Skillful Performance ─ Enacting Capabilities, Knowledge, Competence, and Expertise in Organizations

One of the most intriguing questions since the time of Plato concerns what defines skillful performance in terms of specific capabilities, knowledge, competence, and expertise. As Frederick Taylor famously noted, an answer to that question would enable us to know what to focus on and what to do to improve the performance of individuals, groups, and organizations. Although we have come to know a great deal about the 'properties' of capabilities, knowledge, competence, and expertise at large, we know significantly less about how they are enacted in skillful performance. Thus, how skillful performance draws on knowledge, how skills develop, and how competencies and capabilities are put to action are still eluding us. Process thinking has not sufficiently explored skillful performance.

This book aims to address this gap. It brings together scholars from different backgrounds, traditions, and disciplines whose common perspective is distinctly process-oriented. They seek to rethink capabilities, knowledge, competence, and expertise, not as if these phenomena were already accomplished but, on the contrary, as processes in the making - as performative accomplishments. Such rethinking opens up several new conversations and extends the range of inquiry about how capabilities, knowledge, competence, and expertise are accomplished in practice, and, consequently, how they may be improved.

Jorgen Sandberg is Professor in the School of Business at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research interests include competence and learning in organizations, leadership, practice-based research, sensemaking, theory development, qualitative research methods and philosophy of science. His work has appeared in several journals, including Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Harvard Business Review, and Review of Educational Research. He has published several books, including Managing Understanding in Organizations (with Targama, Sage, 2007), Constructing Research Questions: Doing Interesting Research (with Alvesson, Sage, 2013), and numerous book chapters. He serves on the Editorial Boards of Academy of Management Review, Journal of Organizational Behavior and Organization Studies.

Linda Rouleau is Professor at the management department of HEC Montreal and guest Professor at UMEA School of Business and Economics in Sweden. Her research work focuses on micro-strategy and strategizing in pluralistic contexts. She is also researching on the strategic sensemaking role of middle managers and leaders. In the last few years, she has published in peer reviewed journals such as Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Accounting, Organization and Society, Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, etc. She is co-responsible for the GePS (Study Group of strategy-as-practice, HEC Montreal). She is also leading an international and interdisciplinary network on " (www.organizingextremecontexts.org).


Ann Langley is Professor of Strategic Management at HEC Montreal, Canada and holder of the Canada research chair in Strategic management in pluralistic settings. Her research focuses on strategic change, inter-professional collaboration and the practice of strategy in complex organisations. She is particularly interested in process-oriented research and methodology and has published a number of papers on that topic. In 2013, she was co-guest editor with Clive Smallman, Haridimos Tsoukas and Andrew Van de Ven of a Special Research Forum of Academy of Management Journal on Process Studies of Change in Organizations and Management. She is also coeditor of the journal Strategic Organization.

Haridimos Tsoukas (www.htsoukas.com) holds the Columbia Ship Management Chair in Strategic Management at the Department of Business and Public Administration, University of Cyprus, Cyprus and is a Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the International Symposium on Process Organization Studies (with Ann Langley). His research is informed by process philosophy, phenomenology, and neo-Aristotelian perspectives on reason and the social. His interests include: knowledge-based perspectives on organizations and management; organizational becoming; practical reason in management and policy studies; and meta-theoretical issues in organizational issues in organizational and management research.