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Philip Selznick has been a central, historical figure in the development of institutional theory. In particular his contribution in TVA and the Grass Roots and Leadership in Administration has been key. However, we put forward the relevance of Selznick’s broader portfolio of ideas, to show that they could inform institutional analysis in new ways. There are important ideas and insights that can be brought to bear on contemporary issues within institutional theory. In particular, Selznick was concerned with the ways in which organizational goals are deflected because of different interest groups. Organizations use various kinds of cooptation to deal with interest groups. Selznick’s perspective implies that institutional theorists need to be concerned with both deflection of purposes and interests. These ideas are explored further in his work, The Organizational Weapon, showing a concern with the nefarious effects of organizational practices, an avenue that institutional theory needs to explore further. Indeed, Selznick was always concerned with the consequences of institutionalization. He dealt with issues of organizational governance, purposes and interests, ideas of unanticipated as well as anticipated consequences, negative as well as positive effects of institutionalization all of which require further analysis in contemporary institutional theory. Also at the heart of Selznick’s work was an emphasis on policy and practice, coming from American pragmatist philosophy. For Selznick, knowledge is to be utilized to produce good policy and practice. Institutional theorists need to consider the applications of their knowledge.

Extant research posits that mergers and acquisition (M&As) do not create value. Still many firms adopt expansion strategies such as alliances, joint ventures (JVs), and M&As to grow and enhance their performance. Through performing a meta-analysis on 204 papers that assess the relationship between the three most prevalent expansion strategies formed by firms, alliances, JVs, and M&As and their different substantive and symbolic performance effects, this study contributes in two ways. First, it becomes clear that alliances and M&As enhance a firm’s substantive performance, while no positive performance effect is observed for JVs. In turn, all three expansion strategies boost a firm’s symbolic performance in terms of its legitimacy and status. Second, a distinction between their effects on a firm’s substantive performance in terms of their market-based and accounting-based performance shows that alliances and M&As both positively contribute to a firm’s accounting-based performance, while only the former spurs a firm’s market-based returns. This indicates that M&As have more long-term accounting-based performance effects compared to alliances and JVs, which suggests that in the long-term firms do best by expanding through M&As.

During industry emergence, what we call the proto-industry phase, the lack of agreement about legitimate organizational forms between audiences and firms is a key problem. We develop an ecological model of emerging institutional pressures among audiences and firms during the emergence of new industries to understand these challenges. We develop a theoretical framework that includes mimetic, normative, and coercive pressures, deriving propositions linking them with survival and growth. We use simulation methodology to test these propositions, finding strong support for these predictions. We close by exploring some conclusions and implications of our model for both theory and practice.

Despite increasing interest in business model innovation (BMI), there is only limited scholarship that examines how business model (BM) innovators present and explain their innovations to various stakeholders. As BMI often involves the creation of a new ecosystem, understanding how innovators can gain support of future ecosystem members is important. Based on a longitudinal case study of Salesforce, a pioneer in cloud computing, the authors show how the innovator’s skillful framing to different audiences fosters the emergence of an ecosystem around the new BM. The authors suggest that effective framing constitutes an important strategic process that enables BM innovators to shape new ecosystems due to the performative power of words.

Adults with Down's Syndrome are at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease in later life. This paper gives an overview of the current research in the area and discusses the implications it raises for individuals, carers and service providers. Information on the link between Down's Syndrome and Alzheimer's disease and prevalence rates are given. The clinical symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and a stage model documenting the progression of the disease are presented. Attention is drawn to the problems inherent in assessing and diagnosing Alzheimer's disease in a person with a pre‐existing learning disability. The importance of a thorough assessment procedure and guidelines for assessment methods are highlighted. The paper also discusses the management of Alzheimer's disease and focuses on care management practices and recommendations for service provision. Guidelines for supporting individuals include maintaining skills, adopting a person‐centred approach, implementing psychosocial interventions and multidisciplinary care management. Finally, high prevalence rates of Alzheimer's disease in adults with Down's Syndrome and increasing life spans are highlighted as a particular concern, and recommendations for the future include increasing education and awareness, implementing screening services, improving assessment methods and developing appropriate services.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the degree to which organizational ecology (OE) had a long-term impact on the way scholars study organizational foundings. Dubbed the “rates” approach by Aldrich and Weidenmayer (1993), OE argued that organizational foundings depend on intra- and inter-population processes such as organizational density, prior foundings, and prior disbandings. It de-emphasized the personal characteristics of founders and entrepreneurs – the “traits” approach. The analyses reveal that OE had limited impact, especially after the mid-2000s. OE’s limited appeal is partially explained by its lack of influence on scholars outside its orbit of influence and/or those publishing in non-sociology journals. In contrast to OE’s slight long-term impact, the authors argue that another perspective that was attuned to environmental conditions – new institutional theory (NIT) – has had greater success in influencing scholars studying foundings. The authors speculate that OE’s impact was ultimately limited because it was embedded in a relatively exclusive scholarly community, compared to NIT’s more inclusive scope.

Is the sharing economy a field? Answering this question is crucial to understanding how sharing organizations look and behave, as well as how the sharing economy might develop. In this chapter, the authors applied two different field conceptions – organizational field and issue field – as a starting point for an explorative empirical analysis. To capture both field concepts, the authors collected relational data and data on organizations’ self-representations to see how organizations engaged in the debate on the sharing economy relate to each other. The observed network of organizations suggests that the sharing economy is an issue field. In addition, the core of this network shows the relational structure of an organizational field. Surprisingly, it is not an organizational field of the sharing economy. Instead, it is a field of organizations heavily engaged in proselytizing new organizational forms that will change other fields. What the authors observed is a new field configuration – the authors call it a disruptive field – that is, less inward-oriented than other fields but much more engaged in changing other fields’ structures and dynamics. With these insights, the authors contribute to institutional research on field configuration and shed light on the phenomenon of the sharing economy and its potential development.

The purpose of this paper is to identify complementarities between the approaches of population ecology and evolutionary economics in order to contribute to a synthesis of organizational evolutionary dynamics and its implications for a strategic management research model. Using the metatriangulation technique to construct theories, we attempt to entwine these two perspectives. The proposed model is structured in two dimensions: the environmental selective system and the corporate adaptation process. The environmental selective system gathers together the complementary factors presented by evolutionary economics and ecology: technological innovation, demographic processes, environmental dynamism, population density and other institutional processes, and interpopulation dynamics. As ecology does not encompass the corporate adaptation process (generation, selection, and propagation of variations), the proposed model adopts the theoretical grounds underpinning evolutionary economics. The model offers three main contributions for future research into strategic management. First, it allows the development of descriptive and normative studies of the relationship among the environmental selection factors and the different types of enterprise strategies. Second, the proposed conceptual framework may be very beneficial for studies of interorganizational learning. Third, the model has the advantage of responding to the criticism of strategy theories in terms of their inability to generalize.