Conflicting Institutional Logics Research Articles

Pockets of Trust in a Landscape of Distrust: Interorganisational Trust and the Challenge of Conflicting Institutional Logics

This paper examines the development of trust in interorganisational relationships (IORs) that are embedded in conflicting institutional logics. The study focuses on a recently established customer choice system for domestic elderly care that involves a complex constellation of logics for the parties involved in the IORs to handle. We explore how boundary spanners deal with conflicting logics and the impact it has on the development of trust in IORs, including both positive and negative expectations of trustees and the new customer choice system. Using the institutional logics in action theory, we propose a new approach to understanding the role of institutional embeddedness in IORs and provide empirical evidence of how institutional logics influence the development of trust. We introduce the concept of “pocket of trust” to describe the compartmentalised development of trust in an organisational environment otherwise characterised by distrust and control efforts.

Practitioners’ Responses To Conflicting Institutional Logics: Evidence From Primary Care

Based on a study of primary care setting, this paper examines how practitioners perceive and interpret conflicts among multiple institutional logics prevailing in their professional sphere and how they respond to tensions between logics. The existing empirical work on how organizational actors respond to conflicting institutional logics assumes homogeneous responses to conflicting institutional logics or focuses on professions where actors have the freedom to choose among available logics. Yet, not every practitioner is autonomous in practicing or making practice-related decisions. By focusing on the responses given to institutional conflicts that prevail in a partially autonomous practice setting, we show that there is heterogeneity in responses at the individual level while underscoring moderating effects of practitioner and practice context-related factors that guide actors’ responses. We show the role of the logic carrier in defining the type of response that the practitioners construct. Distinguishing between two forms of responses (i.e., primary and secondary), we show that not the dominance of one of the logics, but the individual response mechanisms of the practitioners, yields stability in the institutional setting. Drawing on these findings, we advance an integrative model explaining how individuals respond to conflicting institutional logics.

Integrating ESG: Mapping Individual Responses to Conflicting Institutional Logics

Integrating ESG: Mapping Individual Responses to Conflicting Institutional Logics

Examining the Viability of Organization-Sponsored Sharing Platforms

Organization-sponsored sharing platforms represent the sharing economy ideal because they facilitate the peer-to-peer exchange of goods and services among members of an established community. By embedding sharing within an organization, this platform configuration infuses collaborative consumption with the moral dimension of shared values and concerns. However, the conflicting institutional logics inherent in community-based sharing create paradoxical tensions that are likely to destabilize this new organizational form. Therefore, to understand when an organization-sponsored sharing platform is viable, we conducted an empirical investigation of the Zimride by Enterprise® ridesharing platform for universities and corporations. Using qualitative and quantitative data from 25 organizations that sponsored Zimride’s ridesharing service, we found that this new organizational form is characterized by contradictions due to the market, hierarchy, and community logics of its multilevel B2B2P2P service delivery model. However, the mere presence of such paradoxical tensions did not render this sharing economy ideal infeasible. We therefore discuss when the Zimride platform was viable and how site coordinators at sponsoring organizations managed, in particular, the tension between their organizational members’ need for a heterogeneous supply of transportation options and a strong collective identity to motivate their collaborative consumption.

Digitalization and the Conflicting Institutional Logics within Law Firms

This paper explores the conflicting institutional logics that arise as digitalization impacts the legal industry. The legal industry is shaped by strong formal institutions that has created certain...

Value Creation by Support Organizations Through the Prism of Conflicting Institutional Logics

Abstract The article sets out to explore how conflicting institutional logics of support organizations influence their value creation. Value creation undertaken by support organizations does not directly reflect their missions. Even though one can generalize that all support organizations should adjust their offer according to the idea of helping companies (especially small- and medium-sized enterprises [SMEs]) in their development, support organizations very often struggle with the conflict between mission delivery and survival needs, which affects value proposition of services. Moreover, support organizations are also shaped by institutional logics, which, embedded in social systems, govern all social agents. Therefore, the study explains the challenge of value creation from the perspective of the conflict of competing institutional logics that govern support organizations. The study also has its academic impact by contributing to existing literature on value creation by support organizations through the use of institutional logic theory. To gain this knowledge, discourse analysis is utilized in the study.

Organizing for Commons-Enabling Decision-Making Under Conflicting Institutional Logics in Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship develops innovative opportunities and solutions aimed to (re)generate the common good. This emerging organizational form poses unprecedented challenges to group decision and negotiation studies. This article leverages conceptual tools from the literature on the commons and institutional logics as it explores the organizational conditions of social entrepreneurship that trigger commons-enabling decision-making in its organizational field. Through an inductive analysis of a longitudinal case, this study proposes a model that highlights the critical role of the bridging organization that can be introduced by the social entrepreneur in a previously fragmented organizational field. This bridging organization is in the condition to develop an innovative co-creation logic that can serve as a common ground to enable collaboration between actors from diverse and even conflicting institutional logics. The proposed model suggests that a practice-driven path to the construction of such a common ground for decision-making is more effective than a disclosure-driven path, which is based on classical conflict analysis techniques. The ICT-enabled activity system developed by the social entrepreneur injects transparency and traceability into a previously opaque field, thus creating the conditions for distributed, flexible, and complementary sense- and decision-making processes that develop and protect the commons.

Serving or Being Served? Leadership under Conflicting Institutional Logics in Transition China

Drawing on institutional theory, we explore the indigenous leadership in China by analyzing the interaction between leaders and the institutional environment. We provide novel answers to three fundamental questions in leadership research: what leadership is, where leadership influences come from, and how leaders influence followers. In conceptualizing the Chinese institutional context in transition as ambidextrous, we argue that leadership in China is dominated by two logics: the professional logic adopted from Western democracy and the authoritarian logic originating in the local culture. Our arguments advance leadership research in general and contribute to the understanding of leadership in China in particular by developing a dual-logic leadership model that integrates an institutional perspective.

Conflicting Institutional Logics in the Religious Context of Islam

Conflicting Institutional Logics in the Religious Context of Islam

Human Resource Management in Professional Services Firms: Too Good to Be True? Transcending Conflicting Institutional Logics

Why is it that HR specialists appear to have difficulty applying their knowledge, systems and techniques in a systematic way when it comes to professional services firms (PSFs) – particularly when the drivers for developing powerful HRM practices within such businesses seem more pressing than ever? This paper analyzes the ways HR specialists and PSF managers/partners differ in their understanding of organizations and their management. The analysis supports the argument that, while HR specialists and the discipline of HRM are governed by bureaucratic logic in their approach to management, PSF managers by contrast are driven by professional logic. This creates a number of subtle as well as explicit tensions and disconnects that will have to be tackled if the practices of HRM are to prevail in PSFs. This paper contributes to HRM literature as well as institutional theory, by applying an analysis of institutional logics to HRM practice in PSFs. The paper builds on interviews with five HR managers who have held positions in PSFs, as well as a longitudinal case study of PSF managers in one of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms. The paper offers a number of tentative proposals around how HRM and PSFs might transcend the described gulf between the two approaches to management.

Deep Dive and Back: Social Impact Projects, Conflicting Institutional Logics, and Employee Retention

Firms are increasingly launching initiatives with explicit social mandates. Often the business case for these initiatives is justified through one critical aspect of human capital management: employee retention. Although prior empirical studies have demonstrated a link between such corporate social initiatives and intermediate employee-related outcomes like motivation and identification with the firm, the relationship between employee participation in these initiatives and retention outcomes has not been investigated. Our study fills this gap. Using individual-level project participation and retention data for approximately 10,000 employees in a global management consulting firm, we present empirical evidence in support of a positive retention effect associated with participation in an initiative with social impact goals. In addition, we offer arguments for moderating conditions that might weaken this relationship, and present evidence consistent with these arguments. Further econometric analysis based on a stringent matching approach as well as additional analyses based on survey and interview data also point towards there being a retention effect. Overall, by demonstrating a positive association between corporate social engagement and employee retention, this study calls attention to the need for further research into the mechanisms through which social engagement can serve as a tool for strategic human capital management.

Sociomaterial Negotiation of Conflicting Institutional Logics at the Swedish Migration Board

This study combines the institutional logics perspective with a sociomaterial lens to explore how a new element of an institutional logic is negotiated and manifested in sociomaterial practic-es at the micro-level of organizing. Building on recent research emphasizing the role of agency in the micro-level dynamics and use of logics, we show how the interpretive flexibility of a new and contested element of a logic (Lean Practices) is used to negotiate the influence of competing institutional logics. Moreover, by showing how the development and implementation of a new information system intensifies the negotiation between conflicting institutional logics and manifests meanings in daily work routines, our study sheds light on the constitutive role of information technologies in the negotiation and transformation of institutional logics. While previous research has concentrated on processes of translation between global ideas and local context, this study recognizes how local negotiations and adaptations of new elements such as management concepts can be understood as sociomaterial enactments.

Retraction Notice

Retraction of Garrow, E. E. (2013). Competing social service and market-driven logics in nonprofit work integration social enterprises: A comparative study. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/0899764013476923 The Article has been retracted because of overlap with another work written by the same author in a previously published book chapter, “Managing Conflicting Institutional Logics: Social Service versus Market,” by Eve Garrow and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, published in Social Enterprises: An Organizational Perspective, edited by Benjamin Gidron and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, Print and Online Publication Date: August 2012 (doi:10.1057/9781137035301.0015). It is the editorial policy of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ) to publish only articles containing scholarship that has not been previously distributed in substantive form. NVSQ was not made aware of the publication of the earlier chapter by the author upon submission of the Article or by citation in the Article.

Incumbents and Challengers: Conflicting Institutional Logics in SaaS ERP Business Models

With a shift in the architecture for the design and delivery of information systems (IS), new business models are emerging. Professional analysts predict that by the end of 2012, a majority of all enterprise-wide information systems will be delivered by a business model dominated by services rather than by on-site installations. This paper reports on a research project conducted between 2009 and 2011 that involved case studies of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems delivered according to a Software as a Service (SaaS) logic. Using a business model ontology, 10 case studies in the Swedish ERP market were conducted and analyzed. After constructing generic business models that explain two types of vendors in the market—the Incumbents (the traditional ERP vendors) and the Challengers (the new SaaS ERP vendors)—a discussion follows, based on institutional logic, which examines how these two groups of vendors adapt the dominant institutional logic. As the results show, both vendor groups hybridize their business models using the other’s institutional logic. At the same time, the vendors differentiate themselves as they try to establish the dominance of their own logic.

Conflicting Institutional Logics: A National Programme for IT in the Organisational Field of Healthcare

This paper reports the findings from a 4-year study on the UK National Health Service on the introduction of a national programme for information technology.1 This is the largest civil IT programme worldwide at an estimated technical cost of £6.2 billion over a 10-year period. An institutional analysis of our historical and empirical data from six NHS organisations identifies growing fragmentation in the organisational field of healthcare, as past and present institutional logics both fuel and inhibit changes in the governance systems and working practices of healthcare practitioners. This is further complicated by new institutional logics that place the citizen at centre stage of the NFfIT, in a move to promote patient choice and public value.