Coopetition is widely viewed as a strategy through which firms collaborate with competitors to enhance both firm-specific and collective value creation and capture. Yet, the strategic boundaries of coopetition remain ambiguous, particularly regarding whether it constitutes a firm-level or a collective strategy. To address this ambiguity, and drawing on a resource-based theory foundation, this essay conceptualizes coopetition as a collective strategy through three lenses: multipolarity, alignment , and relationality . The multipolar lens views coopetition strategy as a configuration of firm-specific resource bases and strategic intents, in which different firms simultaneously leverage their proprietary resources and access or acquire competitors’ resources. The alignment lens emphasizes deliberately designed synergies across different firms’ complementary and supplementary resource bases that generate greater joint value than when those resources are used separately. Finally, the relationality lens portrays coopetition as a setting for developing relational resource portfolios and routines that create idiosyncratic advantages relative to external competitors.
This conceptual paper addresses a puzzle in business collective action research: why resource-independent firms able to pursue collective strategies alone would choose to tolerate memberships in trade associations whose outputs contradict their interests. Resolving this conundrum requires extending existing business collective action research—focused on aggregation and trade-associations outputs—to consider internal organizational arrangements through which members constitute these outputs. To do so, we develop the Calculus of Tolerated Misalignment, a member-centric framework grounded in meta-organization theory. The Calculus of Tolerated Misalignment explains how, through meta-organizational features, firms mobilize internal and external leverage to moderate perceived costs of misalignment. This mechanism allows them to regulate the benefits of trade-association membership when collective outputs diverge from their individual interests. Our research advances business collective action and collective-strategy scholarship by shifting focus to a constitutive logic where trade associations serve as bargaining arenas for their members. It also extends meta-organization theory by providing a dynamic model of member-level agency, conceptualizing firms’ trade-association membership as an active strategic-management process.
Intelligent technologies, that is, AI-based, computational systems that can generate, adapt, and act on outputs through forms of inference that extend beyond pre-specified rules, are increasingly implicated in how organizations learn, what they know, and how they are structured. Yet, strategy and organization scholarship has largely continued to treat technology as contextual rather than constitutive, leaving core assumptions about knowledge, social interaction, and organizational form insufficiently examined. In the call for papers, we asked researchers to remedy this by putting technology front and center in rethinking the field’s foundational building blocks. The ten contributions to this special issue take up that call and illuminate three critical ways through which intelligent technologies are reconfiguring organizations. First, intelligent technologies reshape organizational learning by moving firms from managing knowledge scarcity to navigating knowledge abundance. Second, they alter the production and validation of organizational knowledge by introducing new forms of machine-generated inference and epistemic stances that challenge established knowing practices. Third, they transform organizing itself by reshaping coordination, interaction patterns, and the structures through which collective activity is accomplished. A closing editorial synthesizes key insights and develops a research agenda for advancing strategy and organization scholarship in this new landscape.
Strategy-making increasingly depends on integrating knowledge across functional and hierarchical boundaries, often through processes mediated by material artifacts. While research shows that the material properties of individual artifacts partly shape what can be known, discussed, and decided, less is known about knowledge integration during moments when a structured strategy tool moves it through materially distinct artifacts. Drawing on an in-depth study of two strategic roadmapping projects in a large organization, we examine how transitions between artifact forms shape knowledge integration. We identify four artifact types, ephemeral, interim, stabilized, and analytical, and the transitions between materially distinct forms during which knowledge is reconstituted rather than simply carried forward. Across both projects, we identify three dynamics during these transitions: selection, surfacing, and reconfiguration. We contribute by identifying reconstitution as a knowledge-integration mechanism and by offering a tools-in-process account of how structured strategy tools work through transitions between artifact forms over time.
In the first chapter of Foundations of Social Theory , James Coleman advances a meta-theoretical framework that specifies an ideal explanatory structure for social science. This is often represented by the Coleman “bathtub,” which distinguishes three linked components: a macro-to-micro component, an individual-action component, and a micro-to-macro component. In management research, the bathtub has become a widely used heuristic for articulating microfoundational explanations. At the same time, a growing literature has criticized or rejected the bathtub as an inappropriate framework for management theorizing. This article responds to these critiques by reconstructing and defending the Colemanian project in management research. We begin by clarifying Coleman’s distinction between meta-theory and first-order theory and by situating the bathtub within his systems-oriented and interventionist conception of social explanation. We further argue that the bathtub embodies a pragmatic and generative meta-theoretical orientation that places relatively weak constraints on first-order theoretical commitments, allowing flexibility in how agency, social organization, and change are theorized. We then show how the microfoundations movement in management research illustrates this generative potential by mobilizing the bathtub across a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, extending well beyond Coleman’s own rational choice commitments. This diversity helps explain both the widespread uptake of the bathtub and its continued usefulness for management theorizing. Finally, we argue that many contemporary critiques overlook these explanatory payoffs by advancing ontology-first objections that neglect Coleman’s fundamentally methodological and explanatory concerns. Recasting the Colemanian project in this way clarifies both the value and the limits of the bathtub and highlights its continuing relevance as a flexible meta-theoretical framework for management theorizing.
