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

What Makes Teams Work: Group Effectiveness Research from the Shop Floor to the Executive Suite

How we Think

The complexity of political, regulatory, and technological changes confronting most organizations has made radical organizational change and adaptation a central research issue. This article sets out a framework for understanding organizational changes from the perspective of neo-institutional theory. The principal theoretical issue addressed in the article is the interaction of organizational context and organizational action. The article examines the processes by which individual organizations retain, adopt, and discard templates for organizing, given the institutionalized nature of organizational fields.

Understanding Radical Organizational Change: Bringing Together the Old and the New Institutionalism

Contingency-based research has a long tradition in the study of management control systems (MCS). Researchers have attempted to explain the effectiveness of MCS by examining designs that best suit the nature of the environment, technology, size, structure, strategy and national culture. In recent years, contingency-based research has maintained its popularity with studies including these variables but redefining them in contemporary terms. This paper provides a critical review of findings from contingency-based studies over the past 20 years, deriving a series of propositions relating MCS to organizational context. The paper examines issues related to the purpose of MCS, the elements of MCS, the meaning and measurement of contextual variables, and issues concerning theory development. A final section considers the possibility that contingency-based ideas could encompass insights from a variety of theories to help understand MCS within its organizational context.

/pdf/management-control-systems-design-within-its-organizational-4a3pxeot3h.pdf

Management control systems design within its organizational context: findings from contingency-based research and directions for the future

The Calculated and the Avowed: Techniques of Discipline and Struggles Over Identity in Big Six Public Accounting Firms

An Institutional Perspective on the Rise, Social Transformation, and Fall of a University Budget Category.

Case-mix accounting systems have been advanced as both reflecting the economic reality that underlies a hospital's various “product lines”, as defined by DRG prospective payment categories, and facilitating rational decision making regarding resource acquisition, deployment and use. This article uses the institutional perspective to extend this conceptualization of case-mix accounting systems. The institutional perspective proposes that many elements of organizational structure, like case-mix accounting systems, reflect as much a need to conform to societal expectations of acceptable practice as the technical imperative of fostering rationality. This article also extends institutional theory regarding the issues of power and decoupling by considering institutionalization to be an unfinished process in the health-care context, wherein the active agency of individuals and organizations is subjected to systematic examination. In this specific context, case-mix accounting may play a significant role in establishing and perpetuating — not merely supporting — the very social structure of legitimacy, and may consequently be considered an interest-oriented activity having the potential to penetrate and alter the internal operating processes of financially strained hospitals.

/pdf/an-institutional-theory-perspective-on-the-drg-framework-3bb79k6tfc.pdf

An Institutional Theory Perspective on the DRG Framework, Case-Mix Accounting Systems and Health-Care Organizations

Within accounting, an emerging perspective has held that budgeting is complicit in the creation of a social reality. Seen in such terms, budgetary dialogue is one manner in which societal expectations are expressed, thereby transforming contemporary organizations. Further, it is argued that organizational practice must specifically embody and reproduce these societal expectations in order for the organization to exist. This paper describes a field study directed at assessing the usefulness of such a perspective on budgeting by examining the nature of the budgetary process between a major state university and its state government.

The use of budgetary symbols in the political arena: An historically informed field study☆

Control is important within public accounting firms for a variety of reasons. Yet professional pronouncements are limited in providing guidance to auditors in the form of formally stated rules and requirements. The purpose of this article is to examine the non-formalized, non-rule oriented approaches employed in large public accounting firms to effect control. More specifically, it is directed towards understanding the possible roles of informal and nonformal communications and mentoring in managing public accounting firms. Based upon evidence gathered using a naturalistic, qualitative research methodology, it is concluded that: (1) informal communications exist in public accounting firms, play a limited role in informing organizational members of the politics and power within the organization, and are of some benefit to lower level individuals; and (2) nonformal communications and mentoring are involved with the performance of audit tasks, socialization of the individual firm, and instruction as to politics and power within the organization, and benefit the protege, mentor and firm, though at some cost. Implications of the study are also explored.

Mark W. Dirsmith

Papers

The Calculated and the Avowed: Techniques of Discipline and Struggles Over Identity in Big Six Public Accounting Firms

An Institutional Perspective on the Rise, Social Transformation, and Fall of a University Budget Category.

An Institutional Theory Perspective on the DRG Framework, Case-Mix Accounting Systems and Health-Care Organizations

The use of budgetary symbols in the political arena: An historically informed field study☆

Informal communications, nonformal communications and mentoring in public accounting firms