communication. Attention is a function of more than what is written or spoken and includes the myriad subtleties that underpin our interactions, from the fleeting glances and micro-expressions to the pauses between thoughts and the intensity of a gaze. These non-verbal cues often speak volumes, revealing layers of intent, emotion, and cognition that words alone cannot convey. We expect that future attention studies will not only consider the contents of the words but also take into consideration facial and body recognition, as a way to have a richer understanding of attention and complement deliberation with emotions. In addition, the inflections in voice tone, the pitch, the voice, and the delicate dance of turn-taking in conversations are all informative aspects of how we organize, lead, and cooperate.

We can now rely on multiple tools that can facilitate the analyses of non-verbal communication forms (Won et al., 2014). Automatic detection of non-verbal behavior predicts learning in dyadic interactions. These methods can be powerful and can analyze large amounts of data but can also be very reductionist in their analyses, automatically equating categories of words with concepts, and leaving the context in the background. A more complete understanding of attention demands studies that encompass both what is said and what is unsaid. We foresee an important space for qualitative methods as their richness, openness for emergent themes, and general allowance for interconnectedness will continue making them important tools as complement to other methods but also on their own.

In conclusion, the contrast between the familiar and novel dynamics and organizational settings we study and the familiar and novel methods we can use to study creates a very fertile ground for the ABV in the coming decades. Attention, as the founder of psychology William James puts it, is so very fundamental but also so very difficult to capture. Organizational attention is even more so. The fertile ground ahead of us needs to be carefully tended to, and the complexities of how individuals interact not left aside. As we tend to this fertile ground, we hope for a balanced refinement of both the broad and general descriptive theories we have, while, at the same time, deriving some more local and immediately useful prescriptive findings for the organizations we care for.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

John Joseph is a professor of strategy at the University of California, Irvine. He received his PhD from Northwestern University. He studies organization design and its impact on information processing and decision-making in complex organizations. His current research examines the antecedents of different organizational structures and the impact of structure on innovation, growth, and performance.

Daniella Laureiro-Martinez leverages cognitive science theories and findings to investigate decision-making, creative problem-solving, and organizational learning in rapidly changing environments. She works at ETH Zurich where she serves as the director of the Cognition Learning and Adaptive Behavior (COLAB) research group.

Amit Nigam is a professor of management at the Bayes Business School (formerly Cass), City, University of London. He received his PhD from Northwestern University. His current research looks at field-level change in professions and in the role of professions and occupations in processes of organizational change.

William Ocasio is the James F. Towey Professor of Business and Leadership at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Director of the Illinois Strategic Organizations Initiative. His research focuses on attentional control by institutions, organizations, management, and algorithms. Most recently he is working of combining multiple methods in attention research including archival analysis, interviews, and natural language processing models.

Claus Rerup is a professor of management at Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. His research captures attention, learning, routine, and sense-making dynamics by tracing organizational processes over extended periods.

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