Institutional analysis in a digital era: mechanisms and methods to understand emerging fields

Abstract

Walter Powell, Achim Oberg, Valeska Korff, Carrie Oelberger and Karina Kloos deal with the processes and mechanisms of organizational change and field transformation. On the one hand, this is a classical topic of neo-institutional theory and research, and the authors make use of an impressive array of knowledge from previous studies here. On the other hand, and based on that ‘intellectual history’ as the authors call it, they conduct a highly innovative study by focusing on new organizational forms and field transformation in the nonprofit sector. To underline innovativeness, the authors have developed a web crawler in order to determine change by analyzing organizations’ websites and their references to other organizations through hyperlinks. By doing so, they identify the diversity and dynamics of organizational fields whose boundaries are becoming increasingly porous.