Institutional maintenance work and power preservation in business exchanges: Insights from industrial supplier workshops

Abstract

Research Highlights:• Demonstrates how power is a property of institutional maintenance work.• Recognizes the significance of temporary industrial workshop settings for maintaining power.• Provides insights into how the work of institutional maintenance 'bears down' on buyer and seller exchanges.• Elucidates priming work activity and pressure specialist mechanisms for legitimation or relegitimation of roles and expectations.• Shows power intensification in the instituting and normalizing of distinct in-group market rules. 4Institutional maintenance work and power preservation in business exchanges: Insights from industrial supplier workshops Abstract This paper aims to offer new theoretical and empirical insights into power dynamics in an industrial supplier workshop setting. Theoretically, it advances an institutional perspective on supplier workshops as an important venue in managing, preserving and instituting industrial market power. Based on a detailed ethnographic analysis of an industrial workshop setting, this article investigates the institutional maintenance work of Retail Co. in preserving the power dynamics of market dominance in business exchanges and market structures. Our findings revealed three previously unreported insights into the subtle, but nonetheless pervasive power from institutional maintenance work in an industrial workshop setting. First, the institutional workshop work comprised a cultural performance; constituting socialization practice through a performance game, the power of numbers in field comprehension and an award ceremony. Second, the institutional workshop work mobilized projective agency, stipulating, directing and appealing for the instituting of distinct market rules and collective identities. Finally, the institutional workshop work increases supplier docility and utility via the regulative technologies-of-the-self to enhance business planning, operations and market decision-making practice, without necessarily being seen to be disciplinarian.

Purchasing Policy or Purchasing Police? The Influence of Institutional Logics and Power on Responses to Purchasing Formalization

“…The purchasing of management consulting services can thus be regarded as an arena where actors following different logics meet and struggle to define what practices and values should be established as appropriate. By exploring how institutional logics and institutional complexity are managed by microlevel actors in buyer and seller organizations, we add to both the literature on inhabited institutionalism and the PSM literature, both of which have a strong need for more multilevel theorization (Carter, Meschnig & Kaufmann, ; Palmer et al., ; Smets et al., ).…”

“…So far, however, existing studies have tended to focus on the macro level, studying regulators, market settings, and industry structures, whereas micro‐institutional arrangements and the processes through which power is maintained are less well studied (Hingley, ; Palmer et al., ). Little is therefore known about the impact of power on inter‐ and intrafirm relations (Bastl et al., ; Hingley et al., ).…”

“…We therefore combine the literatures on institutional logics and power in our theoretical framework. Despite their potential to advance theory, the combination of the two literatures has received very little attention so far in PSM research (Palmer et al., ).…”

“…Institutional theory has been used in PSM research to study how institutions can act as stabilizers in buyer–seller relationships, as they provide rules and norms for exchanges and, through isomorphism, lead to organizations becoming more alike (Palmer et al., ). Recently, interest in using institutional theory as a theoretical foundation in studies has expanded to include other areas of PSM as well (Kauppi, ).…”

“…It is an illuminating example of how actors deal with conflicting institutional demands, and it provides new insights into actors' responses to increased purchasing formalization (Eisenhardt & Graebner, ). Existing studies have tended to focus on the state, firm, or supply chain level (Saldanha, Mello, Knemeyer & Vijayaraghavan, ), but less is known about how actors at the microlevel cope with conflicting institutional demands (Palmer, Simmons, Robinson & Fearne, ; Yang & Su, ). It has also been pointed out that conflicting institutional demands lead to an increase in political games in organizations (Jarzabkowski, Matthiesen & Van de Ven, ) and that the outcome of the games depends on the power distribution between those involved (Bjerregaard & Jonasson, ).…”