This study examines the role of professional associations in a changing, highly institutionalized organizational field and suggests that they play a significant role in legitimating change. A model...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3069285.pdf

Theorizing Change: The Role of Professional Associations in the Transformation of Institutionalized Fields

This article examines the historical contingency of executive power and succession in the higher education publishing industry. We combine interview data with historical analysis to identify how institutional logics changed from an editorial to a market focus. Event history models are used to test for differences in the effects of these two institutional logics on the positional, relational, and economic determinants of executive succession. The quantitative findings indicate that a shift in logics led to different determinants of executive succession. Under an editorial logic, executive attention is directed to author‐editor relationships and internal growth, and executive succession is determined by organization size and structure. Under a market logic, executive attention is directed to issues of resource competition and acquisition growth, and executive succession is determined by the product market and the market for corporate control.

Institutional logics and the historical contingency of power in organizations: Executive succession in the higher education publishing industry, 1958-1990

Institutional Logics and the Historical Contingency of Power in Organizations

Our main objective in this article is to join the growing group of "green" organization theorists by demonstrating the usefulness of institutional theory as an approach to ecologically sustainable organizations. Institutional theory helps to understand how consensus is built around the meaning of sustainability and how concepts or practices associated with sustainability are developed and diffused among organizations. We extend institutional theory by offering hypotheses in four different areas: (a) the incorporation of values into organizational sustainability, (b) the study of institutions as distinct elements within systems, (c) the study of institutions as distinct spheres, and (d) the construction of paradigms that support organizational sustainability. We then offer possible modifications to institutional theory that are suggested by the extension to a new area of study. Among them are the consideration of natural constraints on sense making and paradigm construction, the study of regional networks, and the recognition of the role of individual actors. Finally, we discuss possible avenues for future research by drawing on research that we are currently conducting.

Ecologically Sustainable Organizations: An Institutional Approach

Successful collaboration in health care teams can be attributed to numerous elements, including processes at work in interpersonal relationships within the team (the interactional determinants), conditions within the organization (the organizational determinants), and the organization's environment (the systemic determinants). Through a review of the literature, this article presents a tabulated compilation of each of these determinant types as identified by empirical research and identifies the main characteristics of these determinants according to the conceptual work. We then present a "showcase" of recent Canadian policy initiatives--The Canadian Health Transition Fund (HTF)--to illustrate how the various categories of determinants can be mobilized. The literature review reveals that very little of the empirical work has dealt with determinants of interprofessional collaboration in health, particularly its organizational and systemic determinants. Furthermore, our overview of experience at the Canadian HTF suggests that a systemic approach should be adopted in evaluative research on the determinants of effective collaborative practice.

David Brain

Papers

Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge.By Eliot Freidson. University of Chicago Press. 241 pp. $20.00

Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge.