Professor Jochen Koch honored with the Decade Award of the Academy of Management Review
Professor Jochen Koch has recently been honored with the Decade Award of the Academy of Management Review for the paper "Organizational Path Dependence: Opening the Black Box". The article published together with Prof. Dr. Jörg Sydow and Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Georg Schreyögg (both FU Berlin) has been acknowledged the most often quoted article of the past 10 years (2009 - 2019). For the first time ever, it was a team of authors exclusively from German universities that received the prize.
Jörg Sydow, Georg Schreyögg, Jochen Koch: Organizational Path Dependence: Opening the Black Box. In: Academy of Management Review Vol. 34, No. 4.
To enable a better understanding of the underlying logic of path dependence, we set forth a theoretical framework explaining how organizations become path dependent. At its core are the dynamics of self-reinforcing mechanisms, which are likely to lead an organization into a lock-in. By drawing on studies of technological paths, we conceptualize the emergent process of path dependence along three distinct stages. We also use the model to explore breakouts from organizational path dependence and discuss implications for managing and researching organizational paths.