How Do New Organizational Forms Emerge? A Review and Integration of 50-year Research

Abstract

This paper concerns about the emergence problem of new organizational forms. Reviewing the primary literature in last 50 years, it intends to strengthen the dialogue and synthesis among various research strands, promoting future research. Understanding of the concept of organizational form in extant literature can be classified into three types, namely patterns presented by organizational activities, organizational templates shaped by institutional logics, and collective identities endowed by social audiences to organization populations. These three types of understanding denote three perspectives for exploring the emergence problem of new organizational forms. The emergence process of new organizational forms involves two different inner phases, that is to say generation” and establishment”. As for a new organizational form, generation is the initial phase of coming into its social field, and establishment is the stabilization phase of becoming an explicate category of the social and cultural classification system. The two progresses in overlapping, and are mutually permeated. In consistency with the three kinds of organizational form conception, the three perspectives have their own different interpretations about these two phases. The pattern perspective concerns about the material face of a form, explaining generation by figuring out changes in resource spaces and social structure, or sources of new practice and regarding establishment as diffusion or permeation of new practice. The template perspective emphasizes the cultural face of a form, viewing generation as institutional entrepreneurship that actors pick out and take in various elements of different templates knitting into a new template, and expounding establishment by presenting the conflicts and balance of multiple institutional logics. The identity perspective focuses on the social face of a form, ascribing generation to initiative identity construction activities of actors, and depicting establishment by revealing the generalization and identification process of social audiences and rhetoric strategies of organizational actors. However, there is a basic consensus among these three perspectives, that is, the crucial thing in the generation phase is to combine multiple organizational elements, and the one in the establishment phase is to acquire legitimacy. We integrate the three perspectives, arguing that pattern, template, and identity are three coexisting faces of organizational forms and three diachronic states through new organizational forms emergence, and stand out as major image in turn during the term from generation to establishment; institutional logics are the common foundations of three faces and the constitutive forces penetrating three states. Looking into the longitudinal course of new organizational forms emergence, a form arises as a pattern at the first moment, and is a new set of technical solutions of organizational issues. It appears as a template in the intermediate state, diffusing and becoming institutional frames and standards to guide other organizations into structurization with its growing legitimacy. At the end, it turns into the identity label of an organizational population which is regarded as a social category, indicating that it is established as an identifiable organizational form. During this process, institutional logics equip actors with cognitive frames to select materials of new forms, shaping the configuration of elements combination, and provide scripts for actors to construct legitimacy, deciding the probability of the new forms legitimization as criteria for legitimacy evaluation. No matter as patterns, templates or identities, organizational forms are undergirded by some institutional logics and shaped by the organizing principles deriving from those logics, presenting some predominate cultural values with some appearance. Furthermore, we propose that bricolage can provide a new perspective, blending the existing three perspectives, and expecting to deepen and advance current study. Bricolage is to create something new with old things. Repertoire（old things）, elements selection, and elements synthesis（the outcome is new thing） are key points of bricolage. Bricolage is a cognitive process, also social and political, and involves contingency at the same time. The key points and main attributes of bricolage are highly consistent with the courses of new organizational forms emergence. It is hopeful to unveil the inner complex dynamics of new organizational forms emergence with bricolage as a new perspective. This paper has strengthened the communication among various theoretical schools to some extent and has laid the foundation of future empirical research.