Search

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.

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]

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]

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]