The Social Psychology of Organizations.

Strategic alliances have been recognized as arenas with potential for opportunistic behavior by partners. Hence, a firm needs to have an adequate level of confidence in its partner's cooperative behavior. In this article we examine the notion of confidence in partner cooperation in alliances and suggest that it comes from two distinct sources: trust and control. We make the argument that trust and control are parallel concepts and that their relationship is of a supplementary character in generating confidence. In addition, we suggest that control mechanisms have an impact on trust level and that the trust level moderates the effect of control mechanisms in determining the control level. Finally, we discuss various ways to build trust within strategic alliances and important alliance control mechanisms.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/259291.pdf

Between Trust and Control: Developing Confidence in Partner Cooperation in Alliances

Recent analyses of organizational change suggest a growing concern with the tempo of change, understood as the characteristic rate, rhythm, or pattern of work or activity. Episodic change is contrasted with continuous change on the basis of implied metaphors of organizing, analytic frameworks, ideal organizations, intervention theories, and roles for change agents. Episodic change follows the sequence unfreeze-transition-refreeze, whereas continuous change follows the sequence freeze-rebalance-unfreeze. Conceptualizations of inertia are seen to underlie the choice to view change as episodic or continuous.

/pdf/organizational-change-and-development-1ld3nf3mhy.pdf

Organizational change and development

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.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Governing the Commons

Cross-Sector Partnerships to Address Social Issues: Challenges to Theory and Practice:

Cross-sector social partnerships (CSSPs) can produce benefits at individual, organizational, sectoral and societal levels. In this article, we argue that the distribution of benefits depends in part on the cognitive frames held by partnership participants. Based on Selsky and Parker’s (J Manage 31(6):849–873, 2005) review of CSSPs, we identify three analytic “platforms” for social partnerships – the resource-dependence platform, the social-issue platform, and the societal-sector platform. We situate platforms as prospective sensemaking devices that help project managers make sense of partnerships by calling attention to certain desired features or downplaying other features. We describe the three platforms and contrast them on factors that influence social benefit, including orientation, learning, and power. We provide illustrations of each platform and demonstrate how the choice of platform is consequential for practice, such as how a partnership project gets started, evolves and produces social benefits.

Platforms for Cross-Sector Social Partnerships: Prospective Sensemaking Devices for Social Benefit

This paper explores what happens when complexity and change exceed the collective adaptive capacity of members populating an environment—a condition called hyperturbulence. The prospect of hyperturbulence generates an adaptive response by members called partitioning, which attempts to allocate and protect scarce capacity. Two types of domains emerge within the environment: the social enclave and the social vortex. Both domains are described, examples of each given, and implications for future research noted.

Hyperturbulence and the Emergence of Type 5 Environments

This article examines the role of social context in corporate social responsibility (CSR) research. The authors direct attention to three major perspectives in organization studies—institutional, c...

The Social Context of Corporate Social Responsibility: Enriching Research With Multiple Perspectives and Multiple Levels

This article examines the behavioral dynamics at the interface between organizations in strategic partnerships called cause-based partnerships (CBPs). These are partnerships between a corporation a...

/pdf/interface-dynamics-in-cause-based-partnerships-an-4k8ap840ul.pdf

John W. Selsky

Papers

Cross-Sector Partnerships to Address Social Issues: Challenges to Theory and Practice:

Platforms for Cross-Sector Social Partnerships: Prospective Sensemaking Devices for Social Benefit

Hyperturbulence and the Emergence of Type 5 Environments

The Social Context of Corporate Social Responsibility: Enriching Research With Multiple Perspectives and Multiple Levels

Interface Dynamics in Cause-Based Partnerships: An Exploration of Emergent Culture: