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Research Summary: This article examines the adaptation process of a large manufacturer in the Indian steel industry faced with radical sociopolitical shifts in the external ecosystem. It uses the Bower-Burgelman process model in combination with Bourdieu's praxis theory to explain the emergence of competing managerial initiatives and associated contests in the company's internal ecology of strategy-making in terms of socially acquired dispositions. It illuminates process-practice pathways through which top management's resource allocation supported changes in the efficacy of the different forms of capital of the contesting managerial classes, thereby legitimizing the daily "doings" of the rising class and institutionalizing a (re)defined adaptive rule structure. Managerial Summary: How do managers' early influences, including family upbringing and schooling, bear upon organization's renewal strategy? Our study finds that during discontinuities imposed by socioeconomic upheavals, when organizational performance flounders, managerial initiatives are driven by deepest dispositions derived from early age socialization. Competing managerial fractions jostle to impose practices favorable to their longstanding preferences by putting their weight behind preferred product-market choices and seeking appropriate changes in the ineffective internal rule structure. Administration's challenge lies in leveraging internal contests to iteratively allocate resources in search of winning dispositions and configurations aligned with evolving social relations in the external environment. Internal availability of managerial groups from diverse social origins is crucial for the administration to reclaim organizational advantage by arbitrating between contesting practices and practitioner fortunes.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to unpack the conflation between the silence and purported passivity of the Third World NGOs (TNGOs). Explaining the invisibility of their voices in the critical and post-development perspectives, it locates the inquiry in the context of the action of these TNGOs. Design/methodology/approach The paper follows the phronetic research approach, which involves a case study of a locally developed Indian NGO. It uses phronetic inquiry along with Ashis Nandy’s notion of “silent coping” as the conceptual framework. To explain the purported passivity of TNGOs in the texts under global circulation, the paper uses Walter Mignolo’s discussion on “texts in circulation”. Findings The uncertain nature of action – that it begets further action possibilities; precludes the prospect of visualizing such action spaces in the context of their generation. This emergent nature of local action spaces makes it difficult to capture them within the dominating global discursive structures, thereby creating local spaces of agency for the TNGO actors. Selective appropriation of artefacts and texts from the global circulation and the creation of alternate stake structures at the local level support the realization of such action spaces. Further, such local artefacts and texts do not travel into texts circulating globally, thereby rendering the TNGOs invisible and silent in the reading of global texts and leading to the TNGOs being framed as passive. Originality/value This paper locates the voices and acts of the TNGOs and highlights the mechanisms that enable them to silently cope with structures of discursive domination, thereby contributing to post-development studies and post-colonial organizational analysis.