Michael Lounsbury

University of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Strategic Management and Organization

In this paper, I examine how variation arises in the staffing of recycling programs at colleges and universities. Through initial fieldwork, I identified two basic recycling program forms. Some schools adopted recycling programs that entailed the creation of new, full-time recycling manager positions that were filled by ecological activists. Other...

This paper examines practice diffusion in an environment where competing logics exist, focusing on how organizational and practice variations are institutionally shaped. Empirically, I study how trustee and performance logics in the mutual fund industry that were rooted in different geographic locations (Boston and New York) led to variation in how...

We define cultural entrepreneurship as the process of storytelling that mediates between extant stocks of entrepreneurial resources and subsequent capital acquisition and wealth creation. We propose a framework that focuses on how entrepreneurial stories facilitate the crafting of a new venture identity that serves as a touchstone upon which legiti...

Categories are key elements of classification systems that segregate things into groups and impose coherence. Sociologists have studied how categories shape action in a wide variety of contexts but have spent much less time investigating the sources of category durability and change. We address this gap by investigating how existing product categor...

This article examines how social movements contribute to institutional change and the creation of new industries. We build on current efforts to bridge institutional and social movement perspectives in sociology and develop the concept of field frame to study how industries are shaped by social structures of meanings and resources that underpin and...

Institutional scholarship on organizing in poverty contexts has focused on the constraining nature of extant institutions and the need for external actors to make transformative change interventions to alleviate poverty. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the potentially enabling nature of extant institutions in poverty contexts. We ar...

The institutional logics perspective provides a powerful theory that emphasizes how symbolic beliefs and material practices are intertwined in relatively enduring configurations that can profoundly shape behavior across space and time. In this article, we build upon the arguments and insights of Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li, suggesting the need...

Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In this concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways...

A rapidly growing research stream examines the social effects of entrepreneurship on society. This research assesses the rise of entrepreneurship as a dominant theme in society and studies how entrepreneurship contributes to the production and acceptance of socio-economic inequality regimes, social problems, class and power struggles, and systemic...

To the surprise of many in the West, the fall of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to the adoption of liberal democratic government around the world and the much anticipated “end of history.” In fact, authoritarianism has made a comeback, and liberal democracy has been on the retreat for at least the last 15 years culminating in the unthinkable: the in...

Research Summary Cultural entrepreneurship theory suggests that entrepreneurial narratives need to be optimally distinctive—neither portraying an offering as too similar to nor too distinctive from the conventions of its product category—for attracting superior demand. Building on and extending this literature, we propose that the benefits and down...

For several decades, entrepreneurship scholarship has been fixated on understanding “the processes of discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities” (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000: 218). This has fundamentally shaped how we teach entrepreneurship to students at all levels, leading to an emphasis on the heroic cognitive powers of individua...

In this article, we take stock of the institutional logics perspective and highlight opportunities for new scholarship. While we celebrate the growth and generativity of the literature on institutional logics, we also note that there has been a troubling tendency in recent work to use logics as analytical tools, feeding disquiet about reification a...

While the cultural entrepreneurship literature has shown how the stories entrepreneurs tell about their ventures help them attain legitimacy and acquire resources, we still know very little about how entrepreneurs develop their stories or how they change over time. In this paper, we draw upon Donald Schön's research in design studies to conceptuali...

Organizational change and innovation are central and enduring issues in management theory and practice. The need to understand processes of organization change and innovation has never been greater in order to respond to dramatic changes in population demographics, technology, stakeholder needs, competitive survival, and social, economic, environme...

Volumes 70 and 71 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations combine to comprise cutting edge theory and empirical scholarship at the interface of practice and institution in organization studies. As we highlight, this interface has spurred particularly generative conversations with many open questions, and much to explore. We provide a review o...

While there is a growing literature on moral markets that aim to create social value through market exchange, much of it has focused on how producer activism is able to legitimate new, institutionally complex, organizational and economic forms that are inscribed with competing market and social/community logics. Much less attention has been directe...

In this study, we explore how institutional complexity-the existence of conflicting logics-shapes the strategic orientation of new ventures. Drawing on a dataset of Japanese ventures, we explore how firms exhibit strategic orientations associated with stakeholder versus shareholder logics as exhibited by the pursuit of employment growth versus the...

In the wake of recent scholarly disquiet regarding organizational institutionalism, we argue for a more focused constitutive approach to institutional analysis that concentrates attention on the socio-cultural sources of actors and their behavior. To do so, we suggest that complementarities between world society institutionalism and the institution...

This Element provides an overview of cultural entrepreneurship scholarship and seeks to lay the foundation for a broader and more integrative research agenda at the interface of organization theory and entrepreneurship. Its scholarly agenda includes a range of phenomena from the legitimation of new ventures, to the construction of novel or alternat...

In this paper, we embrace the critique of the contemporary entrepreneurship literature offered by Foss, Klein, and Bjørnskov, and applaud their advance of the Judgment‐Based Approach (JBA) as a way to broaden our understanding of entrepreneurial processes by contextualizing entrepreneurial action. However, we believe that to attain the promise of t...

Innovation and entrepreneurship lie at the heart of the modern economy. Yet, while scholars have long examined the economic drivers of innovation and entrepreneurship, less is known about the cultural forces that shape these dynamics. To the extent that the existing literature has considered how culture shapes innovation and entrepreneurship, it ha...

In this paper, I applaud but also critique the project to integrate the literatures on stakeholders, non-market strategy, and social movements under the umbrella of business and society. My main concern is that some may perceive this integrative effort as hinging on a kind of applied economic imagery of actors and interests that valorizes instrumen...

In this paper, we develop an exemplar-based model of the emergence and evolution of proto-categories—new groupings of products that are only weakly entrenched, but have the potential to become widely institutionalized—and examine how different positioning strategies of new entrants vis-à-vis the exemplar of a proto-category affect entrant performan...

Taking as our starting point Merton’s (1942) defense of science facing pressures from totalitarian regimes, we argue that today’s challenge to the integrity of management scholarship does not come from external demands for ideological conformity, rather from escalating competition for publication space in leading journals that is changing the inter...

Michael Lounsbury on Society and Economy: Framework and Principles.

Although existing research has demonstrated the importance of attaining legitimacy for new market categories, few scholars have considered the trade-offs associated with such actions. Using the U.S. organic food product category as a context, we explore how one standards-based certification organization—the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCO...

The study of institutional change is a core research area in organization theory and is of increasing relevance for scholarship in other disciplines. In this article, we review the substantial number of studies that have examined the ways by which institutions are created, modified, or transformed, highlighting the lack of integration of prior work...

Research summary : A ttaining optimal distinctiveness—positive stakeholder perceptions about a firm's strategic position that reconciles competing demands for differentiation and conformity—has been an important focal point for scholarship at the interface of strategic management and institutional theory. We provide a comprehensive review of this l...

Recent empirical and theoretical developments related to the microprocesses of institutional logics have helped to cultivate a powerful theory of agency. We build on these developments to show how the institutional logics perspective can shed light on important questions related to frame construction and how institutions matter. In particular, we s...

This double volume presents a collection of 23 papers on how institutions matter to socio-economic life. The papers delve deeply into the practical impact an institutional approach enables, as well as how such research has the potential to influence policies relevant to critical institutional changes unfolding in the world today. In Volume 48A, the...

Risk has become a central concern for businesses, regulators and communities. At one level, risk is about numbers and information. But at another level, risk is about narratives and meanings. In this paper, we describe four risk perspectives: technical, economic, perceptual, and cultural. Technical and economic perspectives inform techno-economic a...

In this paper, we call for renewed attention to the structure and structuring of work within and between organizations. We argue that a multilevel approach, with jobs as a core analytic construct, is a way to draw connections among economic sociology, organizational sociology, the sociology of work and occupations, labor studies and stratification...

While scholars have developed increasingly well-developed accounts of institutional change, little attention has been paid to how change is resisted and, in particular, how efforts to marketize fail. We draw on the institutional logics perspective to guide analysis of an empirical case of the failed attempt by the Dutch state to marketize childcare...

Scholars in the fields of institutional theory and strategy-as-practice have recently begun to reach out to each other to broaden and nuance their theorizing of current puzzles. This chapter identifies natural points of connection between the two literatures, reviews existing literature drawing on insights from both camps and outlines a research ag...

Now in its second edition, this extended and thoroughly updated handbook introduces researchers and students to the growing range of theoretical and methodological perspectives being developed in the vibrant field of strategy as practice. With new authors and additional chapters, it shows how the strategy-as-practice approach in strategic managemen...

This essay discusses a new approach to institutional analysis—the institutional logics perspective (ILP). This perspective is a meta-theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of social science theories to better understand the effects of cultural institutions on individuals, organizations, and societies. We describe the history of the...

Although many recent studies have emphasized the multiplicity of institutional logics and the competition among them, how some institutional logics become prioritized over others in shaping organizational decisions is undertheorized. Drawing on panel data of 118 industrial facilities across 34 communities in Texas and Louisiana, we show that the sa...

Entrepreneurial stories are crucial to how entrepreneurs construct and situate their identity within a particular institutional field in order to legitimate themselves and their novel products or practices. Such communications are at the core of what Lounsbury and Glynn refer to as cultural entrepreneurship which more generally refers to the proces...

Research in entrepreneurship has been booming, with perspectives from a range of disciplines and numerous developing schools of thought. It can be difficult for young scholars and even long-time researchers to find their way through the lush garden of ideas we see before us. The purpose of this book is to map the research terrain of entrepreneursh...

The purpose of this panel symposium is to examine the range of theoretical tools that are available to understand the cognitive foundations of institutions and how meanings in institutions are constructed and changed. The institutional logics perspective has become a dominant approach to institutional analysis among organization theorists; however,...

While we agree with the spirit and much of the content of Munir’s critique of “institutional theory,” it is important to note at the outset that recent developments—especially the rise of the institutional logics perspective (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012)—provide new opportunities to embrace more critical traditions and notions of power and...

The past several years have brought public awareness of social movements to the forefront, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, highlighting their ability to advocate for social change. In management research, the role of social movements in facilitating the emergence of new markets has increasingly become a research focus. This symposium br...

The relationship between organization and management theory (OMT) and critical management studies (CMS) has been limitedly developed. It has been widely acknowledged that following its early proliferation in the study of organizations, power swiftly fell out of favor for numerous reasons, including the incorporation of organization theory into busi...

Words are powerful tools (e.g., Austin, 1966, Wittgenstein, 2010 [1953]). Organizational research contains myriad illustrations that actors can – and do – use words strategically to create meaning (e.g., Hirsch & DeSoucey, 2006; Wry, Lounsbury & Glynn, 2011) and guide the actions of others (e.g., Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Rindova, Dalpiaz & Ravasi,...

In this article, we respond to recent critiques about the state of organization theory that have characterized it as being anachronistic, overly theoretical, or lacking the right kind of theory. We argue that organization theory is extremely vibrant and highlight several areas where there are flourishing and generative developments—institutional lo...

Despite its central importance in nearly all societies, religion has been largely neglected in the study of organizations and management. In this introduction to the volume on religion and organization theory, we argue that such neglect limits unnecessarily the relevance and scope of organization and management theory (OMT) and that there is theref...

Institutions are the formal and informal rules that operate in society which shape and give meaning to human interaction (North, 1990). They are underpinned by coercive structures, normative systems, and cognitive understandings (Scott, 2008). Given this definition of institutions, it is fair to say that capitalism is one of the most dominant insti...

This study develops and tests a set of novel theoretical predictions about the conditions under which category spanning is rewarded by external audiences. To do this, we revisit the assumption that comprehensible organizational identities are associated with individual categories. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, we suggest that categ...

This symposium was presented at the 73rd annual meeting of the Academy of Management in 2013 in Orlando. The word bricolage was first introduced by Lévi-Strauss in 1967 to refer to a spontaneous design activity whereby actors create new forms by using “what is at hand”. Institutional theorists and other organizational scholars are showing increasin...

This double volume presents state-of-the-art research and thinking on the dynamics of actors and institutional logics. In the introduction, we briefly sketch the roots and branches of institutional logics scholarship before turning to the new buds of research on the topic of how actors engage institutional logics in the course of their organization...

How can organizations spanning institutionalized categories mitigate against the possibility of reduced attention by audiences? While there has been a good deal of research on the illegitimacy discount of category spanning, scant attention has been paid to how organizations might strategically address this potential problem. In this paper, we explo...

How do organizations manage multiple logics in response to institutional complexity? In this paper, we explore how intraorganizational problems related to multiple logics may be addressed via the mechanism of institu-tional bricolage – where actors inside an organization act as ''bricoleurs'' to creatively combine elements from different logics int...

This paper explores how legacies of past logics spawn variation in the institutional landscapes of different geographic regions in China. Of particular interest is how this variation influences the ways that actors interpret and respond to broader societal and world society pressures. Employing a cross-level comparative research design, we examine...