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The Effects of Regulatory Agencies on Organizations in Wood Products and High Technology/Electronics Industries
... Besides, much accounting and finance literature emphasizes the role of managers' perceptions and preferences in green innovation efforts and participation in voluntary environmental programs. A strong consensus exists that managers' negative attitudes towards environmental regulations are a great hindrance to firms' environmental progress and green efforts (Rivera Ungson et al. 1985;Cordano et al. 2004). Many recent studies highlighted that voluntary environmental regulations with more flexible tools and lower standard levels will encourage more corporate green innovation. ...
... Compliance with regulations may depend on the degree to which organizations can modify internal structures and processes to accommodate the regulation (Dobbin and Kelly 2007;Ungson, James, and Spicer 1985). Dedicated professionals inside organizations are often key actors in achieving compliance (Dobbin and Kelly 2007) both because they can directly influence internal colleagues and decision makers and because they focus their own activities on compliance. ...
Health care in the United States is highly regulated, yet compliance with regulations is variable. For example, compliance with two rules for securing electronic health information in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act took longer than expected and was highly uneven across U.S. hospitals. We analyzed 3,321 medium and large hospitals using data from the 2003 Health Information and Management Systems Society Analytics Database. We find that organizational strategies and institutional environments influence hospital compliance, and further that institutional logics moderate the effect of some strategies, indicating the interplay of regulation, institutions, and organizations that contribute to the extensive variation that characterizes the U.S. health care system. Understanding whether and how health care organizations like hospitals respond to new regulation has important implications both for creating desired health care reform and for medical sociologists interested in the changing organizational structure of health care.
Information disclosure programs (IDPs) are an increasingly common aspect of organizational existence as stakeholders seek to shape organizations' actions by measuring and revealing information regarding performance in various domains. In this manuscript we extend research on how organizations respond to IDPs in three ways. First, we extend theorizing regarding institutional waves to explain why organizations' rate of change on disclosed metrics are likely to follow a tapering pattern such that improvement occurs most rapidly immediately following the start of an IDP and then slows with time. Second, we explain why organizations that exhibit the worst initial performance are also likely to exhibit more pronounced tapering in their rates of change. Third, we begin to reconcile competing predictions regarding how organizational size affects organizations' responses to IDPs by theorizing and testing temporal moderation effects between size and [1] rates of initial improvement and [2] extent of tapering. We test our theory using panel data on motor carrier safety obtained from governmental databases following the implementation of a new IDP in 2010. Our results from fitting mixed-effects models offer new insights regarding the effectiveness of information disclosure programs and, moreover, contribute to our understanding of how institutional pressures affect organizations.
This is a comparative study of six organizations operating in the same industrial environment. The subsystems (sales, research, and production) in each organization were differentiated from each other in terms of subsystem formal structures, the member's goal orientation, member's time orientations and member's interpersonal orientations. This differentiation was related to the requirements of the particular subenvironment with which each subsystem dealt. A relationship was found between the extent to which the states of differentiation and integration in each organization met the requirements of the environment and the relative economic performance of the organizations. Within each organization the degree of differentiation of behavior and orientation between the various subsystems was found to be inversely related to the degree of integration obtained between these subsystems. Since this environment required that economically high performing organizations be both highly differentiated and well integrated, an investigation was also made into how effective organizations attained both of these antagonistic states. All six organizations had similar integrative devices (integrating teams and departments), but in the high performing organizations the integrative devices more fully met six determinants of effectiveness, which included such factors as the pattern of influence in the organization and the typical mode of behavior used to resolve conflict.
This paper examines organizational adaptations to an environmental jolt--a sudden and unprecedented event (in this case, a doctors' strike)-- that created a natural experiment within a group of hospitals. Although adaptations were diverse and appeared anomalous, they are elucidated by considering the hospitals' antecedent strategies, structures, ideologies, and stockpiles of slack resources. Assessments of the primacy of the antecedents suggest that ideological and strategic variables are better predictors of adaptations to jolts than are structural variables or measures of organizational slack. Although abrupt changes in environments are commonly thought to jeopardize organizations, environmental jolts are found to be ambiguous events that offer propitious opportunities for organizational learning, administrative drama, and introducing unrelated changes.
This paper presents a preliminary framework for understanding why politically and legally strong corporations face significant regulatory pressures. Three general factors are addressed. First, divisions within and between industries bring about unlikely proregulation coalitions. Second, the responses of agencies to pressures do not reflect the balance of resources among interested organizations because (1) the marginal values of technical lobbying decline significantly after a point because of agency standardization of responses, and (2) regulatory organizations do not react in neutral ways to competing claims because of their cultures and stability. Third, proregulation litigation, the diverse dispositions of federal courts, and rules of judicial review interact to considerably offset better endowed corporate litigation. Studies are suggested on the variance of units within sectors and on the development of dialectical and decision-making perspectives on regulation.
Propositions about the influence of environmental constraints on organizational behavior are rare, but they are essential in administrative science. Behavior depends on the patterns of inputs from the environment to an organization and on the interpretation of these inputs as tasks by members of the organization. A study of two Norwegian firms shows how the autonomy of managerial personnel-their decisions for and against independent action-may be influenced by the structure of the environment, by the accessibility of information about the environment, and by managerial perceptions of the meaning of environmental information.