I offer an institutional theory of corporate social responsibility consisting of a series of propositions specifying the conditions under which corporations are likely to behave in socially responsible ways. I argue that the relationship between basic economic conditions and corporate behavior is mediated by several institutional conditions: public and private regulation, the presence of nongovernmental and other independent organizations that monitor corporate behavior, institutionalized norms regarding appropriate corporate behavior, associative behavior among corporations themselves, and organized dialogues among corporations and their stakeholders. Concerns about corporate social responsibility have grown significantly during the last two decades. Not only has the issue become commonplace in the business press and among business and political leaders (Buhr & Graf

http://laisumedu.org/DESIN_Ibarra/desin/imagenescampbell/tres-c.pdf

Why would corporations behave in socially responsible ways? an institutional theory of corporate social responsibility

Providing a retrospective and prospective overview of organization studies, the Handbook continues to challenge and inspire readers with its synthesis of knowledge and literature. As ever, contributions have been selected to reflect the diversity of the field. New chapters cover areas such as organizational change; knowledge management; and organizational networks.
Part One reflects on the relationship between theory, research and practice in organization studies.
Part Two address a number of the most significant issues to affect organization studies such as leadership, diversity and globalization.
Comprehensive and far-reaching, this important resource will set new standards for the understanding of organizational studies. It will be invaluable to researchers, teachers and advanced students alike.

Institutions and Institutional Work

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)

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

As well as review the literature on the notion of institutional entrepreneurship introduced by Paul DiMaggio in 1988, we propose a model of the process of institutional entrepreneurship We first present theoretical and definitional issues associated with the concept and propose a conceptual account of institutional entrepreneurship that helps to accommodate them We then present the different phases of the process of institutional entrepreneurship from the emergence of institutional entrepreneurs to their implementation of change Finally, we highlight future directions for research on institutional entrepreneurship, and conclude with a discussion of its role in strengthening institutional theory as well as, more broadly, the field of organization studies

/pdf/how-actors-change-institutions-towards-a-theory-of-157mc7o554.pdf

How actors change institutions : Towards a theory of institutional entrepreneurship

Institutional theory rests on a rejection of reductionism. Instead of reducing higher-order phenomena to aggregates of behavior, institutional theory reverses this causal imagery. It attributes the behavior of organizations and nation-states to contextual factors, notably organizational fields, national institutional systems, or the emerging global polity, Institutionalists, particularly within sociology, also emphasize specifically cultural mechanisms for these higher-order effects. This article develops the methodological foundations for these claims. It surveys and elaborates research designs for documenting higher-order effects and for differentiating the cultural mechanisms of institutional influence. It also presents new strategies for assessing multiple logics and the coherence of institutional orders, moving beyond adoption and diffusion studies to analyze the dynamic and contested processes of institutionalization and institutional change.

/pdf/the-typical-tools-for-the-job-research-strategies-in-24zw4tb4ap.pdf

The Typical Tools for the Job: Research Strategies in Institutional Analysis*

Institutionalists commonly invoke exogenous shocks or the transposition of logics across national systems to explain institutional change and new path creation. Using organizational data on American infrastructure industries, this paper shows instead how established institutional paths contain within them possibilities and resources for transformation and off-path organization. Even settled paths are typically littered with flotsam and jetsam - with elements of alternative economic orders and abandoned or partly realized institutional projects. These elements of 'paths not taken' are legacies of constitutional struggles and movements for alternative forms of order whose settlement or defeat help fix the path that triumphed. Moreover, they represent resources for endogenous institutional change, including the revival, reassembly, redeployment and subsequent elaboration of alternative logics within national capitalisms. As the analysis of the US case shows, such legacies underwrote the construction of an entirely different, cooperatively organized path alongside the dominant path of impersonal markets and for-profit corporations. Taken together, these findings generate new leverage for explaining institutional change. They also highlight features of the US case that have been ignored by institutionalist and 'varieties of capitalism' research, including internal structural variety, endogenous change processes, and the co-evolution of cooperative or coordinated and liberal market economies within American capitalism.

/pdf/what-s-on-the-path-path-dependence-organizational-diversity-3c4eroh8go.pdf

What's on the path? Path dependence, organizational diversity and the problem of institutional change in the US economy, 1900-1950

How do social movements promote diversity and alternative organizational forms? We address this question by analyzing how cooperative enterprise was affected by the Grange—a leading anticorporate movement in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State-level analyses across three industries yield three findings. First, the Grange had positive effects on cooperatives and mutuals during the nineteenth-century populist struggles over corporate capitalism. Second, these effects were stronger where corporations counter-mobilized to block challengers' political efforts. Grangers pursued economic organization as an alternative to politics and in response to blocked political access. Third, the Grange continued to foster cooperatives even as populist revolts waned. It did so, however, by buffering cooperatives from problems of group heterogeneity and population change, rendering them less dependent on supportive communities and specific economic conditions. These findings advance research at the movements/organizations interface by documenting movement effects and by isolating different causal pathways through which mobilization, counter- mobilization, and political opportunity shape economic organization. The results also provide economic sociology with new evidence on how social structure moderates economic forces, and help revise institutional analyses of American capitalism by showing how cooperatives emerged as significant, rather than aberrant, elements of the U.S. economy.

/pdf/social-movements-and-organizational-form-cooperative-43aptl82fd.pdf

Social Movements and Organizational Form: Cooperative Alternatives to Corporations in the American Insurance, Dairy, and Grain Industries

/pdf/social-movements-and-institutional-analysis-38x8dxg42c.pdf

Social Movements and Institutional Analysis

This article assesses three approaches to state regulation: capture theory, interest group analyses, and neoinstitutional research. State‐level event history analyses of fire insurance rate regulation from 1906 to 1930 are used. Contrary to capture theory, regulation was not driven simply by firms’ interests in market control. Instead, consistent with interest group analyses, regulation was more likely when anticompany forces—farmers and small businesses—could challenge big business politically. Further, as neoinstitutional research suggests, regulation was more likely when industry governance evoked legitimacy crises, when courts and professions endorsed regulation and its underlying models, and when states developed system‐wide administrative capacities. Institutional conditions also mediated the effects of markets and politics on regulation. Using these findings, we develop a theory of how political and institutional conditions shape industries’ governance options.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/323574.pdf

Marc Schneiberg

Papers

The Typical Tools for the Job: Research Strategies in Institutional Analysis*

What's on the path? Path dependence, organizational diversity and the problem of institutional change in the US economy, 1900-1950

Social Movements and Organizational Form: Cooperative Alternatives to Corporations in the American Insurance, Dairy, and Grain Industries

Social Movements and Institutional Analysis

Regulating American Industries: Markets, Politics, and the Institutional Determinants of Fire Insurance Regulation1