The Rise of the Corporation in a Craft Industry: Conflict and Conformity in Institutional Logics

Thornton, Patricia

doi:10.5465/3069286

Cited by 277 publications

(408 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…While decoupling and impression management tactics provide actors with some flexibility in constructing legitimate accounts (Elsbach, 1994;Elsbach and Sutton, 1992), actors are ultimately constrained either to conform with or to deviate from abstract institutional logics. These logics reflect macro-forces, and they are regarded as being beyond the reach of actors (Thornton andOcasio, 1999, 2008). The institutional perspective thus downplays actors' deliberate engagement with institutional logics and it underestimates the competencies that actors deploy in their efforts to repair or maintain legitimacy.…”

Section: Institutionalist Perspective On Legitimacy Maintenancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Institutionalists downplay the role of managerial agency and consider the collective structuration of entire fields or sectors of organizational life (Suchman, 1995, p. 576). From this perspective, social organizations achieve legitimacy through convergence towards rationalized myths and dominant institutional logics (Lounsbury, 2001(Lounsbury, , 2007Meyer and Rowan, 1977;Thornton andOcasio, 1999, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, discursive approaches to institutions and orders of worth are based on different assumptions with respect to representations of the social order, definitions of legitimacy, role of agency, and types of dynamics at play. Specifically, discursive approaches tend to consider the social order as segmented in stable institutional fields in which legitimacy is discursively maintained through stakeholders' compliance with a dominant logic (Friedland and Alford, 1991;Thornton, 2002). The evolution of a field may generate tensions in the existing order, which may prompt the emergence of alternative/competing logics and discourses (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Maintaining Legitimacy: Controversies, Orders of Worth, and Public Justifications

Patriotta

Gond

Schultz

2011

J Management Studies

358

378

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We build on Boltanski and Thévenot's theory of justification to account for the ways in which different stakeholder groups actively engage with discourses and objects to maintain the legitimacy of institutions that are relevant to their activity. We use this framework to analyse a controversy emerging from a nuclear accident which involved a large European energy company and sparked public debate on the legitimacy of nuclear power. Based on the findings, we elaborate a process model of institutional repair that explains the role of agents and the structural constraints they face in attempting to maintain legitimacy. The model enhances institutional understandings of legitimacy maintenance in three main respects: it proposes a view of legitimacy maintenance as a controversy-based process progressing through stakeholders' justifications vis-à-vis a public audience; it demonstrates the role of meta-level 'orders of worth' as multiple modalities for agreement which shape stakeholders' public justifications during controversies; and it highlights the capacities that stakeholders deploy in developing robust justifications out of a plurality of forms of agreement.

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Section: Institutionalist Perspective On Legitimacy Maintenancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Maintaining Legitimacy: Controversies, Orders of Worth, and Public Justifications

Patriotta

Gond

Schultz

2011

J Management Studies

358

378

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“…While traditional neoinstitutionalist research focuses on the organization's conformity to legitimacy imperatives in a highly institutionalized field, recent research has expanded the explanatory power of this school of thought to the process of institutional changes (or deinstitutionalization) where institutionalized structures or practices are weakened, transformed, and replaced with new ones (Sherer and Lee, 2002;Thornton, 2002). This research has found that institutional changes can be explained by incorporating more active roles of interest, agency, power, and economic factors into the view of legitimacy (DiMaggio, 1988).…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adoption and Coverage of Performance‐Related Pay during Institutional Change: An Integration of Institutional and Agency Theories

Kang

Yanadori

2011

J Management Studies

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Whether or not to adopt and how extensively to use a newly legitimized practice are discrete decisions made by firms undergoing institutional change. The aim of this paper is to identify the distinct effects of economic, social, and political factors on the adoption of performance-related pay practices and their coverage (i.e. the proportion of employees covered by the practices) by integrating institutional and agency theories. An empirical analysis is performed with a unique sample of Korean firms that experienced the East Asian financial crisis of 1997. The results show that while performance-related pay adoption was influenced by economic and social factors, performance-related pay coverage was related to political factors as well as economic and social factors. This finding suggests that while firms adopt performance-related pay practices in search of legitimacy, they do not blindly imitate such practices but rather proactively adapt them based on economic efficiency considerations. This study makes valuable contributions to research on institutionalism and remuneration by empirically identifying the conditions under which a pay practice adopted for social legitimacy fits or fails to fit the economic needs of the adopters.

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“…Such belief systems prescribe what actions to take and what concerns and issues to bring to managerial attention. A significant body of research demonstrates how institutional logics either lead to the establishment of a new institutional logic, as in the case of the shift from the editorial logic to the market logic in the American publishing industry (Thornton, 2002), or to the existence side-by-side of different institutional logics over even longer periods of time, as in the case of the health care sector, combining traditional professional medicine and business-like principles (Reay & Hinings, 2009). This paper reports a study of the biopharmaceutical industry and shows that there is a new logic of institutionalization for new drug development being enacted by primarily smaller biotechnology companies, seeking to move beyond the small molecules/one target therapy model.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competing Institutional Logics in the Biopharmaceutical Industry: The Move away from the Small Molecules Therapies Model in the Post‐Genomic Era

Styhre

2011

Creat Innov Manage

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The concept of institutional logics has been introduced as the totality of beliefs and assumptions guiding actors in a specific institutional field. While an institutional logic provides actors with guidance for action and an integrated worldview, it is possible for two or more institutional logics to coexist, even over longer periods of time. This study demonstrates how actors in the biopharmaceutical industry are conceiving of a shift from the incumbent small molecules/one target model for new drug development, predominant in the pharmaceutical industry during the post-World War period, to a more complex model where both genomic and post-genomic research methods and new forms of in silico biocomputation methods are constituting a new drug development regime where biological entities such as stem cells, biologics (larger molecules such as vaccines) and antibodies play a role in the new therapies.The study concludes (1) that institutional logics are never devoid of struggle and controversy and must be understood as outcomes of complex social processes, and (2) that linear periodizations of the life sciences into, for example, 'traditional', 'genomic' and 'post-genomic' eras impose an overly simplistic image of how new drug development is organized and technologically embedded in the contemporary period.

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The Rise of the Corporation in a Craft Industry: Conflict and Conformity in Institutional Logics

Cited by 277 publications

References 47 publications

Maintaining Legitimacy: Controversies, Orders of Worth, and Public Justifications

Maintaining Legitimacy: Controversies, Orders of Worth, and Public Justifications

Adoption and Coverage of Performance‐Related Pay during Institutional Change: An Integration of Institutional and Agency Theories

Competing Institutional Logics in the Biopharmaceutical Industry: The Move away from the Small Molecules Therapies Model in the Post‐Genomic Era

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