Reorganizing from Within: Recalibrating Coordination in Entrepreneurial Ventures

Reorganizing from Within: Recalibrating Coordination in Entrepreneurial Ventures

What happens when fast-growing organizations can no longer rely on the ways of working that once made them successful?

Uniquely positioned through a dual researcher–practitioner lens, this dissertation follows a European technology scale-up from the inside of the organization as it transitions from hypergrowth to a new performance paradigm. Based on a rare embedded three-year longitudinal study, it shows how organizations and their members reorganize by collectively crafting shared organizing principles to recalibrate coordination.

Moving beyond research focused on founding stages or the adoption of strategy tools, the study demonstrates that coordination is not restored through formal structures alone, but through collective strategy toolmaking—the joint production, enactment, and embedding of simple, shared principles that guide decision-making and orient action across the organization.

Adopting a process view of organizing and a practice-based lens, the dissertation reframes how organizing unfolds under scaling conditions, highlighting how temporally structured participation enables new forms of coordinated action and decision-making to emerge and endure.

Finally, the dissertation contributes methodologically through the concept of Inclusion-as-Practice (IaP). It shows how long-term involvement as a researcher–practitioner does not only provide access but generates a distinct form of knowledge—one that captures how organizing is experienced, negotiated, and progressively shaped from within ongoing transformation processes.

Keywords: Reorganizing; Coordination; Strategy Tools; Collective Toolmaking; Entrepreneurial Ventures; Inclusion-as-Practice

Thesis director

Prof. Sylvain Bureau, Full Professor of Entrepreneurship and Art Thinking, ESCP Business School

Referees & Suffragants:

• Prof. Laure Cabantous, Full Professor of Management and Organization Studies, ESCP Business School
• Prof. Claire Champenois, Professor in Entrepreneurship, Audencia

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