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Discourse and Deinstitutionalization: The Decline of DDT
Abstract
Drawing on institutional theory emphasizing translation and discourse, we explore outsider-driven deinstitutionalization through a case study of the abandonment of widespread, taken-for-granted practices of DDT use between 1962 and 1972. Our findings illustrate how abandonment of practices results from "problematizations" that-through subsequent "translation"- change discourse in ways that undermine the institutional pillars supporting practices. This occurs through new "subject positions" from which actors speak and act in support of problematizations, and new bodies of knowledge, which normalize them. We introduce the concept of "defensive institutional work" and illustrate how actors carry out disruptive and defensive work by authoring texts.
... Existing literature on deinstitutionalization has illuminated some of the ways in which actors can destabilize established practices (Dacin & Dacin, 2008). For example, Maguire and Hardy (2009) found that outsiders working as activists used combinations of factual arguments and justified reasoning to erode the continued use of DDT. Hiatt, Sine, and Tolbert (2009) found that discursive criticism undermined the normative, cognitive, and regulative aspects of alcohol consumption, as the Women's Christian Temperance Movement brokered prohibition to cripple what they perceived as an immoral industry. ...
... For example, environmentalists and First Nations groups turned to provocative tactics to disrupt institutionalized forestry practices in British Columbia, dubbing clear-cutting as "earth rape" and labeling forestry companies as "criminals" (Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010, p. 204). Disruptive strategies are often driven by outsiders waging a "direct assault" on an institution as a whole (Oliver, 1992); the deinstitutionalization of DDT we mentioned above was triggered by outsiders such as Rachel Carson (Maguire & Hardy, 2009), while the decline of French Classic Cuisine was inspired by cognate fields and protests (Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2003). Deinstitutionalization efforts aimed at repair and renewal, thus, can be expected to use different tools and tactics than those deployed in disruptive deinstitutionalization. ...
... Third, we advance research on deinstitutionalization by presenting a multimodal approach, moving beyond models limited to verbal and textual discourse (Maguire & Hardy, 2009) to also include visual tactics. Therein, we show how different modalities-images and words-present different affordances, all of which are important in longer-term repair efforts. ...
Increasingly we are faced with broad societal challenges that encourage us to rethink existing institutions. Yet many people also want to preserve institutions they cherish. This tension points to the need for change that can erode or discontinue unsustainable or problematic aspects of institutions while also maintaining what is sacred and valued. In this paper we ask how can organizations deinstitutionalize taken-for-granted practices while also preserving the institution? We answer this question by exploring how Trout Unlimited deployed visual and discursive tactics to push out unsustainable catch-and-harvest fly fishing practices and insert new catch-and-release practices. Our primary theoretical contribution is a model of repair-focused deinstitutionalization, illustrating how custodians utilize three forms of work to respond to threats—mending, caring, and restoring—all with an eye on deinstitutionalization via repair rather than disruption. Importantly, we show how the construct of repair is multipurpose, not limited to maintenance strategies, but can also be a catalyst for change. In addition, we extend research on deinstitutionalization by presenting a multimodal approach that goes beyond discourse, with particular attention to visuality and show how different modalities present different affordances in longer-term repair efforts.
... Our work also contributes to discussions of the strategic role of marginalized sources in legitimacy and change (Maguire and Hardy, 2009;Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005). This is done by employing the EW concept of qualified subject (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) to clarify the concept and role of validation institutions (Bitektine and Haack, 2015), including how sources can gain such status. ...
... We argue that such separation might not hold in practice, when examining legitimacy in times of instability. Challenges to the status-quo are chiefly moved on moral grounds (Maguire and Hardy, 2009;Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005) and we have shown how individuals respond to challenges through justifications that incorporate both taken for granted aspects related to extant validity (cognitive legitimacy) and evaluations of benefits for specific stakeholder groups (pragmatic legitimacy) that, however, cannot be separated from broader societal concerns (moral legitimacy). We feel that such segregation might reproduce the very separation, between business and ethics, that scholars have long tried to overcome, not least for the performative effects on managers (see Tenbrunsel and Smith-Crowe, 2008). ...
... Finally, our conclusions have implications for the expectations of marginal actors regarding their status in the social order and their ability to ignite change. Although the literature acknowledges that marginal actors have a crucial role in initiating change in the legitimacy of institutionalized practices (Deephouse et al., 2017;Maguire and Hardy, 2009;Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005), it remains unclear how and whether change in legitimacy is paired with emancipation for the sources that disrupted the status quo. Employing the concept of 'qualified subject' (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) helps to explain how sources can gain, retain or lose status in informing legitimacy judgements. ...
The presence of conflicting cues about what is legitimate provided by various stakeholders, begs the question of how the legitimacy of contested institutionalized practices is justified. Recent critique of tax minimization strategies exemplifies this difficulty: on one hand, practitioners need to increase shareholders’ profits; on the other, a growing number of stakeholders push for ‘fairer’ corporate tax payments. Conducted during a time of public criticism of Australian corporate tax strategies, our study draws on justifications of corporate tax minimization strategies by senior tax practitioners and corporate submissions to a Senate Inquiry on corporate tax avoidance. The study explores how legitimacy judgments come under pressure by conflicting cues. Through the application of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) Economies of Worth (EW) framework, we advance legitimacy scholarship by clarifying what constitutes situated judgments in times of instability. Our work puts forward the concept of perceived forecasted consensus as a guide for individuals in making situated legitimacy judgments in times of instability.
... The second part of the article draws on concepts from organisational studies (Lawrence et al., 2013) to explore how these valued institutional elements are preserved despite shifts in policy. It explores the concepts of disruptive and defensive institutional work (Oliver, 1992;Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006;Maguire & Hardy, 2009;Hardy & Maguire, 2008). The phenomena of being 'loyal after the end' describes a sense of belonging to an organisation outlasting the organisation itself (Walsh et al., 2019). ...
... The concepts of 'disruptive institutional work' and 'defensive institutional work' offer an insight into the erosion of and the defence of institutional traditions and practices (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006;Hardy & Maguire, 2008;Maguire & Hardy, 2009 organisational studies (Lawrence et al., 2013) and is a body of scholarly work focusing on 'the purposeful action of individuals and organisations aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions' (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006: 215). While the body of literature on disruptive and defensive work primarily focuses on business organisations, some studies have suggested that there is value in applying these concepts to other areas. ...
... Understanding institutions in this way has implications for those who wish to challenge them. Disruptive institutional work occurs when one of the three elements or 'pillars' that hold the legitimacy of the institution in place are undermined or challenged (Scott, 2001;Maguire & Hardy, 2009). The cultural-cognitive pillar describes the 'shared conceptions that constitute the nature of social reality and create the frames through which meaning is made' (Scott, 2001: 48). ...
While many studies have identified the problem of reproducing small institutions in community settings, few have explored why. This article explores how staff preserve and defend institutionalised beliefs and practices in community settings. We apply the concepts of disruptive and defensive institutional work to analyse the findings of qualitative interviews at six Irish residential institutions that were identified as priority sites for a national de-congregation programme. Reflecting on their roles, staff conceptualised their practices as historical, traditional, and reflective of a bygone era. However, the findings indicate that it would be misleading to represent institutional practices as relics of the past. The programme offered an olive branch for staff members who wanted to distance themselves from a 'lifetime of habits' and 'sins of the past'.
... As such, we have surprisingly little insight into interactions and conflicts between actors engaging in varying types of institutional work (Ansari and Krop, 2012;Boon et al., 2019) and how they may utilize rhetoric as a response to other actors' institutional work. This void of research echoes a larger issue within the field of institutional work Smolka and Heugens, 2020) in that, even though scholars acknowledge that institutional change is the product of a struggle between actors with different institutional interest (Battilana and D'Aunno, 2009), few studies have explored concurrent offensive and defensive institutional work by different actor groups (for exceptions, see: Ben-Slimane et al., 2020;Boon et al., 2019;Maguire and Hardy, 2009). ...
... In particular, it seems to entail an overemphasis on the influence of one actor group and often downplays the importance of other, yet influential actors (Barnett et al., 2020). Further, it causes scholarship to focus on the questions of how institutional discourses affect institutional change (Hardy and Maguire, 2010;Maguire and Hardy, 2009;Patala et al., 2019), but neglects the equally important question of why institutional discourses might move toward either supporting or hindering institutional change (Brown et al., 2012). In other words, there seems to be a pressing need for a stronger research focus on how actors engage in contesting institutional work. ...
... Third, disrupting institutions encompasses work directed at the deinstitutionalization of existing institutions, for instance, through undermining belief systems (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). As such, institutional work consists of 'offensive institutional work,' i.e., actions aimed at institutional change, and 'defensive institutional work,' i.e., actions aimed at institutional stability (Maguire and Hardy, 2009). ...
The rise of the sharing economy represents a disruption for incumbent organizations, institutional regimes, and society at large, causing multiple actor groups to engage in institutional work to create, maintain, and disrupt institutions. While research has provided insights into the ways in which individual actors engage in institutional work, we still lack an understanding of the dynamics between actor groups and the institutional work battles they wage in the context of the emerging sharing economy. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of the discursive institutional work during the rise of Uber and Airbnb, as represented in the news media, we first provide new insights into which actors groups engage in institutional work and which rhetoric they utilize. We inductively distill 15 discursive strategies of institutional work related to seven institutional discourses. Moreover, enfolding extant literature, we derive a taxonomy of institutional work battles and introduce the concept of cross-countering—defined as efforts to weaken, oppose, or nullify opposing discursive institutional work. Altogether, our work provides novel insights on institutional work in the sharing economy, highlights the contested nature of institutional discourses and formalizes when such contestation fosters or hinders institutional change.
... While the level of maturity of organizational fields influences the dynamics of institutional entrepreneurship (Battilana & D'aunno, 2009;Fligstein, 1997), recent work suggests that the positions of institutional entrepreneurs (e.g., insiders vs. outsiders) in fields shape their entrepreneurial efforts (Gill et al., 2020;Hardy & Maguire, 2018;Pradies et al., 2021). In particular, unlike insiders, outsiders to a field lack the centrality and legitimacy to encourage field members to adopt their innovative ideas (Hardy & Maguire, 2018;Maguire & Hardy, 2009). Despite long-standing interest in the impact of external actors on the structure and behavior of institutions, the "roles that external actors play … has been largely overlooked" (Lawrence & Phillips, 2019, p. 142). ...
... This is due to the contextual challenges associated with their relative positions (outsiders vs. insiders). Outsiders to a field may find it easier to develop ideas for change because they are less embedded in the field (Maguire & Hardy, 2009), and thus, are more likely to be motivated to bring about change (Hardy & Maguire, 2018). However, the paradox in this case is that the focus is on how outsiders can mobilize field members to adopt their novel ideas, rather than how they initially developed the ideas for change. ...
... Our findings suggest that rationale construction commences with normalization to produce claims about the effectiveness of new practices and make the case for their adoption. Our concept of normalization resonates with Maguire and Hardy's (2009) notion of 'bodies of knowledge.' They argue that the construction of practices as effective, beneficial, and appropriate to normalize certain ways of behaving, is a particularly demanding approach to challenge the prevailing institutional arrangements. ...
The phenomenon of outsider-driven institutional entrepreneurship may appear both paradoxical and opaque. We examine outsider-driven institutional entrepreneurship by drawing on an in-depth qualitative case study of the emerging field of positive psychology education. We investigate how institutional entrepreneurs, located outside Kuwait’s Ministry of Education, enabled actors inside the Ministry both to deviate from existing institutional arrangements and to institutionalize new practices. Our findings illustrate that outsider-driven institutional entrepreneurship in emerging fields starts with ‘normalization’, that is, the production of claims, arguments, and evidence, about the effectiveness of the newly proposed practices. Our study contributes to the literature on outsider-driven institutional entrepreneurship in emerging fields by identifying a set of critical activities associated with deviation from prevailing institutional arrangements, and the institutionalization of innovation.
... 234-235), while institutional maintenance, although appropriate for our first research question, seems inapplicable to the urgency of defending against threats. Helpfully, Maguire and Hardy (2009) introduce the notion of defensive institutional work. In their study of how 'outsiders' attempted to deinstitutionalize an industry leading insecticide, they define defensive institutional work as "insiders attempt[ing] to defend existing practices" (Maguire & Hardy, 2009, p. 149). ...
... Currie, Lockett, Finn, Martin, and Waring (2012) describe how medical specialists worked to maintain a favorable (to them) institutional arrangement when a disruptive situation arose, namely a new medical policy. Other situations that kindle and influence situated institutional work include, for example, professional service reform (e.g., Micelotta & Washington, 2013;Rainelli Weiss & Huault, 2016;Ramirez, 2013), financial crises (e.g., Riaz, Buchanan, & Bapuji, 2011), threats to industry position (e.g., Maguire & Hardy, 2009) and technological change (e.g., Raviola & Norbäck, 2013). ...
... Ours is the first to consider institutional maintenance by the Big Four. Additionally, examining comment letters (RQ2) enables us to augment the relatively thin literature on defensive institutional work (Maguire & Hardy, 2009). Thus, we address Canning and O'Dwyer's (2016, p. 1) "call for research focusing on how targets of regulation in accounting engage in institutional work as they respond to efforts to restrict their autonomy" (see also Hampel et al., 2017). ...
The Big Four’s organizational field is dominated by two conflicting institutional logics, the professional logic and the commercial logic, resulting in a fragile logic equilibrium. We conceptualize logic equilibrium as offering instrumental value to the Big Four, and therefore a resource worth maintaining and defending. The paper mobilizes Goffman’s dramaturgical framework to examine how the Big Four maintain logic equilibrium in recurrent performances (i.e., their annual reviews), and defend it against threats in contingent performances (i.e., their comment letter responses to a regulatory inquiry). The research uses meaning-oriented content analysis. The study finds that the Big Four maintain logic equilibrium via recurrent performances that ostensibly summon concepts evocative of the professional and commercial logics in equal measure, but in substance, mobilize professional-logic concepts to privilege client-centric concerns associated with the commercial logic. In defending logic equilibrium from threats, the Big Four’s contingent performances draw almost exclusively on concepts associated with the professional logic. However, these contingent performances also principally use the professional logic towards a commercial end, in this case, as a buffer against regulatory proposals. In foregrounding institutional work’s performative nature, we contend that the commercial logic has commandeered the professional logic, the latter becoming a performative sign-vehicle directed towards commercial ends.
... We follow Suddaby et al. (2017) in defining the legitimation process as a social construction (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) between actors in a business relationship who either seek or oppose changes in an appropriate status quo, such as a prevailing relationship norm. If an actor opposes an existing relationship norm, he or she delegitimates it by enacting it differently (Berger et al., 1998;Maguire & Hardy, 2009;Oliver, 1992). ...
... In relationships that have lasted for decades, one or both of the parties might feel the need to re-evaluate the relationship (e.g., Alajoutsijärvi, Möller, & Tähtinen, 2000;Halinen & Tähtinen, 2002). As a result, the parties seek ways to restructure the relationship by reinterpreting or delegitimating (Berger et al., 1998;Maguire & Hardy, 2009;Oliver, 1992) the established norms guiding the behavior of the exchange (Macneil, 2000). The reasons for relationship decay could be exogenous (e.g., market fluctuation, government policy, public pressure) or endogenous (e.g., decrease in performance, resignation of key personnel, resource reallocation) and result from passive neglect or active betrayal (Ring & Van De Ven, 1994;Zhang et al., 2016). ...
... First, through legitimating the norms regime, that is, living up to the agreed professional and interpersonal roles and committing to informal psychological contracts, positive social impact is exerted on the relationship and its partners. Second, by delegitimating (Berger et al., 1998;Maguire & Hardy, 2009) the norms regime, the reverse, that is, negative social impact on the relationship, is achieved (see [2001][2002][2003][2004][2005] in the case study). Consequences on the relationship include a reserved atmosphere characterized by distrust and loss of commitment (Kaufmann & Dant, 1992;Macaulay, 1963;Ojansivu et al., 2013;Ring & Van De Ven, 1994). ...
The process through which social impact occurs in business relationships has largely remained unexamined. In this paper, we draw on relational contracting theory to examine relationship norms and the social impact of their legitimation. Our data consist of 27 years of historical secondary data about the business relationship between Nokia and its subcontracting partner Elcoteq (1984–2011). We reveal how the legitimation of the role integrity and contractual solidarity norms causes social impact within this relationship and how harmonization with the social matrix norm leads to social impact both within and outside of the relationship. As a result, we introduce a concept network view of social impact. This concept thus contributes to the business relationship literature by conceptualizing the ripple effect of one business relationship on a connected network.
... By professional position I refer to a professional group's stance in an organization: a standpoint from which to achieve goals and exert influence by, for example, promoting certain values and practices within an organization. Positions are characterized as altering standpoints from which to speak and act; they are often discursively constructed by the position holders themselves in relation to others (Maguire & Hardy 2009;Thomas & Davies 2005). Other studies have used concepts such as role identity (Goodrick & Reay 2010;Rao et al. 2003), identity position (Carollo & Guerci 2017), subject position (Kuhn 2009;Thomas & Davies 2005) and professional identity (Roche & Teague 2012;Wright 2008) to conceptualize the phenomena where occupational groups use language to construct their stance in organizations and society. ...
... In understanding how professional positions are constructed, I draw from the literature on subject positions (Fairclough 1992;Maguire & Hardy 2009;Törrönen 2001;Törrönen 2013). Subject positions are vantage points that shape how we understand social reality, how we act in it and how we might influence it (Fairclough 1992;Maguire & Hardy 2009;Phillips & Hardy 1997). ...
... In understanding how professional positions are constructed, I draw from the literature on subject positions (Fairclough 1992;Maguire & Hardy 2009;Törrönen 2001;Törrönen 2013). Subject positions are vantage points that shape how we understand social reality, how we act in it and how we might influence it (Fairclough 1992;Maguire & Hardy 2009;Phillips & Hardy 1997). Building upon the work by Hall (1996), Törrönen (2001 specifically argues for the aspect of discourse in the analysis of subject positions; they are historically, socially and culturally produced through language use (Törrönen 2001;Törrönen 2013). ...
The overall aim of this study is to increase the understanding of how municipal HR practitioners discursively construct professional positions for themselves. This study brings attention to how they relate to both other actors in the municipalities as well as institutionalized discourses of high performance and well-being at work in Finnish work life during the first decade of the 2000s.
Theoretically, I contribute to the literature on HR practitioner roles by emphasizing the discursive, institutional context when exploring HR positioning. Also, I highlight the relational aspect of HR positioning and extend the scope of relevant HR practitioner relations to local policymakers and local residents. Furthermore, I show how well-being at work is deployed as a building block in the positioning of HR practitioners.
Empirically, I ask how HR practitioners use discourses to strengthen their position in municipal organizations. In order to answer this question, I focus on different aspects of discursive positioning by analysing semi-structured interviews with municipal HR practitioners. First, I highlight the relational positioning of HR practitioners towards line managers, top managers and policy makers (Study 1), local residents (Study 2) and employees (Study 2 and 3). Second, I focus on their contextual positioning in relation to the institutionalized discourses of well-being at work (Study 3) and high performance (Studies 1,2 and 3).
By adopting a discursive perspective to HR practitioner positioning, I offer a deep contextual understanding to the phenomenon. As a result, the ambiguous position of HR practitioners turns out to be an asset; it enables HR practitioners to adhere to the different discourses of high performance and well-being at work simultaneously. Still, well-being at work is constructed more as a bridge to performance than a result in itself.
... To do so, we first theoretically frame online SMOs in the "discursive model of institutionalization" (Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2004). This framework posits that the processes supporting institutionalization and deinstitutionalization of behaviors (Maguire & Hardy, 2009) are based on the actors' production of texts that shape the overall discourse. Drawing from this, social media can be considered as technologies that have "decentralized and democratized access to discursive power" (KhosraviNik, 2017, pag. ...
... 109). Therefore, institutionalization-and deinstitutionalization (Maguire & Hardy, 2009)-is produced by discursive activities influencing actions instead of actions per se (Phillips et al., 2004). Actions per se do not have the necessary characteristics to be diffused and transmitted over time and across spaces by the actors involved in these actions; these functions are provided by textshere produced onlinewhich can leave traces and directly modify the overall discourse (Phillips et al., 2004). ...
... The discursive model of institutionalization claims that institutionalization processes, through which institutions and institutionalized practices and behaviors are produced and maintained (Phillips et al., 2004), and deinstitutionalization, through which they are disrupted (Maguire & Hardy, 2009), are both based on discourse. Discourse can be defined as "a system of statements that define an object" (Parker, 1992, pag. ...
This study investigates linguistic devices and discursive strategies employed by online social movement organizations (SMOs) in attempts to deinstitutionalize long-standing, institutionalized behaviors. The research draws from an in-depth analysis of public discourse within anti-vaccine online communities in Italy and contributes to the social movement literature on framing and the theory of discursive institutionalization. It employs semi-automated text-analysis methods and interpretive analysis of textual data from seven anti-vaccine social media communities, before and subsequent to the 2017 regulatory intervention of the Italian government to increase vaccination rates. This intervention followed a phase of intense debate centered on the decrease in vaccination coverage and the spread of anti-vaccine ideas in social media as well as in the broader public discourse. The study analyzes the discursive strategies and linguistic devices of community leaders (moderators) and followers (members), and investigates shifts in micro-level online anti-vaccine discursive strategies that developed after the government regulation. The findings suggest that anti-vaccine online SMOs employ specific sets of linguistic devices, namely rhetorical fallacies, that support well-defined discursive strategies such as those aiming to delegitimize actors that endorse vaccines. Furthermore, the evidence shows that these linguistic devices and discursive strategies, after the government regulation, shift from an evidence-based stance towards values and emotions-based argumentations.
... Institutional researchers propose a two-stage model in which early adopters aim for efficiency and late adopters seek legitimacy (Tolbert and Zucker 1983;Westphal, Gulati, and Shortell 1997). Critics noted that legitimacy and efficiency cannot capture all of the motives and that there are many other potential intended meanings that drive action (Green and Li 2011), which may hold the key to explain the sudden abandonment of a widely adopted practice (Maguire and Hardy 2009) and the variation in practice adoption (Gondo and Amis 2013). ...
... What is originally intended by actors with specific words and actions may evolve to a new and different intention over time and in a different context, one that may only loosely associate with the original intention (Li 2017). Consider the observation that the organizational practice in an Israeli rape center remained the same while the theories for using the practice changed from feminism to psychiatry (Zilber 2006), or that the technical potency of DDT remained the same but changes in discourse led to its drastic abandonment (Maguire and Hardy 2009). In both cases the original intended meaningbe it about an organizational practice or a pesticideacquired signification in a new belief system with distinct language and intentions. ...
Organization theory and organizational institutionalism have moved toward a more generative understanding of agency to better account for the relation between the microfoundations and macrofoundations of institutions. Central to such an understanding is an overlooked construct: intentionality, defined as actors’ consciousness directed at or about something, the content of which is actors’ intended meaning. Intentionality and intended meaning have three dimensions: prior intentionality, intentionality in action, and posterior intentionality. I propose that intentionality and collective intentionality mediate between macro-level structures and micro-level actions. This model allows for a more fluid conception of intended meaning before, during, and after an action, and thus facilitates a more fine-grained understanding of (1) how the macro is instantiated in the micro and how the micro transforms into the macro, (2) multiple pathways of institutional maintenance and change, and (3) the complexity of decoupling at both the micro and the macro levels.
... In the first phase, we analyzed the entire data through discourse analysis to identify what kinds of subject positions could be found in the local actors' talk about energy transition, with the analytic focus on the specific ways in which local renewable energy is coproduced discursively and what subject positions the actors attribute to themselves or others in their talk. We understand a subject position in terms of the fictive person as a placeholder: a linguistic category and a structure in formation, which enables positioning an individual within a system of representation (Maguire and Hardy 2009). Further, seeing the discourses as ideologically bounded and grounded (Eagleton 2007), it is assumed that when group members explain, motivate, or legitimate their (group-based) actions, they typically do so in terms of an ideological discourse (Van Dijk 2006). ...
... We started the semiotic analysis by identifying two main semantic oppositions and then extended them further with their contradictory and complementary categories. It is important to note that subject positions and semantic oppositions are linguistic categories (Maguire and Hardy 2009) that arise from the discourses: they do not picture a specific person but are used as meaning structures, enabling us to position the individual within a system of representation (Markkula and Moisander 2012). Thus, although we refer to the subject positions as "he" when describing the results, they do not only reflect male informants' thoughts but are also based on the cross-sectional analysis of the entire data. ...
This chapter utilizes the semiotic square analysis to identify and elaborate
the semantic categories of energy transition ideologies. The qualitative data were generated in the real-life settings where local actors participated in workshops discussing renewable energy opportunities available for their municipality. The analysis reveals two semantic oppositions of Dominant Social Paradigm and New Environmental Paradigm, which form the main ideological paradigms underlying the
energy transition talk. Moreover, the semiotic square also presents two categories, Not Dominant Social Paradigm and Not New Environmental Paradigm, which complete and contrast the main paradigms. The categories are further connected to fictive subject positions, Change Maker, Tree Hugger, Follower, and Rationalizer, portraying more specifically how local actors talk about the energy transition
opportunities. The chapter adds to the previous literature on energy transition by illuminating the subtle categorizations of how the underlying paradigms guide local decision making and legitimization of renewable energy. The chapter concludes that the complimentary categories should be studied in more depth to better understand the subtle ways of composing the ideological paradigms in certain locally
embedded contexts.
... Brand managers can, however, use certain strategies to ensure that the legitimacy of entities is safeguarded, even though they are constantly criticised. For instance, the oil industry continues to survive, which can be partly explained by the 'defensive institutional work' (Maguire & Hardy, 2009) of leaders and other actors within the industry (Humphreys & Thompson, 2014). Defensive institutional work is aimed at legitimising problematic or even highly controversial entities (see also Desai, 2011). ...
... If the company comes under fire and its legitimacy is threatened, defensive institutional work aims at ensuring its survival. Defensive institutional work is essentially centred around institutional maintenance (Maguire & Hardy, 2009), without actually changing any of the contested structures or practices. By analogy, we assume that the defensive institutional work of brand managers in higher education plays a crucial role in the survival of entities facing legitimacy threats, but the literature on marketing for higher education currently offers little or no insight into this aspect of branding and communication. ...
Studies of marketing for higher education have widely explored the branding activities of specific entities in higher education such as universities and programmes, but they consistently focus on proactive brand management. Proactive strategies are centred around gaining and maintaining a stronger brand. This also implies that reactive strategies are underexplored. Reactive strategies are rather centred around repairing stakeholder trust in contexts where stakeholders criticise the brand. For instance, in the Netherlands, stakeholders have strongly criticised teacher training programmes, by raising fundamental issues concerning their quality and societal relevance. Based on a case study of a specific teacher training programme in the Netherlands, we investigate processes underlying reactive brand management. We identify several micro-level strategies of brand managers such as acknowledgement, normalisation and denial of responsibility. Our assumption is that these kind of strategies can contribute to the continuity of problematic or even highly controversial entities in higher education.
... Most studies, however, find that incumbents usually assess the demands for change as threats and engage in defensive behaviors (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006;Maguire and Hardy, 2009). Their overarching aims are to protect themselves and their business interests. ...
... 1 Warn of Economic Consequences: emphasize the potential economic disadvantages of change, particularly job losses (Denniss, 2012) and consumer costs (Lee and Hess, 2019). 2 Doubt the Scientific Data: cast doubt on the environmental science or data (Maguire and Hardy, 2009;Oreskes and Conway, 2011). 3 Challenge Government Standards: attempt to change government standards, for example, CO 2 targets (Haas and Sander, 2019;Schwedes et al., 2015). ...
Most serious environmental and health problems caused by the transport sector stem from the automobile. While other sectors have reduced emissions, transport emissions have increased and the sector's sustainability transformation seems stalled. Why is that? And what role do incumbent automobile industry actors play? Relatively few scholars have focused on the behavior of these incumbents. Our study contributes towards filling this gap by analyzing two case studies of how the German automobile industry has reacted to environmental policy initiatives. Our analysis allows us to make several contributions to the literature. First, we demonstrate how industry and policy makers attempted to outmaneuver each other. Second, we illuminate several tactics employed by incumbents to resist change. And third, our analysis reveals a pattern of behavior that we argue is linked to the degree of pressure placed on incumbents. Most other attempts to identify patterns have prioritized the temporal dimension.
... However, even if these intelligent applications might enhance the value of business operations, their diffusion across organizations is difficult, as institutions suffer from organizational inertia [17,18]. As such, over time, various processes and institutional routines emerge and define how organizations operate [19]. ...
... Although the distribution of power relations is stable under existing processes, the question of power has to be redefined as organizational processes change. Managers who might lose to the changing power balance could obstruct the introduction of AI due to opportunistic reasons [18]. Therefore, organizations should not only pay attention to the concerns of employees, but also to the potential consequences for managers, and support the transformation with active change management. ...
Technological advances in the field of artificial intelligence offer enormous potential for organizations. In recent years, organizations have leveraged this potential by establishing new business models or adjusting their primary activities. In the meantime, however, the potential for greater efficiency and effectiveness in support functions such as human resource management (HRM), supply chain management (SCM), or financial management (FM) through these technological advances is also increasingly being recognized. We synthesize the current state of research on AI regarding the potentials and diffusion within these support functions. Building upon this, we assess the deinstitutionalization power of AI for altering organizational processes within business support functions and derive implications to harness the full potential of AI across organizations.
... Following Maguire & Hardy (2009), we make the argument that stigmatizer audiences are associated with both specific subject positions-institutionalized roles in society that enable them to engage in specific kinds of labeling (Berger & Luckmann, 1968;Bitektine & Haack, 2015;Suchman, 1995). 6 Because subject positions "provide the actors that occupy them with rights to speak and act" (Maguire & Hardy, 2009: 150;Maguire, Hardy, & Lawrence, 2004), and only "a limited number of subject positions are understood as meaningful, legitimate, and powerful" (Hardy, Lawrence, & Grant, 2005: 65), the impact of a given stigmatizing label is likely to be contingent on whether the audience articulating it does so from a subject position that warrants voice (Potter & Wetherell, 1997). ...
Research summary: Organizational stigma has been commonly associated with a number of negative economic externalities in prior literature, but the mechanism by which this occurs and the extent of the associated consequences have received little attention. We address these gaps by theorizing that stigmatizing labels damage the legitimacy of the target by highlighting a deviation from the expectations of relevant audiences. We also argue that the content and focus of stigmatizing labels, as well as the features of the stigmatizer audience deploying them, will affect the magnitude of the negative economic consequences of stigma. Through an analysis linking the condemnation of arms producers in the media between 1998 and 2016 to cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) in the stock market, we find broad support for our arguments. Managerial summary: This paper examines the economic impact of stakeholder criticism on firms, using data from the global arms industry to develop a typology of criticism based on its content, focus, and origin. We find that criticism can negatively affect a firm's stock market returns, particularly when those criticizing have the authority to condemn specific behaviors. Civil society entities like nonprofits or the media, politicians, and economic players such as investors each have unique authority to criticize harmful behavior, illegal behavior, and unethical affiliations, respectively. Understanding the different types of criticism and their potential economic consequences can help firms better manage stakeholder relationships and mitigate negative impacts on their financial performance.
... In this view, legitimation is defined as the "process by which cultural accounts from a larger social framework in which a social entity is nested are construed to explain and support the existence of that social entity, whether that entity is a group, a structure of inequality, a position of authority or a social practice" (Berger et al., 1998: 380). Accordingly, legitimacy is not the outcome of a single actor's efforts but is, rather, a socially constructed outcome that emerges as part of the contestation and co-creation (Suddaby et al., 2017) in which all participants are pursuing their own self-interest (Maguire & Hardy, 2009). However, scholars in this tradition tend to create a somewhat artificial division of the social world into 'actors' and 'audiences' (Golant & Sillince, 2007;Bitektine, 2011;Hoefer & Green, 2016). ...
The co-creation of new value requires entrepreneurs to have insight into a new direction that might turn out to meet desires or needs that could not have been known before. Yet, entrepreneurs are just the beginning, because the co-creation of new value depends on the consumer environment. For entrepreneurs this means a request to interact with contemporary consumers who pursue new consumption experiences. Accordingly, it is evident that entrepreneurs should have a clear understanding of consumers and their social contexts, because collaboration between entrepreneurs and consumers has become the core of business. However, entrepreneurship scholarship has thus far paid only cursory attention to consumers, and scholarly interest has largely neglected the interactions between entrepreneurs and consumers. Unfortunately, this has led to a limited understanding of the essence of entrepreneurship, and, thus, to a limited understanding of where the new value truly emerges from.
Therefore, the main aim of this dissertation is to suggest an interaction-based approach to entrepreneurship research. While conducting this research, I focus on the complex phenomenon of the co-creation of new value. I elaborate a theoretical framework of the co-creation of new value by synthesizing different theoretical debates. Using this theoretical framework, I provide novel insights into decision making, action and context, the key elements that must be taken into account to comprehensively understand the complex and dynamic co-creation of new value. Furthermore, this dissertation empirically provides some abstractions of reality to illuminate some new insights on whence new value truly emerges and how it is co-created.
Based on the acquired theoretical knowledge and empirical studies, I have summarized my key findings into three subpropositions. First, I argue that when aiming to co-create new value, entrepreneurs capture relevant knowledge about their consumers by making sense of the multilayered consumer environment. Second, I claim that interaction practices, which involve multiple actors, construct legitimacy that at times enables and at others constrains entrepreneurial efforts and the co-creation of new value. Third, I state that consumers constitute the multilayered consumer environment that works as a context for the co-creation of new value by situating themselves in relation to the social environment and their situational self. These three subpropositions collectively illustrate that the co-creation of new value is a highly interactive event. Therefore, my main proposition, which answers the main research question and fulfills the main aim of this dissertation, is that, when co-creating new value, entrepreneurs can tap into the consumer environment by adjusting their sensemaking, judgment, and practices for the socially situated interplay of decision making, action, and context.
Overall, I believe that, with this dissertation, I have been able to gain new insights on whence new value truly emerges and how it is co-created. Furthermore, with this dissertation I also foster some novel ways to break away from the process perspective and to capture time-sensitive descriptors of ongoing actions and the new value that is pursued. Thus, I consider that my propositions bend some boundaries of the existing entrepreneurship research and make some important contributions to the field of entrepreneurship. Moreover, I am certain that my findings provide some topical and practical knowledge for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurially minded managers, the advisers within the institutions who support entrepreneurs, and also for entrepreneurial education.
... Other relevant examples concern agents seeking to change existing practices that are harmful to health and the environment (Maguire and Hardy 2009;Van Wijk et al. 2013;Zietsma and Lawrence 2010). In each case, the MacIntyrean perspective points to the role of particular practices in contributing to or obstructing human flourishing, that is, a coherent narrative unity of life, where particular practices make sense because of their fit with this coherent conception of a life well-lived (Van Hulst and Tsoukas 2021; Von Krogh et al. 2012). ...
MacIntyre’s distinctive version of practice theory has already influenced strategy as practice research but his approach has further relevance to the field. The MacIntyrean approach further focuses attention on joint production as an organization-wide practice that potentially encompasses and integrates sub-organizational practices. It also highlights the way that ordinary organization members engage in modes of praxis in order to integrate productive practices in the service of morally salient, organizational goals, facilitating collaboration and long-term value creation, illustrating how participation in joint production shapes members’ identities beyond that derived from sub-organizational, productive practices. As such, this approach offers new insights into the nature of the praxis, practices, and practitioners that shape processes of strategizing within organizations., This approach also furthers the integration of the practical and critical strands of strategy as practice research and provides insights into the way it can be integrated with other research in strategy.
... Second, there are a number of existing legally binding international conventions, particularly in the environmental realm, that have caused considerable shifts in industry-level practices. One may think of the banning of the pesticide DDT (or Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) through the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (Maguire and Hardy, 2009) or the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances, which led to a phasing-out of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) (Maxwell and Briscoe, 1998). Interestingly, in the latter case, negotiators made use of those industry forces ready to gain from the ban (Maxwell and Briscoe, 1998). ...
The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of health technologies to mitigate against the spread of the disease and improve care, dominantly including life-saving vaccines. But the pandemic has also highlighted that the current biopharmaceutical business model, based on the enclosure of these technologies and on the immense accumulation of capital it enables, leads to vast inequalities in healthcare particularly in low and middle-income countries. We believe that the pharmaceutical industry has a moral duty to enable and enact global solidarity through tech sharing instead of tech hoarding, but judging by current technology transfer practices we question their willingness to assume their role in organizing healthcare markets through solidaristic principles. In the absence of a voluntary adoption of solidaristic principles and practices by biopharmaceutical firms, the institutionalization of global solidarity as a fundamental organizing principle for healthcare markets is necessary to strengthen resilience and know-how globally. With this call, we add to existing conceptualizations of solidarity by (a) introducing a global level of solidarity and (b) thinking through the concept not as an abstract humanistic stance but as a concrete organizing principle for global healthcare markets.
... The past decade has seen the increasing importance of analyzing talk and other forms of language use in organization and management studies (Harmon, Green, and Goodnight, 2015;Heracleous and Klaering, 2014;Patala et al., 2019). This linguistic turn spans discursive analysis (Lefsrud and Meyer, 2012;Maguire and Hardy, 2009;Phillips and Oswick, 2012), analogy and metaphor (Gary, Wood, and Pillinger, 2012;Vecchiato, 2020;Cornelissen, Holt, and Zundel, 2011), rhetoric (Erkama and Vaara, 2010;Green, 2004;Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005), pedagogy (Amernic, Craig, and Tourish, 2007;Oakes, Townley, and Cooper, 1998), communicative institutionalism (Schoeneborn, Kuhn, and Kärreman, 2019) and framing theory (Borah, 2011;Cornelissen and Werner, 2014). Despite the continuing development towards -a fractured paradigm‖ (Entman, 1993), the emphasis has been to consider the role of language and communication in the materialization of social and organizational activities (Borah, 2011;Goffman, 1974;Lounsbury, Ventresca, and Hirsch, 2003). ...
The purpose of this paper is to study how people use texts and languages to interpret or make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on the theoretical literature of framing perspectives to formulate our arguments that consider the virus a socially constructed reality. We use Taiwan as an empirical case study, using topic modeling analysis of newspaper articles. Our findings show that the language of the COVID-19 coverage combines the four frames of political evaluation, economic impact, biomedical science and social life in varying proportions. These frames are subject to changes in pandemic conditions. Implications for theory and practice are presented.
... While research on both organizations (Phillips et al., 2004) and communication (Barbour, 2010;Lammers, 2011;O'Connor et al, 2017) has highlighted how institutional messages can carry institutional logics and reinforce institutionalized practices, few have theorized the complex relationship between what is being communicated (i.e., the symbolic meaning) and what is being done (i.e., the material practices) during times of profound change (Phillips & Malhotra, 2008). Existing studies tend to examine how language and material practices are positively related (e.g., language arguing for or against certain material practices leads to the prevalence or abandonment of those practices, Maguire & Hardy, 2009) or negatively related (e.g., language is used to disguise the deficiency of a material practice, Westphal & Zajac, 2001). ...
How do institutions think about change? Building on Mary Douglas’s famous contention that institutions think by means of analogy, we suggest that institutions think about change by means of irony. Irony is pronounced during times of profound change when the rhetoric and the reality of change can be inconsistent. We show that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has enacted what we term loosely coupled change—change in which symbolic meanings and material practices are only weakly connected and retain their independence. The CCP employed the rhetorical form of irony, known as casuistry, to legitimize a change to market systems as being incremental while in practice radically adopting market systems and dismantling socialist practices. We contribute to research on institutional messaging by examining the hermeneutic depth of casuistry. We also contribute to research on organizational change by explicating how casuistry reconciles contradictory ideologies and facilitates loosely coupled change.
... What is known, and also visible here, is that it is often strong exogenic factors or incidents that drive or trigger organisational change [107]. The Diesel scandal may have played a strong role for Bosch, as probably have many of the other factors described. ...
Already more than 140 countries consider or have pledged to reach net-zero emission targets by 2050 or earlier and the share of global emissions falling into an emission pricing scheme has steeply increased over the past three years. Even where there are no direct implications for industry (yet), there is a series of subtle pressure points driving an increasing number of companies across the globe to work towards climate neutrality and pledging ambitious emission reduction goals. This article sheds light on the pressure points, the subtle triggers, the underlying considerations as well as the hoped-for benefits for industrial companies from achieving net-zero emissions. The observations and ideas presented in this paper are derived from quantitative data obtained via the Energy Efficiency Index of German Industry (EEI) and qualitative data. Not only societal, work force, supply chain and investor expectations play a large role, but also many strategic considerations which have the potential to make the company more resilient and profitable, particularly in time of crisis. Those companies that do not move towards decarbonisation, on the other hand, may face a costly late-mover disadvantage. This piece uncovers subtle interconnections, helping stakeholders from industry and beyond to grasp opportunities and challenges ahead.
... Phase-out poli cies may specify a date by which the practice has to end, a path or steps toward that end, compensations for those negatively affected by the phase-out, and other details (ibid.). Phase-out policies have been implemented for toxic substances such as DDT (Maguire and Hardy 2009), products such as light bulbs or gasoline vehicles (Meckling and Nahm 2019) and technologies such as nuclear power ). ...
The central questions of this book are how technologies decline, how societies deal with technologies in decline, and how governance may be explicitly oriented towards parting with ‘undesirable’ technology.
Surprisingly, these questions are fairly novel. Thus far, the dominant interest in historical, economic, sociological and political studies of technology has been to understand how novelty emerges, how innovation can open up new opportunities and how such processes may be supported. This innovation bias reflects how in the last centuries modern societies have embraced technology as a vehicle of progress. It is timely, however, to broaden the social study of technology and society: next to considering the rise of technologies, their fall should be addressed, too. Dealing with technologies in decline is an important challenge or our times, as socio-technical systems are increasingly part of the problems of climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequalities and geo-political tensions. This volume presents empirical studies of technologies in decline, as well as conceptual clarifications and theoretical deepening. Technologies in Decline presents an emerging research agenda for the study of technological decline, emphasising the need for a plurality of perspectives.
Given that destabilisation and discontinuation are seen as a way to accelerate sustainability transitions, this book will be of interest to academics, students and policy makers researching and working in the areas of sustainability science and policy, economic geography, innovation studies, and science and technology studies.
... Indeed, endorsement in mass media has been shown to support the legitimation of firms (Deephouse & Carter, 2005;Vaara et al., 2010) and consequently lead to beneficial outcomes such as higher founding rates (Hybels, Ryan, & Barley, 1994), decrease in stock market risks, and supportive investor behavior (Bansal & Clelland, 2004). Conversely, the disapproval of organizations in mass media can negatively impact their operations (Dyck, Volchkova, & Zingales, 2008;Zavyalova, Pfarrer, Reger, & Shapiro, 2012;Vergne, 2012) and even lead to the decline of whole industries (Maguire & Hardy, 2009). ...
... As practices become habits and objectively accepted by the masses, they become visible and in other terms identifiable (Tolbert & Zucker, 1999). Such visibility has also been shown to trigger processes of deinstitutionalization -notably by prompting reflexivity and (re-)examination of taken-for-granted arrangements and social practices (Dacin & Dacin, 2008;Maguire & Hardy, 2009;Seo & Creed, 2002). ...
... Consequently, selfreinforce ment is often sidelined in empirical research that takes a practicebased perspective, even though it is quite common in organizational practice. Pertinent examples of such relegation are reported in research on the escalation of commitment (Sleesman, Conlon, McNamara, & Miles, 2012), competence traps (Leonard Barton, 1992), processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization (Maguire & Hardy, 2009), pathdependent working time regimes (Blagoev & Schreyögg, 2019), and vicious and virtuous circles of different kinds (Garud & Kumaraswamy, 2005;Lewis, 2018;Masuch, 1985;Tsoukas & Pina e Cunha, 2017). ...
Practice theories inform much of current organization and management research by focusing on social practices “in vivo and in situ,” helping us understand how they are produced, reproduced, connected, and eventually transformed by practitioners. Despite the explicit focus of these theories on process, some important dynamics within and across organizations remain undertheorized. This is particularly true for self-reinforcing processes like escalating commitment or path dependence. While such dynamics have been studied quite extensively with the help of other theories, this work often lacks a clear relation or relevance to lived life in organizations. This paper offers an integration of self-reinforcing dynamics into practice-based theorizing, and thereby outlines a new way of understanding self-reinforcement “in vivo and in situ.” By discussing the role and relevance of specific performative linkages as being “weak signals” for self-reinforcement, we provide a new way of analysing this important process phenomenon that is closer to life lived forward, where outcomes are necessarily uncertain, and practitioners can always choose to act differently.
... Als Basis dafür wird eine wahrgenommene Unsicherheit des Gesetzgebers angesprochen, abgeleitet aus der Legisvakanz der Bestimmung im ersten Jahr. Es handelt sich hier um eine Form zerstörerischer institutioneller Arbeit, bei der die Grundannahmen des Gesetzes infrage gestellt werden (Lawrence und Suddaby 2006;Maguire und Hardy 2009). Im Gesetzgebungsfeld wird deutlich, dass die Legisvakanz auf eine Forderung des Arbeitsmarktservice (Arbeitsamt und gesetzliche Arbeitsvermittlung) zurückgeht und diese von der gesetzlichen AG-Vertretung "ausdrücklich begrüßt" (WKO 2010) wurde. ...
... A theory of deinstitutionalization is an important milestone for institutional theory as it asks whether and how even highly institutionalized practices, norms and beliefs tend to weaken, erode, decay and disappear over time (Oliver, 1992;Røvik, 1996;Clark and Jennings, 1997;Dacin et al., 2008;Maguire and Hardy, 2009;Kondra and Hurst, 2009;Gilmore and Sillince, 2014;Becker, 2014;Clemente and Roulet, 2015;Patora-Wysocka, 2015;Christiansen and Kroezen, 2016;Chaudhry and Rubery, 2019;Aksom, 2022a). Before Oliver's (1992) theory there were no theoretical extensions of new institutionalism with regard to the fate of institutions. ...
Purpose
Once introduced and conceptualized as a factor that causes erosion and decay of social institutions and subsequent deinstitutionalization, the notion of entropy is at odds with predictions of institutional isomorphism and seems to directly contradict the tendency toward ever-increasing institutionalization. The purpose of this paper is to offer a resolution of this theoretical inconsistency by revisiting the meaning of entropy and reconceptualizing institutionalization from an information-theoretic point of view.
Design/methodology/approach
It is a theoretical paper that offers an information perspective on institutionalization.
Findings
A mistaken understanding of the nature and role of entropy in the institutional theory is caused by conceptualizing it as a force that counteracts institutional tendencies and acts in opposite direction. Once institutionalization and homogeneity are seen as a product of natural tendencies in the organizational field, the role of entropy becomes clear. Entropy manifests itself at the level of information processing and corresponds with increasing uncertainty and the decrease of the value of information. Institutionalization thus can be seen as a special case of an increase in entropy and a decrease of knowledge. Institutionalization is a state of maximum entropy.
Originality/value
It is explained why institutionalization and institutional persistence are what to be expected in the long run and why information entropy contributes to this tendency. Contrary to the tenets of the institutional work perspective, no intentional efforts of individuals and collective actors are needed to maintain institutions. In this respect, the paper contributes to the view of institutional theory as a theory of self-organization.
... This "taken-for-grantedness" means that prior adoptions fuel future adoptions and result in a "contagion of legitimacy" (Zucker, 1988). Scholars taking a neoinstitutional approach have examined the spread, legitimation, and delegitimation of everything from beverage consumption (Hiatt et al., 2009) to pesticide use (Maguire & Hardy, 2009). ...
Kübler-Ross's five-stage model of death and dying-denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance-is one of the most popular theoretical models to come out of the 20th century. How did an obscure theory of the dying process come to dominate our understanding of emotional processes altogether? Building on previous work in the sociology of knowledge, I analyze the diffusion and institutionalization of Kübler-Ross's five-stage model in scientific and journalistic fields. Specifically, I analyze all 3216 citations of Kübler-Ross in the New York Times and the Web of Science database using qualitative and quantitative text analysis. I demonstrate how early scientific interest and commercial promotion led to adoption in popular culture, and document how the five-stage model expanded to cover everything from rent prices to COVID-19. I also argue that renewed interest in Kübler-Ross's work may signal contemporary attempts to mine the tradition for meaningful understandings of death and dying.
... Por ello es relevante el estudio de las organizaciones y la forma en que estas afectan en los sistemas sociales(Evan, 1967), ya que toda organización formal se encuentra en un ambiente donde interactúa con otras organizaciones, así como de un conjunto de normas, valores y colectividades de la sociedad(Provan & Milward, 1995). La visión de la organización esta acatada al resultado de ideas, valores y creencias que originan el contexto, de tal forma que se pueden ver como realidades concretas con ordenamientos de recursos para obtención de objetivos, brindando así un marco de referencia que facilita la interorganización(Maguire & Hardy, 2009).De acuerdo con DiMaggio & Powel (1983), las organizaciones se ven obligadas a adaptarse al ambiente competitivo basado en el mercado ...
Purpose
Organization studies in India has largely remained insular to the writings of Indian scholars in parent disciplines such as sociology. The lack of engagement with Indian sociological works has promoted excessive dependence on Euro–American theory. It has further hindered the development of indigenous theories. This paper aims to argue that engagement with the writings of classical and contemporary Indian sociologists can resolve this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper delineates the contribution of Indian sociologists to organizational or sociological institutionalism. It focuses specifically on the contribution of these scholars concerning two subtopics: conceptualization of institutions and fields, and the dynamics of institutional change.
Findings
The paper draws upon the work of Indian sociologists to develop a concept of ecological field. It further delves into the dynamic interplay between ideas and institutional change. More precisely, it draws attention to the role of actors and mechanisms that produce ideas.
Originality/value
Future studies can leverage the contribution of Indian scholars to explicate, elaborate and develop creative theories of organizational institutionalism. Such cumulative efforts can help in building an Indian tradition of organizational institutionalism.
Purpose
Despite intense scholarly interest in social entrepreneurship, opportunity recognition remains a poorly understood facet of the phenomenon. Linkages between the micro- and macro-level forces shaping social entrepreneurship are particularly unclear. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of institutional channeling, the process by which institutions socialize and direct individuals into specific knowledge corridors, as a key mechanism influencing the ability of entrepreneurs to identify and create different types of opportunities.
Design/methodology/approach
Through a synthesis of institutional theory and the knowledge corridor thesis, this research offers a theory explaining why some individuals are able to recognize opportunities for social entrepreneurship.
Findings
The authors develop a conceptual model that explains how non-contested institutions channel entrepreneurs into homogeneous knowledge corridors, which support the creation of purely for-profit and non-profit organizations. By contrast, experiences involving institutional plurality activate and enable heterogeneous knowledge corridors, which are associated with the ability to recognize opportunities, like social entrepreneurship, that blend institutions.
Originality/value
The central contribution of this paper is an explanation of why certain individuals, because of their institutional experiences, are more likely than others to recognize for-profit, non-profit and social opportunities. This article highlights that previous efforts at addressing this issue were predominantly centered at the micro level of analysis and focus on individual entrepreneurs and their identities, personality traits and social networks. Although these studies have shed light on important facets of opportunity recognition, they do not sufficiently explain the influence that institutions can have on the micro processes involved in social entrepreneurship opportunity recognition.
This chapter examines the practices disrupting the legitimacy of an institutional, corporate logic in the field of non-profit art museums. It focuses on activist group Liberate Tate’s (2010–16) protests aimed at ending BP’s (beyond petroleum) corporate sponsorship of Tate Galleries. It puts forward a sociology of art protests where emotions emerge from the performance of interaction rituals (Passionate Politics, 2001, The University of Chicago Press; Interaction Ritual Chains, 2004, Princeton University Press). These types of protests enable protesters to express loyalty to their cause, and to launch a critique against institutionalised ways of financing arts museums and their collections.KeywordsCorporate sponsorshipProtestsEmotionsPerformancesTate Galleries
Lo studio analizza l'impatto dello scandalo noto come Mafia Capitale sul sistema
cooperativo sociale italiano e come tale scandalo si è diffuso rapidamente in tutto il settore
cooperativo. La ricerca evidenzia i meccanismi attraverso i quali il settore ha combattuto tale
stigma. I risultati mostrano come un lavoro istituzionale di tipo difensivo abbia avviato un processo di “revisione” degli obiettivi e dei valori fondanti del sistema cooperativo. Tale revisione ha, infatti, portato le cooperative a discutere all’interno del loro sistema di come operazionalizzare tali valori in pratiche e modelli operativi in grado di rispondere alla stigmatizzazione.
We conducted a qualitative study of the category of independent tourism entrepreneurs in the politically contested territory of Northern Cyprus to understand how a collective of entrepreneurs whose shared identity is deeply rooted in place perceives and copes with threats arising in an extreme context. Northern Cyprus is an extreme context as it suffers from enduring political and socio-cultural challenges. Our findings reveal that the entrepreneurs’ collective identity is rooted in a deep-seated attachment to local family, culture, and region. This place-based collective identity drives not only their entrepreneurial engagement, but also their explicit concern for cultural suppression and dilution as a core identity threat and commons problem within the extreme context. Our findings show how the place-based entrepreneurs, in coping with this threat, become custodians of local culture as they engage in a set of collective custodial activities aimed at preserving the local cultural heritage. Our study holds important contributions for research on categories and place, custodianship, and entrepreneurship in extreme contexts.
To accelerate sustainability transitions, policy makers have to set clear targets for the decline and phase-out of unsustainable technologies. As such decisions are contested, many different actor groups engage in the politics and discourse around decline. This chapter compares the debates surrounding coal phase-out in three countries: the UK, Germany and Finland. Despite major differences, e.g. in the relevance of coal for energy supply and jobs, we find many similarities in discourse dynamics, key arguments and the actor groups engaged. Our findings can therefore inform debates about coal and other unsustainable technologies in places where phase-outs are still pending. Our analysis advances the repertoire of comparative studies in transitions research, and shows how the technological innovation systems framework can be mobilized to also explore processes of technology decline.
Already more than 140 countries consider or have pledged to reach net-zero emission targets by 2050 or earlier and the share of global emissions falling into an emission pricing scheme has steeply increased over the past three years. Even where there are no direct implications for industry (yet), there is a series of subtle pressure points driving an increasing number of companies across the globe to work towards climate neutrality and pledging ambitious emission reduction goals. This article sheds light on the pressure points, the subtle triggers, the underlying considerations as well as the hoped-for benefits for industrial companies from achieving net-zero emissions. The observations and ideas presented in this paper are derived from quantitative data obtained via the Energy Efficiency Index of German Industry (EEI) and qualitative data. Not only societal, work force, supply chain and investor expectations play a large role, but also many strategic considerations which have the potential to make the company more resilient and profitable, particularly in time of crisis. Those companies that do not move towards decarbonisation, on the other hand, may face a costly late-mover disadvantage. This piece uncovers subtle interconnections, helping stakeholders from industry and beyond to grasp opportunities and challenges ahead.
Radical sustainability innovations (RSIs) often run the risk of producing unintended consequences, which can sometimes be of catastrophic nature. Literature offers some innovation management methods (IMMs) for preventing unintended consequences, but these methods remain untested at the boundary condition of failure, i.e., catastrophic failure. This gap leaves blind spots in our understanding of the application of IMMs, especially in cases of catastrophic failure of RSIs. Our objective is to apply select radical sustainability innovation management methods (RSIMMs) to a case where RSI failed catastrophically, in order to: (i) identify shortcomings of these methods at boundary condition; and (ii) understand how these methods can prevent catastrophic failures. We chose representative RSIMMs through systematic literature search. We applied these methods to the case of leaded gasoline, which qualifies the definition of RSI but produced disastrous consequences. We used process analysis technique to explicate discovery, commercialization, institutionalization, and abandonment of leaded gasoline between 1910s and 2000s. Results suggest that disputed science can be leveraged for purely economic gains, and ‘show me the data’ and ‘my science is right’ mentality can set managers/scientists on pathways leading to failure. We propose a preliminary model for integrating RSIMMs to promote reflective thinking by rendering multiple layers of protection against likelihood of catastrophic failure. Our work has implications for understanding the role of stakeholders in RSIs, rethinking temporal dimension of innovation performance, policy literature on sustainability, and speed of innovation theory. Managers can use these results to improve ‘new product development’ process by reconsidering the temporal dimension in life-cycle assessments.
This study explores how the adoption of management ideas is conditioned by wider macro-level mentalities that are not company based but that instead reflect professionally or nationally rooted ways of managing. Drawing from studies on professional mentalities and practices, we study Finnish top executives working in globally operating multinational corporations in the metal and forestry industries, showing how, starting in the 1980s, they adopted new management practices during the rise of globalisation, market liberalisation and post-Fordism. Altogether, a traditional engineering mentality strongly conditioned the dissemination of new management ideas, which needed to adapt with the existing mentality. As a result, we find three ways of management idea dissemination: (a) new ideas had to fit in with the old business elite mentality, (b) new ideas were side-lined and belittled by the old mentality and (c) new ideas were smuggled into management by reframing and widening the old mentality. By extending Guillén’s work on elite mentalities, the study contributes to the research on management ideas by exploring the role of societal macro-level mentalities in management learning, highlighting their role in times of societal transformation.
This article examines how organizational experience influences social enterprise responses to impact assessment practices. Limited attention has been paid to why organizations resist or challenge impact assessment practices or how prior experience with impact assessment may shape organizational responses. The study draws on interviews with practitioners involved in social enterprise–impact investor dyads in Australia and the United Kingdom. The findings reveal that social enterprises enact either combative or collaborative responses in their relationships with impact investors based on past experiences with impact assessment. The study shows how more experienced social enterprises reach a state of impact lock-in—where they become committed to particular approaches to understanding, measuring, and reporting impact. The article contributes to the literature on impact assessment and impact investment by showing how organizational experience shapes divergent reactions to the demands imposed by impact investors, creating complementary forces of institutionalization and contestation of impact assessment practice.
The deliberate destabilisation of socio-technical regimes receives increasing attention in sustainability transition governance. Existing conceptualisations differ substantially in underlying assumptions and analytical scope. Yet, a systematic identification of differences between analytical frameworks is missing. To fill this gap, we explore the explanatory power of a deliberative, a regulatory and a transition pathways perspective on regime destabilisation governance. Each represented by a key analytical framework, these perspectives are comparatively applied to German pesticide policy in the context of European multilevel governance. We find that each documents different aspects of governance efforts to destabilise the incumbent pesticide regime. Through a content analysis of policy documents, we reveal how policy, especially on the European level, is increasingly, but incompletely oriented away from the incumbent pesticide regime, expressed in discursive shifts, changes in policy instruments and evolving political goal setting, respectively. Thus, we identify avenues for developing more robust frameworks of regime destabilisation governance.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) transparency has predominantly been treated as an organizational outcome in previous literature. Drawing on rich qualitative data, we find that CSR transparency can emerge through sensemaking processes where employees are instrumental in exercising moral judgements, engaging with stakeholders, and creating shared narratives. The study contributes to our understanding of CSR transparency by showing that the phenomenon is reflected by social processes and should not be narrowly conceptualized as an outcome of information disclosure at the corporate level. The study also provides fine-grained details about the cognitive and organizational mechanisms at play in the shaping of CSR transparency. Specifically, we introduce a bottom-up model which explains how reserved and non-reserved approaches of CSR transparency are developed.
Research interest in the institutionalization of accounting has risen appreciably in the past twenty years. Much of this work has been occupied with regulations and professional norms, often in individual firm settings. However, social spaces around, i.e., institutional fields, and beyond corporations, regulatory agencies and professional organizations are important in the process of accounting innovation and transformation. This paper draws attention to these social spaces by developing the concept of the cultural fields of accounting practices as an institutional field level analysis that has so far been relatively neglected in the accounting literature. In developing this concept, we outline how we define and characterise cultural fields, emphasizing their cultural-cognitive character, their lack of formal governance, their dispersion and the varying social space they can inhabit (from bounded technology fields to global ‘world culture’ Meyer, 2009; Lechner & Boli, 2005). Our term ‘cultural fields’ references both the wider, field-level processes that are not captured by a focus upon professional norms and state regulations, and the ‘cultural-cognitive’ character of cultural field-level processes that we argue merit wider consideration in accounting research. We identify three linked features of the cultural fields of accounting practices: the dispersed sites of the cultural production of accounting; the diverse, shifting and hybridised logics; and the role of arbiters of tastes and the carriers of ‘best practices’. We draw on these key features to discuss and offer examples of researching accounting that would address these processes of accounting development and institutionalization.
Drawing on selected discourses of non-essentialist ecofeminism this article proposes and substantiates an ecofeminist position. This distinct position is shown to bring with it a capacity to challenge widely-uncontested, corporate-produced truths regarding the benefits and the legitimacy of certain commercial activities. Three historical cases inform the discussion: the fights led by Rachel Carson against dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), by Erin Brockovich against hexavalent chromium, and by Vandana Shiva against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Distinguishing characteristics of this emblematically individual and critical activist practice include that: it is aimed at fighting environmental degradations; it originates from outrage; it is sustained by dedication and courage; and it combines pedagogy, politics, and ethics. We show how this practice may be understood by reference to acknowledged ecofeminist tenets and in particular with the advocating of a holistic, respectful association with all forms of life on Earth. This in stark contradistinction to dualist, corporate positions of self-interested detachment from the environment, and a corresponding denial of the entanglement of the social and physical worlds. We show how such an ecofeminist position has been capable of disrupting both established corporate truths, as well as the discursive power relationships attached to them; and how it engenders an imperative that corporations must confront and engage with the deliberate, anthropogenic consequences of their activities. 1 2 [M]ankind is not affecting climate change. Robert Murray, Murray Energy Chairman and CEO (2017) [O]ur leaders are failing in their duty to act on our behalf. Our current systems of governance are compromised by a focus on profits and economic growth. Politicians can be influenced by lobbies of powerful corporations and the media are hampered by vested interest of corporate advertisers undermining our democratic values.
The environmental, social and economic limits and shortcomings of the current linear model of production and consumption highlight the necessity of a rapid transition towards a sustainable paradigm. The concept of a circular economy has recently gained traction among scholars, policy‐makers and businesses as a promising alternative. Yet our understanding of how to speed up the systemic transition from a linear economy paradigm towards a circular economy paradigm is lacking. In this paper, we address this research gap by introducing the concept of ‘circular disruption’ and by describing how such a disruption may unfold. To do so, we build on S‐curve thinking and the concept of panarchy. Based on the resulting synthesis, we propose three phases that constitute the core of the disruption process: (1) the release phase, (2) the reorganisation phase and (3) the eruption phase. We then operationalise these three phases for different enabling innovation system functions and illustrate our observations with examples for the textile and fashion sector. We discuss how each of the three disruption phases can be accelerated to quickly create an opening for the new circular paradigm. The proposed circular disruption framework offers novel insights on socio‐technical transitions and changes and contributes to strengthening a systemic and theoretically grounded approach to circular economy research. Scholars and practitioners alike may take advantage of this work to focus circular economy efforts on speed and scale—an urgently needed focus to start tackling the sustainability challenges humankind is currently facing.
We advance research on how businesses engage with the complex social problems currently known as Grand Challenges. We study the concepts that preceded the term Grand Challenges, the connected ontologies that ground them, and the diversity of perspectives they offered. We construct a knowledge map that includes well-researched obstacles, such as governance obstacles hindering engagement and sensemaking obstacles limiting the ideation of novel and creative efforts. But we also build on prior research to identify curation obstacles, which precede engagement and define which problems receive social attention, and adaptation obstacles, which create uncertainty over workable solutions and bias the momentum of social systems toward the status quo. Our broader view on the obstacles defining Grand Challenges opens new pathways and identifies underexplored levers by which to understand and influence business engagement with complex social problems.
Institutional theorists have recently been moving towards a notion that nonisomorphic institutional change is precipitated by significant events or 'jolts'. In this paper, we argue that in doing so theorists have tended to move away from the social constructivist roots of institutional theory towards an understanding which implies the emergence of new organizational forms or practices in response to functional imperatives. In this context, we examine the ongoing institutional change from photography to digital imaging. Our analysis suggests that attributing institutional change to a single event or 'jolt' leads to a flawed understanding of institutional change processes. We demonstrate that, rather than causing institutional change, events are a pan of the change process, and only become significant as actors bring them to our notice and 'theorize' around them (Greenwood et al. 2002). This social construction process determines the scope, significance and relevance of events, leading to the development of new artifacts and the enrolment of new stakeholders in the field. Situating events within the theorization process, rather than outside it, underlines the importance of focusing on social construction processes in accounts of institutional change.
This article discusses management research and what makes it interesting. In a well-known paper, “That’s Interesting!” Murray Davis argued that what most makes scholarly work interesting is that it disconfirms some (but not all) of the assumptions held by its audience. Davis’ arguments about what constitutes interesting research are summarized, including something that engages readers’ attention, something that stands out for readers “in contrast to the web of routinely taken-for-granted propositions which make up the structure of their everyday life.” Some perspectives from a Brazilian scholarly journal, “Revisita de Administracao de Empresas,” are also presented.
We explore the relationship between discourse and interorganizational collaboration, arguing that interorganizational collaboration can be understood as the product of sets of conversations that draw on existing discourses. Specifically, we argue that effective collaboration, which we define as cooperative, interorganizational action that produces innovative, synergistic solutions and balances divergent stakeholder concerns, emerges out of a two-stage process. In this process conversations produce discursive resources that create a collective identity and translate it into effective collaboration.
The study of business interests adds an important dimension to our understanding of the development of international environmental agreements. The contrasting role of business interests in the cases of ozone depletion and climate change is critical to explaining why climate change is a much more difficult issue for the international community to tackle. In the case of ozone depletion, industry concentration and the technological factors provided incentives for industry leaders to invest in alternative products and processes. By contrast, fossil fuel substitutes present a long-term strategic threat to the major sectors that produce and use these fuels. Where relatively few actors were involved in ozone depletion, it will be much more difficult to craft an agreement that is acceptable to the broad range of industries affected by climate change. However, business does have substantial influence over the timing and shape of international environmental agreements, even when there is considerable disunity within the business ranks.
Through an analysis of an entire institutional history of pricing on-line database field during 1971-94, this study documents and explains institutional development in emerging and turbulent fields. The dialectic process model developed and illustrated here suggests - that inherent contradictions and. opposition, generated and reinforced by institutionalization, serve as internal sources of continuous dialectic contest. Fused with external developments, the process by which these. endogenous potentials develop is path-dependent and is central to their realization in the form of overt institutional stability or change.
This study measured changes in the constituency of an organizational field centered around the issue of corporate environmentalism in the period 1960-93, correlating those changes with the institutions adopted by the U.S. chemical industry to interpret the issue. The article develops the ideas that fields form around issues, not markets or technologies; within fields, competing institutions may simultaneously exist; as institutions evolve, connections between their regulative, normative, and cognitive aspects arise; and field-level analyses can reveal the cultural and institutional origins of organizational impacts on the natural environment.
We conceptualize discourse as a duality of communicative actions and deep structures, mediated by the modality of interpretive schemes, and develop a discourse analysis methodology based on the fields of hermeneutics and rhetoric. We then explore the role of discourse in shaping organizational change processes through its influence on actors' interpretations and actions, using a longitudinal field study of electronic trading implementation in the London Insurance Market. We conclude with some theoretical and practical contributions on discourse-practice links, the illumination of multiple perspectives in change processes, and implications for electronic data interchange implementation.
This study examines the role of professional associations in a changing, highly institutionalized organizational field and suggests that they play a significant role in legitimating change. A model of institutional change is outlined, of which a key stage is "theorization," the process whereby organizational failings are conceptualized and linked to potential solutions. Regulatory agencies, such as professional associations, play an important role in theorizing change, endorsing local innovations and shaping their diffusion.
Language and power are central to an understanding of control. This paper uses the work of Pierre Bourdieu to argue that an enriched view of power, in the form of symbolic violence, is central. We examine the pedagogical function business plans played in the provincial museums and cultural heritage sites of Alberta, Canada. The struggle to name and legitimate practices occurs in the business planning process, excluding some knowledges and practices and teaching and utilizing other knowledges and ways of viewing the organization. We show that control involves both redirecting work and changing the identity of producers, in particular, how they understand their work through the construction of markets, consumers, and products. This process works by changing the capital, in its multiple forms-symbolic, cultural, political and economic-in an organizational and institutional field.
In 1980, the conglomerate firm, a firm composed of several unrelated businesses, was perhaps the dominant corporate form in the US. Yet, by 1990 this form had in effect become deinstitutionalized. Using comprehensive time-series data from the 1980s on a population of the largest industrial firms in the US, it is demonstrated that this deinstitutionalization was effected by two processes: First, diversified firms were taken over at a high rate and their unwanted parts were typically sold off, and second, the less diversified firms that survived shunned the strategy of conglomerate growth. The aggregate result was that by 1990 the largest industrial firms in the US became considerably less diversified. It is argued that an unintended consequence of the successful spread of the conglomerate form was to replace the conceptualization of the corporation as a sovereign actor with a reductionist view of the firm as a network without boundaries or a nexus-of-contracts among separate individuals. The implications of this conceptualization for organization theory are discussed. -from Authors
Many perceive the predominantly command-and-control structure of regulatory policy to be overly restrictive and inefficient in achieving America's emerging environmental goals. In response, the U.S. government has introduced several voluntary programs to develop innovative, beyond-compliance environmental management solutions through the collaboration between government agencies and regulated entities. Yet, these programs have not gained widespread acceptance. This article analyzes the cognitive and institutional barriers to that acceptance by looking specifically at two programs-Project XL and Habitat Conservation Plans. These barriers act out of force of habit, creating a resistance to change and a rejection of new forms of regulatory policy. The authors argue that policy change requires a shift in how individuals think and how institutions guide that thinking.
Building on Scott's (1995) institutional theory framework, this article uses a microinstitutional approach to develop a model of the institutionalization of mindsets in a differentiated institutional field. This model is grounded in textual data involving the 1992 explosion at Westray Mines, illustrating how regulative, normative and cognitive elements contributed to the institutionalization of a harmful mindset of invulnerability that clouded individual perceptions of the inherent risks in daily work practices. This process culminates in organizational crisis.
This paper attempts to develop a new approach to the study of corporate strategy. It draws on the methodology of Michel Foucault to suggest that corporate strategy can be seen as a discourse which has its own specific conditions of possibility. These are traced historically to various exercises of power within the conduct of war and the development of business organizations. Strategy is located as an emergent set of practices which has distinctive power effects on organizations and subjectivity. Analyses of strategy cannot be reduced either to rationalist accounts of markets and environments nor interpretive understandings of actors' frames of reference. The emergence and reproduction of 'strategy' as an essential element in managerial discourse needs to be located in specific changes in organizations and managerial subjectivity, because it is a mechanism of power that transforms individuals into particular kinds of subjects who secure a sense of well-being through participation in strategic practices. Conflict over 'strategy' is therefore more than just a question of career politics and market competition. It touches on the very sense of what it is to be human as well as having effects that readily legitimize prevailing relations of inequality and privilege in contemporary organizations and institutions.
In this chapter, we aim to provide a summary and synthesis of research on what we refer to as 'institutional work' - the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions. Thus far, research on institutional work has been largely unconnected as such - literatures on institutional entrepreneurship and deinstitutionalization have emerged as semi-coherent research streams, but the overall focus has remained largely unarticulated. Thus, a key contribution of this chapter will be the provision of a framework that connects previously disparate studies of institutional work and the articulation of a research agenda for the area. By focusing on empirical work that has occurred in the past 1 5 years and mapping i t i n terms of the forms of institutional work that it has examined, we are able to both provide a first cataloguing of forms of institutional work and point to issues and areas that have been under-examined.
A challenge facing cultural-frame institutionalism is to explain how existing institutional logics and role identities are replaced by new logics and role identities. This article depicts identity movements that strive to expand individual autonomy as motors of institutional change. It proposes that the sociopolitical legitimacy of activists, extent of theorization of new roles, prior defections by peers to the new logic, and gains to prior defectors act as identity-discrepant cues that induce actors to abandon traditional logics and role identities for new logics and role identities. A study of how the nouvelle cuisine movement in France led elite chefs to abandon classical cuisine during the period starting from 1970 and ending in 1997 provides wide-ranging support for these arguments. Implications for research on institutional change, social movements, and social identity are outlined.
This paper proposes that processes of institutional change vary depending on the form taken by the three factors that define them: agency, resource mobilization, and opportunity. The paper builds on a conceptualization of agency that considers that change may result from diverse forms of agency (i.e. strategic, routine, and sensemaking). It develops the concept of resource mobilization, focusing on the process as opposed to the skills required for mobilization. It then suggests that the mobilization of resources, support and acceptance, accompanying the diffusion and legitimation of institutional changes may follow leverage, partaking, or convening processes. Finally, the paper defines institutional opportunity as an objective condition of organizational fields, suggesting that fields may be opportunity opaque, transparent, or hazy. Opportunities, of course, only become real when perceived by actors. Building on current sociological work, the paper suggests that actors' perception of the opportunity transparency of fields varies with their temporal orientation and social networks. Considering the possible variations of agency, resource mobilization, and opportunity, and how they may combine, the paper defines three profiles of institutional change: entrepreneurship, partaking, and convening.
We are delighted to introduce this special issue of Organization Studies ,t he purpose of which is to develop a deeper understanding of the concept of institutional entrepreneurship and to offer new avenues for future research. This concept has been attracting considerable attention in recent years, as was reflected in the record number of papers that were submitted ‐ the largest number that this journal has received for any of its special issues to date. As a result, the selection process has been stringent and we are very pleased to present the eight articles in this special issue, all of which survived the demanding review process. Each of these articles contributes important insights to our understanding of institutional entrepreneurship and, collectively, they provide an important benchmark for subsequent research on this phenomenon. In different ways, they explore how actors shape emerging institutions and transform existing ones despite the complexities and path dependences that are involved. In doing so, they shed considerable light on how institutional entrepreneurship processes shape ‐ or fail to shape ‐ the world in which we live and work The term institutional entrepreneurship refers to the ‘activities of actors who have an interest in particular institutional arrangements and who leverage resources to create new institutions or to transform existing ones’ (Maguire, Hardy and Lawrence, 2004: 657). The term is most closely associated with DiMaggio (1988: 14), who argued that ‘new institutions arise when organized actors with sufficient resources see in them an opportunity to realize interests that they value highly’. These actors ‐ institutional entrepreneurs ‐ ‘create a whole new system of meaning that ties the functioning of disparate sets of institutions together’ (Garud, Jain and Kumaraswamy, 2002). Institutional entrepreneurship is therefore a concept that reintroduces agency, interests and power into institutional analyses of organizations. It thus offers promise to researchers seeking to bridge what have come to be called the ‘old’ and ‘new’ institutionalisms in organizational analysis (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991; Greenwood and Hinings, 1996). We preface these papers with some of our own observations on institutional entrepreneurship stemming from its paradoxical nature. Research on institutions has tended to emphasize how organizational processes are shaped by institutional forces that reinforce continuity and reward conformity. In contrast, the literature on entrepreneurship tends to emphasize how organizational processes
This study tests a theory of how a craft- and profession-based industry adopted multidivisional organization, examining higher education publishing from 1958 through 1990. 1 combined interviews and historical analysis to identify two institutional logics, an editorial and a market logic. Hazard rate models of differences in the effects of these logics showed a decrease in the importance of professional determinants of organization structure and an increase in the salience of its market determinants, The covariates explaining the rate at which firms divisionalized changed as a consequence of their strategic and structural conformity with the prevailing institutional logic.
Pluralistic organizations characterized by multiple objectives, diffuse power and knowledge-based work processes present a complex challenge both for strategy theorists and for strategy practitioners because the very nature of strategy as usually understood (an explicit and unified direction for the organization) appears to contradict the natural dynamics of these organizations. Yet pluralism is to some extent always present in organizations and perhaps increasingly so. This article explores the usefulness of three alternate and complementary theoretical frames for understanding and influencing strategy practice in pluralistic contexts: Actor-Network Theory, Conventionalist Theory and the social practice perspective. Each of these frameworks has a predominant focus on one of the fundamental attributes of pluralism: power, values and knowledge. Together, they offer a multi-faceted understanding of the complex practice of strategizing in pluralistic contexts.
This paper develops a theoretical framework that situates institutional entrepreneurship by drawing from Gramsci's concept of hegemony to understand the contingent stabi-lization of organizational fields, and by employing his discussion of the Modern Prince as the collective agent who organizes and strategizes counter-hegemonic challenges. Our framework makes three contributions. First, we characterize the interlaced material, dis-cursive, and organizational dimensions of field structure. Second, we argue that strategy must be examined more rigorously as the mode of action by which institutional entre-preneurs engage with field structures. Third, we argue that institutional entrepreneurship, in challenging the position of incumbent actors and stable fields, reveals a 'strategic face of power', particularly useful for understanding the political nature of contestation in issue-based fields.
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 schools adopted more minimalist programs that were staffed by current employees who were more ecologically ambivalent and assumed recycling management responsibilities as a part-time, additional duty. Results of a subsequent survey of a population of colleges and universities show that this variation in staffing was importantly shaped by the Student Environmental Action Coalition, a national social movement organization that provided resources and support to student environmental groups at particular schools. Implications for the study of how field-level organizations shape the content of organizational practices are discussed.
In this article the authors discuss an article published in a pervious issue that presented an approach to building better theory through the use of case studies. The authors suggest that the paper does not do enough to support the claim that the methods used surpass pervious methods for conducting case studies. They compare the author's approach with various case studies and discuss the limitations of the author's work. Their main concerns fall into three areas; the in-depth study of a single case, deep vs. surface description and the telling of good stories vs. the creation of good constructs. They assert that by not conducting the in-depth research applied in a traditional case study the author is depriving the research of the insight one receives from that depth of study.
The work of Michel Serres has not found a great audience within Anglophone Social Science, despite his substantial influence on modem Science Studies. This article offers an introduction to his thought. Serres is a global thinker who describes his work as 'structuralist'. The notion of translation as a way of describing the communication and movements between different forms of knowledge and cultural practice is central. Serres offers a philosophy of science that is in stark opposition to the Bachelardian tradition of 'epistemic ruptures'. In order to make a break with 'breaks', Serres offers an account of science and cultural practice as multiplicities that are immersed within noise. Structure, when it emerges, comes about in acts of parasitism. Serres then explores how human relations obey a 'parasite logic' which contains an attendant risk of sacrifice. This risk is managed through the circulation of 'quasi-objects'. Serres' later work poses the question of what we can hope for when this circulation itself begins to falter.
Using the discourse of high tech in Israel around the millennium as a case study, I explore institutionalization as translation. Whereas the meanings attached to high tech were derived from broad cultural frameworks, they were reconstructed in the context of high tech. Differences in construction were manifested at two times and at two levels: before the high-tech economic bubble and after it, and at the societal and organizational field levels. Thus, institutionalization involves the translation of generic rational myths into specific ones, which change over time in relation to material fluctuations and depend on the dynamics of local institutional spheres.
The research reported here explores how institutional practices change over time in an interorganizational field, in the historical context of the U.S. radio broadcasting industry. It identifies three endogenous mechanisms of change: analogies that are used to make sense of and manage new phenomena, private agreements between identifiable parties, and conventions, the practices adopted by some constituents to solve coordination problems. The use of each mechanism is associated with the nature of the goods transacted within a field and triggers change in established practices as actors attempt to realize value from their transactions. After describing each mechanism as found in the radio broadcasting industry, we focus our historical analysis on conventions. It reveals that conventions were introduced into the broadcasting field by fringe players to deal with shifting coordination problems and competitive pressures. Once they were adopted by the central players, these conventions transformed the organization of the industry by changing the basis of transactions and became its new institutional practices. We conclude that the organization of a field is not permanent, but is contingent upon institutionalized definitions of what is being transacted.
In this article, I present an analysis of institutionalization as an interplay between three interrelated yet separate components - actors, actions, and meanings. Drawing on ethnographic data of a rape crisis center in Israel, where the entry of therapeutically oriented members resulted in the infusion of new meanings into originally feminist practices, I examine the role of organization members as carriers of institutions and their (possible) agency in infusing actions with meanings through interpreration; how meanings connect actors with actions; and institutional meanings as political resources.
An ethnographic field study in Big Six public accounting firms, where management by objectives and mentoring are used as techniques of control, examines how organizations transform professionals into disciplined and self-disciplining organizational members whose work goals, language, and lifestyle come to reflect the imperatives of the organization. The study shows that the scope and effect of these techniques shaped the identities of organizational participants but that the discourse of professional autonomy fueled resistance to these pressures toward conformity. Implications of these results are discussed as they relate to conflict between professionals and organizations and to the critical study of organizations.
This article draws on the work of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, in order to problematize conventional approaches to the study of management and organizations that have been thought of as informed by a positive epistemology. Such a methodology encourages researchers to produce positive knowledge in the form of representations of what they consider to be the real world of management. This involves a concentration on what may be seen as the outcome of human activity in the form of second-order constructs, such as markets, demand and supply schedules, company accounts, selection techniques, or collective bargaining. Although those who conduct positive studies claim merely to report or represent the reality they observe, it is argued here that positive studies actually constitute the "subjectivity" of management through their representations. In so doing, these studies treat the subject, whether this be an individual, a group, or a class of activities (such as an organization) as if it were no different from an object in the natural sciences. But unlike those objects, "subjectivity" can never be finally fixed in knowledge. One reason for this is that once knowledge of the social world enters the public domain, the human conditions which rendered it possible are changed, thus undermining the original validity of such knowledge. Accordingly, positive knowledge is as precarious as the conditions (i.e., the social, political, and philosophical discourses and practices) that make it possible.
I have on my desk several reviews written in criticism, in analysis, in rebuttal, or in praise of Silent Spring. As far as I can make out, if spring comes it will be anything but silent. The shudders of anguish, the enthusiasm of applause, and the violent reactions on all hands indicate that Rachel Carson has got hold of a tooth which, while it may not be too firmly anchored to its moorings, has a live and wonderfully sensitive root. Is the tooth viable? Anybody who reads Silent Spring as a scientific document simply does not understand the difference between testimony and evidence. Furthermore, a person who cannot tell a tract from a testament must be impervious to the history of Western man and science over the last 500 years. Since the printing press has been in a position to disseminate all manner of information, misinformation, propaganda, and scientific material
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 dialectical theory, we identify four dynamics that form a process model of elite institutional entrepreneurship.
This article examines the clash between stakeholder- and shareholder-based business systems resulting from an increase in foreign portfolio investment in the Japanese economy during the 1990s. An analysis of 1,108 firms between 1991 and 2000 shows that as foreign institutional investors, who were more interested in investment returns than in long-term relationships, replaced domestic shareholders, one fundamental pillar of Japan's stakeholder capitalism began to crack. Japanese firms began to adopt downsizing and asset divestiture, practices more characteristic of Anglo-American shareholder economies. The influence of foreigners, however, was weaker in firms more deeply embedded in the local system through close ties to domestic financial institutions and corporate groups. Thus, foreign investors were influential primarily in firms less embedded in the existing stakeholder system. This research contributes to debates on globalization and convergence of business systems, institutional change, and corporate governance systems.
This article examines the diffusion of a novel governance structure, the so-called partner-associate structure, among a population of Dutch professional services firms during the period 1925-90. An institutional change emerged out of an interaction between selection at the level of sector and imitative adoption at the firm level. We argue that market feedback regarding the novel structure fostered its legitimacy. Furthermore, the effect of market feedback is conditional upon three diffusion filters: social networks, propinquity, and strategic group membership. Diffusion as a legitimization process unfolds, therefore, at both the sectoral and the firm level of analysis.
In this paper we outline a key mechanism through which organizational fields are constituted. We suggest that in competitive fields, the market serves as a magnet around which groups of actors consolidate, and that cognition of markets occurs through the creation, distribution, and interpretation of a web of information about the "market." To illustrate our theory, we present a case study of the Billboard music chart from the commercial music industry to show that changes in either scope, methodology, or political tone with which market information is presented can provide a major jolt to the participants' understanding of their field.
Deinstitutionalization refers here to thc erosion or discontinuity of an institutionalized organizational activity or practice. This paper identifies a set of organizational and environmental factors that are hypothesized to determine the likelihood that institutionalized organizational behaviours will be vulnerable to erosion or rejection over time. Contrary to the emphasis in institutional theory on the cultural persistence and endurance of institutionalized organizational behaviours, it is suggested that, under a variety of conditions, these behaviours will be highly susceptible to dissipation, rejection or replacement.
Product substitution is an important discontinuity in technology evolution. Conventional accounts draw on rational, linear models of change and emphasize that the process is driven by the appearance and adoption of new artifacts. This article adopts a constructivist approach to address the question of whether the social reconstruction of incumbent artifacts can trigger their substitution, even in the absence of new alternatives. Drawing on a case study of the insecticide DDT and employing a discourse analytical perspective, four artifact-constituting discourses which have been employed to construct and reconstruct DDT are identified, and their implications for product substitution discussed.
We examine how a new discourse shapes the emergence of new global regulatory institutions and, specifically, the roles played by actors and the texts they author during the institution-building process, by investigating a case study of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and its relationship to the new environmental regulatory discourse of 'precaution'. We show that new discourses do not neatly supplant legacy discourses but, instead, are made to overlap and interact with them through the authorial agency of actors, as a result of which the meanings of both are changed. It is out of this discursive struggle that new institutions emerge.
Faced with increasing real-time dislocation of institutionalized practices in empirical studies, it has become clear that neo-institutional theory is still ill-equipped to elucidate strategies of change in institutional fields. In this article, I endorse the claim that neo-institutional theory can both become more strategic and give a richer meaning to the strategy-formation process by integrating issues of ideology, power and agency in a political-cultural rhetoric of legitimation. Using the social movement metaphor to describe institutional change, I study incumbents and challengers as potentially antagonistic social movement organizations (SMOs) that strive to hegemonize entrepreneurship in fields. After having outlined a model linking institutional change to the strategy-formation process, I identify four archetypes of SMOs and strategic propensities, and illustrate the presented propositions about the incumbent SMO-challenger SMO dynamic using the case of emerging Internet challengers in the music industry.
In this paper we develop a theoretical model that helps to understand change in mature organizational fields by emphasizing the role of competing institutional logics as part of a radical change process. Our investigation into a large-scale, government-led health reform initiative in Alberta, Canada, is based upon a qualitative case study approach to understanding the process of field recomposition. This study focuses on the later portions of change in an organizational field - that is, rather than explaining the sources of change, we investigate how a field becomes re-established after the implementation of a radical structural change.
This paper describes the methods being used by the Minnesota Innovation Research Program to develop and test a process theory of innovation which explains how and why innovations develop over time and what developmental paths may lead to success and failure for different kinds of innovations. After a background description of the longitudinal field research, this paper focuses on the methods being used to examine processes of innovation development. These methods pertain to the selection of cases and concepts, observing change, coding and analyzing event data to identify process patterns, and developing theories to explain observed innovation processes. We believe these methods are applicable to other studies that examine a range of temporal processes, including organizational startup, growth, decline, and adaptation.
This study examines the role of downsizing in the deinstitutionalization of permanent employment among publicly listed companies in Japan between 1990 and 1997. We found that although economic pressure triggered downsizing, social and institutional pressures shaped the pace and process by which downsizing spread. Large, old, wholly domestically owned, and high-reputation Japanese firms were resistant to downsizing at first, as were firms with high levels of human capital, as reflected by high wages, but these social and institutional pressures diminished as downsizing spread across the population. We argue that this breakdown of social constraints was due to a safety-in-numbers effect: as downsizing became more prominent, the actions of any single firm were less likely to be noticed and criticized, and the effect of the institutional factors that once constrained downsizing diminished.
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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 opponents of the new organizational form. We observe that such rhetorical strategies contain two elements. First are institutional vocabularies, or the use of identifying words and referential texts to expose contradictory institutional logics embedded in historical understandings of professionalism, one based on a trustee model and the other based on a model of expertise. A second element of rhetorical strategies is theorizations of change by which actors contest a proposed innovation against broad templates or scenarios of change. We identify five such theorizations of change (teleological, historical, cosmological, ontological, and value-based) and describe their characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Administrative Science Quarterly is the property of Administrative Science Quarterly and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)