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The purpose of this paper is to describe how an Academic Health Science Centre, providing pediatric rehabilitation services, research, and education, developed a Centres for Leadership (CfL) initiative to integrate its academic functions and embrace the goal of being a learning organization.

Historical documents, tracked output information, and staff members’ insights were used to describe the ten-year evolution of the initiative, its benefits, and transformational learnings for the organization.

The evolutions concerned development of a series of CfLs, and changes over time in leadership and management structure, as well as in operations and targeted activities. Benefits included enhanced clinician engagement in research, practice-based research, and impacts on clinical practice. Transformational learnings concerned the importance of supporting stakeholder engagement, fostering a spirit of inquiry, and fostering leaderful practice. These learnings contributed to three related emergent outcomes reflecting “way stations” on the journey to enhanced evidence-informed decision making and clinical excellence: enhancements in authentic partnerships, greater innovation capacity, and greater understanding and actualization of leadership values.

Practical information is provided for other organizations interested in understanding how this initiative evolved, its tangible value, and its wider benefits for organizational collaboration, innovation, and leadership values. Challenges encountered and main messages for other organizations are also considered.

A strategy map is used to present the structures, processes, and outcomes arising from the initiative, with the goal of informing the operations of other organizations desiring to be learning organizations.

Joining recent calls to focus our attention on how institutional logics work on the ground, I offer a critique of current studies of institutional logics that often offer a macro and reified depictions thereof. I suggest that to fully appreciate how institutions matter, we need to complement these studies with a research program that is based on a constructivist ontology, ethnographic methods of inquiry, and use of theories of action. I exemplify this emerging research agenda, and discuss its broader analytical and empirical implications.

Borrowing from practice theory to enhance institutional theory has much potential. It may help institutional scholars reconnect with its constructivist, processual origins. Yet previous attempts of borrowing across paradigmatic boundaries – both in organization studies and in institutional theory – teach us that borrowing is not a straightforward adoption. Instead, theories that cross known paradigmatic boundaries go through a process of translation, and may well get lost in the way. In this paper, the author focuses on methodology and points to impediments to the fruitful adoption of a practice-driven approach to institutionalization, and offers ways to overcome them. In particular, the author points to the need to change the focus from process as an outcome to the inner life of the process; capturing action in vivo and in situ; and finding ways to focus on practice yet not lose connection to its institutional context and implications.

Drawing on close readings of Schatzki and Friedland, this paper explores the nexus of practice, logics, and values, and especially the implications of practice-driven institutionalism for the concept of values and vice versa. In essence, the article searches for values in practice-driven institutionalism and articulates how they might be found, deploying practice theory, institutional logics, and values work as guides. The article’s core argument is that both practice theory and institutional logics ascribe an important conceptual role to values, but neither has developed a theory of values that is wholly compatible with the onto-epistemological commitments of practice-driven institutionalism. The article introduces burgeoning scholarship on values work and argues that this approach offers a bridge between practice theory and institutional theory and, by extension, provides conceptual resources and an important research lacuna for those interested in practice-driven institutionalism.

This paper poses the question of whether the mainstream feminist movement in the United States, in concentrating its efforts on achieving gender parity in the existing workplace, is selling women short. In it, I argue that contemporary U.S. feminism has not adequately theorized the problems with the relatively unregulated market system in the United States. That failure has contributed to a situation in which women’s participation in the labor market is mistakenly equated with liberation, and in which other far-ranging effects of the market system on women’s lives inside and outside of work – many of them negative – are overlooked. To theorize the effects of the market system on women’s lives in a more nuanced manner, I borrow from the insights of earlier Marxist and socialist feminists. I then use this more nuanced perspective to outline an agenda for feminism, which I call “market-cautious feminism,” that seeks to regulate the market to serve women’s interests.

This chapter investigates the mutual relationship between logic and paradox, showing that paradox is indispensable to test logic, as well as logic is necessary to extend our understanding of paradox. Firstly, I consider the lesson that organizational theory can draw from formal logic’s investigation of semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. Subsequently, I survey the plural interpretations of the concept of “logic” in organizational theory (as logic of theory, logic of practice, and institutional logics). I argue that this plurality of meanings is not a source of confusion but offers an opportunity to illustrate different manifestations of, and ways to cope with, organizational paradoxes.

This study examines the characteristics that affect college persistence from the first to second year among low-socioeconomic status (SES) high school graduates who enrolled in a two- or four-year college degree program, using the ELS:2002 database. Specifically, this study compares the influences of student entry characteristics, social and cultural capital, institutional characteristics, and college experiences across SES quartiles. While academic preparation and college support measures were predictors of persistence for all groups, predictors of persistence for low-SES students included measures of academic preparation and talking with faculty or advisors. Implications extend to institutional responses needed to support the success of low-SES students.

Previous quantitative research documents that college students with disabilities do not attain higher education at rates equal to their nondisabled peers. This qualitative study posits that socioeconomic status (SES) is a determinant of this discrepancy, and explores how SES and disability shape the college experience of New York City (NYC) students with learning disabilities (LDs), specifically.

Research findings from semi-structured interviews with students with LDs (n = 10) at a low-SES and a high-SES colleges are presented against the backdrop of administrative data from NYC baccalaureate-granting colleges (n = 44), disability staff surveys (n = 21), and disability staff interviews (n = 9). Examined through the lens of political economy, qualitative data demonstrate the ways colleges create environments that enable or hinder student success through difference in policy implementation.

Student themes like stress, identity, and entitlement are discussed against the theoretical and empirical exploration of the intersectionality of SES and disability. Socioeconomic differences are linked to variation in students’ college choice, accessing evaluations, requesting accommodations, and receiving supplementary supports.