Ambidexterity-as-Practice: Understanding the Role of the Manager in IT-Services Projects.

We argue that the literature on ambidexterity, defined here as the simultaneous enactment of exploration and exploitation, does not fully explore the detailed practices by which this may be achieved in practical, complex organisational working structures. This paper presents a qualitative insight into the management of ambidexterity in such an environment, specifically, IT-services projects, using the manager as the unit of analysis. We use this to investigate the idea of ambidexterity-as-practice, which has been underexplored. In particular, we examine the management of intellectual capital (human, social and organisational) to develop a more fine-grained understanding of the micro-foundations of ambidextrous practices. We show that the forms of intellectual capital are entwined with one another and with the processes of exploitation and exploration, and that to conceive of them as separate, as the literature to date has done, is an insufficient theorisation. We posit that this is an area that requires further investigation. Authors: