Opportunizing: A classic grounded theory study on business and management

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 ofopportunizing 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), andconfiguration 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 valuehierarchical, 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.