Management of Extreme Situations

19Community of Practice, Variation of Knowledge and Change in Extreme Management Situations

19.1. Introduction

The emergence of a new economic context since the 1990s has been reflected in numerous research studies by an intensive innovation regime (Eisenhardt and Brown 1998; Hatchuel and Weil 1999; Amin and Cohendet 2003; Foray 2009) where the ability to manage disruptive innovations is an essential issue (Henderson and Clark 1990; Le Masson et al. 2006; Ben Mahmoud-Jouini and Charue-Duboc 2008; Charue-Duboc et al. 2010;). Companies thus evolve in this context in an extreme management situation, simultaneously marked by change, uncertainty and risk (Lievre et al. 2010; Bouty et al. 2012). They thus move globally from an exploitation regime to an exploration regime that involves relying on knowledge expansion processes (Lenfle 2008).

Here, we define knowledge expansion as the evolution of an organization’s knowledge base over time. Knowledge expansion therefore refers here to the ability of firms to change in response to external stimuli or the emergence of new ideas internally. This capacity for change is based on the firm’s cognitive capacities and the way it implements them.

The literature on organizational change in management sciences identifies two main change models. In the first model, organizational change results from the aggregation of multiple incremental changes that take place mainly at the operational and middle management levels (Brown and Eisenhardt 1997). ...