The anatomy and causal structure of a corporate myth: Nokia by the book

In this paper we conceptualize explanations of company-specific commercial performance as corporate myths. To improve our understanding of anatomy and causal structure of corporate myths, we analyze publications that deal with Nokia's historical transformation from a loss-making 1980s conglomerate to a focused and successful telecommunications company in the early 1990s. From a corpus of related literature, 89 causal arguments are identified and analyzed in terms of the logic of the arguments employed. The analysis shows that: (1) most existing analyses offer either a specific or a biased explanation for Nokia's success; (2) very few explanations are either plausible or logical; and (3) it is most unlikely that another company would achieve the same outcomes even if exactly the same decisions were made. Even though combining and comparing different explanations does not enhance the validity of any specific historical interpretation of Nokia's evolution or commercial success, it does offer an improved conceptual understanding of the ingredients found in corporate myths.

The extent to which management and organizational studies affect business practice has remained largely unresolved (Gulati 2007). What we do know is that managers do not read Administrative Science Quarterly or the Academy of Management Journal (or indeed any 'scientific' management-focused journals). Instead, managers engage in 'management discourse' through which academic scholars, consultants, business school teachers, journalists and practicing business people generate manifestations of how (and why) both organizations and management function (Furusten 1999, 15 -17). A quick glance at the books that are most popular on amazon.com, for example, reveals that popular management books are an important part of this particular sector. Add in executive biographies, a variety of history books and business magazines and it is easy to achieve an understanding of the de facto sources of managerial knowledge in modern organizations.
Earlier research into popular sources of knowledge regarding management techniques has primarily focused on the structural patterns and evolution of management fashions and 'popular management books' (for recent reviews, see Engwall and Kipping 2004;ten Bos and Heusinkveld 2007). 1 The approach we adopt complements this research tradition but diverges from it by focusing on the explanations for company-specific business processes offered by many authors. In other words, we examine the topic of corporate myths (cf. Delahaye et al. 2009 that focuses on corporate history). Currently, an increasing number of stories about the successes, failures and transformations of several celebrity companies (Apple, General Motors, General Electric, etc.) are appearing. These stories build images and reflections that to some extent feed the genre of popular management literature. Stories of this type also affect how the corporations concerned engage in sense-making, how they interact with their public image, and thus generate further material for myth-building (Boje, Fedor, and Rowland 1982;Foster et al. 2011).
From this motivational starting point, we examine case-based and/or historical explanations for Nokia's turnaround in the early 1990s, together with the company's subsequent market dominance and success that lasted for more than a decade. The case is relevant for our research objective because Nokia's rise to a position of market leadership in the mid-1990s has been characterized as a mythical journey in a large number of publications. There is of course no doubt that the company's metamorphosis from a northern European conglomerate manufacturing paper, rubber boots, tyres and televisions to a modern global telecommunications concern can seem peculiar and thus demands some form of explanation. Our research question deals with the anatomy and causal structure of such explanations by examining two questions: (1) To what extent do these explanations follow causal logic as it is understood in the social sciences? (2) What are the elements of a corporate myth? We do not directly analyse the extent to which such texts have affected business communities, but rather the nature of the claims about success which, by and large, employ and play with causal rhetoric (e.g. 'CEO X created a positive attitude in the organization').
We collected most, possibly all, relevant writing (journalistic texts excluded) on the subject of Nokia that has been published in Finland and internationally. From these texts we identified 89 causal arguments and coded the material in terms of the logic of the arguments employed. Our analysis revealed that: (1) most analyses offer some specific explanation for Nokia's success; (2) very few of the explanations offered are plausible or logical; and (3) it is very unlikely that another company would achieve the same outcome even if it made the same decisions.

Literature review
The anatomy of popular management literature and corporate myths Popular management literature has emerged as an important research topic in organizational studies. As well as enriching our understanding of the evolution of management research, it also enhances our comprehension of the ways in which management practice seeks out and consumes knowledge. Research findings include the distinction between academic research and popular management knowledge (Kieser 1997), the importance of societal context in the promotion of certain types of management models (Barley and Kunda 1992), the fashion-like nature of popular management knowledge (Abrahamson and Fairchild 1999), and the diffusion of popular management knowledge into managerial practice (Doorewaard and van Bijsterveld 2001;Scarbrough and Swan 2001).
In connection with our research agenda, the distinction between popular management literature and academic business research is elemental because corporate myths -our specific research topic -are built using both traditions and all three follow systems of logic that are inherently different (Kieser and Leiner 2009;Ponzoni and Boersma 2011).
Brief sketches of the attributes of these three knowledge-generation systems can be found in Table 1.
As the entries in Table 1 illustrate, at least three different knowledge systems with an interest in business organizations and management exist. Popular management literature is primarily a business segment closely related to management consulting, executive education and other fields of service provision that target companies and practicing managers. The popular management genre follows business logic with actors aiming to produce new marketable items for the largest possible audiences. As Alfred Kieser (Kieser and Nicolai 2005;Bort and Kieser 2011) and others have demonstrated, the interest shown in knowledge is not intended to extract reliable or valid information, but to feed developments in the management 'industry'.
Academic business research studies corporate activity by following techniques similar to those employed in other social sciences and -to some extent -by imitating techniques used in scientific investigations. While the results obtained from academic business research cannot be fed directly into managerial practice, many of the research results can be translated into business activity. On the other hand, the logic for expanding knowledge is primarily scientific and includes expectations regarding criticism, transparency, reliability and validity. Even though the line between 'academic' and 'popular' is sometimes thin, they are two separate systems.
Corporate myth is an interesting topic because of its partial membership in both of the knowledge systems already described. The most obvious feature of corporate myth literature is its focus on specific companies. Books such as Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired -and Secretive -Company Really Works (Lashinsky 2012) or At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit (O'Boyle 1998) are written by journalists and the rhetoric employed is similar to that in popular management literature. There are, however, historical works written by professional historians, such as Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition by Harvard professor Geoffrey Jones (2005), which are academic by nature although focusing on one company. A specific case is books and articles that adopt a critical approach to scandals and misbehavior by individual managers in specific companies, such as The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (McLean and Elkind 2003) or David M. Boje's (1995) classic account of Disney as a storytelling organization.
Boje's study is of particular interest as it touches directly on Disney's role as an active producer of myths concerning its own identity. In the same genre, Hegele and Kieser (2001) articulate how legends involving GE's Jack Welch are used to frame both his life and his career as an example of successful leadership. The important message in Hegele and Kieser's work is the understanding that legend-building requires a communicative relationship between the author(s) and the audience: The audience, the business community, has chosen to let Welch shine as a good hero. Legends are not falsifiable, either by O'Boyle or by historians who collect evidence in a more scientific fashion. They live as long as the believers want them to live, or they die if more attractive heroes come along. (Hegele and Kieser 2001, 308) Although Hegele and Kieser draw a distinction between myth and legend, the Jack Welch case reflects the importance of stories as sense-making devices (Gioia and Thomas 1996;Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005) used in rhetorical contests involving corporate reputations (Suddaby and Greenwood 2005). In terms of rhetorical persuasion (Sillince 2002), simplicity is a virtue. Corporate myth expositions typically adopt only a single angle when explaining either success or failure. In some cases this is a well-known A social sciences discipline that includes the study of all possible topics connected with organizations, management, finance and other business issues.
Genre development Two specific modes of genre development.
One involves management fashions emerging and evolving in repeated cycles with each fashion being followed by another. The other involves a broad range of literature that recycles and revamps existing and established management concepts.
Corporate myth narratives fall into a number of academic and popular management genres, all the way from business histories to 'airport-shop books'. One easily identifiable genre is critical accounts of companies such as Enron that have failed for specific reasons (unethical behavior, economic losses, quality problems, etc.).
Genre development takes the form of scientific discourse in which: (1) paradigms follow natural evolutionary life cycles including variation, selection and retention; and (2) paradigms compete with each other and changes in dominance are the result.

Generalizability
Popular management knowledge is based on the concept of universality -i.e. that the lessons, models and suggestions offered can help in managing all types of companies.
Corporate myth narratives typically adopt a specific attitude to success and argue for the superiority of one specific cause or more specific causes.
In terms of phenomenology, a heterogeneous area.
(Continued) Depending on the mandate that may (or may not) have been given by the target corporation, archive material, interviews, public material and other material that typically features in historical case studies.
All types of material and methods are used.

Authors Business professors, management 'gurus'
and other competent writers whose reputations have not been spoiled by being considered too academic.
Academic scholars, business historians, journalists and writers operating in the popular management book genre.
Mainly professional researchers affiliated to universities or research institutes.
Academic groups with research interest Scholars of popular management literature, researchers into management fashions and management 'gurus', and institutional theorists.
leadership figure, but specific strategic moves (as in the case of Southwest Airlines) can also be proposed as arguments for a company's success. The number of possible explanations can also be assumed to be high, reflecting the heterogeneity of the management sector when compared to the many types of readers who consume corporate myth narratives. Finally, the precise motivations that encourage authors to produce corporate myth stories are unknown. Initially, it would appear that companies allocate resources (i.e. money and access) to some authors while rejecting others, but the exact role played by corporations in myth-building is unclear (for a functional use of history, see Rowlinson and Hassard 1993). More importantly, knowledge regarding the causal structure of corporate myths is either scattered or nonexistent.

Causality and corporate myths
In broad terms, causality describes the relationship between two or more variables through which causes (inputs) are transformed into one or more effects (outputs). The application of causal methods has moved in an increasingly mathematical and theoretical direction, with causal inferences being drawn by collecting large quantities of data and analyzing these using tools such as probability theory, graphs and counterfactuals (Pearl 2000;Morgan and Winship 2007). The strengths of causality approaches lie in their ability to formulate logically valid conclusions from data that is complex and often difficult to observe. The predominate use of causal methodology has been in the fields of medicine, political science and social science, as the effects of interventions such as pharmaceutical compounds or governmental policies easily lend themselves to causal investigations (e.g. Thompson, Easton, and Goldgar 2003). In our research context, we assume that: (1) popular management books are not usually interested in strict causality; and (2) academic research, by definition, takes causality as an important issue in research activity and related reporting. Causal arguments imply that x happened because of y, and this often involves x doing something to y. On the other hand, if x is merely a catalyst for the occurrence of y, a causal link cannot be claimed because x is only a condition that allowed y to happen, with the real cause lying elsewhere. As an example, it can be said that oxygen is a required condition for wood to burn, but intense heat is the real cause of the burning (Pearl 2000). Extending this line of thinking to corporate myths, factors presented as essential requirements for a company's success that are actually no more than conditions can be deemed to be implausible -or at least weak -arguments for such success.
The nature of the relationship between causes and effects can be revealed by considering what is sufficient and what is necessary (Pearl 2000). Sufficient causes 'measure the capacity of x to produce y' (Pearl 2000, 18, original emphasis), whereas necessary causes measure the possibility that y can occur without x. In other words, if x is a sufficient cause, it is enough to produce outcome y when acting alone, while a necessary cause is needed to achieve outcome y but may not be able to produce the desired outcome on its own. As their definitions make clear, sufficient and (especially) necessary causality are closely related to counterfactual arguments. Consistent with arguments proposed by Durand and Vaara (2009) and the 'counterfactual history' method, testing for causality between a specific claim and a company's success requires that alternative scenarios in which the claimed cause had not happened be imagined, together with an evaluation of whether the company would have become successful in such circumstances (cf. Booth et al. 2009).
Singular causation and general causation are two different levels of causal claim that also require a short introduction. Singular causes are particular and scenario-specific, which means that they contain more information and are difficult to generalize unless they can be reduced to general causes (Pearl 2000). General causes, on the other hand, are less bound to any context and, as such, resemble umbrellas that can accommodate many singular causes of the same type. Pearl (2000, 309-310) employs the claims that 'a car accident was the cause of Joe's death' and 'car accidents cause deaths' as examples of singular and general causes, respectively. For management research, singular and general causes have a number of key implications. The idiosyncrasies and importance of context in case studies and narratives mean that their causal inferences are usually singular by nature. As the majority of academic research is aimed at making discoveries and contributions that can be generalized for other applications, most studies have to make the transition from singular to general causation and an ongoing debate on the relationship between them exists in philosophical literature (Hitchcock 1995). It is however clear that the process of conversion -that is, generalization from the results of case studies -often lacks credibility. In the study of management cases, especially those that investigate aspects of company performance, it is important to decide whether the factor or factors being proposed as causal are peculiar to the organization in question or if they can be found in all companies. As the fundamental difference that exists between singular and general causation also affects the credibility of any claim related to company success, the causal nature of each argument must be characterized as either singular -company-specific -or general (Pearl 2000). By operating in this manner, false generalizations can be distinguished from sound ones and, conversely, general claims that are not justifiable can be determined and excluded.
To summarize, having discussed corporate myths and especially their potential causal structure, two questions can be asked: (1) What constitutes an adequate number of explanations in the context of a single corporate myth? (2) Do all corporate myths require a specific causal structure?

Method
We decided to study Finland-based Nokia as it is a company whose success in the early 1990s has attracted a large number of explanations (for detailed information on Nokia's history, see . We began by assembling a comprehensive corpus of Nokia-related literature (Appendix 1). All available texts on the company were identified using several reference and academic databases as well as local libraries and normal internet searches. A set of exclusion criteria was then established to reduce any bias related to subjective exclusion (Glass 1976). The criteria used in selecting items for inclusion in this study were: (1) texts had to deal in some way with Nokia's success in the early 1990s (cf. Aspara et al. 2011); and (2) articles published in newspapers and business magazines were excluded.
A total of 59 pertinent publications were identified, read and carefully examined for references to factors that were claimed to have had an influence on Nokia's success. The resulting 432 claims were coded and assembled into a table, together with details of their respective authors and publication dates. We also coded the time phase of each claim with the aim of obtaining an accurate representation of how explanations for Nokia's success evolved over time. The set of success factors gradually became saturated, and each of the 432 claims was allocated to one of a set of 89 distinct claims for Nokia's success. In accordance with the methods of meta-synthesis (Jensen and Allen 1996;Dixon-Woods et al. 2004), the 89 claims were then sorted into 12 broad themes that represent domains for the sources of Nokia's competitive advantage. These included both firm endogenous factors (organizational architecture, leadership, superior products, etc.) and firm exogenous factors (government policy, demand patterns, coincidence, etc.). These domains and the claims attributed to them enabled us to formulate a system dynamics model for Nokia's success, while the coded time phases attached to each claim revealed important causal relationships and interdependences between the different claims.
Even though we attempted to compile a comprehensive list of publications, the possibility that some important texts could have been overlooked is an acknowledged, but minor, limitation on the results obtained from this study. It was, however, noticed that most of the claims made, if not all, were presented by at least two authors, which in turn suggests that the most likely result of including material from additional, as-yetundiscovered items of literature would be to only increase the overall quantity of claims, not the number of distinct claims and/or their quality. Another limitation in this study is the potential for overlooking one or more proposed success factors as a result of reader subjectivity. In addition, the allocation of each suggested success factor to one of 89 distinct claims may have resulted in some of the depth or detail associated with individual proposals being lost. On the other hand, even with these limitations, it is fair to assume that the meta-analysis presented in this study is a comprehensive representation of the factors that have been proposed by a wide range of parties for Nokia's success.
After identifying the 12 broader domains, the causal properties of each of the 89 distinct claims for Nokia's success were analyzed. In practical terms, this meant examining the underlying logic of the explanations provided and testing the validity of any causal statements made. To ensure the maximum possible degree of objectivity, a panel of four external experts was employed to examine the causal logic in each individual claim. These experts were chosen on the strength of their formal knowledge of: (1) the philosophy of science and causality; (2) causal modeling in management science; and (3) the historical analysis of business phenomena. Each expert was given a list of the successrelated claims that had been identified and was requested to rate the soundness of each claim using the causality tests introduced above. In their deliberations, the experts were asked to ignore any background knowledge that they might have about Nokia and focus purely on the logic employed and the plausibility of each claim proposition at the level of specific sentences. The objective was to isolate causal arguments that, when examined in the most objective manner possible, would still appear to be beneficial to Nokia even if the company had performed in a way or ways that were less successful. Table 2 is a presentation of the assessments made by the four external experts. The evaluation was performed in a rudimentary set theoretical manner, with the 'Rating' column indicating the degree of agreement and the remainder of the columns indicating how many claims corresponded to each degree of agreement. For example, for eight of the 89 claims, all four experts agreed that the claim under consideration implied causality, while 21 of the 89 claims were deemed by all four experts to not imply any degree of causality. A total of 534 evaluations were made by each member of the panel, and all four experts agreed upon a claim belonging to a specific set in 122 instances.
The analysis process was continued by examining each of the tests for causality separately and was concluded with an overall discussion of their adequacy or inadequacy. In this evaluation, a claim was deemed to belong to a specific set if it had been allocated to that set by at least three of the four experts on the panel. Using this procedure, 26 of the 89 claims were determined to be evident causes -which in turn means that more than twothirds of the claims do not imply any significant degree of causality -while 36 of the 89 claims belong to the condition set.
To improve our understanding of the composition of corporate myths, the causal properties associated with each of the 89 claims were then examined in the context of the 12 domains. Using a weighted average of ratings by the four experts, each domain was awarded a score based on the causal properties of the claims allocated to it. This provided an indication of the general tendencies in corporate myth constructs by labelling each domain as predominantly causal or conditional, as either sufficient or necessary and as either singular or general. Figure 1 synthetizes our research process.

Analysis
The heterogeneity of the 89 claims for Nokia's success reflects the dissonance that often exists in accounts of successful company performance. Even though they can be broadly categorized into 12 domains, the claims differ significantly in their plausibility, generality, nature, temporality and context. In order to illustrate the dissonance that exists in explaining Nokia's success, a brief overview of the multitude of different claims extracted from Nokia-related literature is presented in Table 3. The 12 thematic domains are listed in the left-hand column headed 'Genre of explanation'. Table 3 presents all aspects of the repertoire that writers have employed when attempting to explain Nokia's success in the 1990s. The first impression derived from the contents of the table is that it effectively mirrors the contents of a primer in business    (Mäenpää and Luukkainen 1994, 13) Mäkinen (1995), , Bruun, Wallén, and Hyrkäs (1999), Saari (2000), , Steinbock (2001Steinbock ( , 2003a, Moen and Lilja (2004), Steinbock (1998), Sokala (2002) Government policies The government's decision to distribute business opportunities in the telecom market evenly was critical to Nokia's telecom business.
'Rapid product innovation, coupled with design flair and control over system design, became the core part of Nokia strategy . . . Nokia's close customer focus paid particular dividends . . . ' (Richards 2004, 179) Mäkinen (1995), Paija (2001a) Strategy Nokia's determination to succeed arose from its use of strategic intent.
'The other central [success] factor has been internationalization. Being a small country, it has been clear from an early stage that the domestic market is not large enough to support the development of a high-tech industry like telecommunications.' (Blomström and Kokko 2002, 253) Pulkkinen (1997), Gooderham and Nordhaug (2003), Castells and Himanen (2002) Coincidence Nokia's success would not have been possible without coincidence.
'Coincidence has, luckily, had its part in Nokia's success as well.' (Lemola 1996, 171) Owen (2004), Bruun, Wallén, and Hyrkäs (1999) management -adding Management accounting and removing Coincidence, Government policies and National environment would turn the list of domains into the contents of an MBA course. It is therefore reasonable to assume that a successful celebrity company will usually attract a large number of writers who produce a heterogeneous group of explanations. Second, explanations associated with each of the 12 domains are clearly not equal in terms of their popularity. For example, domains (i.e. broad themes) involving strategy and leadership are popular while others such as 'Superior products' or 'Coincidence' win relatively few citations. The feature that distinguishes the more popular and less popular themes appears to be that the former reflect currently popular academic discourses in the management and strategy fields, while the latter are not academic in nature. It can thus be asserted that although the explanations put forward are said to be inductive, they generally reflect current themes in academic discourse. Third, it is also clear that some explanations are very positive towards Nokia, as are some writers (e.g. Steinbock 2010), while other explanations assign a lower value to Nokia's strategic decisions in situations dominated by larger contextual factors. Although there is no unequivocal evidence of commercial relationships between Nokia and specific authors, we may logically assume that such relationships may exist. It therefore seems that the more closely an author is involved with the focal company, the more positive the interpretations related to that company's management. Ultimately, creating your own myth or using ghostwriters makes more sense than allowing academic individuals to enter the company environment (cf. Hegele and Kieser 2001).
To identify larger trends in corporate myths, an analysis of the causal structures implicit in the 12 domains was also required. Table 4 shows the strength of each success factor's membership in the different groups of causal properties. As is typical in set analysis (Pajunen 2008 Examining each causal property in isolation to determine when membership is 0.75 or more (i.e. strongly significant), five themes can be interpreted as causes, four can be interpreted as conditions, three as sufficient explanations, two as necessary, four as specific to Nokia (i.e. singular) and seven as general explanations for success. In overall terms, examining success factors in this logical manner does not result in any clear pattern or a specific 'formula for success'. The next step in the analysis was to map combinations of causal properties in two dimensions: Cause/Condition against Singular/General ( Figure 2) and Cause/Condition against Sufficient/Necessary (Figure 3). Examination of causal properties mapped using the Cause/Condition and Sufficient/ Necessary dimensions reveals interesting and even dramatic insights into the causal nature of success factors. Only one, the possession of Technological capabilities, emerges without doubt as a sufficient cause for success. Both Superior products and International orientation are causal factors in Nokia's success, but they are not sufficient explanations. In contrast, the weighting given to International business environment indicates that it is sufficient for Nokia's success (the company's global achievements would have otherwise been rather difficult), but its positioning indicates that it is an essential condition for success rather than a cause. The remaining success factors are clustered around the origin, which means that they are more conditions than causes. Such weak membership in both categories indicates that most of the success factors plotted in the figure possess little or no explanatory power.
Examination of causal properties mapped using the Cause/Condition and Singular/ General dimensions strengthens the comments made regarding Figure 2 above. Once again there are only two factors -Technological capabilities and International orientation -that can be seen as specific causes for Nokia's success, while two factors that could be responsible for Nokia's success -Superior products and Process management -are not exclusive to the outcome. Almost all the other success factors either have low partial memberships in both dimensions or are very general in nature. Interestingly, the Great leader explanation is located in 'no man's land' as neither a cause nor a condition for success, even though it is essentially a company-specific property.

Conclusion
The tendency to interpret historical processes from the perspective of successful outcomes in popular management literature has recently been criticized and labeled as the 'halo effect' (Rosenzweig 2007). In examining the claims made for Nokia's success, we noticed that many of the causal claims are so vague that it is difficult for even a small panel of experts to agree on any of the claims' causal attributes. These results may be indicative of a more general tendency to present causal arguments based on intuition, narrow theoretical constructs and subjective guesswork rather than on solid data. For example, an argument such as 'Nokia was successful because it focused on phone designs' is not justifiable unless consumer-related data exist that demonstrate a clear preference for Nokia's phone designs. We contribute to the critical study on popular management literature and corporate myths in three ways. First, we position corporate myths as a literature genre that exists in the space between academic business studies and popular management literature (cf. Kieser 1997). Corporate myth literature is a hybrid form that focuses on specific companies. Of particular importance is the notion that corporate myth authors use management literature as a source of concepts and ideas when proposing explanations for the evolution of companies, a tendency that was clearly evident in the case of Nokia. The causal categories identified provided broad coverage of the issues studied and theorized in the strategic management field as a whole. A speculative interpretation of the tendency to deductively reflect the content of management literature rather than provide externally generated explanations for a specific company's evolution would be that authors simply do not have sufficient data to offer inductive explanations of individual events. Likewise, company historians have to cover the entire life of a company by embedding individual events (such as company turnarounds) into the flow of historical processes.
Second, this study offers an enhanced understanding of the catalytic influence of corporate myths and the forms of research required to investigate these topics further. The first avenue for future research would be an examination of the motives and backgrounds of the authors who produce corporate myth literature. Important questions that have not yet been dealt with in a thorough manner include: (1) What is the role of corporate communication functions in myth production (cf. Delahaye et al. 2009); (2) To what extent do writers' demographic and other qualities affect the interpretations they offer; and (3) How does access to internal and external corporate material influence the resulting explanations? As corporate myths are widely used in education, public policymaking and other contexts as examples of processes leading to success, these questions are not trivial ones. For example, Nokia has been used as a benchmark case of good management in practically all fields of Finnish society, starting from start-up firms and ending in totally different contexts such as universities and military organizations. From that perspective, it is important to understand the antecedents, processes and outcomes related to the corporate myth genre. Third, corporate myth writing is an important element of the discursive context in which corporations operate. The public image of any listed corporation importantly shapes how it is perceived not only by external observers but also by employees and corporate owners. Thus, the structure and content of the corpus of literature focused on the specific corporation is not trivial for the focal organization. Instead of aiming to manipulate the discourse, we propose that corporations allow researchers to access internal materials without governing the content of research agendas. That is, by allowing heterogeneous and critical accounts of their evolution, corporations may engage in open-ended sense-making and allow the emergence of alternative histories and ultimately scenarios for further development (cf. Booth et al. 2009). To clarify our argument, we did not find any critical account of Nokia's transformation. Instead, all publications were solely focused on explaining Nokia's evolution from hindsight instead of building counterfactual or critical interpretations. Compromising some of the corporation's polished outlook would certainly result in a richer understanding of the ingredients for success.