Temporal Tensions of Dynamic Capabilities: The Integration of External Resources and the Implications of Assetization for Non-Profit Hybrid Organizations

The literature on dynamic capabilities takes assets as givens, leaving the processes through which organizational assets are created or integrated under-explored. In this paper, we argue that the contingent socio-material practices of diverse organizational actors are implicated in the transformation of external resources into organizational assets – defined as a process of assetization. Based on an extensive, qualitative study of Danish research grant funding to universities, we show that researchers – as organizational actors – frame and integrate external resources as organizational assets in the pursuit of career-related goals. In so doing, they adopt an investee logic that configures the organization of universities in potentially problematic ways, reinforcing the unequal concentration of organizational assets. Following from this, we show that the organizing of resources and assets engenders a range of temporal tensions, in particular associated with temporariness of research funding resources and the uncertainty that this engenders for organizational actors. These findings advance our theoretical understanding of dynamic capabilities by emphasizing the temporal tensions inherent to the management of resources and assets.