Analogical Dissensus: The Cognitive Underpinnings of Organizational Inertia

• In Event: 094 - Regular Session. Sociology of Culture 1: Evolving Meanings and Messages in Organizational Settings

Abstract

Much has been written on the relationship between cognition and successful or failed organizational change. Less is known about the influence of cognitive factors on the liminal state that many organizations occupy: that of neither success nor failure. This article elucidates a cognitive mechanism through which organizations sustain inertia. Using the case of the music industry’s adaptation to MP3 technology in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I examine how organizational actors made sense of a radical technological intervention, and how the strategies they employed facilitated inertia. Drawing from discourse analysis of Billboard magazine and in-depth interviews with record label personnel, I develop the concept of analogical dissensus to account for the influence of analogical reasoning and its attendant institutional ambiguity on organizational adaptation. The failure to achieve analogical consensus results in an equivocal learning process. Different analogies call attention to different potential sites of learning. There is more than one fruitful point of departure, but the solutions deduced from each site are not complementary, which results in further learning attempts. Such institutional ambiguity prevents rapid, successful adaptation because of the conflict it invites. However, exposing and questioning taken-for-granted values also prevents abject failure. The concept of analogical dissensus illuminates the cultural cognitive underpinnings of middling adaptation, and contributes to our understanding of how most organizations – those that neither fail nor succeed – endure.

Author

• Kim de Laat, University of Toronto