How Constituents Evaluate Configurations of Status and Conformity

Abstract

Recent management research on institutional pluralism has surfaced that today’s organizations typically face multiple – oftentimes competing - institutional expectations. Despite this recognition, research on institutional pluralism remains circumscribed in two important ways: First, the existing literature typically assumes that pluralistic organizations straddle two sets of competing expectations, rarely more. Second, competing expectations are represented and evaluated by discrete sets of constituents with unidimensional expectations, for example when investors only evaluate financial aspects, and environmentalists only environmental aspects of firms. Examples that challenge these two assumptions abound, for instance when impact investors evaluate firms holistically based on their financial, environmental, and social performance. Where individual constituents have those multidimensional expectations, we argue, they holistically evaluate how organizations conform with multiple, interdependent expectations. Yet, such configurational approaches to evaluating pluralist organizations are currently absent from the literature. To address this gap, we conducted a fuzzy-set configurational analysis of 117 international business schools to uncover the configurations through which prospective students evaluate how MBA programmes conform with their expectations. Based on our analysis, we make three contributions to the literature on institutional pluralism. First, we explain how organizations are evaluated holistically as configurations of multiple interdependent, rather than independent expectations represented by individual constituents. Second, by doing so we add to current accounts of institutional outcomes. We extend current, binary accounts of the existence or demise of pluralist organizations to consider social evaluations as a more nuanced outcome of pluralism. Third, we provide new insights about how configurations of conformity and status interact in producing holistic evaluations in the context of institutional pluralism.