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Drawing on supply chain collaboration, institutional theory and alliance literatures, we explore how a large buyer builds interpartner legitimacy to gain supplier commitment to a multiparty allianc...

The literature on corporate governance and institutional theory suggests that corporate governance responds to a broad array of institutional influences. In extending this literature, we adopt the ...

Using an institutional theory perspective we examine workplace gender segregation and provide a systematic analysis of what the rise of nonstandard employment means for gender inequality in the wor...

While the behavioral theory of the firm explains the heterogeneity of organizations’ search for new technologies in response to performance shortfalls, institutional theory illuminates isomorphic o...

This proposed symposium gathers scholars who have critically intervened institutional theory at various junctures in its history, and who have developed perhaps alternative “brands” of institutiona...

The microfoundational turn in institutional theory has focused on how mechanisms of institutionalization at different levels of analysis are intertwined. However, how social actors can more specifi...

Drawing on signaling and institutional theory, we perform an analysis of emerging market multinational enterprises’ ownership strategies in advanced markets. Specifically, we claim that experience-...

We examine the cross-country diffusion of a new entrepreneurial practice, namely Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Drawing on institutional theory, we argue that governments (including their financial...

This symposium makes a direct contribution to the 2020 AOM’s theme to “Broaden our Vision,” promoting cross-disciplinary dialogue among scholars from organization theory, entrepreneurship, and econ...

Despite an increasing scholarly effort to integrate institutional theory into strategic management, we still know little about how organizations balance conformity and differentiation when they are...

This paper draws upon institutional theory to incorporate multi-level influences of institutional environment (i.e., knowledge distance at the country level, industry attraction at the industry lev...

This study investigates whether and how multinational enterprises (MNEs) respond to violent conflicts. We employ institutional theory to argue that the response of MNEs to violent conflicts is a fu...

This research investigates the institutional challenges faced by Chinese manufacturing suppliers and their corresponding strategic responses through an institutional theory lens. The empirical research is based on a multiple case study involving nine case companies of three company size categories in the Chinese nonwoven fabric product industry. Data were collected over a period of three years from 2015 to 2017. This paper identifies three categories of institutional challenges, i.e., macro-institutional challenges, meso- institutional challenges, and micro-institutional challenges, faced by Chinese suppliers. Furthermore, it identifies the strategic responses undertaken by these companies in response to the above challenges, i.e., economic upgrading, environmental upgrading, and social upgrading, which in turn are associated with the companies’ size and level of maturity in upgrading practices. Finally, a maturity framework is developed with five positions that reveal a four-stage upgrading trajectory and strategic changes on the trade- off between institutional efficiency and legitimacy. As most extant research on the phenomenon of sourcing from China approaches it from the viewpoint of global buyers, this research examines the phenomenon from the viewpoint of Chinese suppliers. Through applying the theoretical lens of institutional theory to investigate GVC upgrading, this study contributes to the literature streams on both GVC and institutional theory.

This study examines entrepreneurial orientation as a potential driver of firms’ green management in an emerging market context. Combining entrepreneurship literature and the institutional theory, w...

This study investigates the relationship between individuals’ gender attitudes and the likelihood of creating new business ventures. We employ social feminist theory and institutional theory and ar...

Institutional theory argues that institutions shape organizational decisions in uncertain contexts. Since acquisition negotiations are mired in uncertainty, we expect institutions to influence such...

The Dynamic Capability (DC) construct has matured into one of the most influential theoretical lenses in the field of strategic management research. Important contributions have helped to understand how firms can achieve and sustain a competitive advantage by developing and maintaining DCs. We do however know very little about the erosion of DCs as well as the responsible forces. Hence, we ask the question: Why and how do DCs erode? Utilizing institutional theory, we show that because of their both static, path-dependent and at the same time dynamic, self-changing nature, DCs are institutionalized change inside organizations. The erosion of which can be viewed as a form of institutional change, which means that once institutionalized practices under sources of institutional pressures begin to change away from their former institutionalized form. In the case of DCs we focus on a specific form of institutional change: deinstitutionalization. This specific process is driven by political, functional and social pressures, which erode the three DC elements of sensing, seizing and reconfiguring. In our paper we show how those processes affect the mechanics of DC erosion and contribute to DC theory by closing this important theoretical gap. Also, we show that institutional change, which so far has solely been understood as productive measure to absorb market feedback, can produce highly destructive outcomes.

The recent infusion of practice theory into institutional theory, or the practice-driven institutionalism (PDI), has opened up novel opportunities and directions for studying many research puzzles ...

Institutional theory has developed into a leading perhaps the dominant perspective in organizational analysis these days. One prominent point of criticism of institutional theory has been its overl...

Building on legitimacy in institutional theory research, we theorize how the perception of regulative legitimacy based on strong versus weak government regulations varies in conjunction with instit...

Meanings -- the shared understandings that underpin structures and practices-- is a critical building block of institutional theory. The meaning attributed to different issues carries strategic con...

We examine the use of institutional theory (IT) in international business (IB) related empirical research. We identified a total of 190 empirical papers in IB journals in the last 40 years that hav...

We draw on the microfoundations of institutional theory to study a common manifestation of hybridity that has been neglected in the literature: the communication of both social and financial themes...

Medical Leadership (ML) propagates physicians’ use of organizing-type competencies. Drawing on Institutional Theory, the present abductive study: a) explains ML’s emergence in Western healthcare sy...

Despite the centrality of meaning in institutional theory, meaning tends to be inferred from observable behaviors and practices, taken literally from spoken or written texts, or simply assumed by r...

Socially diverse leadership teams can have both positive and negative impacts on organizational performance. Institutional theory identifies two prominent reasons for an organization to diversify i...

Institutional theory has a Gordian knot to be solved. It lacks a theory of actorhood that defines actors as change agents who perceive institutional contradictions as opportunity for change while complying with institutional theory’s key principal of actors’ embeddedness. To cut this knot, we develop a microfoundational and dynamic based theory of actorhood that is based on two actors’ main properties: skills and identity. As these properties are shaped by macro-conditions such as stable social fields or institutional contradictions and as they evolve over time, our theory of actorhood explains dissimilar behaviour of actors in similar situations. On this basis, we develop four types of institutional actors that behave differently during situations of institutional contradictions.

We study how changes in state control mechanisms impact the internationalization process of state-owned multinational companies. By taking an institutional theory perspective, we find that state co...

This study draws on multiple strands of literature from institutional theory, corporate governance, and theories of diversification to examine the role of institutional context and organizational o...

This paper approaches institutional theory to examine the ethnic entrepreneurship of first- and second-generation immigrants in their host countries. The varying impacts of institutions on the entr...

The adoption of innovation is a central topic in institutional theory. Yet, institutional scholars have tended to examine innovation adoption without considering the competitive consequences adopti...

Blending social identity theory (SIT) and institutional theory, this study explores new types of liability of foreignness focusing on the reason why legitimacy is more difficult to maintain for for...

We examine the cross-country diffusion of a new entrepreneurial practice, namely Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Drawing on institutional theory, we argue that governments (including their financial...

I draw on a qualitative study of the emergence and evolution of sustainability reporting in the Netherlands to understand the role of commensuration in institutionalisation processes. I find that t...

The concept of institutional work is a growing theoretical lens in the institutional theory tradition. Institutional work is concerned with practices and processes aimed at creating, maintaining, a...

Across industrialized countries, women are significantly less likely to be engaged in entrepreneurial activity than their male counterparts. Building on theories of entrepreneurship and institutional perspectives on gender inequality in the labor market, this paper develops and tests an institutional theory of gender inequality in entrepreneurship. It is proposed that in countries where social policies effectively integrate women into traditional employment, women are less likely to be “pushed” into entrepreneurship as a result of work/family conflict. As a result, contexts with such policies are likely to have larger gender gaps in the odds of being engaged in entrepreneurial activity, but smaller gender gaps among established business owners in their motivation for starting a business, orientation toward growth and propensity to innovate. Results from a multilevel analysis of survey data from 24 countries largely support this contention: generous public funding for childcare is associated with larger ge...

BACKGROUND:: The interest toward hospital restructuring has risen significantly in recent years. In spite of its potential benefits, often organizational restructuring in health care produces unexpected consequences. Extant research suggests that institutional theory provides a powerful theoretical lens through which hospital restructuring can be described and explained. According to this perspective, the effectiveness of change is strongly related to the extent to which innovative arrangements, tools, or practices are adopted and implemented within hospitals. Whenever these new arrangements require a substantial modification of internal processes and practices, resistance to implementation emerges and organizational change is likely to become neutralized. PURPOSE:: This study analyzes how hospital organizations engage in decoupling by adopting but not implementing a new organizational model named clinical directorate. METHODOLOGY:: We collected primary data on the diffusion of the clinical directorate model, which was mandated by law in the Italian National Health Service to improve hospital services. We surveyed the adoption and implementation of the clinical directorate model by monitoring the presence of clinical governance tools (measures for the quality improvement of hospital services) within single directorates. In particular, we compared hospitals that adopted the model before (early adopters) or after (later adopters) the mandate was introduced. FINDINGS:: Hospitals were engaged in decoupling by adopting the new arrangement but not implementing internal practices and tools for quality improvement. The introduction of the law significantly affected the decoupling, with late-adopter hospitals being less likely to implement the adopted model. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS:: The present research shows that changes in quality improvement processes may vary in relation to policy makers' interventions aimed at boosting the adoption of new hospital arrangements. Hospital administrators need to be aware and identify the institutional changes that might be driven by law to be able to react consistently with expectations of policymakers. Copyright © 2014 Wolters Kluwer Health Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

This paper examines the reputational consequences of corporate governance arrangements and, in so doing, attempts to establish stronger linkages between the literatures on governance and corporate ...

Recent studies suggests frames and framing provide a window into the link between institutions and the motivations and discursive strategies of actors behind them, but little is known about how and...

Drawing on institutional theory and using a methodology adapted from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, early stage entrepreneurial activities are examined within an American Indian Nation. Natio...

Is being the first entrant in a nascent industry an advantage or a disadvantage? Both institutional theory and population ecology suggest that in a nascent industry an increase in the number of fir...

Institutional theorists have recently called for the development of the microfoundations of institutional theory. This call coincides with noteworthy progress in research that has used institutiona...

Recently, scholars have begun to transform and expand institutional theory to a multi-level approach that explicitly incorporates the role of micro-processes. Although the emerging research stream ...

Despite decades of social and organizational commitments to increasing boardroom gender diversity, women are still underrepresented on U.S. boards. In this paper, we explore an important antecedent of female board representation: shareholder activism. Drawing on institutional theory, we predict that firms that are targeted by shareholder activists due to the lack of women on boards are likely to improve gender diversity in their boardroom to earn more legitimacy and protect themselves from further pressures. Using shareholder proposals on board diversity for S&P 1500 firms from 1997 to 2013, we found that firms that received shareholder proposals on board diversity tend to increase the number of women on their boards. Also, we found that the effect of shareholder proposals is weaker when the firm has a female CEO and demonstrates strong performance, because these organizational conditions are likely to provide them a shield that would make them less vulnerable from external pressure from shareholder activ...

Drawing on institutional theory and the resources and capabilities view, this study aims to shed light on the idea that isomorphic organizational changes seek legitimacy over efficiency. Our study ...

An increasingly common practice across the world is to introduce private alternatives into publically funded education systems. Economists have found that following from this practice, private schools often engage in what is called “cream skimming”, where they attract solely the most highly able students and thereby worsen the socio-economic stratification of the education system. In this paper, we argue that under conditions where for-profit schools are allowed, but they only receive a flat voucher per student, the phenomenon of “reverse cream skimming” where private schools selectively target the least motivated students is a likely outcome. We show this to be the case in a quantitative analysis of admissions to the secondary schools in a Swedish municipality from 1999 to 2017. Implications for theories of how schools compete, public education policy, and for institutional theory are discussed.

Incumbents’ inertia in the face of disruptive innovations has been emphasized in prior literature. Nevertheless, incumbents may be able to invest appropriately in these innovations if they possess the motivation and ability to do so. In this paper, we use three streams of research in order to investigate contextual, organizational, and individual antecedents of incumbents’ motivation and ability to adopt and use potentially disruptive digital innovations in health care: institutional theory, the resource-based view, and technology acceptance literature. We test the impact of various antecedents on the adoption and usage of telemedicine using a dataset of 9,196 European general practitioners. Our findings from logistic regressions suggest that only isomorphic pressure, complementary assets, and perceived output quality significantly influence both adoption and usage. Formal institutions and perceived usefulness yield ambiguous results. These findings provide important implications for future analyses of antecedents of incumbents’ response to disruptive innovations.

We build on institutional theory and international business strategy perspectives to explore liabilities of foreignness that firms face in the global debt market, and how they can mitigate these li...