This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identifies three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based on normative approval: and cognitive, based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness. The article then examines strategies for gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/258788.pdf

Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches

In this article we offer a view that suggests that a firm's critical resources may span firm boundaries and may be embedded in interfirm resources and routines. We argue that an increasingly important unit of analysis for understanding competitive advantage is the relationship between firms and identify four potential sources of interorganizational competitive advantage: (1) relation-specific assets, (2) knowledge-sharing routines, (3) complementary resources/capabilities, and (4) effective governance. We examine each of these potential sources of rent in detail, identifying key subprocesses, and also discuss the isolating mechanisms that serve to preserve relational rents. Finally, we discuss how the relational view may offer normative prescriptions for firm-level strategies that contradict the prescriptions offered by those with a resource-based view or industry structure view.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/259056.pdf

The Relational View: Cooperative Strategy and Sources of Interorganizational Competitive Advantage

This chapter aims to develop one of perhaps multiple specifications of embeddedness, a concept that has been used to refer broadly to the contingent nature of economic action with respect to cognition, social structure, institutions, and culture. Research on embeddedness is an exciting area in sociology and economics because it advances understanding of how social structure affects economic life. The chapter addresses propositions about the operation and outcomes of interfirm networks that are guided implicitly by ceteris paribus assumptions. While economies of time due to embeddedness have obvious benefits for the individual firm, they also have important implications for allocative efficiency and the determination of prices. Under the conditions, social processes that increase integration combine with resource dependency problems to increase the vulnerability of networked organizations. The level of investment in an economy promotes positive changes in productivity, standards of living, mobility, and wealth generation.

Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness

A growing number of sociologists, political scientists, economists, and organizational theorists have invoked the concept of social capital in the search for answers to a broadening range of questions being confronted in their own fields. Seeking to clarify the concept and help assess its utility for organizational theory, we synthesize the theoretical research undertaken in these various disciplines and develop a common conceptual framework that identifies the sources, benefits, risks, and contingencies of social capital.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4134367.pdf

Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept

This article applies the convergent insights of institutional and resource dependence perspectives to the prediction of strategic responses to institutional processes. The article offers a typology of strategic responses that vary in active organizational resistance from passive conformity to proactive manipulation. Ten institutional factors are hypothesized to predict the occurrence of the alternative proposed strategies and the degree of organizational conformity or resistance to institutional pressures.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/258610.pdf

Strategic responses to institutional processes

This article suggests that the context and process of resource selection have an important influence on firm heterogeneity and sustainable competitive advantage. It is argued that a firm’s sustainable advantage depends on its ability to manage the institutional context of its resource decisions. A firm’s institutional context includes its internal culture as well as broader influences from the state, society, and interfirm relations that define socially acceptable economic behavior. A process model of firm heterogeneity is proposed that combines the insights of a resource-based view with the institutional perspective from organization theory. Normative rationality, institutional isolating mechanisms, and institutional sources of firm homogeneity are proposed as determinants of rent potential that complement and extend resource-based explanations of firm variation and sustainable competitive advantage. The article suggests that both resource capital and institutional capital are indispensable to sustainable competitive advantage. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Sustainable competitive advantage: combining institutional and resource- based views

Introduction - Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver, Kerstin Sahlin and Roy Suddaby PART ONE: FOUNDATIONAL THEMES Legitimacy in Organizational Institutionalism - David L Deephouse and Marc Suchman Isomorphism, Diffusion and Decoupling - Eva Boxenbaum and Stefan Jonsson Institutional Logics - Patricia H Thornton and William Ocasio Organizational Fields - Melissa Wooten and Andrew J Hoffman Past, Present and Future PART TWO: INSTITUTIONAL DYNAMICS The Work of Meanings in Institutional Processes and Thinking - Tammar B Zilber Power, Institutions and Organizations - Thomas B Lawrence Institutional Entrepreneurship - Cynthia Hardy and Steve Maguire Circulating Ideas - Kerstin Sahlin and Linda Wedlin Imitation, Translation and Editing Organizational Implications of Institutional Pluralism - Matthew S Kraatz and Emily S. Block Microfoundations of Institutional Theory - Walter W Powell and Jeannette A. Colyvas Institutions and Transnationalization - Marie-Laure Djelic and Sigrid Quack PART THREE: APPLICATIONS Traditions as Institutionalized Practice - M Tina Dacin and Peter A Dacin Implications for de-institutionalization New Forms as Settlements - Hayagreeva Rao and Martin Kenney Social Movements and Failed Institutionalization - Gerald F Davis and Peter J J Anderson Corporate, (Non)Response to the AIDS Epidemic Institutions and Corporate Governance - Peer C Fiss PART FOUR: INTERFACES Beyond Constraint - Mary Ann Glynn How Institutions Enable Identities Institutionalism and the Professions - Kevin T Leicht and Mary L Fennell Institutionalism and Globalization Studies - Gili S Drori Organizational Institutionalism and Sociology - C R Hinings and Pamela S Tolbert A Reflection Coalface Institutionalism - Stephen R Barley New Sociology of Knowledge - Renate E Meyer Historical Legacy and Contributions Systems Theory, Societal Contexts and Organizational Heterogeneity - Raimund Hasse and Georg Kr cken Charting Progress at the Nexus of Institutional Theory and Economics - Peter W Roberts Ecologists and Institutionalists - Heather A Haveman and Robert J David Friends or Foes? Networks and Institutions - Jason Owen-Smith and Walter W Powell Institutional-Level Learning - Pamela Haunschild and David Chandler Learning as a Source of Institutional Change Social Movements and Institutional Analysis - Marc Schneiberg and Michael Lounsbury Examining 'Institutionalization' - David J Cooper, Mahmoud Ezzamel and Hugh Willmott A Critical Theoretic Perspective Taking Social Construction Seriously - Nelson Phillips and Namrata Malhotra Extending the Discursive Approach in Institutional Theory Institutional Leadership - Marvin Washington, Kimberly B Boal and John N Davis Past, Present and Future PART FIVE: REFLECTIONS Is the New Institutionalism a Theory? - Donald Palmer, Nicole Biggart and Brian Dick How to Misuse Institutions and Get Away with It - Barbara Czarniawska Some Reflections on Institutional Theory(ies) Been There, Done That, Moving on - Paul Hirsch Reflections on Institutional Theory's Continuing Evolution Reflections on Institutional Theories of Organizations - John W Meyer

The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism

This article integrates the literature on interorganizational relationships into six generalizable determinants of relationship formation, applies these determinants to the prediction of six types of interorganizational relations, and proposes hypotheses for future research that specify the conditions under which each determinant will he more likely to predict different types of relations. These determinants provide the basis for a general theory of interorganizational relationships and suggest that alternative theoretical perspectives on relationship formation provide important but only partial insights into why organizations enter into relationships with one another.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/258156.pdf

Determinants of Interorganizational Relationships: Integration and Future Directions

Deinstitutionalization refers here to the erosion or discontinuity of an institution alized organizational activity or practice. This paper identifies a set of organiza tional and environmental factors that are hypothesized to determine the likelihood that institutionalized organizational behaviours will be vulnerable to erosion or rejection over time. Contrary to the emphasis in institutional theory on the cultural persistence and endurance of institutionalized organizational behaviours, it is suggested that, under a variety of conditions, these behaviours will be highly susceptible to dissipation, rejection or replacement.

Christine Oliver

Papers

Strategic responses to institutional processes

Sustainable competitive advantage: combining institutional and resource- based views

The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism

Determinants of Interorganizational Relationships: Integration and Future Directions

The Antecedents of Deinstitutionalization