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The concept of collective identity has gained prominence within organizational theory as researchers have studied how it consequentially shapes organizational behavior. However, much less attention has been paid to the question of how nascent collective identities become legitimated. Although it is conventionally argued that membership expansion leads to collective identity legitimacy, we draw on the notion of cultural entrepreneurship to argue that the relationship is more complex and is culturally mediated by the stories told by group members. We propose a theoretical framework about the conditions under which the collective identity of a nascent entrepreneurial group is more likely to be legitimated. Specifically, we posit that legitimacy is more likely to be achieved when members articulate a clear defining collective identity story that identifies the group's orienting purpose and core practices. Although membership expansion can undermine legitimation by introducing discrepant actors and practices to a collective identity, this potential downside is mitigated by growth stories , which help to coordinate expansion. Finally, we theorize how processes associated with collective identity membership expansion might affect the evolution of defining collective identity stories.

We define cultural entrepreneurship as the process of storytelling that mediates between extant stocks of entrepreneurial resources and subsequent capital acquisition and wealth creation. We propose a framework that focuses on how entrepreneurial stories facilitate the crafting of a new venture identity that serves as a touchstone upon which legitimacy may be conferred by investors, competitors, and consumers, opening up access to new capital and market opportunities. Stories help create competitive advantage for entrepreneurs through focal content shaped by two key forms of entrepreneurial capital: firm-specific resource capital and industry-level institutional capital. We illustrate our ideas with anecdotal entrepreneurial stories that range from contemporary high-technology accounts to the evolution of the mutual fund industry. Propositions are offered to guide future empirical research based on our framework. Theoretically, we aim to extend recent efforts to synthesize strategic and institutional perspectives by incorporating insights from contemporary approaches to culture and organizational identity.

Both history and current events attest to the continued significance of religion in society. Despite the role and importance of the institution of religion, and the profound influence that religious organizations continue to exert, it occupies a curiously marginal place in organization theory. At the same time, organization theory has been criticized for its narrow focus on corporations and there have been calls to study a much broader range of organizational forms (e.g., Bamberger and Pratt, 2010). Interestingly, the small number of studies on religious organizations to have published have had a disproportionate impact on the field. This suggests that religious organizations deserve more attention, and that attending to them will have significant benefits for our understanding of organizations. This volume brings together leading organization theorists with an interest in religion. The aim is to consolidate and make available in one place existing knowledge on religion and organizations, as well as encouraging more organization theorists to include religion as part of their research activities and agenda.

Research summary: Attaining optimal distinctiveness—positive stakeholder perceptions about a firm's strategic position that reconciles competing demands for differentiation and conformity—has been an important focal point for scholarship at the interface of strategic management and institutional theory. We provide a comprehensive review of this literature and situate studies on optimal distinctiveness in the broader scholarly effort to integrate institutional theory into strategic management. Our review finds that much extant research on firm-level optimal distinctiveness is grounded in the strategic balance perspective that conceptualizes conformity and competitive differentiation as a trade-off along a single organizational attribute. We argue for a renewed research agenda that draws on recent developments in institutional theory to conceptualize organizational environments as more multiplex, fragmented, and dynamic, and discuss its implications for core strategic management topics. Managerial summary: This article aims to provide managers with a more comprehensive and contemporary view of how firms can become optimally distinct—being different enough from peer firms to be competitive, but similar enough to peers to be recognizable. We aim to equip managers with an understanding of firms as complex, multidimensional entities, and encourage them to identify and orchestrate various types of strategic resources to reconcile conformity versus differentiation tensions, address the multiplicity of stakeholder expectations, and aptly modify their positioning strategies in order to succeed in dynamic environments.

The concepts of practice and institution are of longstanding importance across the social sciences. This double-volume builds directly on the scholarship of Theodore Schatzki and Roger Friedland, to map out new theoretical and empirical directions at the interface between the practice and institutional \"logics\" literatures in organizational sociology, bridging the two perspectives. Volume 70 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations focuses on theoretical development including two major, and complementary, theoretical statements by Schatzki and Friedland that engage key ontological issues which lay the groundwork for how their approaches to practice and institutions can be generatively connected.

The concepts of practice and institution are of longstanding importance across the social sciences, that have been too disconnected. Bringing together novel theoretical statements and empirical studies that bridge these social worlds, these two volumes provide a major touchstone for scholars interested in the study of practice and institution.

Although many recent studies have emphasized the multiplicity of institutional logics and the competition among them, how some institutional logics become prioritized over others in shaping organizational decisions is undertheorized. Drawing on panel data of 118 industrial facilities across 34 communities in Texas and Louisiana, we show that the saliency of different kinds of community logics significantly affects environmental practices—specifically, toxic waste emissions—of facilities in a community. Our results show that community logics not only have direct effects but also have indirect effects by filtering organizational reactions to broader field-level institutional logics. We theorize how community logics can amplify or dampen the influence of broader field-level logics and discuss the implications for the study of institutional complexity, social movements, and values in the configuration of institutional logics.

In this paper, I examine how variation arises in the staffing of recycling programs at colleges and universities. Through initial fieldwork, I identified two basic recycling program forms. Some schools adopted recycling programs that entailed the creation of new, full-time recycling manager positions that were filled by ecological activists. Other schools adopted more minimalist programs that were staffed by current employees who were more ecologically ambivalent and assumed recycling management responsibilities as a part-time, additional duty. Results of a subsequent survey of a population of colleges and universities show that this variation in staffing was importantly shaped by the Student Environmental Action Coalition, a national social movement organization that provided resources and support to student environmental groups at particular schools. Implications for the study of how field-level organizations shape the content of organizational practices are discussed.

Differences in management behavior across organizations are attributed to differences in priorities and objectives or differences in the style and preferences of the individuals involved. This volume challenges this image by attending to the extra-organizational and extra-individual forces that shape and constrain how work is structured in organizations. The authors focus their attention on work within and between organizations and emphasize the ways in which the jobs are defined, the power and autonomy they engender, the opportunities that are afforded, and the constraints that are imposed, are continuously contested not only at the individual level, but also at a more aggregate and collective level. This volume is the product of an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars convened with generous support of the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council. It presents new theoretical and empirical papers that examine aspects of the changing nature of jobs and work in organizations from multiple perspectives and methodologies.

In this paper, we develop an exemplar-based model of the emergence and evolution of proto-categories—new groupings of products that are only weakly entrenched but have the potential to become widely institutionalized—and examine how different positioning strategies of new entrants vis-à-vis the exemplar of a proto-category affect entrant performance. Empirically, we study the U.S. console video game industry where proto-categories frequently emerge and evolve around exemplary hit games. Analyzing a proprietary database of 6,544 games comprising 78 such proto-categories, we find that, in the early stages of proto-category emergence, conformity with the exemplar’s features is positively associated with new entrants’ sales. As a proto-category evolves, a moderate level of differentiation becomes important for enhancing sales. We also find that this temporal dynamic is driven by the changing competitive intensity in the proto-category and strongly mediated by critics’ reviews. Moreover, the mediating effect of critics’ reviews on entrant sales becomes increasingly salient with the evolution of a proto-category. Finally, we show that accounting for the influence of emerging prototypes does not diminish the explanatory power of the exemplar model we propose. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of our findings for research on categorization and optimal distinctiveness.