Mattias Axelson

Contemporary disruptions often last months or years, not days or weeks, requiring bureaucratic organizations that provide consistency and continuity. However, bureaucracies are typically rigid and inferior to temporary organizations in terms of flexibility in dealing with disruptions. Conversely, temporary organizations lack the continuity needed during prolonged disruptions. We learned about this poorly understood puzzle during our case study of Sweden’s defense administration’s military response to the greyzone between peace and war following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Longitudinal data reveal how managerial hierarchies select internal trustees based on the trustees knowledge of local contexts and how the trustees reactivate former employees, chosen for their professional expertise, as external trustees to mobilize local resources. These trustees collectively engage in a liminal process of strategizing through familiarity that makes a bureaucracy flexible during prolonged disruptions, blending transparency with secrecy. This discovery challenges extant research that underestimates the ability of bureaucracies to become flexible during disruptions. As a basis for further theory development, we propose a “liminal strategizing through familiarity” model that is socio-culturally rooted among internal and external trustees. Our pre-theory reintroduces flexible bureaucracy, assigning familiarity with a new strategic role for continuity during prolonged disruptions.

This paper assesses how societal disruptions lead to collective action that addresses institutional voids. Examining field data from Sweden’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak, we track institutional voids related to four product market categories. We construct a process model and elaborate on what we conceptualize as entrepreneurial constellations, which consist of collaborating business firms, public organizations, and the government. These entrepreneurial constellations facilitate the functioning of markets or forming of new ones to deal with a disruption. Through collective action, constellations coordinate problems and self-interest to overcome regulatory obstacles. Findings point to institutional voids that relate to surges during the need to scale up existing critical product markets, creating and innovating new critical product markets. Recognizing such institutional voids helps constellations coordinate expertise that collectively enacts regulatory changes and innovation in coordinative functions. While emerging, they accomplish ongoing evaluative reflections that permit them to autocorrect. This new conceptual understanding of the surprising presence and consequences of institutional voids in market economies, where they are not expected to develop and cause insufficiencies and suffering, explains how entrepreneurial constellations improvise solutions to societal disruptions.