Prelims

Half Title Page

Microfoundations of Institutions

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Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Series Editor: Michael Lounsbury

Title Page

Research in the Sociology of Organizations Volume 65A

Microfoundations of Institutions

Edited by

Patrick Haack

University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Jost Sieweke

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Lauri Wessel

University of Bremen, Germany

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2020

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ISBN: 978-1-78769-124-7 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78769-123-0 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78769-125-4 (Epub)

ISN: 0733-558X (Series)

Contents

Lists of Figures and Tables

List of Contributors

About the Contributors

Mattia Anesa is a Lecturer in Ethics at the University of Sydney Business School. His research adopts a sociological lens to understand ethical dilemmas within organizational settings. He employs qualitative research methods to investigate the legitimation process of highly contested institutionalized practices with a particular focus on the tax domain. Mattia’s work is published on Accounting, Organization & Society and Journal of Business Research.

Alex Bitektine is Professor of Management at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. His research interests include entrepreneurship, institutional theory, social judgments (legitimacy, status, reputation, trust, and others), non-market strategies, sustainable development, as well as application of experimental methods in organizational research.

Romain Boulongne is an Assistant Professor in the Strategic Management Department at IESE Business school and affiliated member of the Society and Organizations Center at HEC Paris. His primary research focus is on how categorization processes – the various cognitive mechanisms that people use to make sense of the social world – shape social evaluation and performance of organizations in markets.

Eva Boxenbaum is Professor of Organization and Management Theory at Copenhagen Business School from where she also obtained her PhD. She conducts research on how organizational actors shape the innovation and spread of management practices and organizational forms. Her most recent work focuses on the role of verbal, visual, and material modes of communication in institutionalization processes.

Julia Brandl is a Professor of HRM & Employment Relations at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Julia’s research aims to promote a pluralist HRM paradigm with particular attention to the role of the state for HRM policies and careers. Her current research projects examine the effectiveness of salary transparency legislation in Austria and developments in the HRM profession.

Konstantinos Chalkias is a Lecturer in Management at Birkbeck, University of London. His research interest revolves around the practices and strategic dynamics of organizations and markets. Drawing from social-practice theory, he studies how strategy is done inside organizations and how financial markets are constructed.

Magdalena Cholakova is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Magdalena’s work focuses on several core strands including entrepreneurial reasoning and learning during idea validation, decision-making heuristics under Knightian uncertainty, and microfoundations of institutional complexity.

Magdalena obtained her PhD from Bocconi University, Italy.

Jeannette Colyvas is an Associate Professor at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2007.

W. E. Douglas Creed is Professor at University of Rhode Island. He received his PhD and MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on social identity, change agency, and micro-politics in contested organizational and institutional change processes.

Arnaud Cudennec is a PhD candidate at HEC Paris and affiliated member of the Society and Organizations Center at HEC Paris. His research mainly focuses on expertise, categorization processes and the evaluation of organizations in markets.

Tiffany Darabi is a PhD student in Organizational Behavior at Cornell University’s ILR School. Her research explores how organizations generate social value. Previously, she worked as an organizational development specialist in the international development sector. She holds a BA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University.

Rich DeJordy is Assistant Professor of Management at California State University, Fresno. His research interests are at the intersection of institutions, networks, and identity, exploring how individuals and organizations construct and manage their identities as they navigate their institutional environment.

Jochen Dreher is Chief Executive Officer of the Social Science Archive Konstanz (Alfred Schutz Memorial Archive), University of Konstanz, Germany, and Lecturer in Sociology, University of Konstanz and University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. His research interests are sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture, phenomenology, social theory, sociology of organization, qualitative social research, intercultural communication, sociology of power, and the sociological theory of the symbol.

Rodolphe Durand is the Joly Family Professor of Purposeful Leadership at HEC Paris and the Founder and Academic Director of the Society and Organizations Center. He studies the multiple sources of conformity and deviation that weigh on organizations and their impact on organizational advantage and performance.

Nina Eliasoph is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of three books (Avoiding politics: How Americans produce apathy in everyday life; Making volunteers; and The politics of volunteering), as well as numerous articles about everyday interaction in voluntary associations and nonprofits.

Teppo Felin is Professor of Strategy at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. His current research focuses on strategy, rationality, perception and cognition, entrepreneurship, and markets.

Emamdeen Fohim is a PhD student at the Institute for Systemic Management and Public Governance at the University of St. Gallen. His research investigates institutional change processes in a public sector context.

Nicolai Foss is the Rodolfo Debenedetti Chaired Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Bocconi University. His main research interests are strategic management, entrepreneurship, and the methodology of social science.

Santi Furnari is Professor of Strategy at Cass Business School, City, University of London. His research interests include the emergence of new fields and practices as well as the microfoundations of institutional logics. His paper titled “Interstitial Spaces” received the Academy of Management Review Best Paper Award in 2014.

Claudia Gabbioneta is Senior Lecturer in Accounting at Newcastle University Business School. Her current research focuses on professions and organizational and professional misconduct. Her research has been published in a number of journals including Accounting, Organization and Society, Long Range Planning, and the Journal of Management Inquiry.

Vern L. Glaser is an Assistant Professor at the Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California. His research investigates how organizations strategically change practices and culture.

Mary Ann Glynn is Joseph F. Cotter Professor of Management and Organization at Boston College and 73rd President of the Academy of Management. Her research studies social cognition writ large, as organizational identity and creativity, mapping its embeddedness in systems of meaning attending market categories, institutional fields, and cultural forces.

Jan Goldenstein is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Organization, Leadership, and Human Resource Management, at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. His primary research interests include institutional and glocalization theory, institutional change, organizational actorhood, and research methodology such as natural language processing.

Royston Greenwood graduated from the University of Birmingham in the UK. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Canada; and Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and Honorary Member of the European Group for Organization Studies.

Patrick Haack is Professor of Strategy at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne. His current research focuses on social judgment formation, practice adoption, and the application of experiments and formal modeling approaches to the study of institutionalization and legitimation.

Tim Hallett is Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. He has published extensively on inhabited institutions. He is currently working on developing an inhabited institutional approach to understanding professional socialization via an ethnographic study of a Masters of Public Affairs program. Another line of research examines how social science ideas become public ideas.

Derek J. Harmon is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. His research leverages language as a theoretical and empirical lens to explore social evaluations, collective meaning making in markets, and the microfoundations of institutions.

Amelia Hawbaker is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her scholarly work includes research on organizational sociology, institutional theory, and health policy. Her current research focuses on organizations and medicine, in which she examines medical decision making in the context of hospital-based care.

Osnat Hazan is a Teaching Fellow at the Jerusalem School of Business, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She is interested in organizational theories and social construction. Her research focuses on the patterns in which institutions infuse individuals’ thought and at the same time depend on individuals to sustain them.

Yanfei Hu is a Lecturer in Sustainability at the Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, United Kingdom. Yanfei’s research explores organizational strategies and tactics in changing entrenched cultural and political institutions. She explores this question with institutional theory, social movement theory, and the sensemaking perspective.

Hokyu Hwang is an Associate Professor in the School of Management at the Business School, UNSW Sydney. He received his PhD in Sociology from Stanford University.

Benjamin D. Innis is a Doctoral student in Management and Organization at Boston College. His research focuses on processes whereby organizations both influence, and are influenced by, broader meaning systems, such as categories, institutions, and culture. Currently, his research setting is that of cultural industries and institutions.

Gazi Islam is Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, and has served as faculty at Insper, Tulane University, and the University of New Orleans. He is currently Editor for the Psychology and Business Ethics section at the Journal of Business Ethics. His current research interests revolve around the contemporary meanings of work, and the relations between identity, group dynamics, and the production of group and organizational cultures.

Paula Jarzabkowski is a Professor of Strategic Management at City, University of London, UK, and University of Queensland, Australia. Her research on strategy-as-practice in pluralistic contexts is published in Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and Strategic Management Journal. Her latest co-authored book, Making a Market for Acts of God, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.

Candace Jones is the Chair of Global Creative Enterprise at the University of Edinburgh Business School, UK. Her research uses theoretical lenses of institutional logics, networks, vocabularies, and materiality to explore the symbolic, material, and social relationships of cultural products in architecture, film, and music. She is past division chair for Organization and Management Theory Division, Academy of Management.

Joshua Keller is Associate Professor of Management at the School of Management at the Business School, UNSW Sydney, Australia. His core research interests are in the cultural and cognitive foundations of organizations, using theories from cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and cognitive anthropology. His work has been published in numerous organizational journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and Organization Studies.

Ju Young Lee is a doctoral candidate in Management and Organization at Boston College. His research examines the processes of institutional change with a special focus on changes that address social problems. He is currently exploring these issues in the context of socially responsible and impact investment.

Taehyun Lee is a doctoral candidate in Management and Organization at Boston College. His research focuses on how actors employ meaning systems to open up avenues for and to legitimate innovations and new markets, and how actors embedded in different meaning systems interact in various emergence and change processes.

Lianne M. Lefsrud is an Assistant Professor in Engineering Safety and Risk Management. She draws from institutional theory, framing, emotion, and visual/multimodal rhetoric to equip organizations to better recognize, evaluate, and manage risks (climate change, workplace fatalities, mine tailings, energy development/transitions, and pipeline corrosion).

Omar Lizardo is the LeRoy Neiman Term Chair Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His areas of research interest include the sociology of culture, social networks, the sociology of emotion, social stratification, cognitive social science, and organization theory. He is currently a member of the editorial advisory board of six journals, and with Rory McVeigh and Sarah Mustillo, he is one of the current co-editors of American Sociological Review.

Jade Y. Lo is an Assistant Professor at the LeBow College of Business, Drexel University. She received her PhD from the University of Southern California. She is an organizational theorist with interests in innovation and emerging phenomena, as well as sensemaking and sensegiving in a dynamic environment.

Jaco Lok is Professor of Strategy at Macquarie Business School in Sydney, Australia. He received his PhD from Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include further developing the microfoundations of institutional theory by exploring the complex relations between institutions and the people who live them.

Namrata Malhotra is Associate Professor in Strategy at Imperial College Business School, Imperial College London, UK. Her research interests include organizational and institutional change with a focus on professional services organizations.

John W. Meyer is Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, at Stanford. He has contributed to organizational theory, comparative education, and the sociology of education. He has studied the impact of global models of society (World Society: The Writings of John W. Meyer, Oxford; Bromley and Meyer, Hyper-Organization, Oxford 2015).

Daniel Muzio is a Professor of Management at the University of York. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Management Studies and a Founding Editor for the Journal of Professions and Organization. Daniel’s research interests include the organization and management of professional services firms, wrongdoing, and diversity.

Robert Nason is the Concordia University Research Chair in Entrepreneurship and Society and Associate Professor in Management at the John Molson School of Business in Montréal. He received his PhD in Entrepreneurship from Syracuse University. His broad research interests examine the role of entrepreneurship in society.

Lionel Paolella is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Organization at the Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, and affiliated with the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. He obtained his PhD from HEC Paris. His main line of work explores the categorization processes in markets.

Raissa Pershina is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway, research section Digitalization and Entrepreneurship. Her research interests include organizational and institutional processes involved in creation of innovative products, particularly in the context of the creative and cultural industries.

Nelson Phillips is the Abu Dhabi Chamber Chair in Strategy and Innovation at Imperial College Business School in London, UK. Originally from Canada, he completed his PhD at the University of Alberta in 1995. His research interests include institutional theory, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He has also written extensively about qualitative methods, in particular discourse analysis and other linguistic approaches to the study of social phenomena.

Walter W. Powell is Professor of Education, Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University, where he is a faculty co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. His interests focus on the processes through which ideas and practices move across organizations, and the role of networks in facilitating or hindering the transfer of ideas.

Davide Ravasi is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the UCL School of Management, University College London. His research primarily examines strategic and organizational changes, with particular emphasis on changes that challenge or otherwise affect the organizational culture or identity. He is interested more generally in socio-cognitive processes shaping entrepreneurship, design, and innovation.

Trish Reay is Professor in Strategic Management and Organization at the University of Alberta School of Business in Edmonton, Canada. She is also Visiting Distinguished Professor at Warwick Business School. She is Editor-in-Chief at Organization Studies. Her research interests include organizational and institutional change, professions and professional identity.

Claus Rerup is a Professor of Management at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Germany. Claus studies organizational routines, attention/sensemaking and learning from a process perspective. His work has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Organization Science, and several other journals and handbooks.

Anna E. Roberts is a Doctoral candidate in the Management and Organization Department at the Smeal College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University. Anna studies the future of work, new organizational forms, and the microfoundations of institutions. She earned her BA from Rice University, graduating magna cum laude and was the sole recipient of the Muhammad Yunus Commencement Award for Humanitarian Leadership. Prior to joining academia, she led the West Coast Regulatory Practice Area at Gerson Lehrman Group.

Thomas J. Roulet is a Senior Lecturer in Organization Theory at the Judge Business School and the Fellow in Sociology and Management Studies at Girton College, both at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on negative social evaluations (stigma, disapproval, and scandals) and institutions.

Charles-Clemens Rüling is a Professor of Organization Theory and the Associate Dean for Research at Grenoble Ecole de Management. His research addresses institutional maintenance and change.

Riku Ruotsalainen (D.Sc., Aalto University) is an Assistant Professor of Organization Theory at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. His research focuses on how organizations can lead complex change processes through which they can initiate, foster, and strengthen organizational innovation paths that bring about organizational renewal.

Oliver Schilke is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at the Eller College of Management, University of Arizona. He previously received a PhD in Sociology from UCLA and was a Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Sociology. His research focuses on micro-institutional processes including routines, trust, and legitimacy.

Anna Schneider is an Assistant Professor of HRM and Employment Relations at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Anna has a longstanding interest in managing the workforce as she previously held several HRM positions in a multi-national retail company. Her research focuses on tensions and (e)valuations in new forms of organizing work.

Elke Schüßler is Professor of Business Administration and Head of the Institute of Organization Science at Johannes Kepler Universität Linz. Her research deals with societal challenges such as climate change, decent work or digitalization, as well as with the organization of creative work and innovation.

Jost Sieweke is Associate Professor of Management and Organization at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on human errors and legitimacy. He is also working in the application of natural experiments in management research.

Birthe Soppe is Professor of Business Administration at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is also affiliated with the University of Oslo. Birthe bridges institutional and organization theories to understand the fundamental societal, institutional, and organizational underpinnings that shape new fields and organizational transitions in the context of sustainability.

Andreas Paul Spee is Associate Professor in Strategy at the University of Queensland Business School. Paul’s research is grounded in social practice theory, particularly known for advocating strategy-as-practice as an alternative perspective to traditional strategy theory. Some of his work appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Accounting, Organization & Society, British Journal of Management, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and in influential handbooks. Paul currently serves as Senior Editor for Organization Studies, and as Outgoing Chair for the Strategizing, Activities & Practices Interest Group within the Academy of Management.

Christopher Steele is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management and Organizations at the University of Alberta. His research interests are focused on the social production of truth, the dynamics of individual and collective identity, and the everyday generation of social order. Institutional theory helps casts light on all three topics.

Panita Surachaikulwattana is an Assistant Professor of Organization and Management at the School of Business, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC), in Thailand. She is also a research fellow at the Research Institute for Policy Evaluation and Design, UTCC. She completed her PhD at Imperial College Business School in London, UK. Her research interests include institutionalization and agency, translation, theorization, and organizational form and practices, primarily investigated with the use of qualitative methodologies. Her current research projects focus on translation processes of managerial and social innovations across national boundaries in diverse settings, including the health care industry, the software industry, and the education industry.

Hovig Tchalian studies the impact of language and language-based processes on social and institutional innovation. He uses a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative and computational methods to study the re-emergence of the modern electric vehicle market, the values that underlie corporate governance, and the upscaling of the Canadian whisky category.

Pamela S. Tolbert is the Lois S. Gray Professor of ILR and Social Sciences, and a member of the Organizational Behavior Department in the ILR School at Cornell University. She joined the ILR faculty after receiving her PhD in sociology from UCLA. She is broadly interested in organizational change, culture and entrepreneurship, and organizational practices and social inequality.

Madeline Toubiana is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management and Organizations at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on the role emotions, complexity, and stigmatization play in processes of social change. To understand the dynamics of social change, she examines the intersection and interaction between individuals and institutional systems.

Eero Vaara is a Professor of Organization and Management at Aalto University School of Business, a Permanent Visiting Professor at EMLYON Business School, and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Lancaster University, UK. His research focuses on organizational, strategic and institutional change that he examines from discursive and narrative perspectives.

Peter Walgenbach is Professor of Organization, Leadership, and Human Resource Management at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. His research interests include institutional theory. Currently, he is a Senior Editor of Organization Studies.

Lauri Wessel is Associate Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Bremen, Germany. His research spawns the domains of organization theory and information systems research by applying sociological theories such as institutional theory to understand digital technology.

Tammar B. Zilber is Associate Professor of Organization Theory at the Jerusalem School of Business, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She is interested in the microfoundations of institutions, and how individual-, organizational-, and field-level dynamics involve meanings, emotions, and power relations that take part in constructing and maintaining institutional realities.

Lynne G. Zucker received her PhD at Stanford University and is a Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UCLA. Her research focuses on micro-­institutional processes including trust, legitimacy, and common understandings (standard practices and routines), and the development and protection of tacit knowledge, using quasi-experimental designs.