On Thursday 30 January 2020 at 11:00 in room 2628-M211, Christina Bidmon, post.doc. researcher, Catolica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, Portugal will give a seminar based on the paper that won the best paper award at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in 2019 (see MGMT news)

When incumbents change their mind: Temporal maneuvering in technology shifts 
- by Christina Bidmon, René Bohnsack

Everyone is welcome!

Abstract
How actors evaluate the prospects of novel technologies is unlikely to remain stable over time. In this paper, we focus on a specific group of actors, incumbents, and study how the five largest German car manufacturers publicly framed a potential technology shift from combustion to electric engine in the 25-year period from 1993 to 2017. Based on 125 letters to shareholders and 328 public CEO interviews, we find that the car manufacturers were able to maintain ambiguity about the proximity of a potential technology shifts over a sustained period in time. We discuss temporal maneuvering as a distinct way of temporal framing that enables the communicative construction of ambiguity to accommodate opposing stakeholder demands and retain the flexibility to adjust to ongoing developments. We describe three maneuvering tactics that underlie this mechanism and how the car manufacturers used them to temper or stir expectations on the breakthrough of electric mobility in Germany. How actors such as incumbents communicate about the prospects of a technology is important because it can guide meaning- making and prospective action in the fields that emerge around novel technologies.