Organizations face institutional complexity whenever they confront incompatible prescriptions from multiple institutional logics. Our interest is in how plural institutional logics, refracted through field-level structures and processes, are experienced within organizations and how organizations respond to such complexity. We draw on a variety of cognate literatures to discuss the field-level structural characteristics and organizational attributes that shape institutional complexity. We then explore the repertoire of strategies and structures that organizations deploy to cope with multiple, competing demands. The analytical framework developed herein is presented to guide future scholarship in the systematic analysis of institutional complexity. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research.

Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses

We explore how new types of hybrid organizations (organizations that combine institutional logics in unprecedented ways) can develop and maintain their hybrid nature in the absence of a “ready-to-w...

Building sustainable hybrid organizations: the case of commercial microfinance organizations

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 jurisdictional struggle within accoun...

Rhetorical Strategies of Legitimacy

Institutional theory has risen to prominence as a popular and powerful explanation for both individual and organizational action. It is a vibrant theory that has heen synthesized and contrasted with a number of other approaches. Although its scope has certainly heen expanded, institutional theory has often been criticized as largely being used to explain hoth the persistence and the homogeneity of phenomena. We helieve that this focus did little to tap the full power or potential of institutional theory. We find, for example, that institutions change over time, are not ttniformly taken-forgranted, have effects that are particularistic, and are challenged as well as hotly contested. Thus, we acknowledge that although institutions serve both to powerfully drive change and to shape the nature of change across levels and contexts, they also themselves change in character and potency over time. It was in this spirit that we put forth a call for papers on the study of institutional theory and institutional change. We also believed that the topic of institutional change has emerged as a central focus for organizational researchers. Therefore, we sought to provide new understandings of the manner in which institutions are created, transformed, and extinguished and the way in which institutional processes interact to affect institutional change. We received over 75 manuscripts for review. In-

Institutional theory and institutional change: introduction to the special research forum

Legitimacy is a central concept in organizational institutionalism. The term ‘legitimacy’ dates back to the dawn of organization theory; however, for most of the past century, research on legitimacy emerged only slowly and was fragmented across several distinct social science literatures. Since 1995, however, the body of relevant scholarship has grown rapidly and in a variety of directions. Much of this new literature (like much of the literature that preceded it) has been highly theoretical, invoking legitimacy as an explanatory concept rather than examining it as an empirical property. Empirical accounts, to date, have focused on exploratory case studies of legitimacy being gained or lost, while only a handful of investigations have employed legitimacy as a variable in hypothesis testing. Perhaps because of this heavy skew toward theory development versus theory testing, the legitimacy concept has exhibited substantial plasticity as it has evolved from its earliest institutionalist usages (e.g., Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Meyer & Scott, 1983). As Wright (1985: 292) has observed, ‘the process of concept formation is always simultaneously the process of concept transformation,’ and legitimacy has been no exception. Nonetheless, despite its diversity, the literature on legitimacy displays more than enough coherence and commonality to merit an integrative review. This chapter is organized as follows. Our exploration begins with an overview of past theoretical and empirical research on legitimacy. This discussion includes some basic suggestions on the dimensions, sources, and subjects of legitimation, as well as on key legitimation processes, antecedents and consequences. Second, we consider the relationship between legitimacy and two other types of social evaluation that have recently gained prominence in organization studies, namely status and reputation. Finally, we conclude with several recommendations for advancing legitimacy research in the future.

Legitimacy in Organizational Institutionalism

From an historical and sociological perspective, ‘integrated care’ has emerged as part of institutional efforts to break up professional fiefdoms, especially of subspecialists entrenched in hospitals, and to reorganise services around clinically integrated pathways and services for the patients. It was the more enlightened part of what I have called the ‘buyers’ revolt’, which occurred in the 1980s when those who had long paid the bills (insurers, governments, employers) became so fed up by the waste, excesses, and variability of services delivered under professional dominance that they started to take forceful action w1x. This book is a masterpiece of historical work and organisational analysis of that revolt at its centre, the San Francisco Bay area.

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Donald W. Light

Papers

Institutional change and healthcare organizations: from professional dominance to managed care