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As hybrid organizations become increasingly common, the authors observe that some hybrid forms are becoming institutionalized and legitimated. The authors explore the implications of the institutionalization of hybridity, addressing both the internal tensions that plague many hybrids and the external tensions stemming from evaluator assessments and stakeholder uncertainty. The authors propose that institutionalization can dampen internal tensions associated with hybridity and also facilitate legitimation and acceptance by external audiences. The authors present identity as a useful theoretical lens through which to examine these questions, as identities are born from, but also have the potential to modify, existing institutional arrangements. The authors present directions for future research at the juncture of identity, hybridity, and institutionalization, suggesting potential avenues of inquiry in this productive stream of research.

Much recent work on hybrids has focused on the strategies and practices these organizations develop to manage the institutional contradictions associated with straddling competing logics. Less attention has been paid to what we call the liability of novelty, defined as the heightened institutional challenges new hybrid forms face both internally and externally. These, we argue, go beyond the liability of newness commonly associated with new venture formation. In this chapter, we use the case of Incubate, a Muslim social incubator in Germany. This case is particularly instructive insofar as Incubate is a hybrid in both substance and mode of organizing: Its mission integrated domains of religion, commerce, and community, and its mode of organizing straddled the digital–analog divide. Neither Incubate’s members, nor its external stakeholders could rely on existing institutional templates to make sense of it. It was not only organizationally new, but also institutionally novel. As a consequence, it experienced what we distinguish as descriptive and evaluative challenges. It was both “not understood” and “not accepted.” This chapter outlines four practices to address these challenges: codifying, crafting, conforming, and configuring, and categorizes them along internal versus external as well as forming versus transforming dimensions.

The paper aims to investigate the prevailing institutional logics that underpin the organisational behaviours of Chinese contractors and the institutional complexity they face across several strategic areas when they undertake projects abroad.

The paper draws mainly on industry literature, reports and government websites to develop a typology of two ideal types of institutional logics that prevail among Chinese international contractors. The configurations of institutional complexity in different strategic areas are analysed through pattern-matching.

Two main logics are identified, namely, construction and investment logics. These logics in turn lead to patterns of volatile complexity in the strategic areas of business, technology, human resources and marketing; patterns of aligned complexity in operational and information technology strategic areas; and patterns of segregated complexity in financial strategic area.

The paper presents an ongoing doctoral research. It provides a preliminary understanding of the institutional logics affecting Chinese international contractors and sets out the first step to understand the relationship between complex institutional environments and organisational responses.

Chinese international contractors commonly face resistance, and at times resentment, from the local industries in the countries they operate. The findings of this paper are a first step towards a better understanding of why this is the case and what can be done to rectify the situation and improve long and short-term project performance.

This paper provides practical implications for Chinese contractors to understand their internal context of institutional complexity and provides the basis for further understanding of Chinese contractors’ strategic responses.

Reality breakdowns generate reflexivity and awareness of the constructed nature of social reality. These pivotal moments can motivate institutional inhabitants to either modify their social worlds or reaffirm the status quo. Thus, reality breakdowns are the initial points at which actors can conceive of new possibilities for institutional arrangements and initiate change processes to realize them. Studying reality breakdowns enables scholars to understand not just how institutional change occurs, but also why it does or does not do so. In this paper, we investigate how institutional inhabitants responded to a reality breakdown that occurred during our ethnography of collegial governance in a large North American university that was undergoing a strategic change initiative. Our findings suggest that there is a consequential process following reality breakdowns whereby institutional inhabitants construct the severity of these events. In our context, institutional inhabitants first attempted to restore order to their social world by reaffirming the status quo; when their efforts failed, they began to formulate alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, they engaged in a distributed sensemaking process whereby they diminished and reoriented necessary changes, ultimately inhibiting the formulation of these new possibilities. Our findings confirm reality breakdowns and institutional awareness as potential drivers of institutional change and complicate our understanding of antecedent microprocesses that may forestall the initiation of change efforts.

Strategy scholars have widely recognized the central role that narratives play in the construction of organizational identities. Moreover, storytelling is an important strategic asset that firms can leverage to inspire employees, excite investors and engage customers' attention. This chapter illustrates how advancements in computational linguistic may offer opportunities to analyze the stylistic elements that make a story more convincing. Specifically, we use a topic model to examine how narrative conventionality influences the performance of 78,758 craftsmen selling their handmade items in the digital marketplace of Etsy. Our findings provide empirical evidence that effective narratives display enough conventional features to align with audience expectations, yet preserve some uniqueness to pique audience interest. By elucidating our approach, we hope to stimulate further research at the interface of style, language and strategy.

While a growing body of literature reveals the prevalence of men's harassment and abuse of women online, scant research has been conducted into women's attacks on each other in digital networked environments. This chapter responds to this research gap by analyzing data obtained from qualitative interviews with Australian women who have received at times extremely savage cyberhate they know or strongly suspect was sent by other women. Drawing on scholarly literature on historical intra-feminism schisms – specifically what have been dubbed the “mommy wars” and the “sex wars” – this chapter argues that the conceptual lenses of internalized misogyny and lateral violence are useful in their framing of internecine conflict within marginalized groups as diagnostic of broader, systemic oppression rather than being solely the fault of individual actors. These lenses, however, require multiple caveats and have many limitations. In conclusion, I canvas the possibility that the pressure women may feel to present a united front in the interests of feminist politics could itself be considered an outcome of patriarchal oppression (even if performing solidarity is politically expedient and/or essential). As such, there might come a time when openly renouncing discourses of sisterhood and feeling free to disagree with, and even dislike, other women might be considered markers of liberation.

Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In this concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways from our collective studies. We summarize the main challenges and contestations to collegiality and to universities, but also document lines of resistance, activation, and maintenance. We depict varieties of collegiality and conclude by emphasizing that future research needs to be based on an appreciation of this variation. We argue that it is essential to incorporate such a variation-sensitive perspective into discussions on academic freedom and scientific quality and highlight themes surfaced by the different studies that remain under-explored in extant literature: institutional trust, field-level studies of collegiality, and collegiality and communication. Finally, we offer some remarks on methodological and theoretical implications of this research and conclude by summarizing our research agenda in a list of themes.

This chapter delves into the evolving identity of professionals within the field of research management and administration (RMA), examining the shifts in their roles and expectations in the changing landscape in higher education. After the introductory section, Section 2 offers a conceptual framework that emphasises identity as a dynamic process rather than a static concept. This framework sheds light on the changing roles and expectations that define the RMA profession. In Section 3, we explore the contextual backdrop of shifting expectations surrounding RMA roles while stressing the importance of recognizing the multiplicity of identities to comprehend the nuances of the RMA profession. Section 4 analyzes empirical data and explore the diverse pathways that lead individuals into the RMA profession. We uncover that a notable proportion of RMAs possess scientific training and research experience and highlight the complexities surrounding the identity of RMAs with doctoral training (DRMAs). Lastly, Section 5 discusses key observations that yield valuable insights for future research on the evolving professional identity of RMAs. We emphasise that, through self-exploration and introspection, practitioners in the field can contribute to a deeper understanding of their roles and actively shape their professional identity.

Digital technologies have fundamentally changed organizations, industries, and even the society. Although institutional theory provides rich array of perspectives to both the content and dynamics of such changes, research at the intersection of institutional scholarship and digitalization has remained scarce. In this essay, I draw on the institutional logics perspective to elaborate digitalization as involving a new set of interconnected managerial beliefs and norms, organizational practices, and diverse material and social structures that together complement and challenge the established logics in organizations and institutional fields. I draw attention to two central organizing principles in the logic of digitalization: the pursuit of digital omniscience – the efforts to represent and conceive the world through digital data – and digital omnipotence – the efforts to bring activities inside and outside organizations under the control of information systems. I conclude the essay by elaborating how the institutional logics perspective can help understand organization-level efforts to leverage digitalization by incumbent corporations and new digital-native companies.