Sub-Plenary 1-5

Why Politicizing Failure is Indispensable for Creative Organizing?

 

Organizers:
Marianna Fotaki, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Mikołaj Pawlak, University of Warsaw, Poland

Panelists:
Joseph Amankwah-Amoah, Durham University Business School, United Kingdom
John M. Amis, University of Edinburgh Business School, United Kingdom
Adriana Mica, University of Warsaw, Poland
Devi Vijay, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, India
 

While failure is a commonly shared experience, it is usually “seen as the exception rather than the rule, and as something to be eventually overcome through improvements” (Malpas & Wickham 1995, p. 39). However, grand societal projects often fail, including international peace or climate initiatives and emerging economies transiting to market economies; organizations decline due to their own hubris or larger forces beyond their control. Even the lives of the most accomplished individuals are riven with frustrated ambitions and disappointments. Yet, in a culture obsessed with self-improvement and success, failure is often a tool for achieving future objectives. This resonates with an obsession with innovation the world of technology start-ups encapsulates, where nearly every venture fails, but failure may well contain the seeds of future success (Eisenmann, 2021).
 
Yet, philosophy warns us to be humbler about failure because it is the ultimate condition of human existence (Bradatan, 2023): Failure is vital to a well-lived life, curing us of arrogance and self-deception and engendering humility instead. Organization and management scholars study various forms of failures: responses to organizational decline (Hirschman, 1970), bankruptcies (Amankwah-Amoah, 2016; Mellahi & Wilkinson, 2004), public policy (Fotaki, 2010), and civil service failure (Ozturk et al., 2017), learning from failure (Baumard & Starbuck, 2005), permanent failure (Meyer & Zucker, 1989), technology failure and accidents (Perrow, 1984), failure of entrepreneurial projects (Helanummi-Cole & Jalan, 2023), scandals and moral failure (Shadnam et al., 2020), and intersections of failure and innovation (Christensen, 1997). However, less commonly, they see failure as an outcome of political processes.
 
The focus on failure in many social science disciplines has grown recently, and a new platform of debate – failure studies – has emerged (Mica et al., 2023). The new voices in the failure scholarship are critical of the simple failure-success dichotomy, explore the inequalities in failure, and take into account broader failure regimes – social settings that identify what failure is and what to do about it (Kurunmäki et al., 2023). Thus failure is entangled with politics – failure judgements are conditioned by regimes that often have a long history of oppression. Similarly, revealing the inequalities in failure opens the possibility for political action and creative reorganization of institutional arrangements.
 
In this sub-plenary, we bring together diverse approaches to failure to understand the role of failure in social life. Joseph Amankwah-Amoah will talk about business failure a topic important for management scholarship. From the perspective of institutional change, John Amis will discuss policy reforms as a failure of institutional maintenance. The critical approach will be taken by Adriana Mica, who will present how failure judgments are made when contradictory failure regimes are entangled in a creolized way, while Devi Vijay is going to focus on connections between politics and the failure of decolonizing. Together they will answer such questions as:

• How do individuals and organizations try to avoid it, and what do they do when they experience it?

• Can we be creative about failure's potentialities and learn differently from it?

• And, how can we deal with the unequal failure distribution resulting from past unjust social arrangements?

The sub-plenary's format comprises interventions of the four presenters (10–12 minutes each) and 40 minutes of Q&A session with the audience.
 

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References

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• Amankwah-Amoah, J. (2016): “An integrative process model of organisational failure.” Journal of Business Research, 69 (9), 3388–3397.
• Baumard, P., & Starbuck, W.H. (2005): “Learning from failures: Why it may not happen.” Long Range Planning, 38 (3), 281–298.
• Bradatan, C. (2023): In Praise of Failure. Four Lessons in Humility. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Christensen, C.M. (1997): The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
• Eisenmann, T. (2021): “Why start-ups fail. It’s not always the horse or the jockey.” Harvard Business Review, May–June 2021; https://hbr.org/2021/05/why-start-ups-fail.
• Fotaki, M. (2010): “Why do public policies fail so often? Exploring health policy making as an imaginary/symbolic construction.” Organization, 17 (6), 703–720.
• Helanummi-Cole, H., & Jalan, R. (2023): “Entrepreneurial Failure Contextualized: Sociocultural Approaches.” In: A. Mica, M. Pawlak, A. Horolets & P. Kubicki (eds.): Routledge International Handbook of Failure. London: Routledge, 38–52.
• Kurunmäki, L., Mennicken, A., & Miller, P. (2023): “Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime.” In: A. Mica, M. Pawlak, A. Horolets & P. Kubicki (eds.): Routledge International Handbook of Failure. London: Routledge, 160–176.
• Malpas, J., & Wickham, G. (1995): “Governance and failure: on the limits of sociology.” The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 31 (3), 37–50.
• Mellahi, K., & Wilkinson, A. (2004): “Organizational failure: a critique of recent research and a proposed integrative framework.” International Journal of Management Reviews, 5 (1), 21–41.
• Meyer, M.W., & Zucker, L.G. (1989): Permanently failing organizations. Beverly Hill: SAGE Publication.
• Mica, A., Pawlak, M., Horolets, A., & Kubicki, P. (2023): “FAIL! Are We Headed towards Critical Failure Studies?” In: A. Mica, M. Pawlak, A. Horolets & P. Kubicki (eds.): Routledge International Handbook of Failure. London: Routledge, 3–21.
• Ozturk, I., Amis, J. & Greenwood, R. (2017): “Intra-professional status, maintenance failure, and the reformation of the Scottish civil justice system.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 48B, 207–234.
• Perrow, C. (1984): Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Shadnam, M., Crane, A., & Lawrence, T.B. (2020): “Who calls it? Actors and accounts in the social construction of organizational moral failure.” Journal of Business Ethics, 165, 699–717.
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