Abstract
Doubt is inherent in organizational life, yet scholarship often reduces it to cognitive friction to be minimized or to a fleeting resource to be exploited. Challenging these fragmented paradigms, this dissertation reframes doubt as a structurally produced, stabilized, and distributed organizational achievement.
Grounded in an ethnographic study of an innovation team within a highly regulated engineering firm, this research adopts a pragmatist lens to investigate the material and temporal dynamics of doubt. Across three distinct papers, the thesis introduces an affordance-based view to explain when doubt manifests as generative inquiry rather than corrosive self-undermining.
By analyzing how evolving visual artifacts mediate collective sensemaking and how actors negotiate temporal boundaries, this volume reveals how organizations deliberately sustain doubt to prevent premature closure. Ultimately, this work proposes a novel processual framework for understanding and managing innovation in highly dynamic technological contexts.