Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,107
result(s) for
"Lawrence, Thomas B."
Sort by:
Institutional Work in the Transformation of an Organizational Field: The Interplay of Boundary Work and Practice Work
We draw on an in-depth longitudinal analysis of conflict over harvesting practices and decision authority in the British Columbia coastal forest industry to understand the role of institutional work in the transformation of organizational fields. We examine the work of actors to create, maintain, and disrupt the practices that are considered legitimate within a field (practice work) and the boundaries between sets of individuals and groups (boundary work), and the interplay of these two forms of institutional work in effecting change. We find that actors' boundary work and practice work operate in recursive configurations that underpin cycles of institutional innovation, conflict, stability, and restabilization. We also find that transitions between these cycles are triggered by combinations of three conditions: (1) the state of the boundaries, (2) the state of practices, and (3) the existence of actors with the capacity to undertake the boundary and practice work of a different institutional process. These findings contribute to untangling the paradox of embedded agency—how those subject to the institutions in a field can effect changes in them. We also contribute to an understanding of the processes and mechanisms that drive changes in the institutional lifecycle.
Journal Article
Place and Institutional Work: Creating Housing for the Hard-to-house
The places in which organizational life occurs can have profound impacts on actors, actions, and outcomes but are largely ignored in organizational research. Drawing on ideas from social geography, we explore the roles that places play in institutional work. The context for our study is the domain of housing for the hard-to-house, within which we conducted two qualitative case studies: the establishment of Canada's first residential and day-care facility for people living with HIV/AIDS, and the creation of a municipal program to provide temporary overnight accommodation for homeless people in local churches. In examining these cases, we found that places played three key roles: places contained, mediated, and complicated institutional work. Each of these roles was associated with a distinct ontology of place: places as social enclosures, as signifiers, and as practical objects. Our findings have significant implications for how we understand the relationship between location and organizations and allow us to develop a process model of places, institutions, and institutional work.
Journal Article
Social-Symbolic Work in the Construction of Social Problems: Constructing Gender Inequality in Turkish Social Partnerships
How social problems are constructed within social partnerships has significant effects on the management, impact, and survival of those partnerships. To explore how social problems are constructed, we adopt a social-symbolic work perspective, which highlights the variety of forms of work involved in this process, how they interact, and the impact of context on that process. Empirically, we focus on two social partnerships in Turkey that both addressed gender inequality but constructed that problem in very different terms. Our study suggests that the differences in how they came to construct the problem of gender inequality in Turkey was tied to the qualities of two forms of social-symbolic work—relational work and practice work—in which they engaged: the partnership that constructed gender inequality as an embedded problem engaged in extensive relational work and deep practice work; in contrast, the partnership that constructed the problem as disembedded engaged in efficient relational work and shallow practice work. Further, we observed that the construction of the problem of gender inequality was tied to different outcomes: an embedded social construction of the problem was associated with holistic outcomes on a more limited scale; a disembedded construction of the problem was associated with simpler outcomes on a greater scale. The paper contributes to the literature on social partnerships by showing how social problems are constructed through partners' work and how this affects their impact and sustainability. It also extends the literature on social-symbolic work by highlighting the interplay of different forms of work in constructing social problems. Finally, it contributes to research on gender inequality and organizations by showing how the work of social partnerships can shape conceptions of gender inequality at the meso level.
Journal Article
Organizational responses to institutional complexity stemming from emerging logics
In this article, we address two important gaps in the study of organizational responses to institutional complexity. First, we examine how organizations respond to institutional complexity associated with newly emerging logics that lack well-defined sets of practices; although previous research has examined logics new to a field, those logics have tended to be well-established in other domains. Based on the responses of 10 Canadian public schools to the emerging logic of Aboriginal distinctiveness, we identify four organizational responses (reinterpretation, advocacy, isolation, and integration) that we argue are distinctive of emerging logics. Second, we explore how individuals in organizations shape organizational responses to institutional complexity. We show how individuals’ sensemaking and institutional biographies combine to affect the kinds of action in which organizations engage (discursive or practical) and the scope of that action (expansive across the organization or confined to a subset of actors).
Journal Article
Who Calls It? Actors and Accounts in the Social Construction of Organizational Moral Failure
In recent years, research on morality in organizational life has begun to examine how organizational conduct comes to be socially constructed as having failed to comply with a community's accepted morals. Researchers in this stream of research, however, have paid little attention to identifying and theorizing the key actors involved in these social construction processes and the types of accounts they construct. In this paper, we explore a set of key structural and cultural dimensions of apparent noncompliance that enable us to distinguish between four categories of actors who engage in constructing the label of moral failure: dominant insiders, watchdog organizations, professional members, and publics. The analysis further clarifies which category of actor is more likely to succeed in constructing the label of moral failure under which circumstances, and what accounts they are likely to use, namely scapegoating, prototyping, shaming, and protesting.
Journal Article
Emplaced Partnerships and the Ethics of Care, Recognition and Resilience
The aim of the SI is to bring to the fore the places in which cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) are formed; how place shapes the dynamics of CSPs, and how CSPs shape the specific settings in which they develop. The papers demonstrate that partnerships and place are intrinsically reciprocal: the morality and materiality inherent in places repeatedly reset the reference points for partners, trigger epiphanies, shift identities, and redistribute capacities to act. Place thus becomes generative of partnerships in the most profound sense: by developing an awareness of their emplacement, CSPs commit to place, and through their place-based commitments produce three intertwined modalities of place-specific ethics that bind CSPs and place: ethic of recognition, an ethic of care, and an ethic of resilience. Our authors have found vivid examples of how emplaced CSPs embody these ethics, signaling hope for the sustainability of our (always hyper-local) life-worlds.
Journal Article
Understanding Widespread Misconduct in Organizations: An Institutional Theory of Moral Collapse
Reports of widespread misconduct in organizations have become sadly commonplace. Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, accounting fraud in large corporations, and physical and sexual harassment in the military implicate not only the individuals involved, but the organizations and fields in which they happened. In this paper we describe such situations as instances of \"moral collapse\" and develop a multi-level theory of moral collapse that draws on institutional theory as its central orienting lens. We draw on institutional theory because of its explicit concern with the relationships among individual beliefs and actions, the organizations within which they occur, and the collective social structures in which norms, rules and beliefs are anchored. Our theory of moral collapse has two main elements. First, we argue that morality in organizations is embedded in nested systems of individuals, organizations and moral communities in which ideology and regulation flow \"down\" from moral communities through organizations to individuals, and moral ideas and influence flow \"upward\" from individuals through organizations to moral communities. Second, we argue that moral collapse is associated with breakdowns in these flows, and explore conditions under which such breakdowns are likely to occur.
Journal Article