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

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

This paper examines practice diffusion in an environment where competing logics exist, focusing on how organizational and practice variations are institutionally shaped. Empirically, I study how trustee and performance logics in the mutual fund industry that were rooted in different geographic locations (Boston and New York) led to variation in how mutual funds established contracts with independent professional money management firms. This focus on competing logics redirects institutional research away from isomorphism and the segregation of institutional and technical forces, and towards an appreciation of how multiple forms of rationality provide a foundation for ongoing struggle and change in organizational fields. Implications for the dominant two-stage institutional model of diffusion as well as research on institutions, organizations, and professions are discussed.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1830310_code497077.pdf?abstractid=1830310&type=2

A Tale of Two Cities: Competing Logics and Practice Variation In the Professionalizing of Mutual Funds

In this study, we (1) clarify and distinguish the concept of status, (2) identify and analyze the institutional and organizational factors that can lead to differences in organizational status over...

Status Evolution and Competition: Theory and Evidence

Hostile takeover or joint venture: Connections between institutional theory and sport management research

This paper develops the argument that institutional mechanisms support changes in organizational strategies in ways that contrast with the standard interpretation of institutional "iron cages" that pressure organizations to conform. We specify three institutional process mechanisms that support organizational change-dominant logic-consistent activity, external charters, and peer emulation-and we test these claims with longitudinal data on the emerging strategies in early U.S. intercollegiate athletics. We argue that the supporting institutional mechanisms affect the incorporation patterns of intercollegiate programs in basketball, ice hockey, and lacrosse over the period from the late nineteenth century to the present. The research strategy of examining the spread of three different sports programs, each a proxy for different strategies of resources and visibility, provides evidence on the comparative pattern of effects of the three institutional mechanisms. Results indicate that all three institutional support mechanisms affect the incorporation of the intercollegiate programs. Differences in the pattern of incorporation across the three strategies provide robust evidence for alternatives to a prevailing "iron cage" view of institutional pressures and constraints. These findings also reinforce the importance of specifying field-level mechanisms to supplement a focus on organization-level mechanisms.

How Organizations Change: The Role of Institutional Support Mechanisms in the Incorporation of Higher Education Visibility Strategies, 1874-1995

This paper contributes to extending institutional theory by theorizing institutional maintenance as a process of repair and empirically examining repair work in a professional setting. Our in-depth, longitudinal case study illustrates how Italian professions—led by two professional associations—rebuffed the decisive intervention of the Italian Government to coercively reform the professional service sector and reconstituted institutional arrangements that had been severely disrupted. The paper advances theory on the resilience of institutions by showing that maintenance repair work enables powerful incumbents to reverse change and re-establish the status quo.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0170840613492075

Institutions and Maintenance: The Repair Work of Italian Professions

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the relationship between managers' understanding of a specific organizational change process and their attitudes towards implementing the changeDesign/methodology/approach – After a review of the current literature on the link between organizational change, knowledge of the change, and attitudes towards implementing the change, limited research was found that examined the relationship between knowledge of change and resistance to change Then original empirical research was conducted by administering a survey to 296 managers from the Botswana GovernmentFindings – The results of the regression models suggest that managers who understand the change effort are more likely to be less resistant to change Specifically, the more a manager understood the change, the more likely they were to be excited about the change, the less likely that they would think the change effort would fail, and the less likely they were to state that they wished their organization had never impl

http://tsi4results.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Why-Change-Fails.pdf

Marvin Washington

Papers

Status Evolution and Competition: Theory and Evidence

Hostile takeover or joint venture: Connections between institutional theory and sport management research

How Organizations Change: The Role of Institutional Support Mechanisms in the Incorporation of Higher Education Visibility Strategies, 1874-1995

Institutions and Maintenance: The Repair Work of Italian Professions

Why change fails: knowledge counts