Developing issue-selling effectiveness over time: issue selling as resourcing.(Report)

This paper considers how issue sellers advance new issues within an organization over time, and how they gain competence at doing so. Using ethnographic, archival, and interview data spanning a six-year period, it describes the moves made by members of a high-tech manufacturer to introduce environmental considerations into the design of new manufacturing processes. A significant shift occurred in the pattern of moves used over time, and explanations for the shift are found in two accompanying dynamics: The gradual accumulation of assets by the group advancing the issues and their adjustment of moves used based on earlier experiences. The findings are used to develop a model of issue selling as resourcing; that is, a practical accomplishment through which issue sellers' moves enact key schemas held by issue recipients, triggering their attention and action on the issue. Issue selling as resourcing builds on recent work on resources and organizational boundaries to address how organizational contexts shape opportunities for and barriers to issue selling, and to identify how issue sellers learn to operate effectively within them.

Key words: issue selling; resources; organizational boundaries; environmental management

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An extensive literature on issue selling and upward influence shows that individuals outside of top management teams can shape organizations' strategic actions by directing the attention of others to particular issues and synthesizing and interpreting information from diverse sources (Burgelman 1983, Dutton and Jackson 1987, Floyd and Woolridge 1992, Dutton and Ashford 1993). These individuals and their actions are important to emergent organizational change processes and the incremental adaptation of organizations to their changing external environments (Floyd and Woolridge 1997, Dutton et al. 2001). Although the behaviors of issue sellers have been extensively studied, much less is known about how organizational contexts shape opportunities for, and barriers to, issue selling, and how these, in turn, influence the unfolding of issue selling over time and its effectiveness as a mechanism of organizational change (Dutton and Ashford 1993, Dutton et al. 2002).

Recent work by Dutton et al. (2001) advances a practice perspective (Bourdieu 1977) on issue selling and identifies issue-selling activities as "moves" or situated interactions (Pentland 1992) that express practical knowledge about how to bring about change in an organizational context. Organizational contexts are not simply backdrops for organizational activity, however; they constitute the very meaning structure individuals draw upon as they act within an organization (Clegg and Hardy 1996, Lueger et al. 2005). Central to understanding issue selling as practice, then, is an understanding of how issue sellers' moves tap into meanings prevalent in the organization to enable them to bring about desired changes. Much empirical work on issue selling captures only a relatively "pallid representation of context" (Dutton et al. 2002, p. 367), limiting portrayals of symbolic aspects of organizational context such as meanings and norms and their role in shaping issue-selling attempts and their effectiveness.

This paper builds on the practice perspective on issue selling by using ethnographic, archival, and interview data spanning six years to explore a series of situated issue-selling efforts at Chipco, (1) a high-tech manufacturer. Focusing on the moves made by sellers, interactions between sellers and recipients, and changes in each over time, the analysis probes how the sellers came to understand the meanings, interests, and norms of the recipient group, and use this contextual knowledge to improve their ability to influence this group. Two related research questions are addressed. First, what makes issue-selling moves effective at generating attention and action from others within an organizational context? And, second, how does issue selling change over time, and what mechanisms contribute to this change?

The analysis leads to a model of issue selling as a form of resourcing, defined as the "creation in practice of assets" that enable actors to enact schemas that create action within organizations (Feldman 2004, p. 296). Issue-selling moves found to be effective at resourcing at Chipco struck a balance between representing novelty associated with the issues and appealing to dominant schemas. Two key empirical mechanisms contributed to issue sellers becoming better at resourcing over time: First, sellers accumulated assets such as formal authority and normative knowledge that enabled them to launch moves; second, they learned from experiences of failure or resistance to adjust their moves.