Royston Greenwood

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

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...

Stigma has become an increasingly significant challenge for society. Recognition of this problem is indicated by the growing attention to it within the management literature which has provided illuminating insights. However, stigma has primarily been examined at a single level of analysis: individual, occupational, organizational, or industry. Yet,...

Why do ideas that have been successfully moved across highly different contexts subsequently fail? To answer this question, we use longitudinal data on the Dutch organization Villages for Africa that introduced ‘macro-credit’ loans to rural Tanzanians that would enable them to establish their own village enterprises. Only two years after the seemin...

We study the introduction of the private logic into a mature Italian hospital that was governed previously as a hybrid of professional and public logics. Intriguingly, the reconstituted hospital was for several years widely praised for its strong clinical and financial performance, but quickly and with little warning, it became riven by political d...

This study examines the maintenance of highly institutionalized practices during periods of vehement contestation and changing external demands. Employing a cross-level longitudinal research design, we explore how the recruitment model of elite French business schools persisted, remaining fundamentally intact despite serious questions raised about...

Recently, the cognitive emphasis within institutional theorizing has been challenged and emotions have been proposed as a key but neglected component of institutional processes (Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2014; Massa, Helms, Voronov, & Wang, 2016; Voronov, 2014; Voronov & Vince, 2012; Wright, Zammuto, & Liesch, 2015). The insightful pa...

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...

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...

We have been working together for more than 40 years with some success. In this chapter, we use that lengthy collaboration to suggest what elements and processes have been important for us, and, which we believe are important for working together more generally. These include: the local environment for collaborative research; the dynamics of an ong...

Using a case study of the Italian spirit grappa, we examine status recategorization—the vertical extension and reclassification of an entire market category. Grappa was historically a low-status product, but in the 1970s one regional distiller took steps that led to a radical break from its traditional image, so that in just over a decade high-qual...

Status orders are critically important – yet shifts in the status and social meaning of a market category and of the organizations associated with it have been little investigated. In particular, there is limited understanding of how a deeply institutionalized low status category might extend its reach to high status positions. Instead, most studie...

The co-existence of multiple, often contradictory, institutional demands pose challenges to organizations. Despite the intriguing context that multinational enterprises (MNEs) present for the study of organizational action to such demands, research has focused on organizational fields. To more deeply consider the MNE context, we argue that MNEs off...

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...

Professions have traditionally been thought to act as 'social trustees' of key skills for the benefit of society as a whole or as 'gatekeepers' who play a fundamental role in maintaining the integrity of broader institutions. Yet recent scandals from Enron to Parmalat and the recent financial crisis call into question the fiduciary role played by t...

This paper provides an overview comparison of how organization and managemnt theory was practised 40 years ago with how it is done today. We are a much larger and more international community and our work has advanced in many excellent ways. Howevoer, an important difference is the nature of expectations placed upon scholars – which has led to narr...

E-book available from: http://www.elgaronline.com/abstract/9781781000403.xml?rskey=5RQUcy&result=1

The goal of this symposium is to provide a more systematic understanding of how being at the intersection of different institutional systems influences organizational behavior. Each paper examines important effects of institutional complexity at a different organizational life stage and as a result of changing external conditions. Three of the pape...

The last 20 years have seen some of the most dramatic cases of corporate corruption. One of the most striking features of these cases is the inability of professionals and professional firms to recognize and publicize corporate corruption. In this essay, we argue that professionals’ failure to detect corporate corruption may be the result of instit...

In this essay we argue that institutional scholarship has become overly concerned with explaining institutions and institutional processes, notably at the level of the organization field, rather than with using them to explain and understand organizations. Especially missing is an attempt to gain a coherent, holistic account of how organizations ar...

This paper examines the relationship between the institutional environment and sustained corporate illegality. We find that cognitive assumptions generate expectations that can, under specific circumstances, induce organizations to amplify illegal actions and that serve to lessen regulatory scrutiny. We also find that, once initiated, illegal actio...

How organizations cope with multiple and sometimes conflicting institutional demands is an increasingly familiar yet little understood question. This paper examines how four French business schools responded to demands that they internationalize their management education whilst retaining their traditional identities. We trace the role played by fi...

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...

This article develops a model of practice-driven institutional change—or change that originates in the everyday work of individuals but results in a shift in field-level logic. In demonstrating how improvisations at work can generate institutional change, we attend to the earliest moments of change, which extant research has neglected; and we contr...

The roots of the new institutional theory are well known (Scott, 2008). Meyer and Rowan (1977) undermined the (then) prevailing imagery of organizations as quasi-rational actors navigating economic and technical contingencies, showing instead that organizations are influenced by socio-cultural and cognitive (institutional) factors that prescribe an...

This article studies the rise of management consulting within large accounting firms. It first discusses the history of accounting, and then looks at the rise of management consulting within large accounting firms. It also introduces two tensions that emerged from the growth in these services, namely the tension between consultants and accountants...

The geographically bounded community is explored as a political jurisdiction. Jurisdictions are important sites as local factors determine which political party is in power and because different professionals work within them. Jurisdictions are, thus, arenas for the expression of public policies, which have significant societal consequences. Specif...

How does organizations' embeddedness in social and cultural communities influence their behavior? And how has this changed with recent communication technology advances and globalization trends? In this introductory chapter to Research in the Sociology of Organization's volume on Communities and Organizations we consider how diverse types of commun...

Organizations face institutional complexity whenever they confront incompatible prescriptions from multiple institutional logics. Our interest is in how plural institutional logics, refracted through field-level structures and processes, are experienced within organizations and how organizations respond to such complexity. We draw on a variety of c...

People go to extraordinary lengths to gain and defend their status. Those with higher status are listened to more, receive more deference from others, and are perceived as having more power. People with higher status also tend to have better health and longevity. In short, status matters. Despite the importance of status, particularly in the workpl...

Although the cottage industry of neoinstitutional research gained its momentum through a conceptual architecture that was centred on a bifurcation of technological/material forces and cultural dynamics, current research in this genre has begun to re-examine the utility of such distinctions. One of the downsides of such a conceptual distinction is t...

Organization Studies is closely associated with European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS) and its traditions. The essays in this Special Issue are deliberately not 'celebratory’ in the sense of providing cheerful and empty accolades of times past. On the contrary, the themes and debates raised and discussed reflect murmurings frequently heard...

This special issue had it roots in a symposium organized by Tammar Zilber and Roy Suddaby for the Academy of Management 2003 annual meetings in Seattle. The symposium was titled "Reclaiming the Symbolic in Institutional Theory" and represented an effort to refocus research attention on the phenomenological aspects of institutions. At the time, we w...

This paper shows that organizations in market settings face complex institutional contexts to which they respond in different though patterned ways. We show how both regional state logics and family logics impact on organizational responses to an overarching market logic. Regional logics are particularly potent when the activities of firms, especia...

Large transnational professional service firms (PSFs) are highly influential in today's global econ-omy because they underpin the integrity of financial markets, enable complex international transactions, and deliver ideas and advice to the world's largest corporations and governments. They sell expertise – that most intangible of outputs – and the...

The ability to design complex organizations to meet challenges such as globalization, outsourcing, and capability development has become ever more important. Yet the field of organization theory has for long neglected the fine-grained study of design. It has opted instead for truncated characterizations of this complex phenomenon, or, more commonly...

We propose that the study of organization design has been unduly neglected in recent years despite its critical importance for organizational performance. We point to the daunting complexity of the subject matter as a pivotal reason why researchers have turned to other questions. In this paper, we argue that the complexity of design can be successf...

This paper investigates a question at the core of entrepreneurship research: how does novelty affect new venture performance? We address this question for a type of factor-market innovation deemed critical in the contemporary economy: novelty in employment systems. Our longitudinal study of new firms in a knowledge-intensive service industry shows...

The paper examines the stated reasons for recent mergers between members of the (former) Big Eight accounting firms. The reasons are expressed in terms of hypotheses about the perceived advantages of very large size and the hypotheses are tested using 1986‐9 data from the top 1000 Canadian companies. The focus of the paper is thus on the link betwe...

Few papers achieve the success of DiMaggio and Powell's 1983 “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” The impact of the paper, as indicated by its citation count and its influence on a wide range of disciplines, has been extraordinary. Furthermore, the paper's influence continues to i...

The uniqueness of professional service firms (PSFs) has been well established. Accounting, law, engineering, and management consulting firms are known to differ significantly from both traditional manufacturing and service organizations in their organizational and managerial arrangements. Their performance depends heavily on the reputation and stat...

Concurring with Barley's pessimism that we do neglect the study of how corporations seek to influence and perhaps have captured the State, this text suggests two starting points that can give theoretical and practical leverage to investigate those issues. Theoretically, the institutional perspective, which always had an interest in the influence of...

Introduction The motivation for this Handbook arose from a conversation with Don Palmer, who raised the question of whether organization theories in general have life cycles. Given the proliferation of theoretical paradigms, do organization theories build into coherent conceptual frameworks supported by diligently conducted empirical work, or do th...

This article examines an attempt to transform the operations of a professional service firm, namely, a public accounting firm, a major office of one of the big six. In examining the change process the article deals with three particular issues:1) The process of change in an autonomous professional organization, owned and controlled through a partne...

Entrepreneurs often turn to outsiders for financial assistance. Venture capitalists represent an outside source of finance that generally takes an active interest in managing the firm. Two common practices within the venture capital industry are co-investing and staged financing. Responding to the call for more process research which examines the d...

The general study of organizational change and the specific development of the concepts of transformation and transition has come about in a way which is typical of organization theory. On the one hand there were increasing theoretical and methodological criticisms of the 1970s 'state-of-the-art' knowledge with its essential basis in a static conti...

The secondary aim of this paper is to describe the organizational arrangements of the new local authorities in England and Wales. We shall consider, several issues arranged according to the complementary concepts of "differentiation" and "integration". Differentiation refers to the division of labour within the local authority, expressed as the num...

Worsening financial circumstances have prompted local authorities to review the appropriateness of traditional budgetary arrangements. Using Wildavsky's concept of incremental budgeting as a guiding framework this paper examines how and why authorities have altered their budgetary processes. Results indicate that underlying incrementalism is the as...

Local government is the subject of official review. This paper suggests that any review of the system of local government should consider at the outset the purposes or values which provide the rationale for local government, and should examine how the institutional framework and prevailing organizational practices promote or hinder achievement of t...

The organizational arrangements of local authorities are known to vary. Explanations of the variation observed have usually been set within the contingency theory perspective. The present paper utilizes a different approach, examining how far structural variations are a consequence of differences in strategic style. The concept of strategic style i...

The creation of markets for new products involves interplay between various field constituents. A major challenge in this process is to establish a sufficient level of legitimacy in order for a market to become accepted in the organization field. Yet, this process of market creation may be suppressed by established institutional arrangements that a...

Studies of English local government have often described the system as though it were a uniform system with minor rather than fundamental variations. Uniformity may appear inevitable given that local authorities in England and Wales operate within common framework of law. It was the extent of variation, however, which was noted by the (Mand) commit...

This paper examines the role of large accounting firms in the emergence of a transnational regulatory field in professional services. We use neo-institutional theory to illuminate the process by which new fields are created. We observe a shift in the structural boundaries of professional regulation to include new actors, specifically Big Four accou...

How do new professional service firms strategically position themselves in fields where developing a favourable external reputation is critical to performance? Are certain positioning strategies more effective than others? This study reveals that most professional service firm start-ups attempt to establish themselves by pursuing a strategy of mode...

Understanding the effects of ownership upon organizational performance is a well-established theme in organization theory, but comparison across ownership forms has been neglected. We develop hypotheses comparing public corporations, private corpora-tions and partnerships and test them in a sample of large management consultancies. We find that pri...

To consider the argument presented in Stubbart and Knight's paper (see, Stubbart C. I. and Knight M. B. (2006), "The Case of the Disappearing Firms: Empirical Evidence and Implications", Journal of Organizational Behaviour, Vol. 27, pp. 79-100) that, since the majority of organizations have relatively short life spans, the meta theory (which assume...

Radical organizational change Understanding organization change is, today, a central question within organization theory. It was not always so. Prior to the 1970s, change was rarely an explicit concern. Instead, most perspectives on organizations assumed change per se to be of modest importance and not particularly difficult to accomplish. Partly,...

G rowing interest in knowledge as a competitive asset suggests the benefit of studying professional service firms (PSFs). These firms are highly successful examples of organizations whose ability to manage knowledge is critical to their success. Furthermore, they are worthy of study because they constitute a significant sector of the economy, wheth...

Our conception of the ideal organization has changed from the machine-like efficiency of Weberian bureaucracy to a post-industrial ideal (Bell, 1973) in which organizations spurn the bureaucratic form to become more adaptive, receptive and generative. Such ideal organizations, we are told, will exhibit strong employee involvement and will rely on s...

This paper examines how founders' work experiences and beliefs about an industry's prevailing practices influence the degree of novelty exhibited by their firms. Our results indicate that extensive experience in the core of an organizational field constrains individuals into acting as “imitative entrepreneurs,” essentially reproducing established r...

Max Weber’s influence upon the study of organizations has been profound, perhaps unrivaled. But his contemporary relevance is less certain. This special issue celebrates the achievements of Weber and, at the same time, reflects on his current influence. Contributors vary in their assessment and suggestions.

This paper describes the role of rhetoric in legitimating profound institutional change. In 1997, a Big Five accounting firm purchased a law firm, triggering a jurisdictional struggle within accounting and law over a new organizational form, multidisciplinary partnerships. We analyze the discursive struggle that ensued between proponents and oppone...

This study examines change initiated from the center of mature organizational fields. As such, it addresses the paradox of embedded agency — that is, the paradox of how actors enact changes to the context by which they, as actors, are shaped. The change examined is the introduction of a new organizational form. Combining network location theory and...

This paper examines the effect of diversification upon intra-industry performance. We propose that intra-industry diversification promises three sets of benefits, which, separately and in combination, provide firms with a competitive advantage: synergies arising from economies of scope; premiums from mutual forbearance enabled by multi-market compe...

In this paper,we examine the re-organizing attempts of the Alberta government in healthcare from the viewpoint of uncertainty,loose coupling and the frequently unrecognized consequences of such change.We suggest that our understanding of change processes can be enhanced by conceptualizing the impact of task and environmental uncertainty through the...