Institutional Logics Approach Research Articles

Diversity and professionalism in the Big Four firms: Expectation, celebration and weapon in the battle for talent

The Big Four accounting firms play a crucial role in the social construction of professional identity. This study focuses on their response to the diversity agenda. We analyse the image of the new, contemporary diverse accountant that is emerging in social media spaces in the UK, US and Canada. Adopting an institutional logics approach, we examine the interplay between multiple logics, with different loci of responsibility that frame public messages about diversity, equality and inclusivity. A traditional favouring of homogeneity is giving way to heterogeneity as integral to professional success. The value of diversity, and its celebration, is growing visibly. However, the containment of diversity discourses to the language of productivity, as a branding opportunity, a client expectation, a battle for diverse talent, and successful networking raises queries about the extent of any deep change in professional logics. Rather, diversity has been institutionalised through its attachment to traditional, commercial, professional discourses and motifs. These discourses do little to indicate a rupture in the power of firm hegemony. Explicit messages strategically position diversity as an economic good and an aspect of a commercially relevant professional excellence. Implicit messages point to ambiguities and certain conditions that are attached to the new image of the diverse accountant. Public interest logics presenting diversity as a social good, prompting self-reflection by firms about behaviours, are less prominent. The findings of this study contribute to understandings of how diversity is perceived and enacted in professional settings.

The Unbearable Lightness of University Branding

This study investigates how universities brand themselves and in what ways visual self-representation varies cross-nationally. We trace differences in the icons (emblems and logos) used in the Internet self-representation of 821 universities and higher education institutions in 20 countries in 5 continents. Emerging from content analyses of the icons were three main visual types (guilded, national, and organizational), arranged in five subtypes (classic, science/technology, local, abstract, and just-text). Generally, the visual expression of abstract or text-based organizational type is the least visually loaded, such lightness matching modern principles of corporate branding; the other types are rich in references to the national or guilded professional field of universities. We find that while the abstract organizational type of visual expression has become dominant in Western countries, including France, Germany, and the United States, heterogeneity prevails in other nations such as Australia, Italy, or South Africa. We develop possible explanations of the observed distribution of types across countries and discuss the implication of our findings for world society institutionalism and the institutional logics approach.

Equity in REDD+: Varying logics in Tanzania

AbstractEquity is frequently cited as one of the key design aspects of environmental governance regimes. In the context of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), a forest‐based climate change mitigation instrument, the manner in which ‘equity’ is understood will be of critical importance for the impacts and acceptance of REDD + policies and initiatives. Whereas the concept has been extensively studied in the academic literature, references to equity in REDD + policy debates and documents are often vague, leaving room for various interpretations and modes of implementation. In our case study of the Tanzanian national REDD + policy domain, we provide a conceptual framework based on an institutional logics approach for analysing the various underlying rationalities in the ‘equity in REDD+’ debate. We apply it to demonstrate how the involved policy actors draw from heterogeneous equity logics in their support for and opposition to different governance models, highlighting the importance of precise contextualization and operationalization of broad international principles in national REDD + initiatives. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

An Institutional Logics Approach to the Analysis of Social Movement Fields

How do institutions generate stability within and limited diversity across social movements? To answer this question, we draw on select strands of Institutional Analysis and introduce the concept of institutional movement logics (IMLs), cultural templates made up of combinations of issues, tactics, and targets that provide social movement organizations with a focus of attention, a source of meaning and identity, and a vision of how to “do” contention. Movement organizations can be observed in clusters based on their IMLs that define the dominant set of logics within that field. In this way, IMLs account for patterns of stability and diversity within social movement fields. We provide evidence of the empirical utility of the IML approach with an analysis of Seattle’s social movement field between 1999 and 2005. Using scaling methods to elicit clusters of movement organizations by their combinations of issues, tactics, and targets, along with archival and interview data, we find that this field was structured by robust and stable partitions between three distinct IMLs. With this analysis, we advance an institutional logics approach for understanding social movements, showing how Social Movement Theory can concretely benefit from a tighter integration with Institutional Analysis.

THEORIZING HYBRIDITY: INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS, COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS, AND ACTOR IDENTITIES: THE CASE OF NONPROFITS.

We propose a novel approach to theorizing hybridity in public and nonprofit organizations. The concept of hybridity is widely used to describe organizational responses to changes in governance, but the literature seldom explains how hybrids arise or what forms they take. Transaction cost and organizational design literatures offer some solutions, but lack a theory of agency. We use the institutional logics approach to theorize hybrids as entities that face a plurality of normative frames. Logics provide symbolic and material elements that structure organizational legitimacy and actor identities. Contradictions between institutional logics offer space for them to be elaborated and creatively reconstructed by situated agents. We propose five types of organizational hybridity – segmented, segregated, assimilated, blended, and blocked. Each type is theoretically derived from empirically observed variations in organizational responses to institutional plurality. We develop propositions to show how our approach to hybridity adds value to academic and policy-maker audiences.

An institutional logics approach to the heterogeneous world of highly skilled work

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship of highly skilled work and (collective) power. It develops an institutional logics perspective and argues that highly skilled workers’ propensity to join trade unions varies by institutional order.Design/methodology/approach– Data from two occupational fields in Austria, university professors and management consultants, representing two different institutional orders were collected via questionnaires. Stepwise logistic regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses.Findings– The results show that over and above organisational level variables, individual's background and employee power variables institutional logics significantly add to explaining trade union membership of highly skilled workers. Prevalence of a professional logic in a field makes collective action more likely than market logic.Originality/value– Highly skilled workers are overall described as identifying themselves more with the goals of their employer or client and with their professional peers than with other corporate employees or organised labour. They are thus expected to develop consent rather than conflict orientationvis-á-vistheir employers and clients. This paper supports a differentiated view and shows that within highly skilled work there are groups engaging in collective action. By developing an institutional logics perspective it provides a useful approach to explain heterogeneity within the world of highly skilled work.

Methodological Positionings and Perspectives

The article compares the French economics of convention (EC) with institutional logics approach (IL). Both approaches share a perspective on a pluralism of deeper structures for coordination in organizations and fields. The differences in theoretical embedding, theoretical concepts, and underlying methodological positions are worked out. While IL is closely linked to a “culturalist methodological holism,” EC is linked to a methodological position of a “complex pragmatic situationalism.” Still, the reception of EC in the current strand of IL is weak. Reception (in both directions) and comparison should avoid reducing these approaches to single concepts as “convention” or “institutional logics” and respect their embeddedness in different theoretical traditions and methodological cultures. Analytical dimensions for comparison of institutional approaches are proposed.

The structuration of socio-technical regimes—Conceptual foundations from institutional theory

In recent years, socio-technical transitions literature has gained importance in addressing long-term, transformative change in various industries. In order to account for the inertia and path-dependency experienced in these sectors, the concept of the socio-technical regime has been formulated. Socio-technical regimes denote the paradigmatic core of a sector, which results from the co-evolution of institutions and technologies over time. Despite its widespread acceptance, the regime concept has repeatedly been criticized for lacking a clear operationalization. As a consequence, empirical applications tend to depict regimes as too ‘monolithic’ and ‘homogenous’, not adequately considering persistent institutional tensions and contradictions. These are however crucial for assessing transition dynamics. In this paper, we revisit two concepts from institutional theory that enable an explicit identification of socio-technical regimes and more generally a specification of the ‘semi-coherence’ of socio-technical systems. First, we will show that ‘levels of structuration’ can be conceptualized as degrees of institutionalization, thereby treating institutionalization as a variable with different effects on actors, the stability of the system and thus the potential for change. Secondly, we draw on the institutional logics approach to characterize the content of various structural elements present in a system and to trace conflicts and contradictions between them. We illustrate this approach with an empirical in-depth analysis of the transformation of the Australian urban water sector since the 1970ies.

Money in – brains out? Institutional logics affecting athletes’ preparation for alternative careers

Competitive sport encourages athletes to put all their effort into excelling in their sport despite the fact that sport careers are short and can be abruptly terminated. This study addresses the issue of dual career preparation among team sport athletes in a sample comprising Norwegian full-professional male soccer players and semi-professional soccer and handball players. Professional athletes hardly spend more time on their sport than do semi-professional top players, but while the latter group of athletes combine sports careers and higher education (or work), professional players tend to spend their leisure time more with family and friends. A competing institutional logics approach is utilised to analyse the data and reflect on social influences on athletes’ choice of career preparation.

Institutional Logics in Global Accounting Standard Setting

The purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamics of organizational change and institutional logics in global accounting standard setting. In particular, with applying the institutional logics approach, I investigate what kind of changes were occur in the transformation of the IASC to the IASB and their theoretical implications, and the significance of the further organizational changes in the IASB after 2000. First, I inductively develop two ideal types of organizational-level competing logics in global accounting standards setting i.e., the representation and expertise logic. Then I discuss the consecutive revisions of the constitution and consequent organizational changes of the IASB from 2000 onward with using these two ideal types. Findings show that the IASB revised the constitution and further clarify its accountability to the G20 major economies as a quasi-world government; and enabled to avert its legitimacy crisis. This organizational change may also suggest the possible emergence of new logic in which re-blends democratic representation and/or personal expertise as sources of legitimacy and emphasizes accountability to the legitimacy-granting authority.

Strong and Weak Events: How to Measure Them?

This paper is related to our previous work (submitted to the 6th New Institutional Workshop, Lyon, 2009) dealing with the analysis of the evolution of the Italian Temporary Work Agencies’ field (TWAs) through the new institutional logics approach. Through this approach, we aimed to analyze the TWAs that constitute a fairly young field which came into being in 1997. The process of rise and evolution of the TWAs’ field has been complex and lengthy. It has been characterized by different phases and several events that shaped and influenced actions and behaviors of individual and collective actors involved in the field.Last year during the workshop the discussion brought out the interest about the analysis of the events according to several variables. Therefore, this contribution represents a step forward focusing on the analysis of the events occurred in TWAs’ field. We focus on the methodological process used to identify and to measure the events relevant to the analysis of this organizational field.In light of these assumptions, the paper aims to identify the events occurred in the Italian TWAs’ field from 1986 to 2010. In addition, we aim to measure the strength of these events in order to find out which are the critical ones that caused the shift from one phase to another and from one institutional logic to another in the process of institutional change.