Charlotte Cloutier

Abstract: Research on institutional logics has exploded in the last decade. Much of this work has taken its inspiration from Friedland and Alford’s call to “bring society back in” to organizational analysis. Interestingly, when Friedland and Alford published their seminal piece, another body of work with similar focus emerged in France under the banner of French Pragmatist Sociology. In this article, we discuss how French Pragmatist Sociology complements institutional logics by helping it address its main limitations or blind spots. These include (a) microfoundations and recursiveness (how institutions are formed, maintained, or changed at a micro level), (b) legitimacy struggles (how struggles are resolved on a day-to-day basis), (c) morality (as an important element underscoring institutional logics), and (d) materiality (as physical and tangible instantiations of logics). We conclude by suggesting that a rapprochement between both approaches provides an elegant means of bridging the lingering divide between “old...

Abstract: This article draws on recent developments in institutional theory to better understand the managerial efforts implicated in the implementation of government-led reforms in public sector services. Based on a longitudinal study of a massive reform effort aimed at transforming the province of Quebec’s publicly-funded healthcare system, the article applies the notion of institutional work to understand how managers responsible for newly formed healthcare organizations defined and carried out their individual missions while simultaneously clarifying and operationalizing the government’s reform mandate. We identify and describe the properties of four types of work implicated in this process and suggest that structural work, conceptual work, and operational work need to be underpinned by relational work to offer chances for successful policy reform. By showing the specific processes whereby top-down reform initiatives are taken up by managers and hybridized with existing institutionalized forms and practices, this article helps us better understand both the importance of managerial agency in enacting reform, and the dynamics that lead to policy slippage in complex reform contexts.

Abstract: Although scores of articles and books have been written on what constitutes good writing in academia, we’ve granted far less attention to academic writing as a daily practice. Yet it is precisely b...

Abstract: In recent years, there have been many calls for scholars to innovate in their styles of conceptual work, and in particular to develop process theoretical contributions that consider the dynamic unf...

Abstract: This volume presents state-of-the-art research and thinking on the analysis of justification, evaluation and critique in organizations, as inspired by the foundational ideas of French Pragmatist Sociology’s economies of worth (EW) framework In this introduction, we begin by underlining the EW framework’s importance in sociology and social theory more generally and discuss its relative neglect within organizational theory, at least until now We then present an overview of the framework’s intellectual roots, and for those who are new to this particular theoretical domain, offer a brief introduction to the theory’s main concepts and core assumptions This we follow with an overview of the contributions included in this volume We conclude by highlighting the EW framework’s important yet largely untapped potential for advancing our understanding of organizations more broadly Collectively, the contributions in this volume help demonstrate the potential of the EW framework to (1) advance current understanding of organizational processes by unpacking justification dynamics at the individual level of analysis, (2) refresh critical perspectives in organization theory by providing them with pragmatic foundations, (3) expand and develop the study of valuation and evaluation in organizations by reconsidering the notion of worth, and finally (4) push the boundaries of the framework itself by questioning and fine tuning some of its core assumptions Taken as a whole, this volume not only carves a path for a deeper embedding of the EW approach into contemporary thinking about organizations, it also invites readers to refine and expand it by confronting it with a wider range of diverse empirical contexts of interest to organizational scholars

Abstract: What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

Abstract: This paper analyzes trust and power as means of co-ordinating trans-organizational relationships. It is argued that, depending on the institutional environment, there are two distinct patterns of controlling relationships, where trust and power are interrelated in quite different ways. First, both mechanisms are generated at the inter-personal level and either trust or power dominates the relationship. Second, power occurs at the level of the structural framework of relationships and is highly conducive to developing trust between individual organizations. Thus, specific forms of trust and power are identified and the institutional environment is viewed as playing a crucial role in shaping the quality of trans-organizational relations. The theoretical background of the paper mainly draws on conceptual ideas of Systems Theory, Structuration Theory and New Institutionalism