Eyes Wide Shut: Technology, Entrepreneurship, Inertia and the Impact of Organizational Field Transparency

Research has consistently linked organizational inertia to the failure of industry incumbents to prosper or even survive from periods of discontinuous change driven by technological entrepreneurship. Recent work has unbundled the structure of inertia into two key determinants; 'resource rigidities' and 'routine rigidities'. In this study, we elaborate our understanding of the conditions under which these two forms of inertia are likely to occur, by drawing on the notion of Organizational Field Transparency, central to Institutional Theory. We use four years of field data from two manufacturing cases and their 21 responses to discontinuous threats and opportunities. We show that as a manager's experience of their organizational field transparency varies (opaque, semi-transparent, transparent, semi-hazy or hazy) so does their sensitivity to discontinuous threats and opportunities, along with the legitimacy and intensity of resource and routine rigidities. We offer our findings as a novel conceptual progression with five two-part propositions, which also have implications for dealing with heterogeneity in entrepreneurship and innovation research.