Opportunizing A classic grounded theory study on business management
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Abstract
Opportunizing emerged as the core variable of this classic GT study on business and management. Opportunizing is the recurrent main concern that businesses have to continually resolve, and it explains how companies recurrently create, identify, seize or exploit situations to maintain their growth or survival. Opportunizing is the recurrent creation and re-creation of opportunities in business. Opportunizing is basically what business managers do and do all the time. The problematic nature of opportunizing is resolved by a core social process of opportunizing and its attached sub-processes that account for change over time and for the variations of the problematic nature of its resolution.
Opportunizing has five main facets. These are conditional befriending (confidence building & modifying behavior), prospecting (e.g. information gaining), weighing up (information appraisal & decision-making), moment capturing (quick intervention for seizing strategic opportunities), and configuration matching (adjusting the business organization to abet the other activities of opportunizing).
On a more abstract level, opportunizing has three more organizational facets: the physically boundary-less, the value hierarchical, and the physically bounded. The first of these called perpetual opportunizing. This emerges from the conjunction of conditional befriending and prospecting. The second facet is called triggering opportunizing. It arises from the coming together of weighing up and moment capturing. The final facet is called spasmodic opportunizing. This happens when moment capturing and configuration matching unite.
Thus, the tree facets of opportunizing are sub-core variables, while the five facets of opportunizing are sub-sub-core variables. The five facets can also be seen as stages of the core process of opportunizing. Yet, they are more than stages, because weighing up is involved throughout.
Each of the five facets of opportunizing also attach to subprocesses that account for the resolving of still more tangible dimensions of opportunizing. For example, confidence building and modifying behavior are two categories of conditional befriending. It is not possible to create opportunities in business without modifying people’s behavior, but this latter is impossible or difficult without confidence building. The model of opportunizing will assist managers in focusing on the most important and problematic. Practitioners will be able to adopt and adapt the theory according to the variation in the data that their individual contexts manifest.
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