Keeping up with the decarbonization: Conceptualizing and investigating incumbents’ responses to transition pressures in the post-Paris world

Incumbents are central regime actors who simultaneously adapt to transitions and actively shape them. This study has two objectives: advance the conceptualization around these actors’ behaviors in contemporary transition processes and demonstrate a novel research approach to study this behavior in practice. The focus is on incumbents’ responses to transition-related external pressures. These responses are studied by reviewing related work from organization and management literature, as well as conducting an empirical case study in the aviation sector. The theoretical and empirical insights are combined through flexible pattern matching into a conceptual framework, which simultaneously accommodates a holistic view of different types of responses incumbents use to navigate the complex operating environment, while also supporting particularity that goes beyond strategy talk. For the empirical investigation, this research utilizes incumbent airlines’ transition risk work as a source of information on what external pressures these actors themselves perceive and the responses they operationalize. The empirical case study illustrates how by distinguishing between standard, inconsistent, and unconventional response areas that incumbents take part in, even a snapshot analysis of a contemporary transition phenomenon can reveal what is happening in socio-technical regimes. The analysis also pinpoints how responses have two important characteristics that signify the importance of acknowledging the variety of responses that incumbents have at their disposal: multi-functionality and parallelity. Together, the insights of this paper can support the study and understanding of the complex, heterogeneous, and nuanced behavior of incumbent organizations, and encourage more research efforts on transitions in the making.