Competing Institutional Logics Research Articles

How Competing Institutional Logics Affect Corporate Social Responsibility Benefits: the Mediating Role of Paradox Mindset and Multi-Stakeholders

How Competing Institutional Logics Affect Corporate Social Responsibility Benefits: the Mediating Role of Paradox Mindset and Multi-Stakeholders

Intra-Stakeholder Heterogeneity Perspective on the Hybridity of Competing Institutional Logics for Social Enterprises

Both academics and businesspeople are interested in how to make social enterprises sustainable. The focus of this research is on the different kinds of stakeholders within a group that make it easier for competing logics to coexist in social enterprises. Based on intra-stakeholder heterogeneity and competing institutional logics, we identify key sub-categories among market stakeholders such as investors, customers, and employees. We tested our hypotheses using survey data collected from 190 social enterprises in Korea. Our research shows that the hybridity of competing logics is better when there are more ethical investors in the investor stakeholder group and cross-sector employees in the employee stakeholder group. However, impure altruistic buyers do not have much of an impact on the hybridity of competing logics among consumer stakeholder groups. Our study’s analysis of intra-stakeholder heterogeneity provides theoretical insight into the hybridity of institutional logics in social entrepreneurship. This study also makes the practical suggestion that in order to achieve hybridity, managers of social enterprises should put in a lot of time and effort to understand the different institutional logics of within-group stakeholders.

Inclusive Entrepreneurship in Handling Competing Institutional Logics for DHIS2 Adoption in Ethiopian Public Health Care Context

Information System (IS) research advocates employing collaborative and loose coupling strategies to address contradictory issues to address diversified actors’ interests than the prescriptive and unilateral Information Technology (IT) governance mechanisms’, yet it is rarely depicting how managers employ these strategies in Health Information System (HIS) implementation, particularly in a resource-constrained setting where IS implementation activities have highly relied on multiple international organizations resources. This study explored how managers in resource-constrained settings employ collaborative IT governance mechanisms in the case of District Health Information System 2 (DHIS2) adoption with an interpretative case study approach and the institutional logic concept. The institutional logic concept was used to identify the major actors’ logics underpinning the DHIS2 adoption. The study depicted the importance of high-level officials' distance from the dominant systemic logic to consider new alternative, and to employ inclusive IT governance mechanisms which separated resource from the system that facilitated stakeholders’ collaboration in DHIS2 adoption based on their capacity and interest.

Coping with Competing Institutional Logics During Policy Implementation: Evidence from China

The policy implementation literature has paid increasing attention to street-level bureaucrats’ coping behaviors. However, the literature is remarkably silent on the institutional antecedents of coping behaviors. This paper sets out to assess the effect of competing institutional logics on individual coping behaviors. It focuses on the environmental protection logic and economic growth logic during the environmental policy implementation in the Chinese context. Based on the analysis of interview and archival data, we found that environmental protection logic increases street-level bureaucrats’ workload and responsibility, and the economic growth logic makes enforcement officials lack power, resources and incentives. These contradictions generate unclear responsibilities in different bureaus and increasing tasks, limited resources and greater pressure for enforcement officials with fewer rewards, leading to the coping behaviors of street-level bureaucrats.

Imprinting Perspective on the Sustainability of Commitments to Competing Institutional Logics of Social Enterprises

This study examines the conditions under which dual commitments to competing institutional logics, particularly a social vs. a commercial logic, are both important to organizational functioning for social enterprises. Using hand-collected data from a survey of 190 social enterprises in South Korea, we identify a reliable measure for the sustainability of competing logics. We also identify the factors associated with variation in a social enterprise’s capacity to sustain dual commitments to competing institutional logics. Using an imprinting perspective, we show that a social entrepreneur’s non-profit experience has a curvilinear effect on the sustainability of competing logics. Moreover, the non-linear effect of a social entrepreneur’s non-profit experience on the sustainability of competing logics is less profound in social enterprises with a highly ambivalent founder.

Carriers of Competing Institutional Logics: The Effect of Returnees in Corporate Boards on M&A

This study examines how overseas returnees from developed countries impacts the cross-border and domestic M&A of the firms in the emerging economies. While the existing literature on overseas returnees has treated the returnees only as the carriers of knowledge, we argue that the returnees could also be the carriers of competing institutional logics. The competing institutional logics makes the overseas returnees more likely to have conflicts with other employees who are regulated by local institutional logics. The conflicts will weaken or even reverse the benefits of the carried knowledge of the overseas returnees. Using a panel data of public listed firms in China, we argue that the positive effect of overseas returnees in the corporate board on cross-border M&As is weaker when the firm is state-owned and/or the firm is located in a province that is less open. We find strong support for our argument.

Organizational Responses to Competing Institutional Logics: The Moderating Role of Type of Wasta

This study explores how subsidiaries of Western multinational companies (MNCs) and private local organizations in Lebanon respond to competing market and culture logics. It investigates the different elements that constitute market and culture logics in a given context. Furthermore, this paper provides and answers to why organizations choose specific responses in the way they do. 33 semi-structured interviews with 36 human resource (HR) professionals and line managers provide an answer to the how and why questions. This paper brings forward the importance of different type of wasta that plays a moderating role in choosing the optimal response to competing logics. Results show that “good” and “bad” wasta affect differently organizational responses. Therefore, insights generated from this study contribute to international human resource management (IHRM) knowledge and institutional logics perspective.

Failure to Launch: Competing Institutional Logics, Intrapreneurship, and the Case of Chatbots

AbstractThis article explores the institutional logics of intrapreneurial units, or groups within organizations that are designated to foster organizational innovation. Drawing on interviews with news intrapreneurs developing chatbots in news media organizations, this study shows that innovation can be stymied because of conflicting institutional logics. News intrapreneurs adopt a logic of experimentation, audience orientation, and efficiency-seeking, but that approach clashes with a journalistic logic prioritizing news workflows, formats, and associated autonomy for newsworkers. These clashing logics limit the adoption and influence of chatbots. This study illustrates the shaping influence of competing institutional logics and their negotiation in the development, deployment, and success or failure of intrapreneurial activities within organizations. The lesson is not that the existence of competing logics is, by default, a defeating proposition for innovation. Rather, this study advances scholarly understanding of the role of institutional logics in frustrating or facilitating technological adoption in organizations.

Competing Institutional Logics and Paradoxical Universalism: School-to-Work Transitions of Disabled Youth in Switzerland and the United States

<p class="Default">Disablement is a complex social phenomenon in contemporary societies, reflected in disability policies oriented towards contrasting paradigms. Fraught with ambivalence, disability raises dilemmas of classification and targeted supports. Paradoxical universalism emphasizes that to achieve universality requires recognizing individual dis/abilities and particular contextual conditions and barriers that disable. Myriad aspects of educational and disability policies challenge both conceptualization and realization of universal policies, such as compulsory schooling, with widespread exclusion or segregation prevalent. Resulting tensions between providing support and ubiquitous stigmatization and separation are endemic, and particularly evident during life course transitions that imply shifting memberships in institutions and organizations. Particularly visible among disabled youth, school-to-work transitions are fundamentally challenged by contrasting policies, institutional logics, and institutionalized organizations. Analyzing institutional logics facilitates understanding of the lack of coordination that hinders successful transitions. Examining such challenges in the United States and Switzerland, we compare their labor markets and federal governance structures and contrasting education, welfare, and employment systems. Whereas lacking inter-institutional coordination negatively impacts disabled young adults in the United States, Switzerland’s robust vocational education and training system, while not a panacea, does provide more coordinated support during school-to-work transitions. These two countries provide relevant cases to examine ambivalence and contestation around the human right to inclusive education as well as the universality of the right (not) to work.</p>

From Competing Institutional Logics to the Action Horizons of Mediatised Political Performance: A New Approach to the Relationship between Media and Political Action

This article introduces a new approach aimed at capturing three essential action horizons of mediatised political action. The proposed approach focuses on how institutional, discursive and argumentative horizons come together to form a historically specific and issue-dependent publicity that influences how political actors communicate their power and aims. We argue that by studying the interplay of these three horizons in different times and contexts, we can better understand the media’s changing role in politics than by focusing only on the alleged characteristics of media logic (e.g. personalisation and negativism), often proposed in the debates about mediatisation and media interventionism.

The Logic of Innovation: A Study on the Narrative Construction of Intrapreneurial Groups in the Light of Competing Institutional Logics

The Logic of Innovation: A Study on the Narrative Construction of Intrapreneurial Groups in the Light of Competing Institutional Logics

Revenue Embeddedness and Competing Institutional Logics: How Nonprofit Leaders Connect Earned Revenue to Mission and Organizational Identity

The increasing reliance on earned revenue displayed by nonprofits in the US has raised mission-related organizational identity concerns. However, the effect of a market-driven activity on mission-driven service may vary based on revenue embeddedness: the activity’s connection to the organization’s mission. This study draws on the competing logics of isomorphism and resource dependence to examine how the pursuit of earned revenue affects the organization’s perception of its mission and projection of identity. The authors examine how leaders use language to connect market to mission, presents additional dimensions of embeddedness, and offers propositions for future research.

Charter Schools in Turnaround: Competing Institutional Logics in the Tennessee Achievement School District

States increasingly lean on charter organizations to take responsibility for their most underperforming turnaround schools. These efforts employ a different constellation of regulation, market forces, and community involvement that constitute more complex environments for charters. This article relates the experience of operators within the Tennessee Achievement School District adapting to stringent performance demands, weak markets, and a vocal community. Results show the pressures this environment placed on operators to improve outcomes with restricted controls while simultaneously acting as community organizations dedicated to a wide range of goals. We conclude that while charter organizations can support school turnaround, the demands of a contested and complex environment require well-resourced organizations capable of meeting diverse expectations from varying stakeholders.

Competing Institutional Logics And Teaching Effectiveness In Traditional And Online University Classrooms

Competing Institutional Logics And Teaching Effectiveness In Traditional And Online University Classrooms

Environmental Managers and Institutional Work: Reconciling Tensions of Competing Institutional Logics

ABSTRACT:Firms face a variety of institutional logics and one important question is how individuals within firms manage these logics. Environmental managers in particular face tensions in reconciling their firms’ commercial fortunes with demands for greater environmental responsiveness. We explore how institutional work enables environmental managers to respond to competing institutional logics. Drawing on repeated interviews with 55 firms, we find that environmental managers face competition between a market-based logic and an emerging environmental logic. We show that some environmental managers embed the environmental logic alongside the market logic through variations of creation and disruption, thus over time creating institutional change, which can result in blended logics. Others, however, pursue a strategy of status quo or disengagement through maintenance or other forms of disruption, where the two logics coexist in principle but not in practice; instead the market logic retains its dominance. We discuss the implications of our findings for research.

Negotiating Competing Institutional Logics at the Street Level: An Ethnography of a Community Mental Health Organization

AbstractThis article brings street-level organizational theory into conversation with the institutional logics perspective. It uses ethnographic methods to investigate how workers in one community mental health organization negotiated the competing therapeutic logic of the clubhouse and managerial logic of fee-for-service reforms, analyzing how their actions shaped the accessibility of services for those most in need. This article examines the organizational products of new managerial reforms and the structures that were most decisive in shaping them. It finds that reforms in financing and governance produced unresolvable contradictions at the street level, restructured workers’ perceptions of problem clients, shifted workers’ conceptions of the work role, and led to service rationing. I conclude by reflecting on what these findings mean for the development of organizational theory and the project of improving the accessibility of community mental health services.

Inside the Black-Market: Managing and Maintaining Competing Institutional Logics in a Shadow Field

This article explores how competing institutional logics are incorporated and maintained in a shadow institutional field. Relying on a qualitative case study, we investigated the counterfeit luxury industry in Guangzhou, the most renowned counterfeit business hub in China. We show that, instead of organizations managing competing logics internally, as the previous literature suggests, the competing institutional logics were incorporated through a special field structure and associated practices, and maintained by consistent legitimacy work. This study further illustrates how a shadow institutional field can survive and thrive under legal pressure by carrying out innovative practices, which established business could learn from and apply in their formal business.

Competing Institutional Logics in the Development and Use of Performance Indicators between Hierarchical Levels in Dutch Municipalities

We aim to explain how institutional logics affect the development and use of performance indicators at different hierarchical levels in local government. Furthermore, we aim to show how decision makers cope with competing institutional logics. We use qualitative data from 24 interviews with decision makers at different hierarchical levels in six Dutch municipalities. We use quantitative data from the municipalities’ main budget. We show varying dominant logics at different hierarchical levels. These logics are materialized in different performance management practices. In the relation between politicians and top management, we empirically find that the institutional logic and the type of performance indicators (outcome, output, process) do not necessarily need to fit in order to enhance the use of indicators. Rather, if more output indicators are available, the use of indicators becomes higher. In the relation between top management and department level, we find that service measurability affects the institutional logic, and with it, the use of performance indicators. Finally, we show several ways for organizations to cope with competing institutional logics, whereby we make a distinction in competing means and ends. Our theoretical contribution is threefold. First, we propose a framework with four institutional logics that combines contemporary theory on institutional logics from a sociological perspective, with the institutional logics approach that is being used in the field of accounting. Second, we explicitly examine the performance management practices at multiple hierarchical levels. We provide the arguments for the development and use of performance indicators at different hierarchical levels, as well as the interrelations between them. Third, we examine how competing institutional logics specifically play a role in municipalities, where the provision of performance information is important in order to maintain legitimacy with a broad range of constituencies, whilst being subject to regulatory and other institutional pressures.

Understanding Intra-Organizational Responses to Institutional Complexity

Organizations are embedded within multiple environments, and thus are confronted with multiple, at times contradicting logics. Complying with one might require the violation of another. Although this is prevalent, very little is known about the ways organizations respond and cope with such tensions at the intra-organizational level of inquiry. While many claim to be studying institutional complexity on the organizational level, they usually center on individuals or on the organization-within-the-field, neglecting intra- organizational dynamics. The proposed symposium consists of five empirical papers that explore how organizations respond to institutional complexity from within, examining these responses through various lenses, including [1] organizational practices, [2] organizational members' identification (subjectification), [3] decision making, and [4] emotional processes. Following the presentation, Anne-Claire Pache, a major contributor to the study of organizational complexity at the intra-organizational level, will serve as a discussant to provide both theoretical and practical suggestions. Institutional complexity in action - Inside a Jewish-Palestinian organization Presenter: Linda Jakob-Sadeh; Hebrew U. of Jerusalem Presenter: Tammar B. Zilber; Hebrew U. of Jerusalem Bowing Before Dual Gods: Sustaining Competing Institutional Logics through Flexible Enactment Presenter: Wendy K. Smith; U. of Delaware Presenter: Marya L. Besharov; Cornell U. Re-Combining Institutional Logics in Workplace Practices Presenter: Trish Reay; U. of Alberta Presenter: Jo-Louise Huq; U. of Alberta Presenter: Mariline Comeau Vallée; HEC Montreal Subjectification in Hybrid Organizations: Socializing by Encouraging Questioning Presenter: Silvia Dorado; U. of Rhode Island Presenter: Trish Ruebottom; Brock U. Presenter: Douglas Creed; U. of Rhode Island

Interplay of Competing Institutional Logics: The Case of Socially Sustainable Global Outsourcing

This paper explores the tensions and challenges on hybrids that incorporate competing social responsibility and commercial logics in achieving social and economic value creation objectives of socia...