ABSTRACT We examine how formal and informal institutional logics interact to shape the effectiveness of Collaborative Environmental Governance (CEG). Using fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) of 34 CEG projects in Indonesia, we identify three distinct pathways to effectiveness: co‐faith‐based, multifaith‐collaborative, and secular‐market, each reflecting a unique configuration of authority, market, and social and community logics. Importantly, our findings challenge essentialist views of religion by reconceptualizing it as a context‐dependent institutional logic that can enable or constrain collaboration depending on its institutional embeddedness. Religion represents a dynamic informal force, especially salient where formal institutions are underdeveloped or contested. These insights extend theories of institutional design and collaborative governance, particularly in culturally diverse and institutionally uneven settings. Our study offers practical implications for designing context‐sensitive CEG systems, emphasizing the importance of inclusive leadership and institutional alignment.

ABSTRACT Recent research has underlined the growing importance of sustainability in HRM policy and practice, taking into account long‐term multi‐stakeholder goals. However, few studies have specified the drivers and outcomes of sustainable HRM practices, nor the contradictions that arise when managers attempt to satisfy the demands of both internal and external stakeholders. Drawing on in‐depth case studies of the UK public sector, we distinguish between the institutional sustainability logics of (i) viability (concerned with necessary resources and capacities to deliver) and (ii) legitimacy (concerned with satisfying social and moral demands for fair and consistent HR practices) and explore how these two logics interact through positive and negative feedback loops. Our findings show that across an increasingly complex HRM eco‐system, the tensions between viability and legitimacy are increasingly addressed through a focus on building individual human capital and personal wellbeing rather than protecting job security and the collective ‘common good’.

ABSTRACT Institutional logics are an important conceptual tool when designing and navigating public sector change. Our systematic review discovers how institutional logics clash or combine during healthcare change efforts. We identify logics that are more, or less compatible with each other and offer a framework that map logic relationships. We offer a typology of relationships between institutional logics: independent (constellations, loose coupling), interdependent (rebalancing, hybridization) and co-dependent (dominance, co-optation). We go beyond previous conceptions of logic relationships to characterize these relationship types, identify associated risks, and suggest that successful logic relationships includes clear boundaries, reciprocity, and a balance of power and control.

ABSTRACT While imprisonment’s impact on correctional staff has been widely studied, little attention has been given to military prisons. Addressing this gap, the study examines role perception and mental well-being among 18 former Israeli soldiers who served as correctional guards. Using qualitative methodology and semi-structured interviews, the research reveals three key themes: the complexity of working with diverse inmate populations, navigating multiple prison authorities, and balancing burnout with a strong sense of mission and responsibility. Findings highlight the unique dual identity of military prison guards, caught between rigid military discipline and rehabilitative mandates. This tension shapes a paradoxical maneuvering space: while military discipline can heighten burnout, commitment to rehabilitation sustains meaning and purpose. By focusing on this overlooked context, the study offers practical insights for military correctional systems and introduces a dynamic theoretical model explaining how these competing institutional logics simultaneously challenge and motivate correctional officers within military settings.

ABSTRACT While CSR awards are widely used to promote ethical conduct, their potential to paradoxically generate unintended consequences by intensifying symbolic compliance has been largely overlooked. Based on institutional logic theory, we theorize that rivals’ CSR awards heighten the conflict between market and social logics for non-winning firms, driving them towards CSR decoupling. Using a difference-in-differences model with 1,518 firm-year observations of Chinese publicly listed firms from 2010 to 2019, we find that after rivals have won CSR awards, non-winning firms significantly increase CSR decoupling. Furthermore, competitive intensity and award rarity strengthen the effect of rivals’ CSR awards on non-winning firms’ CSR decoupling. Our findings enhance the understanding of institutional complexity, while extending the research on CSR decoupling and awards by identifying the negative inter-organizational spillover effect of CSR awards. Practically, the results suggest that regulators should strengthen monitoring, enforcement, and transparency mechanisms to ensure that CSR award systems foster substantive rather than symbolic compliance.

Situated within the field of modern Chinese political history, this study investigates the Late Qing New Policies (1901–1911) as a pivotal transition from a traditional tributary empire to a modern multi-ethnic nation-state. A critical limitation in current scholarship is the tendency to reduce these reforms to mere expedients for dynastic preservation, thereby overlooking the complex mechanisms by which they fundamentally reconstructed national identity and interethnic power structures amidst the “triple crisis” of territory, sovereignty, and nationality. To address this, the article employs a comprehensive historical analysis to explore how institutional restructuring in administration, military, and ideology catalyzed the transformation from imperial autocracy toward a “responsible government” framework. The research is distinguished by its innovative application of Anthony D. Smith’s theories of “ethnic” versus “civic” nationalism to deconstruct the “myth-symbol complex” of the Chinese nation, bridging the theoretical divide between the “New Qing History” paradigm and empirical modernization narratives. Findings demonstrate that while the Manchu leadership aimed to secure formal primacy, the practical implementation of reforms engendered a de facto Han-supported power structure, compelling the reconceptualization of the state as a “multi-ethnic constitutional monarchy” and establishing the institutional logic for the “Five Races Under One Union” model. Consequently, this study offers significant academic value by redefining the New Policies as the foundational phase of modern China, providing a crucial theoretical framework for understanding the continuity of China’s multi-ethnic statehood and national identity beyond the dynastic collapse.

ABSTRACT This article uses the notion of crisis complex to analyse the relationship between labour migration and crisis from an institution‐ and process‐oriented perspective. Such an interrogation is timely, given the increasingly crisis‐prone dynamics shaping global labour systems and migration governance, including recruitment, skills recognition and the political privileging of temporary labour — all reinforcing a structural reliance on migrant workforces in capitalist development. Temporary labour migration from the Global South is increasingly framed as a development ‘solution’ to both unemployment in origin countries and labour and skills shortages in the Global North, precisely because its temporary and conditional nature is seen as politically palatable within contexts of anti‐migrant rhetoric and economic nationalism. These migration schemes reflect the unequal exchange between Southern and Northern regions, contributing to the exploitation and protracted precarity of migrant workers. Drawing on empirical evidence from a 2024 pilot project, this article examines how temporary labour migration is shaped by a broader crisis complex, understood as a policy solution that has emerged through a multilayered process driven by political framings, institutional logics and actor involvement across three dimensions: skills and development, governance institutions and business models.

ABSTRACT This study explored admission processes to yeshivas – Haredi (Jewish ultra-Orthodox) secondary schools for boys – in Israel, drawing on the analytical perspective of institutional logics. The data comprised semi-structured interviews with agents holding key positions in the admission processes, including educators, recruiters employed by yeshivas, and admission advisors working for community charity organisations, municipalities, and school networks. Participants emphasised admission criteria guided by the religious logic, relating to classifying students according to their level of religiosity and excellence in religious studies. However, the findings revealed a decoupling between the religious logic, which serves as a legitimacy façade, and actual admission practices that blend this logic with principles informed by the community and market logics. The community logic reflects informal communal stratification based on the power, wealth, and ethnic origin of the student’s family, alongside practices ensuring all students are placed in yeshivas. The market logic is manifested by intense competition, personal and aggressive marketing, and demands for package deals offering joint placement of excellent and weak students. The dominance of the market logic also emerged discursively, as participants frequently used terms like “market”, “branding”, “transaction”, and “products” to describe the admission process. Through decoupling, actors in the yeshivas’ admission processes mask nonconformity to the religious logic under the guise of compliance. Paradoxically, though the Haredi community invests substantial political power to avoid state supervision, the absence of the state logic appears to facilitate the erosion of the religious logic due to a lack of coordination and uniform guidelines.

ABSTRACT Social media guidelines have become essential tools for media organisations seeking to balance the opportunities presented by social media with potential reputational risks. Existing research highlights that such guidelines not only regulate appropriate social media use but also reflect organisational social media imaginaries – the hopes, expectations, and assumptions that shape how media professionals engage online. However, little attention has been given to the historical evolution of these guidelines within public media institutions. This paper addresses this gap by applying Institutional Theory to analyse the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) social media guidelines from 2009 to 2023, focusing on competing institutional logics – understood as the values, goals, and norms that actors invoke when navigating social contexts. Drawing on an extensive review of ABC policy documents, public speeches, parliamentary hearings, and 10 in-depth interviews with senior ABC journalists and editors, this study traces how the ABC’s social media governance evolved from initial enthusiasm through tempered engagement to cautious risk mitigation. The findings reveal the complexities of balancing editorial independence, professional norms, political pressures, and commercial imperatives in a shifting digital landscape. Over time, the ABC’s guidelines demonstrate an increasingly regulated and risk-averse posture as the organisation seeks to reconcile conflicting institutional demands.

Is corruption sand or grease in the wheels of corporate sustainability?

ABSTRACT Forced labor and precarious working conditions are increasingly visible in high‐income economies of the Global North. Mostly perpetrated by the private business sector, immigrant workers are disproportionately affected. However, most management literature has focused on labor exploitation and human rights abuses connected to global supply chains in the Global South. Yet, in industries or activities not easily offshored, low‐cost business models contribute to labor market exploitation in high‐income economies. The ability to implement such models depends on the institutional context as well as corporate capabilities. This insight does not, however, resolve the issue why also democratic welfare societies with strong legal systems see such practices. Using Sweden as a case, we ask what a sociological lens can contribute to our understanding. It suggests that forced labor is an emergent outcome of interlocking market, state, and institutional logics, reinforced by increasingly restrictive migration regimes. Conversely, an appreciation of the business side could inform sociological studies of migration and labor exploitation. Bridging management, sociology, and migration perspectives, this review contributes to the growing recognition that combating modern slavery requires not only better corporate compliance but also a rethinking of the institutional and social foundations upon which contemporary business models depend.

Health and social services in Italy frequently essentialize migrant women's reproductive choices as products of ‘culture’ rather than responses to structural barriers, precarious conditions or institutional failures of listening. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Verona in 2018 – including focus groups and interviews with both practitioners and migrant women – this article analyses how, to paraphrase Mary Douglas, reproductive health services ‘think’. Practitioners’ narratives reveal persistent patterns of infantilization and cultural stereotyping, while migrant women's testimonies point to experiences of obstetrical violence and alienation. Yet some street‐level bureaucrats resist these institutional logics, opening space for more reflexive care practices.

Recent numbers of the share of residential services in the Flemish care reveal that implementing personal budgets did not ignite a large-scale departure from residential care and that the use of full-time residential care even increased. Despite incentives to leave residential care, people with intellectual disabilities and mental health problems (PIDMHP) in particular continue to keep living there (or choose to keep living there). Gaining insight into the possibilities PIDMHP living in residential care have for making a home is of importance in the ever-continuing inquiry and discussion of how to contribute to enhancing service quality and spatial living conditions for PIDMHP. This contribution is built around shadowing activities with 20 PIDMHP living in a residential care facility in Flanders (Belgium), as a form of one-on-one ethnography, coupled with go-along interviews with 12 professional carers. PIDMHP showcases a myriad of socio-spatial strategies relating to co-viviality and conviviality to make sense of 'a good home' in residential care. These strategies emerge within power dynamics and, in the process, are not always recognised by professionals as meaningful/significant or supported to come into being. The conducts of the residents and support workers are not passive by-products of the building design but constitute active shaping of that living environment themselves by means of socio-spatial strategies. The strategies employed by residents are embedded within rules and structures established by professionals. These power dynamics within which 'home-making' takes shape are especially relevant when considering the transformation of residential care facilities and challenging prevailing institutional logics.

ABSTRACT Massification has transformed higher education from elite to high-participation and, in some contexts, universal systems. This expansion has intensified horizontal differentiation among institutions and vertical stratification of students, resources, and status. This comparative study examines how these forces shape student affairs and services (SAS) across nine systems – Mauritius, Singapore, Cambodia, India, Bangladesh, China, Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea. Drawing on institutional theory, we identify five institutional logics – access, equity, quality, market, and global – local adaptation – and show how they are operationalised and contested across governance, funding, functions, target populations, and professionalisation. Incorporating contemporary political pressures, challenges to academic freedom, and shifts in student mobility, we advance an explanatory typology linking constellations of logics to distinct SAS configurations. Findings reveal how hybrid arrangements can either mitigate or reproduce inequalities. We conclude with context-sensitive policy strategies to rebalance equity and market imperatives while adapting international models to local conditions.

For family businesses in the world’s poorest economies, formalization—registering with the government and paying taxes and fees—has been found to lead to better performance. However, formalization may also lead to unexpected negative consequences. Drawing on institutional logics and family embeddedness perspectives and using a sample of family businesses in Eswatini, we find an inverted U-shaped association between businesses’ degree of formality and child work. We find that child work increases, then decreases, as family businesses move from informal, to semi-formal, to formal status. We also explore how entrepreneurs’ gender and family business performance moderate this relationship.

ABSTRACT Journalists are regularly accused of being strongly left leaning, which critics claim leads to biased reporting. Previous research suggests this assumption may be over-simplistic, but direct empirical tests are rare, suffer from substantial shortcomings, and still need to acknowledge this process’s complexity. Therefore, we theorize the conditional nature of how journalists’ political orientations translate into their news reporting. We assert that journalists’ autonomy within organizational constraints and professional role orientations as an expression of journalism’s institutional logic may act as “correctives” against this translation. Our study combines a quantitative manual content analysis of political news items in Austria (n = 3,539) with a subsequent survey of 160 journalists who authored 626 of those items. We operationalize bias in news coverage via subjective evaluations of journalists, political party composition, and value frame composition in the news content they produce. The findings suggest that the left-right political orientation of journalists affects the use of subjectivity in reporting and political party composition, but in the opposite direction in the latter case, in which journalists seem to overcompensate for their individual views. There is only a tentative impact on value frame composition. Political ideology interacts with journalists’ autonomy and with their professional role orientations, but the mechanisms behind different kinds of bias differ fundamentally. We conclude that balancing out ideological biases is a delicate equilibrium utilizing various mechanisms involving organizational and institutional factors that must be continually renewed in a changing news ecosystem.

Abstract Background The clean energy transition required for the decarbonisation of societies to meet climate, energy and sustainability goals make policymakers targets for broad business and non-business advocacy, ensuring that their often-conflicting interests are protected or considered in public policies. The concept of policy entrepreneurs foregrounds the role of agency in understanding such advocacy acts. This paper aims to further the understanding of policy entrepreneurship by comparing strategies used by policy entrepreneurs from various social spheres, who advocate policy change or the status quo, in four longitudinal cases related to EU energy and climate policy from 2011 to 2023. Results Policy entrepreneurship was mainly of a cultural-institutional nature, aiming at altering or diffusing people’s perceptions, beliefs, norms and cognitive frameworks, worldviews, or institutional logics. However, the European Commission’s (EC) actions also included structural entrepreneurship, aiming at overcoming structural barriers to enhance governance influence by altering the distribution of formal authority and factual and scientific information. The motives of policy entrepreneurs in the four cases differ, but strategies do not differ significantly between actors from the public, private and civic spheres of society. However, the results indicate that civil society policy entrepreneurs focus on building broader coalitions, than do public and private sector entrepreneurs. There is no indication that policy entrepreneurs from a certain sector are more successful than others in setting the agenda, changing the perceptions of policy actors, or influencing actual policy change. Conclusions It is concluded that policy entrepreneurs advocating policy change are more active and use more elaborate strategies than policy entrepreneurs advocating the status quo. They are also more successful in influencing policy outcomes. The EC was the only policy entrepreneur using structural entrepreneurship, but other policy entrepreneurs were also found to act in non-transparent ways, hiding who takes decisions. The EC acts to expand its reach into areas where the EU holds no or limited legal competence according to the Treaty of the EU. In all, this comes with democratic deficits related to accountability and legitimacy and raises concerns about technocratisation of EU policy processes. These tendencies should be combated to reinstate and reinforce the position and powers of both national and European legislators in formally making important decisions that impact the lives of European citizens and sustainability in the EU.

ABSTRACT Democratic resilience has emerged as a central theme in academic debates in response to growing threats to contemporary democracies, yet little attention has been paid to resilience capacity to external stressors. This article conceptualises electoral integrity as a key democratic resilience capacity and examines how central actors in the Swedish electoral administration make sense of, and navigate, foreign election interference. Drawing on institutional logics theory and qualitative interviews with Swedish county governors, the article demonstrates how governors approach resilience through a logic of trust: interviewees view trust as both a core democratic resource and a target of foreign adversaries. Assuming the role of guardians of trust, governors rely on institutional practices of transparency, impartiality and standardisation as central tools. By positioning foreign election interference as a key external stressor and electoral integrity as a resilience capacity, the article contributes to the growing literature on democratic resilience. By providing insight into the work of the electoral administration, it also adds a novel resilience perspective to security studies scholarship on foreign interference. Finally, the article indicates a need for future comparative studies on electoral integrity as a resilience capacity in the context of external stressors across settings with diverging levels of trust.

This bibliometric analysis explores stakeholder engagement in climate action decision-making from 2014 to 2024, addressing gaps in understanding its complex, cross-sectoral role. Utilizing a rigorous PRISMA framework, 842 journal articles were systematically reviewed and analyzed with Biblioshiny and VOSviewer. The study aimed to map the intellectual landscape, identify major contributors, with attention to geographic (Global North/South) and inferred racial disparities, prevalent research areas, and distinct engagement typologies. Findings reveal rapid growth in scholarly interest, especially from 2020-2024, underscoring the imperative for inclusive climate solutions. Key themes highlight a human-centric policy focus, acknowledging human actions' influence on climate trajectories, and the critical role of interdisciplinary stakeholder engagement. Engagement typologies fact-finding, collaborative learning, and informed dissemination are crucial for building relationships and effective communication. A significant challenge is the Global North's research dominance and a marginalization of Global South contributions. This imbalance creates context-specific information gaps, risks imposing "Northern" perspectives, and impedes climate justice and equitable global decision-making. The study also notes knowledge and theory-practice gaps hindering effective climate action implementation. To bridge the climate action gap, this paper advocates for equitable, inclusive engagement and innovative solutions. Future research should prioritize amplifying Global South voices for balanced understanding, deepen analysis of institutional logics influencing stakeholder prioritization, and develop robust engagement frameworks addressing implementation gaps and best practice consensus.

Indonesia has long held the world’s largest Hajj quota, an achievement often celebrated as a marker of administrative capability and national devotion. Yet behind this numerical triumph lies a persistent paradox: despite continual reforms, digital integration, and expanded logistical capacity, the regulatory landscape of the Hajj continues to generate new layers of complexity. This study asks whether the 2025 Hajj season will finally deliver genuine accessibility, or whether Indonesian pilgrims remain caught between spiritual aspiration and bureaucratic constraint. Using a two-stage qualitative design, Study 1 examines independent narratives drawn from news media coverage, while Study 2 gathers insights from government officials responsible for Hajj administration to understand the institutional logic that sustains ongoing regulatory obstacles. The comparative analysis reveals a widening gap between regulatory ideals and pilgrims’ lived spiritual experiences, showing that efficiency-driven governance often overlooks the emotional and contemplative dimensions of the Hajj journey. Findings indicate that, although Indonesia’s Hajj management system has become increasingly sophisticated, it remains emotionally fragmented and procedurally burdened. This raises a critical question: when will the Hajj system value not only the physical journey, but also create a sustained cycle of ease for the pilgrims it seeks to serve?