Field-level Evaluation Practices and Practice Experimentation: Social Impact Bonds and Market Logic Encroachment in the Field of Social Integration
On Practice and Institution: New Empirical Directions
ISBN: 978-1-80043-417-2, eISBN: 978-1-80043-416-5
Publication date: 12 January 2021
Abstract
The authors contribute to practice-driven institutionalism by examining how the introduction of new field-level evaluation practices may facilitate encroachment of highly institutionalized organizational fields by new institutional logics. The authors conducted an inductive study of a trial of social impact bonds in the field of social integration services in Finland. Our analysis elaborates how new field-level evaluation practices created an experimental space that induced organizational practice experimentation, reconfigured relationships among field members, and lowered the barriers to entry for new organizations. The authors theorize how evaluation practices may create experimental spaces by suspending the carriers of established logics and legitimizing institutional innovations. The authors further elaborate how such spaces can bring about a parallel “shadow field” by inducing bottom-up experimentation aligned with a new institutional logic.
Keywords
Citation
Schildt, H., Kodeih, F. and Tarabichi, H. (2021), "Field-level Evaluation Practices and Practice Experimentation: Social Impact Bonds and Market Logic Encroachment in the Field of Social Integration", Lounsbury, M., Anderson, D.A. and Spee, P. (Ed.) On Practice and Institution: New Empirical Directions (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 71), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 117-144. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20200000071005
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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