Alex Bitektine

John Molson School of Business, Concordia University · Management

The relationship between institutional logics and organizational legitimacy remains largely unaddressed in organizational theory and management research. We explore how individual evaluators primed with a particular institutional logic react to organizational signals sent by a firm's product/service pricing and by its engagement in corporate social...

Research on the microfoundations of social evaluations requires microtranslation of concepts and measures used in macro-organizational research. The development of valid individual-level measures of organizational legitimacy, reputation, and status presents an essential step in the advancement of organizational theory toward a multilevel perspectiv...

We argue that accounts of relationships among actors, actorhood and institutions are predominantly based on a spatial metaphor of actors operating within institutions. We outline how an inversion of this metaphor – i.e. the perspective that institutions inhabit actors – may prove generative for theory, particularly with respect to recent discussion...

The authors explore how entrepreneurs with limited resources legitimated (or failed to legitimate) a new organizational category in different jurisdictions in Canada despite severe resistance. The authors identify three meso-level domains of institutional action (public, administrative, and legal), where actors intervene to change their macro-insti...

A failure of a large corporate investment project launched by a CEO may affect not only CEO's bonus and equity holdings, but also personal status and future career prospects. Yet, Merton's (1968) “Matthew Effect” would suggest that the risks and benefits associated with risky investment projects may be different for CEOs of different status. High-s...

The decision to trust encompasses evaluation of multiple information cues that are used by evaluators to make inference about the trustee’s qualities and capabilities. The information about the social status of the trustee firm is one of such cues available to evaluators. Yet the relationship between perceived social status of the trustee and the e...

Research on the micro-foundations of social evaluations requires a microtranslation of concepts and measures used in macro-organizational research. The development of valid individual-level measures of organizational legitimacy, reputation, and status presents an essential step in the advancement of organizational theory towards a multi-level persp...

Alex Bitektine, Jeffrey W. Lucas, and Oliver Schilke describe the unconventional use of experimental research designs, using fundamental or applied research logics, to develop understanding of institutions in organizational contexts. The advantages and challenges of experimental designs are explored, and examples of experimental research in institu...

The distinction of macro- and microfoundations of institutions implies a multilevel conceptualization of institutional processes. We adopt the evaluators' perspective on legitimacy to develop a multilevel theory of the legitimacy process under ideal-type conditions of institutional stability and institutional change, and we explore the dynamics of...

Exploring the effects of bounded cognition in real-life decision-making settings requires attention to both the information sources available to the evaluators and an assessment of the conditions under which they make their judgments. Using a sample Chinese IPOs making their debut on U.S. stock exchanges, our study evaluates the importance of direc...

We characterize organizational research as a process driven by researcher’s adaptations to institutional pressures and resource constraints. Drawing on observations on the evolution of several research paradigms in management, organizational studies, and other disciplines, we argue that constraints on the set of legitimate research questions posed...

(Case published in French only). Ce cas se concentre sur les possibilités de croissance pour le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (MBAM) sous la direction de Nathalie Bondil, conservatrice en chef et directrice générale du musée. Il comprend les parties suivantes, dont chacune s’avère essentielle pour bien saisir les éléments permettant de réaliser...

The proposed theory extends research on cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy, reputation, and status by advancing an evaluator's perspective on these concepts as forms of social judgment, each addressing a different evaluator's question about the organization. I describe how evaluators make their social judgments under conditions of bounded rati...

Integrating institutional theory with research on competitive entry deterrence strategies, I develop a theory of competitive social norm manipulations and explore the strategies that well-established organizational populations use to build legitimacy-based barriers to entry into their domain. The study shows that, through social norm manipulations,...

The article advances a prospective case study design in social sciences as an alternative to traditional post hoc case study research in deductive theory testing. It is argued that some limitations of post hoc qualitative methods in deductive theory testing can be alleviated by using a prospective case study design, where researchers formulate a se...

The article advances a prospective case study design in social sciences as an alternative to traditional post hoc case study research in deductive theory testing. It is argued that some limitations of post hoc qualitative methods in deductive theory testing can be alleviated by using a prospective case study design, where researchers formulate a se...