Institutional Logics and Institutional Change in Organizations: Transformation in Accounting, Architecture, and Publishing

PurposeThis study adopts an institutional entrepreneurship perspective in the context of public–private partnerships (P3s) to highlight the role of social actors in enacting institutional change in a complex organizational setting. By studying the actions of two prominent social actors, the authors argue that successful institutional change is the result of dynamic managerial activity supported by political clout, organizational authority and the social positioning of actors.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a field-based case study in a complex institutional and organizational setting in Alberta, Canada. The authors employed an institutional entrepreneurship perspective to identify and analyze the activities of two allied actors motivated to transform the institutional environment for public infrastructure delivery.FindingsThe empirical study suggests that the implementation of institutional change is both individualistic and collaborative. Moreover, it is grounded in everyday organizational practices and activities and involves a coalition of allies invested in enacting lasting change in organizational practice(s), even when maintaining the status quo seems advantageous.Originality/valueThe authors critique the structural explanations that dominate the literature on public–private partnership implementation, which downplays the role of agency and minimizes its interplay with institutional logics in effecting institutional change. Rather, the authors demonstrate that, given the observed impact of social actors, public–private partnership adoption and implementation can be theorized as a social phenomenon.

Institutional Theory and Institutional Change: Introduction to the Special Research Forum

PurposeManaging internal supply chains is becoming increasingly complex, requiring managers to balance diverse needs. As a result, managers continuously face the need to change how they organize their internal supply chains. The purpose of this paper is to examine this phenomenon by addressing why multinational supply chain management organizations (SCMOs) change their designs, as well as how managers respond to pertinent change phenomena using complementary theoretical perspectives.Design/methodology/approachQualitative data, collected from 50 executives within 24 multinational manufacturers, is used to develop an understanding of the organizational design change phenomena. A theory elaboration approach is taken to illustrate how various theoretical perspectives explain organizational design change.FindingsThis study identifies and elaborates organizational design change phenomena in the context of multinational SCMOs, including internal and external drivers of design change. Managers also discussed key supply chain management capabilities that were developed in order to meet perceived changes in business needs.Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to academic understanding of organizational design issues affecting SCMOs. Four theoretical perspectives are elaborated upon to illustrate their applicability for examining SCMO organizational design issues.Practical implicationsThis study provides managerial application of several organizational design change theories by elaborating principles for framing, interpreting, and implementing design change initiatives in internal SCMOs.Originality/valueThis is one of the first studies to investigate organizational design change in multinational SCMOs. This research highlights the complexity and evolving nature of SCMO organizational design decisions by describing the adaption, integration, and reconfiguration of firm resources and competencies in changing environments.

In this article, we address the question of institutional and organizational change through the start-up of new ventures. Following the institutional entrepreneurship theory, we examine the process of divergent change and the kinds of institutional work enabling entrepreneurs operating in a peripheral social position of mature fields to challenge the existing status quo. We argue that the start-up of new organizations can be an opportunity for repositioning existing traditional entrepreneurial capabilities by combining them with additional and complementary competences towards new institutional logics. Building on an in-depth longitudinal case study of a group of Italian small and medium-sized enterprises – acting intentionally as a community for innovation – we highlight the contextual conditions and the implementing factors allowing this type of institutional entrepreneurship. Our study makes two main contributions. First, we try to fill the gap with existing research mostly focused on dominant organizations, by showing how institutional entrepreneurship can be implemented by low-status organizations, within highly institutionalized fields. Second, we shed light on the process implementing new divergent organizational forms, by bridging established mature firms with new innovative fields.

This paper describes assumptions, rationale, and track-offs involved in designing the research methodology used in a longitudinal study of the relationships among changes in organizational contexts, designs, and effectiveness. The basic research question concerns when how, and why do different types of organizational change occur. Given this research question and a desire to develop and test generalizable theory about changes in organizational design and effectiveness, we conducted a longitudinal study of over 100 organizations. Data concerning the changes were obtained through four interviews spaced six months apart with the top manager in each organization. Each interview provided a short-term retrospective event history over the preceding 6-month interval in aggregate, the four interviews provided a 24-month event history for each organization. Additionally, periodic assessments of the state of the organization's context, design, and effectiveness were collected with two questionnaires spaced one year apart. Finally, in each organization, the top manager's personal characteristics were assessed after all other data were obtained. This paper examines the alternatives, advantages, and disadvantages of the research design decisions. With some hindsight, we also offer some suggestions for future researchers with similar goals of developing and testing generalizable explanations of change processes in organizations.

Policemen, managers, lawyers: New results on complementarities between organization and information and communication technology

The Institutional Logic of Digitalization

How are institutional logics transgressed in the organizational fields of open source software and of commercial proprietary software, respectively, by developing a new practice of commercial open source software? I argue that by combining a Critique of Ideology Critique and a Critique of New Institutional Organizational Theory, we become better equipped for understanding institutional change in organizations applying concepts such as institutional entrepreneurs, discursive devices, and meaning arenas. The analysis show that many institutional entrepreneurs apply discursive devices to convince actors in the two organizational fields of the legitimacy of the new practice. This happens in many different meaning arenas such as in the market, in the public discourse, and in concrete open source projects. I advance the assumption that a relation established between institutional entrepreneurs of different legitimacy in the two original fields renders possible their institutional work.

Breaking free from the invisible cage: Leveraging institutional logics to understand and facilitate organizational change projects

The cultural industries consist of those organizations that design, produce, and distribute products that appeal to aesthetic or expressive tastes more than to the utilitarian aspects of customer needs such as films, books, building designs, fashion, and music (Peterson & Berger, 1975, 1996; Hirsch, 1972, 2000; Lampel, Lant, & Shamsie, 2000). Less widely acknowledged, but as critical, cultural industries also create products that serve important symbolic functions such as capturing, refracting, and legitimating societal knowledge and values. For example, educational publishers influence what concepts and theories are promoted to students by the books they publish. Architects shape the sensibilities of interactions at work, home, and play by their choice of technologies, space design, and material resources. Music producers discover and promote vocal artists whose lyrics shape our understandings of age, gender, and ethnicity. Because of the societal impact of these symbolic functions, cultural industries have continued to interest both popular writers and sociologists alike.

The cultural industries have been considered unique and out of the mainstream, not a subject for developing general theory, and therefore relatively understudied by organizational scholars. We argue it is no longer the case that cultural industries are so uniquerepresenting small markets and industries of little matter to research in the sociology of organizations. Cultural industries are now one of the fastest growing and most vital sectors in the U.S. and global economies (U.S. Census Reports, 2000). This growth is fueled in large part by the nature of the symbolic, creative, and knowledge-based assets of cultural industries. In this volume, the manuscripts recognize that the functions of the symbolic, creative, and knowledge-based assets of cultural industries are also characteristic of the professional services and other industries as well. The manuscripts illustrate how the boundaries become blurred between cultural and other related industries that also rest upon the endeavors of and knowledge of creative workers. These dynamic interactions in the commercial landscape between the cultural, professional services, and other industries provide a richer context for the authors in this volume to examine changes in a specific market or industry, and also to advance our understanding of the institutional transformation of organizations

Following 9/11, U.S. immigration law and policy toward international students in the U.S. dramatically changed. Post-9/11, the government instilled restrictive policies, including a tracking program (SEVIS), to closely monitor international students because these students were viewed as possible terrorists. Additionally, the government replaced the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) with a new enforcement agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The elimination of INS was part of a major reorganization of the executive branch, which consolidated Federal departments and agencies into a single Department of Homeland Security, whose mission is to prevent terrorist attacks within the U.S. and reduce U.S. vulnerability to terrorism. This dissertation examines the interactive nature of a transformative event, such as 9/11, discursive strategies, and organizational design in promoting these changes. This project further explores the effect of such changes in law, policy, and government structures on language and meaning. To probe the interrelationship between material events, discourse, and organizational structure, I used three theories of rhetorical analysis: kairos, frame theory, and genre analysis. Each theory provided a different level of analysis to examine the narrative of international students in the post-9/11 United States. Collectively, these three methods offered a systematic and sustained way to examine the story of international students in a time of transition. These three methods expose a process in which material events and discursive practices led to organizational change that then acted as a rhetorical device to replace discursive practices. The new organization created new understandings of social and cultural situations and influenced language and the ability of individuals to promote and curtail argument. This study reveals that rhetoric is not confined to discourse and language. Discourse and organizational change can Ann Margaret Sinsheimer, The Meaning of “International Student” Post-9/11 iv become so intertwined that organizational change seamlessly replaces discourse and therefore must be considered in rhetorical analysis. While my work has focused particularly on legal institutions and on how institutional change within the executive branch of the United States affected the meaning associated with “international student,” this work has implications for the study of institutions and organizations generally. Furthermore, this work demonstrates the need to consider organizational change in rhetorical analysis. Ann Margaret Sinsheimer, The Meaning of “International Student” Post-9/11 v Table of

The substantial institutional and organisational changes in Japan that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868 have often gone down in history as an unmitigated success story. The objective of this paper is to analyse the course of the Meiji reform process to indicate how far it might offer any lessons for institutional and organisational reform in Japan at the start of the twenty-first century. I argue that the reality of the Meiji transformation was invariably more problematic than the successful image often portrayed. Analysis of the Meiji experience of three key areas at the heart of current debates in Japan financial institutions, business enterprise and the labour market suggests that in all three cases the process of institutional and organisational change before the First World War was slow and sporadic. The transformation was stimulated by a sense of national urgency and driven by political will. I suggest that great caution needs to be exercised in drawing any lessons for contemporary Japan from the Meiji experience, but that the analysis suggests firstly that it is unrealistic to expect fundamental institutional change within a very short time span, and secondly that the relative merits of importing new institutions and modifying existing ones are rarely clear cut. A further key difference between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries is also the nature of the global economy, and Japan’s radically different position within it.

Since the Indonesian state entered the reform era in 1998, several state universities that were centers of scientific development had their legal status changed by the government to become State-Owned Legal Entity University. From a sociological perspective, changes in legal status are commonly understood as institutional changes, which include changes in the norms that refer to governance, changes in governance procedures, and changes in organizational structure and governance. Some of the State Universities that have changed their legal status (institutions) are the Universitas Indonesia (UI), Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), Institut Pertanian Bogor (IPB), Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB), Universitas Sumatera Utara (USU), Universitas Pendididikan Indonesia (UPI), and Universitas Airlangga (UNAIR). This article will describe whether, in today’s digital era, these changes cause social problems of their own, especially social problems related to inter-structural relationships in academic activities on campus. This study employed Mixed Methods Research and 100 students as a sample of this study. The results found the fact that most of the student respondents (55.42%) considered that social problems that arise in State-Owned Legal Entity University were related to the capitalism of higher education. This research also found the impact of institutional changes being State-Owned Legal Entity University is a change in the inter-structural relationship among the academic community in carrying out academic activities to become exploitative, hegemonic, and repressive. Therefore these changes in an inter-structural relationship were also considered as a social problem.

There is a lack of research analyzing the formation and change of institutional logics in the Korean healthcare sector. This study examines the major institutional changes that occurred from 1990 to 2018 and explores institutional logics by conducting semantic network analysis on Korean newspaper articles. The analysis identified the 'medical marketization logic' and the 'medical coverage logic' as the main competing logics, and six groups of institutional vocabularies were found to support these two logics. The medical marketization logic has been strengthened primarily during conservative governments, while the medical coverage logic has been strengthened during liberal governments, and large-scale infectious disease epidemics have been shown to be important catalysts for changes in institutional logics. This study contributes to understanding the complexity and dynamics of institutional logics, suggests prospects and possibilities for institutional logic change in healthcare, and suggests directions for future research.