91ÉçÇø

Improvisation in Organizations: The Case of Task and Job Design

Presented by Anne Miner

Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin

Date: Friday, April 25, 2025
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM (EST)
Location: Bronfman building, room 340

(Participants are invited for a tea and topic on creating idiosyncratic careers in academia Thursday, April 24 from 3.00 – 5 pm)

Abstract

Many literatures still deeply embody the ‘vacancy assumption’ in which the organization first designs a job or task, and after that matches a person to execute it. Overwhelming field evidence, however, reveals that jobs/tasks are created or assembled in varied other ways (Cohen, 2013). Sometimes the pattern enacted in a job or task is improvised. It is created while it is actually being performed, one special form of job/task emergence. Improvisation is defined as the deliberate and substantive fusion of the design and execution of a novel production (Miner et al., 2001). i.e. a focal agent enacts a novel action pattern while designing that very pattern.

This talk will pull from work that offers insight on two key issues. (1) Is there scholarly evidence for a nontrivial presence of improvised jobs/tasks? (2) If so, do such jobs/tasks have lasting impact, in domains such as organizational structures, recurring processes, or career sequences?

My own work began using an evolutionary theory lens to contemplate these issues, then moved on to a learning framework and now emphasizes the improvisation process. This lens forces attention to the question of how novel patterns are created, in contrast to issues of how selection or replication occurs once that has happened. I look forward to learning how/if these issues link to current work at 91ÉçÇø.
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About Anne Miner

Anne Miner (BA Harvard University, PhD Stanford University) is Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin. Her current research explores organizational improvisation and learning processes. Specific research contexts/processes include the evolution of jobs and product development, learning from failure, vicarious learning, industry-level learning, and evolutionary models of change. The Technology and Innovation Management of the Academy of Management named Miner the 2004 Scholar of the Year and Google Scholar shows more than 19,000 citations to her work. Miner served as an associate editor at Management Science and Organization Science, on editorial boards including the Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, American Sociological Review, Strategic Organization and as panelist for the NSF Decision, Risk and Management Science Division. She co-edited the Elgar Introduction to Organizational Improvisation (2022), and the Routledge Companion to Organizational Improvisation in Organizations (2024) and gave a keynote address at the 2024 Process Organization Studies (PROS) Symposium in Paphos, Cyprus.

Miner co-founded Wisconsin’s Initiative for Studies in Transformational Entrepreneurship (INSITE), the business curriculum in UW- Madison’s MS in Biotechnology and UW’s first entrepreneurship certificates programs. Before her PhD, she previously served as the executive vice-president for a tiny, closely held California start-up and as University Affirmative Action Officer at Stanford in the office of the President.