Institutional Work: Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies of Organizations

by Edited by Thomas B. Lawrence , Roy Suddaby , Bernard Leca

• ISBN13: 9780521178525
• ISBN10: 0521178525
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-10-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The 'institutional' approach to organizational research has shown how enduring features of social life - such as marriage and bureaucracy - act as mechanisms of social control. Such approaches have traditionally focused attention on the relationships between organizations and the fields in which they operate, providing strong accounts of the processes through which institutions govern action. In contrast, the study of institutional work reorients these traditional concerns, shifting the focus to understanding how action affects institutions. This book sets a research agenda within the field of institutional work by analyzing the ways in which individuals, groups, and organizations work to create, maintain, and disrupt the institutions that structure their lives. Through a series of essays and case studies, it explores the conceptual core of institutional work, identifies institutional work strategies, provides exemplars for future empirical research, and embeds the concept within broader sociological debates and ideas.

Table of Contents

List of figures	p. vii
List of tables	p. viii
List of contributors	p. ix
Introduction: theorizing and studying institutional work	p. 1
Essays on institutional work	p. 29
Institutional work and the paradox of embedded agency	p. 31
Leadership as institutional work: a bridge to the other side	p. 59
Bringing change into the lives of the poor: entrepreneurship outside traditional boundaries	p. 92
Institutional work as the creative embrace of contradiction	p. 120
Studies of institutional work	p. 141
Building the iron cage: institutional creation work in the context of competing proto-institutions	p. 143
Scandinavian institutionalism - a case of institutional work	p. 178
Institutional maintenance as narrative acts	p. 205
Maintaining an institution in a contested organizational field: the work of the AACSB and its constituents	p. 236
Institutional "dirty" work: preserving institutions through strategic decoupling	p. 262
Doing which work? A practice approach to institutional pluralism	p. 284
Index	p. 317
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