Wednesday, 8th May 2013, 12:15
Room: Société canadienne des postes (yellow section)
Title:
Insurance Trading in Lloyd’s of London: Balancing conflicting-yet-complementary Logics in Practice
Speaker: Paula Jarzabkowski, Professor of Strategic Management, City University and EU Marie Curie Fellow, Cornell University
Abstract: Drawing on a year-long ethnographic study of reinsurance trading in Lloyd’s of London, this paper makes three contributions to current discussions of institutional complexity. First, we shift focus from purposeful organizational responses to institutional complexity to the everyday practices by which individuals collectively address competing demands on their work. Based on our findings, we develop a model of how individuals can balance conflicting institutional demands through a set of three interrelated practices, labeled segmenting, bridging, and demarcating. Second, moving beyond the dominant focus on contradiction between logics, we show how these practices comprise a system of conflicting-yet-complementary logics, through which actors are able to both work within contradictions, whilst also exploiting the benefits of interdependent logics. Third, in contrast to most studies of newly formed hybrids and/or novel complexity, our focus on a long-standing context of institutional complexity, shows how balancing logics can become a matter of settled complexity, enacted routinely within everyday practice.
Biographical note: Paula Jarzabkowski is a Professor of Strategic Management at City University and, from 2012-2014, holds an EU Marie Curie Fellowship at Cornell University. Paula’s research focuses on strategy-as-practice in complex and pluralistic contexts, such as regulated infrastructure firms, third sector organizations and financial services, particularly insurance and reinsurance. She focuses primarily on qualitative and ethnographic research methods as a means of studying business problems. In this endeavour, she has been fortunate in winning a series of prestigious fellowships that have enabled her to conduct detailed ethnographic studies in different industries. For example, in 2006-2007, funded by an AIM Ghoshal Fellowship, she conducted an audio-ethnographic longitudinal study of the paradoxical tensions involved in implementing a major strategic shift in a regulated telecommunications firm. From 2009-2012, she held the inaugural Insurance Intellectual Capital Initiative (IICI) fellowship, under which she conducted a 3-year audio and video ethnography of the global reinsurance market, which extended her skills from organisational to industry-level ethnography. She ‘enjoys’ the challenge of publishing such work in leading journals. Her work has appeared in a number of such journals including Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies and in 2005, she published the first book on strategy-as-practice, Strategy as Practice: An Activity-Based Approach (Sage).
Bring your lunch, coffee and juice will be served