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The expansion of the higher education system and the rationalization of universities in South Korea, while broadly following the global patterns, reflect the characteristics of the national political system. We show the rapid growth of universities and document core organizational changes among universities: the elaboration of faculty performance evaluation rules, the expansion and differentiation of central administrations, and the emergence of engagement in vision statements. These changes, constructing universities as organizational actors, parallel the changes in higher education systems elsewhere. However, the uniqueness of the Korean experience lies with the role of the state as a catalyst guiding the overall direction and the structure and strategy of universities. We discuss the implications of our research for the rationalization of universities in a highly centralized system.

The text is an editorial from the journal Organization Studies, discussing the challenges and opportunities presented by the transition from the pandemic to the post-pandemic world. It highlights the deepened inequities and inequalities exposed by the pandemic, as well as the erosion of democratic institutions and the ongoing climate crisis. The editorial introduces two documentaries on the Australian Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020, which are analyzed by organization scholars from different theoretical perspectives. The documentaries provide insights into the organizational dimensions of the bushfires and inspire future research on engaged scholarship and crisis management. [Extracted from the article]

A response is provided to the article "On the Ontology of Action: Actors Are Not “Abstractions,"" by R. McBride and M.D. Packard, which appears within the issue. It discusses a perspective on actors, or those acting with agency, heavily referencing institutional theory, action theory, social constructionism and organizational sociology.

The term "actor" is a central yet contested construct in institutional theory. Regardless of one's position, institutional theory requires a scaffolding that acknowledges the novelty and diversity of actor analyses and facilitates the commensurability, application, and reach in scholarly uses of the term. We put forth a view of actor as an abstraction that consists of three core elements: (1) the level(s) of society that claims about actors occupy (e.g., from individual to organizational to societal), (2) the degree of generality that claims about actors reach (i.e., from concrete to abstract), and (3) the essential features that constitute actors (i.e., ontology). Our lens pushes beyond the prolific use of the term by providing a foundation for identifying and positioning actor-based studies. It also delineates reference sets of actor-based scholarship, even absent of the term altogether, so as to identify where conceptual specifications converge, expand, complement, or compete. Our lens also provides a means of relating actor-based analyses to one another in ways that distinguish the quality of the actor specification from its novelty or empirical validity. In so doing, we move the agenda forward on the analyses of actor as both explanandum and explanans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By widening the scope of I OS i reviews to include media, this changing form of the book will be joined by new types of review-worthy media artefacts. We envision media reviews that can embrace multiple media formats of varying scale and reach, allowing organization scholars to connect with a broader range of creator communities. The I Organization Studies (OS) i book review section is no exception, with our long overdue move to including media reviews, along with reviews of new books. [Extracted from the article]

In this essay, we explore the institutional embeddedness of the Sydney nonprofit sector via its changing relations with the state, market, and civil society. We explore the historical development of these relations and how these durable relations have shifted in recent years, putting pressures on the sector. The federal government's effort to constrain advocacy practices has resulted in a tense relationship between the sector and the state. The push to introduce market mechanisms to generate resources for the sector and the rise of impact investing have pushed nonprofit organizations to explore financial innovations and into the now locally labeled "social economy." These developments directly impinge on how nonprofits perform their roles by circumscribing the scope for advocacy and by putting nonprofits on a different path for financial sustainability. Compounding these shifts are the COVID-19 pandemic and the sector's relationship with civil society. The pandemic underscored the importance of the work carried out by nonprofits and saw a resurgence in the sector's relationship to civil society, while revealing the sector's chronic fragility. By examining the institutional embeddedness of the nonprofit sector in this way, we provide a common framework for understanding a local nonprofit sector in the context of global changes, fostering future comparative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: COVID-19; coronavirus; pandemic; crisis; global societal transformation; institutional theory; institutional change EN COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic crisis global societal transformation institutional theory institutional change 294 300 7 07/20/20 20200901 NES 200901 We are currently living through what future generations might refer to as an external "shock", "jolt", or "radical rupture" that precipitated a major global societal transformation. The Global Institutional Order and the Nation-State in the Postpandemic World The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the interconnectedness of global society, unified by its collective vulnerability to a rapidly spreading virus. Rediscovering the Social in the Individual As societies around the world enforce "social distancing" measures, individual citizens have embraced the paradoxical necessity of such measures: we had to sacrifice our existential need for the social for the benefit of society as a whole. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity for our domain of scholarly inquiry to elaborate on what institutional theory can offer in terms of effectively understanding the current changes in the social world (and possible response strategies) and to explore how the crisis provides ground to question, test, and advance the well-stocked conceptual tool box of institutional theory. [Extracted from the article]

The growing interest in the microfoundations of institutions is a significant, yet surprising development given that the theoretical tradition's original insight was to account for macro, institutional influences on lower-level units. The call for microfoundations has gone on without really clarifying what institutionalists mean by microfoundations. Some reflections on the usefulness or purpose of establishing the microfoundations of institutional theory are in order. The authors advocate for treating the micro as part of pluralistic and multi-level accounts of institutional processes. Central is the conceptualization of actors as more or less institutionalized identities and roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocacy, essential to the unique role of the nonprofit sector, is a term that suffers from a definitional morass that is both crowded and inconsistent, undermining research progress. This problem has been exacerbated by changes in our understanding of the wide variety of nonprofit and voluntary organizations involved in advocacy. To address construct clarity and help research bridge disciplinary silos, we present a framework that, while drawing clearer boundaries around the construct's peripheries, integrates three major dimensions of organizational advocacy among nonprofits: goals, tactics, and motivations. This integrative framework focuses on the targets, contexts, and types of nonprofit actors associated with these dimensions, pointing to avenues for new lines of comparative research. We demonstrate how this framework can elucidate institutional change and advance the field by promoting new understandings of advocacy that better matches changing empirical reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of formal planning in nonprofits and the public sector is thriving, with management gurus providing abundant advice on its value and proper execution. We address a related, but broader issue: why has the management tool of formal planning become prevalent in organizations with a public goal in the first place? To answer this question, we draw on insights from institutional theories of organization, bringing a fresh perspective to the increasingly common practice of formal planning in the administration of public entities. Using a unique dataset constructed from interviews with a random, representative sample of the leaders of 200 nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area, we analyze the factors associated with the presence of a formal plan. We combine the interview data with details on organizational characteristics from tax reports and consider the features of nonprofits that plan using logistic regression. The findings reveal that size and capacity are important, but links to an external, rationalized environment dampen the effects of both. Thus, functional factors, while important, are insufficient to explain why nonprofits engage in planning. For those interested in promoting formal planning as a management tool, our findings provide insight into other organizational features that promote the use of planning. And for those concerned with the potentially deleterious effects of this tool in the nonprofit sector, we show that certain types of organizations seem adept at maintaining a less formal structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In spite of recent interest in its microfoundations, institutional theory’s account of what, why, and when ideas diffuse remains limited and oversocialized. As such, it is unclear how firms decide what to adopt and how these decisions evolve across a population as innovations spread and become taken for granted. We review recent work in institutional theory on this issue and draw from learning theory to inform institutional accounts of adoption decisions in ways that add to current explanations of organizational heterogeneity. In particular, we develop a model of adoption strategies that explains how firms identify which practices to adopt by drawing on knowledge that is either local or distant (search scope) to understand what works and what does not (mindfulness). We then theorize how the decision to adopt is further conditioned by the extent of diffusion (temporal variation) and the characteristics of the field, organization, and innovation (decision context). We discuss the implications of this model for our understanding of how things diffuse and identify additional ways in which the microfoundations of institutional theory can be advanced by studying how organizations learn. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the members of an organizational field adopt similar practices, considerable variation in enactment can ensue. Field-level theories, however, do not yet explain how and why organizations vary in their use of standard practices. To tackle this issue, we focus on the infiltration of managerial practices into a sector traditionally motivated by norms of charity, using data drawn from a random sample of 200 nonprofit organizations. We first carry out an inductive content analysis of interviews with executive directors (EDs) about their use of strategic planning, which reveals three main rationales for adoption-- associational, managerial, and opportunistic--and two outcomes--symbolic adoption and symbolic implementation. We then use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to consider which combinations of organizational attributes and rationales are associated with the outcomes of decoupling or routinization. Our study shows creative yet patterned possibilities in the uses of a standard practice, with both adoption and implementation taking on symbolic meaning. The findings afford a deeper understanding of how multiple forms of decoupling can be used to understand micro-processes of variation, extending research on divergent outcomes of field-wide isomorphic pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]