An­drew Ink­pen

The fields of strategy and or­gan­iz­a­tion­al the­ory de­scribe or­gan­iz­a­tions as per­petu­ally en­gaged in find­ing a bal­ance between the de­mands ori­gin­at­ing in their ex­tern­al en­vir­on­ments and the cap­ab­il­it­ies and re­sources with­in their in­tern­al en­vir­on­ments. This elu­sive equi­lib­ri­um be­comes even more tenu­ous dur­ing peri­ods of en­vir­on­ment­al change and dis­con­tinu­ity when or­gan­iz­a­tions seek to bal­ance their fo­cus between ex­ploit­a­tion activ­it­ies to lever­age in­cum­bent skills, cap­ab­il­it­ies and re­sources, against ex­ploit­a­tion activ­it­ies to at­tempt to forge new sources of com­pet­it­ive ad­vant­age. This study ex­plores the ten­sions between ex­plor­a­tion and ex­ploit­a­tion with­in the oil and gas in­dustry, which is part of the glob­al en­ergy sys­tem that is in the throes of a ma­jor trans­formation.

This study ad­dresses a crit­ic­al chal­lenge in stra­tegic man­age­ment re­search: A tend­ency to frame re­search with­in es­tab­lished paradigms, the­or­et­ic­al and meth­od­o­lo­gic­al bound­ar­ies, which con­strains the emer­gence of nov­el con­cepts. Fo­cus­ing on the concept of “ab­sence”—the non-oc­cur­rence of ex­pec­ted events or phe­nom­ena and the ap­pear­ance of un­ex­pec­ted ones—the re­search pro­poses such an an­om­aly as a power­ful but un­der re­searched trig­ger for identi­fy­ing so far ig­nored phe­nom­ena, for gen­er­at­ing new hy­po­theses, and for fos­ter­ing new the­or­et­ic­al in­sights in the con­text of ab­duct­ive reas­on­ing.