Philip Selznick is a towering figure in the history of organizational studies. His direct contributions to organizational scholarship are relatively few in number and were mostly produced in the early years of his remarkable academic career. But, these early organizational writings, which include TVA and the Grass Roots (1949) and Leadership in Administration (1957), exerted a profound, multi-faceted, and enduring influence on a then-nascent field . They are also widely viewed as the "founding documents" of institutional theory. Each of the papers in this volume revisits Selznick's early...

The year 2012 was the 40th anniversary of the publication of Cohen, March, and Olsen's influential article "The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice," which offered a major new perspective on organizational decision making. To celebrate this enduring paradigm, its impact on our understanding of organizational decision making, and the broad streams of research it has influenced, this collection of papers provides a rich demonstration of the influence that the GCM is continuing to have on current research. The chapters make original contributions to research on organizational decision...

The book examines ongoing dynamics within the organizational fields of health and higher education, with a focus on collective (public universities and hospitals) and individual (professionals) actors, structures, processes and institutional logics. The fact that universities and hospitals share a number of important characteristics, both being hybrid organizations, professional bureaucracies, and operating within highly institutionalised environments, they are also characterised by their distinctive features such as the importance attributed to scientific autonomy and prestige (universities)...

Universities are under pressure. All over the world, their resource environment is evolving, demands for accountability have increased, and competition has become more intense. At the same time, emerging countries have become more important in the global system, demographic shifts are changing educational needs, and new technologies threaten, or promise, to disrupt higher education. This volume includes cutting-edge research on the causes and consequences of such pressures on universities as organizations, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. It provides an empirical overview of pressures on...

The study of multinational companies (MNCs) has been split for many decades into two camps which hardly 'talked' to each other: a) predominantly economic and functionalist oriented International Business Researchers, and b) largely social constructivist and critical management oriented Organization Theorists. This volume intends to build bridges by bringing together leading international scholars from both camps, who provide new insights in the study of MNCs. In addition to the bridge-building exercise, the book aims to develop a more comprehensive organizational theoretical understanding as...

This double volume presents a collection of 23 papers on how institutions matter to socio-economic life. The effort was seeded by the 2015 Alberta Institutions Conference, which brought together 108 participants from 14 countries and 51 different institutions. The resulting papers delve deeply into the practical impact an institutional approach enables, as well as how such research has the potential to influence policies relevant to critical institutional changes unfolding in the world today. In Volume 48A, the focus is on the micro foundations of institutional impacts. In Volume 48B, the...

This double volume presents a collection of 23 papers on how institutions matter to socio-economic life. The effort was seeded by the 2015 Alberta Institutions Conference, which brought together 108 participants from 14 countries and 51 different institutions. The resulting papers delve deeply into the practical impact an institutional approach enables, as well as how such research has the potential to influence policies relevant to critical institutional changes unfolding in the world today. In Volume 48A, the focus is on the micro foundations of institutional impacts. In Volume 48B, the...

The recent growth in research on the topic of evolutionary novelties inspired this volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations. While previous sociological work has done an admirable job of understanding selection and differentiation processes, it has widely ignored the origin of novelty and how it grows to form initial structures and practices. Emergence is an easy to understand intuitive concept, as it simply means that an object comes into existence or appearance, but it needs further unpacking as a description of a widespread social process. In this book, emergence is seen as a...

The papers included in the volume explore how mobilizing Boltanski and Thevenot's EW framework helps address questions regarding the premises and dynamics of agreement and disagreement in coordinated action, both within and across organizations, and by so doing, help advance our understanding of organizational processes more generally. The book is organized into four sections, each with contributions that address one of the four core theoretical objectives around which the volume is structured (1) to clarify how individuals manage the contradictions and compromises inherent to organizational...

This volume focuses on the relationship between different modes in the emergence, diffusion, maintenance, and challenge of social meanings and institutions. The contributions demonstrate the potential of multimodal approaches to advance the design of rigorous methods of analysis for the study of multimodal communicative practices.