98: Managing Innovation - Burns & Stalker - Talking About Organizations Podcast

98: Managing Innovation — Burns & Stalker

Tom Burns

Why do firms continuously have difficulties to convert new ideas into goods or services? This question is at the heart of this month’s reading – The Management of Innovation, a book by Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker from 1961. The book begins with a discussion of how their initial studies on communities of people at work led the authors to a curious finding. At a rayon mill, everything seemed to be working fine – the mill was commercially successful and appeared to be running quite efficiently. But on closer examination, they found that the research and development laboratory, whose roles were to solve problems beyond the capacities of the workforce, was viewed with unusual levels of suspicion and hostility. They would find similar issues in a population of firms in England and Scotland. As the authors investigated the source of these problems they produced a cornerstone of management and organization studies.

The book famously reports the role of organization in innovation. At its heart is the fundamental construct that Burns & Stalker derived to explain two management systems – the mechanistic and the organic. The mechanistic system is akin to ordinary bureaucratic structures that seek predictability and reliability and are most effective in relatively stable situations. The organic system is better for changing conditions and reflects activities to redefine tasks, worker roles, and systems of development and production – in short, to operationalize change. They reflect two ends of a spectrum, and firms can shift along that spectrum at any given time. Importantly, Burns & Stalker’s helped develop ideas on how structural features and social patterns work together into a system and how such system fits different conditions, thus making a major contribution to the development of the contingency approach in organization studies.

Unlike the common misconception that mechanistic systems are necessarily bad for innovation and organic systems are better, Burns & Stalker show that both are equally useful, but that success or failure is both one of alignment with the situation and the successful management of the potential conflicts that innovation can bring.

As usually is the case in classics, the book packs many more insights than its reputation. One of them is their detailed analysis about political and social challenges faced by different organizations as they try to adjust to new conditions. They show that not only do the common challenges of resistance to change appear but also how innovations can threaten power structures and status how the management systems themselves can be a source of barriers to change.

The book also provides an anatomy of the sources of conflict that innovation can create between developers and assembly line, or between scientists and managers. And it shows that innovation is everyone’s responsibility, and that the ability to develop and produce new goods and services depends on being able to sustain them through the full life-cycle as has been acutely explored by subsequent innovation scholars such as Deborah Dougherty.

Part 1. How does organization matter for innovation? (released 14 February 2023)

Part 2. The enduring questions about the value of work (released 21 February 2023)

Read with us:

Burns, T. & Stalker, G. M. (1961). The Management of Innovation. Tavistock Publications Limited.

To Learn More:

Dougherty, D. (1992). Interpretive barriers to successful product innovation in large firms. Organization science, 3(2), 179-202.

Dougherty, D., & Hardy, C. (1996). Sustained product innovation in large, mature organizations: Overcoming innovation-to-organization problems. Academy of management journal, 39(5), 1120-1153.

Hargadon, A. & Douglas, Y. (2001). When innovations meet institutions: Edison and the design of the electric light. Administrative science quarterly, 46(3), 476-501.

Hargadon, A. & Sutton, R. I. (1997). Technology brokering and innovation in a product development firm. Administrative science quarterly, 42(4), 716-749.

Hinings, C. R., Greenwood, R., & Meyer, R. (2018). Dusty books? The liability of oldness. Academy of Management Review, 43(2): 333–343.

Zammuto, R. F., Griffith, T. L., Majchrzak, A., Dougherty, D. J., & Faraj, S. (2007). Information technology and the changing fabric of organization. Organization science, 18(5), 749-762.