Explanations of success and failure in management learning : What can we learn from Nokia’s rise and fall Tomi Laamanen, Juha-Antti Lamberg, Eero Vaara To cite this version: Tomi Laamanen, Juha-Antti Lamberg, Eero Vaara. Explanations of success and failure in management learning : What can we learn from Nokia’s rise and fall. Academy of Management Learning and Education (AMLE), 2016, pp.2-25 P. hal-02276713 HAL Id: hal-02276713 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02276713 Submitted on 3 Sep 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Q Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2016, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amle.2013.0177 ........................................................................................................................................................................ Explanations of Success and Failure in Management Learning: What Can We Learn From Nokia’s Rise and Fall? TOMI LAAMANEN University of St. Gallen, Switzerland JUHA-ANTTI LAMBERG University of Jyvaskyl¨ a,¨ Finland EERO VAARA Aalto University School of Business, Finland EM LYON Business School, France Lancaster University, United Kingdom We study the changing explanations of success and failure over the course of a firm’s history, building on a discursive approach that highlights the role of narrative attributions in making sense of corporate performance. Specifically, we analyze how the Nokia Corporation was framed first as a success and later as a failure and how these dimensions of performance were explained in various actors’ narrative accounts. In both the success and failure accounts, our analysis revealed a striking black-and-white picture that resulted in the institutionalization of Nokia’s metanarratives of success and failure. Our findings also reveal a number of discursive attributional tendencies, and thus, warn of the cognitive and politically motivated biases that are likely to characterize management literature. ........................................................................................................................................................................ Success and failure stories can be seen as present- played a central role in business school teaching can day corporate mythology. They are common in the be seen as repositories of these corporate narratives. popular and academic management literature and They are often based on clear-cut distinctions be- play a central role in the business media. Some tween success and failure (Pfeffer & Fong, 2002; companies achieve celebrity status complete with Raelin, 2009); they influence how we learn to make a positive reputation and a halo effect, whereas sense of successes and failures and are pivotal in others are framed as losers. Some managers become management education and managerial practice. heroes to admire and emulate, whereas others be- Management books and case studies that focus on come objects of blame and stigmatization. Manage- success or failure stories provide ideas that man- ment books and case studies that have traditionally agement can theoretically use to renew their own strategic practices (e.g., Alfalla-Luque & Medina- The authors are listed in alphabetical order. Lopez,´ 2009). However, critical voices have noted We gratefully acknowledge the comments of Kimmo Ala- that these publications’ prescriptions may contain joutsijarvi,¨ Jari Ojala, Jukka Luoma, Kalle Pajunen, and Henrikki major cognitive and methodological biases Tikkanen. We also wish to thank Jarmo Taskinen and Sandra Lubinaite for research assistance. Arjo Laukia contributed greatly (Denrell, 2003; McLaren & Mills, 2010). Overall, the to the earlier versions of the paper. This research project has been literature on the rhetorical and discursive aspects of funded by the Academy of Finland. the presentation of corporate success and failure 2 Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder’s express written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only. 2016 Laamanen, Lamberg, and Vaara 3 highlights the political and contested nature of such sense—in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Our anal- discourses (e.g., Hegele & Kieser, 2001; Kieser & ysis is twofold. First, we study how the managers Nicolai, 2005). “Reading managers” are exposed to themselves, the media, and researchers developed a host of explanations for successes and failures explanations for the group’s success. Second, we ex- (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006), reflecting the views of cor- amine how some of these same actors accounted for porations that seek to control their legacy (Kuhn, the group’s failure in more recent years, what types of 2008; Boje, Rosile, Durant, & Luhman, 2004) and narrative attributions were involved, and how the management fashions that make some stories more transition between success and failure took place. plausible than others (Abrahamson & Fairchild, Our analysis points to the central role of strategic 1999). leadership, organizational capabilities, organiza- Learning from the successes and failures of other tional design, and environmental discourses in the corporations has its problems. In particular, re- accounts of both success and failure. It reveals search on social psychology suggests that making a striking black-and-white picture in which the ac- sense of performance necessarily involves bias. For tual framings and narrative attributions differ dra- example, causal attribution theory predicts that matically from each other in periods of both success people have a tendency to take credit for successes and failure. We propose the use of “metanarrative” and to blame either external factors or others for as a concept to refer to the overall intertextual to- failures (Heider, 1958/2013; Kelley, 1973; Weiner, tality of narratives that jointly constitute a widely 1985). Management scholars have also examined spread and institutionalized understanding of the and found evidence of such tendencies (Gooding & success or failure of a corporation and its explana- Kinicki, 1995; Salancik & Meindl, 1984; Vaara, 2002). tions. We find that such metanarratives can be Although most of the research has focused on self- characterized by cognitive and political discursive attributions, it has also examined such tendencies tendencies, which provide a problematic basis for in the media (Mantere, Aula, Schildt, & Vaara, 2013). managerial learning and education. However, with a few exceptions (Mantere et al., 2013), there is a lack of understanding of how spe- cific parties such as the managers themselves, the THEORETICAL BACKGROUND media, and researchers differ in their constructions Success and Failure Accounts and explanations of success and failure. We also As a Basis of Learning and Education lack understanding of how such framings and at- tributions change over time. Stories of successes and failures of well-known In our work here, we focus on the framing and at- companies are at the core of the de facto reading tributions of success and failure in the management lists of practitioners interested in their own pro- literature. Although we draw from the insights of fessional development. Most managers do not, for attribution theory and related findings, we use example, read articles in the Administrative Science a discursive approach to elucidate important ten- Quarterly or books from the Oxford University Press dencies in making sense of success and failure (see (cf. Kieser & Leiner, 2009). Instead, their independent Brown, 2000; Mantere et al., 2013; Vaara, 2002). We learning and self-education are based on hetero- focus on the framings of success and failure and geneous materials offered, for example, by the transitions between the two. We examine how business press (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006) and popular something is labeled a success or failure and how management books (Furusten, 1999). Moreover, due the narrative attributions of success and failure are to the extensive use of cases in management edu- explained in the accounts of different actors. This cation, business school students are no less exposed allows us to develop an understanding of the variety to success and failure stories. However, as some of ways that specific instances of success and fail- scholars have argued (Denrell, 2003), management ure are constructed and dispersed through popular books and articles based on individual cases and management literature and the media. examples can have a potentially problematic role in Our research object is the Finland-based telecom management learning. group, Nokia. That company can be seen as a re- In general, the research literature views the pro- velatory case that allows us to examine both the liferation of these success or failure narratives in predominant framing and explanations of success popular management books, Harvard-style cases, related to its rise to become a leading global player company histories,