Drawing on institutional theory emphasizing translation and discourse, we explore outsider-driven deinstitutionalization through a case study of the abandonment of widespread, taken-for-granted ...practices of DDT use between 1962 and 1972. Our findings illustrate how abandonment of practices results from "problematizations" that—through subsequent "translation"—change discourse in ways that undermine the institutional pillars supporting practices. This occurs through new "subject positions" from which actors speak and act in support of problematizations, and new bodies of knowledge, which normalize them. We introduce the concept of "defensive institutional work" and illustrate how actors carry out disruptive and defensive work by authoring texts.
We examine post-inquiry sensemaking by emergency management practitioners following an inquiry into the most damaging bushfire disaster in Australia’s history. We theorize a model of post-inquiry ...sensemaking with four distinct but overlapping phases during which sensemaking becomes more prospective over time. In addition to providing important insights into what has, hitherto, been a neglected arena for sensemaking studies, i.e. post-inquiry sensemaking, we contribute to the understanding of sensemaking more generally. Specifically, we show the complex nature of the relationship between sensemaking and equivocality, explain how multiple frames enhance sensemaking, and explore temporality in sensemaking over time.
In this paper, we present the results of a study of the loss of institutional trust following a merger. Specifically, we focus on how issues of organizational identity and identification processes ...contributed to the loss of institutional trust among a group of employees of Citigroup after its creation through the merger of Citicorp and Travelers. Our study makes two important contributions. First, we propose and demonstrate empirically that institutional trust, like interpersonal trust, can be identity‐based. Second, adopting a narrative approach to organizational identity, we explore institutional trust in a post‐merger context, highlighting how institutional trust is initially undermined after a merger by the ambiguity of the new organization's identity; and how later, once the identity of the new organization becomes less ambiguous, institutional trust can continue to be undermined by the absence of employees' identification with the new organization, especially among those who were highly‐identified with their legacy organizations.
We examine how a new discourse shapes the emergence of new global regulatory institutions and, specifically, the roles played by actors and the texts they author during the institution-building ...process, by investigating a case study of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and its relationship to the new environmental regulatory discourse of ‘precaution’. We show that new discourses do not neatly supplant legacy discourses but, instead, are made to overlap and interact with them through the authorial agency of actors, as a result of which the meanings of both are changed. It is out of this discursive struggle that new institutions emerge.
We explore the discursive processes through which a field-configuring event can change an institutional field and organizations. Our case study is of the United Nations conference leading to the ...Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which established new global regulations for several dangerous chemicals but excepted the insecticide DDT. Our study highlights how the production, distribution, and consumption of texts in the multiple discursive spaces generated by a field-configuring event allow new narratives to be told, and how, in turn, these narratives can lead to change in an institutional field and in organizations through three mechanisms: domination, interpretation, and translation.
Drawing on the work of Foucault, we develop an integrated framework for understanding how risk is organized in three different modes: prospectively, in real time, and retrospectively. We show how ...these modes are situated in a dominant discourse of risk that leads organizations to normalize risk in particular ways by privileging certain forms of knowledge and authorizing certain risk identities over others. In addition to identifying the common way risk is organized in each mode and showing how it is held in place by the dominant discourse, we propose alternative ways to organize risk that resist this dominant discourse, and we explain why they are difficult to enact. We then extend our analysis by theorizing how, even when it occurs, resistance to the dominant discourse of risk can contribute to "riskification," with more and more organizing undertaken in the name of risk because of intensification, discipline, and governmentality.
The contemporary "risk society" is associated with the emergence of a wide range of risks characterized by uncertainty and unfamiliarity. These "novel" risks pose a major challenge for organizations: ...their negative effects may be significant, but prevailing risk-assessment techniques are limited in their ability to identify these effects. Building on our prior work on the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), this study examines how organizations deal with novel risks. It finds that organizations engage in "risk translation" by translating equivocality associated with the novel risk into more familiar risks, providing them with a clearer basis and guide for action. As multiple organizations take actions to manage these translated risks, the interactive effects result in an "ecology of risks" that evolves over time, allowing for the construction of a novel risk. The study contributes to research on organizing and risk by theorizing how organizations respond to novel risks, as well as by highlighting the role of translated organizational risks in constructing novel risks and shaping societal responses to grand challenges.
This study develops a model of emergent strategy formation at a large telecommunications firm. It integrates prominent traditions in strategy process research—strategy as patterned action, as ...iterated resource allocation and as practice—to show how emergent strategy originates as a project through autonomous strategic behavior, then subsequently becomes realized as a consequence of mobilizing wider support to provide impetus, manipulating strategic context to legitimate the project by constructing it as consonant with the prevailing concept of strategy, and altering structural context to embed it within organizational units, routines, and objectives. The study theorizes the role of "practices of strategy articulation" in emergent strategy formation, and explains why some autonomous strategic behavior becomes "ephemeral" and disappears rather than enduring to become emergent strategy.
Research Summary
While the notion of ecosystems has become prominent in scholarly and practitioner strategy literature in recent years, more can be done to bridge these two communities. In this ...introduction to the SMS Collection, we interrogate strategy scholarship from the perspective of “ecosystem architects,” who are private or public sector actors interested in nurturing and developing a given ecosystem as a whole. In doing so, we collate and discuss key articles published in the journals of the Strategic Management Society which, considered together, shed new light on processes of ecosystem emergence and evolution. We distill a range of insights for ecosystem architect practitioners and outline four strategies for them to create conditions appropriate to their ecosystem and its stage of development.
Managerial Summary
What insights does strategy research offer to practitioners interested in nurturing the creation and ongoing development of a range of different types of ecosystems? In this introduction to the SMS Collection, we distill relevant findings and outline four strategies for public and private ecosystem architects to create conditions appropriate to their ecosystem and its stage of development. Specifically, we outline approaches to create conditions for coalescence, coopetition, cooperation, and contained contestation within emerging and evolving ecosystems.
PDF
