This essay offers a critical summation of the use of neo-institutionalism to study organizations. While institutionalism has succeeded in becoming the dominant theory to study macro-organizational ...phenomena, there is a danger that the theory has been stretched far beyond its core purpose—to understand how organizational structures and processes acquire meaning and continuity beyond their technical goals. I discuss some possible reasons for this displacement and identify four nascent threads of research that hold strong potential for bringing institutional theory back to its core assumptions and objectives; categories, language, work, and aesthetics.
History and Organizational Change Suddaby, Roy; Foster, William M.
Journal of management,
01/2017, Letnik:
43, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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This research commentary introduces historical consciousness to studying organizational change. Most theories of organizational change contain within them implicit assumptions about history. Made ...explicit, these assumptions tend to cluster into different models of change that vary by the assumed objectivity of the past and the associated malleability of the future. We explore and elaborate the implicit assumptions of history. We identify four implicit models of history in the change literature: History-as-Fact, History-as-Power, History-as-Sensemaking, and History-as-Rhetoric. We discuss the implications of theorizing organizational change from each of these views of history and outline future directions for studying change with a heightened understanding of history.
Entrepreneurship is multifaceted. The purpose of this review is to acknowledge and critically assess the many and varied dependent variables (DVs) of entrepreneurship over the last 17 years. By ...focusing exclusively on systematically reviewing entrepreneurship’s DVs, this paper maps out, classifies, and provides order to the phenomena that scholars consider part of this self-defined field of research. Using a systematic selection process and an inductive approach to categorization, we offer a meta-framework for organizing entrepreneurship’s DVs. On the basis of this meta-framework, entrepreneurship involves the (a) initiation, (b) engagement, and (c) performance of entrepreneurial endeavors embedded in (d) environmental conditions in which an entrepreneurial endeavor is the investment of resources into the pursuit of a potential opportunity. For each category, we offer both a review of the different DVs and opportunities for future research.
This study examines change initiated from the center of mature organizational fields. As such, it addresses the paradox of embedded agency--that is, the paradox of how actors enact changes to the ...context by which they, as actors, are shaped. The change examined is the introduction of a new organizational form. Combining network location theory and dialectical theory, we identify four dynamics that form a process model of elite institutional entrepreneurship.
This article explicates the causal connections between changes in professional jurisdictions and changes in organizational fields. The authors argue that professional projects carry within them ...projects of institutionalization. They focus attention on the critical but often invisible role that professionals play in institutional work, or the creation, maintenance and transformation of institutions. The key contribution of this article is to explicate the professional project as an endogenous mechanism of institutional change. Based on a review of prior research on institutional change in which professionals play a central role, the authors observe four essential dynamics through which professionals reconfigure institutions and organizational fields. First, professionals use their expertise and legitimacy to challenge the incumbent order and to define a new, open and uncontested space. Second, professionals use their inherent social capital and skill to populate the field with new actors and new identities. Third, professionals introduce nascent new rules and standards that recreate the boundaries of the field. Fourth, professionals manage the use and reproduction of social capital within a field thereby conferring a new status hierarchy or social order within the field.
Cet article explique les liens de causalité entre les évolutions au niveau des champs d’application professionnelle et les évolutions au niveau des organisations. Nous pensons que les projets professionnels portent intrinsèquement des projets d’institutionnalisation. Nous mettons l’accent sur le rôle critique mais souvent invisible que les professionnels jouent dans le travail institutionnel, ou la création le maintien et la transformation d’institutions. La contribution principale de cet article est d’expliquer le projet professionnel en tant que mécanisme endogène des changements institutionnels. Sur la base de recherches antérieures sur les changements institutionnels dans lesquels les professionnels jouent un rôle central, nous constatons quatre dynamiques essentielles à travers lesquelles les professionnels reconfigurent les institutions et le champ organisationnel. Premièrement, les professionnels utilisent leur expertise et leur légitimité pour contester l’ordre établi et pour définir un nouvel espace ouvert et incontesté. Deuxièmement, ils utilisent leur capital social intrinsèque et leurs compétences pour introduire de nouveaux acteurs sur le terrain. Troisièmement, ils introduisent de toutes nouvelles règles et standards qui redéfinissent les limites du champ. Quatrièmement, ils gèrent l’utilisation et la reproduction de capital social au sein d’un champ et ainsi confèrent une nouvelle hiérarchie des statuts ou ordre social au sein du champ.
Este artículo explica las conexiones causales entre cambios en las jurisdicciones profesionales y cambios en los campos organizacionales. Nuestro argumento es que los proyectos profesionales llevan consigo proyectos de institucionalización. Nos enfocamos en el rol crítico, pero frecuentemente invisible, que desempeñan los profesionales en el trabajo institucional, o en la creación, mantenimiento y transformación de instituciones. El aporte clave de este trabajo es el explicar el proyecto profesional como un mecanismo endógeno de cambio institucional. Valiéndose de la revisión de una previa investigación sobre cambio institucional en el que los profesionales desempeñan un rol principal, observamos cuatro dinámicas esenciales a través de las cuales los profesionales reconfiguran instituciones y campos organizacionales: (1) Los profesionales utilizan su experiencia y legitimidad para cuestionar la estructura existente y definir un espacio nuevo, abierto y no refutado. (2) Los profesionales utilizan su habilidad y capital social intrínsecos para establecer este campo con nuevos actores y nuevas identidades. (3) Los profesionales presentan nuevas reglas y estándares emergentes que revitalizan los límites del campo. (4) Los profesionales gestionan el uso y la reproducción del capital social dentro de un campo, otorgando así una nueva jerarquía de estado o estructura social dentro del campo.
Beginning with this article, our special issue advances the understanding of the role of professions in processes of institutional change and through this it proposes a retheorization of contemporary ...professionalism. Using institutionalist lenses in professional settings, we highlight the relationship between professionalization and broader institutionalization projects. We start by critically reviewing existing approaches in the sociology of the professions, identifying a functionalist and a conflict‐based approach. Then, we build on and further elaborate an institutionalist perspective on professional work. Such a perspective affirms the importance of studying professions as institutions and connecting professionalization to broader patterns of institutionalization; it highlights the role of professions and professionals as agents in the creation, maintenance, and disruption of institutions, and recognizes the importance of accommodating contemporary patterns of professionalization within the organizational context. We also illustrate how, empirically, the eight papers in this issue advance our understanding of professional agency in contemporary change and, theoretically, contribute to the reconceptualization of the study of professionalism. Finally, we briefly summarize our contribution and identify a series of directions for further research.
In this paper, we discuss an alternative focus for institutional studies of organization - the study of institutional work. Research on institutional work examines the practices of individual and ...collective actors aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions. Our focus in this paper is on the distinctiveness of institutional work as a field of study and the potential it provides for the examination of new questions. We argue that research on institutional work can contribute to bringing the individual back into institutional theory, help to re-examine the relationship between agency and institutions, and provide a bridge between critical and institutional views of organization.
This paper describes the role of rhetoric in legitimating profound institutional change. In 1997, a Big Five accounting firm purchased a law firm, triggering a juris-dictional struggle within ...accounting and law over a new organizational form, multidisciplinary partnerships. We analyze the discursive struggle that ensued between proponents and opponents of the new organizational form. We observe that such rhetorical strategies contain two elements. First are institutional vocabularies, or the use of identifying words and referential texts to expose contradictory institutional logics embedded in historical understandings of professionalism, one based on a trustee model and the other based on a model of expertise. A second element of rhetorical strategies is theorizations of change by which actors contest a proposed innovation against broad templates or scenarios of change. We identify five such theorizations of change (teleological, historical, cosmological, ontological, and value-based) and describe their characteristics.
Drawing from a qualitative empirical study of Canadian entrepreneurs, we seek to understand the nature of entrepreneurial thinking. More specifically, we analyse entrepreneurs’ cognitive capacity to ...mitigate the risk inherent in an uncertain future and overcome low community expectations of entrepreneurial success. We introduce the notion of ‘magical thinking’, an emergent construct that refers to a cluster of beliefs that maintain the motivation and focus of entrepreneurs by transmuting agency from a rational-scientific context in which the entrepreneur imposes his or her will on the environment, to a spiritual context in which the entrepreneur perseveres by remaining true to trust in a wider cosmological belief system. We identify three key elements of magical thinking – finding one’s path, obtaining the answers and being at peace.
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