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Hybrid organizations face particular challenges and opportunities due to combining different logics within one organizational structure. While research on hybrid organizing has advanced considerably our understanding of how these organizations can cope with such tensions, institutional theory suggests that organizational legitimacy and success will also depend on processes that take place at the field level. We connect these two perspectives to examine how field hybridity influences organizational legitimacy. Specifically, we consider both a field’s maturity and its degree of hybridity as two important variables that determine the effects that field hybridity has on organizational legitimacy. Drawing from extant research and leveraging our empirical work in the fields of microfinance, social entrepreneurship and impact investing to provide illustrative examples, we propose a framework that considers both positive and negative effects of field hybridity on organizational legitimacy. We contribute to the literature on hybrid organizing in two ways. First, we show that hybrid organizations face different challenges and opportunities depending on the stage of development and degree of hybridity of the field they operate in. Second, we suggest that the effects of field hybridity on organizational legitimacy can be understood as trade-offs that organizations need to understand and approach strategically to leverage opportunities and mitigate challenges.

As more and more people decide to commit their lives to print, autobiographies constitute a significant resource to explore stories of harm, violence and crime. Published autobiography, however, presents a unique form of storytelling, unavoidably entailing the accumulation and (re)telling of a mass of stories; about oneself, others, contexts and cultures. Relatedly, paratexts – or the elements that surround the central text, such as covers, introductions and prologues – demonstrate how these texts are both individually and collectively shaped. Taking the co-constructed nature of all narratives, including self-narratives, as its starting point, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how terrorists who have authored autobiographies understand the world and their actions within it. In doing so, this chapter provides a practical demonstration of how insight derived from literary criticism can profitably be brought to bear in systematically breaking down and analysing an autobiography – that of a notable American jihadist, Omar Hammami – including its paratextual elements. In particular, I argue that considerations of genre, the inclusion of different types of events and stories collected from others all provide valuable strategies for the ‘doing’ of narrative criminology using autobiographies.

Originally conceptualised as an innovative strategy for environmental conservation, ecotourism is now considered as one of the fastest growing segments of tourism. Although many definitions of ecotourism have been provided over the years, the application of the concept is still inconsistent, shifting its focus from purely nature-based towards more sustainable and conservative activities. Research on ecotourism reveals that ecotourism marketing initiatives are mainly driven by the supply-side or government/environmentalist organisations’ perspective, without taking into account the demand side, i.e., individuals’ motivations for ecotourism. This chapter will provide recognition of the different definitions of the ecotourism concept in order to distinguish it from other similar forms of tourism, e.g., nature-based tourism, and will review the research to build an understanding of the various motivations pushing individuals to choose ecotourism offerings. It will also function as the basis for the development of an appropriate protocol to investigate a sample of ecotourism providers and the congruency of their marketing initiatives with established consumer motivations.

Foundational work on institutional theory as a framework for studying organizations underscored its relevance to analyses of entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship research has often ignored the insights provided by this theoretic approach. In this chapter, we illustrate the utility of institutional theory as a central framework for explaining entrepreneurial phenomena by discussing three primary questions for entrepreneurship researchers: Under what conditions are individuals likely to found new organizations? What are key influences on the kinds of organizations they found? And what factors determine the likelihood of the survival of new organizations? We describe the kinds of answers that an institutional perspective provides to these questions, illustrate some of our arguments by drawing on a recent field of entrepreneurial endeavor, hedge funds, and discuss the implications of our analysis for further work by entrepreneurship researchers.

The sociology of entrepreneurship is a blossoming field of research, but its scholarly contribution has been critiqued for its lack of coherence and intellectual distance from the sociological mainstream. In this article, we critically examine the theoretical presuppositions of the field, trace its historical origins, and attempt to situate the sociology of entrepreneurship within the sociological canon. We place special emphasis on the contribution of Max Weber, whose early work provides a useful template for a comprehensive approach to understanding the context, process, and effects of entrepreneurial activity. We conclude by locating contemporary approaches to entrepreneurship – including the contributions in this volume – within this neo-Weberian framework.

The author distinguishes between state, process, and object perspectives on institutions and institutionalization. While all-purpose process approaches dominate the literature, the author argues that these are analytically insufficient without theorizing the nature of “institutional objects.” Building on recently developed analytic disaggregations of the culture concept in cultural sociology, the author argues that doings, sayings, codes, and artifacts exhaust the broad classes of potential objects subject to institutionalization processes. The proposed approach provides a coherent ontology for future empirical work, features robust microfoundations, places institutional routines and practices in a material context, and acknowledges the importance of semiotic codes and vocabularies in organizational fields.

The authors discuss the microfoundations of institutional theory, specifically as microfoundations are manifested in this volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations. The authors argue that the main interest seems to be in better understanding macrofoundations: top-down forces from institutions to actors. Furthermore, throughout the volume institutions themselves are definitionally layered – in problematic ways – with a large array of other macroconstructs, including fields, logics, practices, habitus, situations, routines, and so forth. The authors argue that there is an opportunity to more carefully delineate microfoundations for institutional theory, by focusing on lower-level heterogeneity, agency, as well as the aggregate and emergent social processes that animate microfoundational explanation.

The present study examines entrepreneurship in established firms holistically and critically. The authors start by reviewing previous research and highlight a variety of definitional, conceptual, methodological, contextual, and temporal factors that have been confounding the research. The authors then present a multidimensional framework that specifies a more nuanced picture of the determinants, motives, activities, and consequences of corporate in established firms. Finally, the authors discuss conceptual, methodological, and practical implications, as well as outline future research avenues.

Both research and child protection practice are still far away from having uniform definitions of violence against children. The different disciplines involved in the sectors of national child protection systems rely on separate discourses and terms; definitions are sometimes rather general or implicit, and operationalizations of important elements are rare. The various terms in use – child maltreatment, child abuse and neglect, child endangerment, children at risk, children in need, etc. – speak of the variety, not only of concepts, but also of practices. With respect to the latter, definitional issues are also issues of the scope and thresholds of intervention. This chapter provides an overview of major terms and definitional approaches to violence against children and identifies eminent differences between them. Findings from several studies on the Swiss child protection system, including the first multi-sectorial national survey on agency responses to child maltreatment, illustrate how professionals use definitions and the consequences of having multiple definitional concepts for documenting reported cases. We conclude by advocating for a consensus-based interdisciplinary process of developing shared definitions of violence against children.