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Selznick (1957) differentiated between institutional leadership, concerned with organizational identity and character, and administrative management, concerned with organizational operations or efficiencies. We investigated the timing and extent of each of these by leaders of new ventures during market emergence. Examining the case of satellite radio, we analyzed 235 executive statements in 244 press releases, 1998–2005, for the start-ups, XM and Sirius. We found that leaders, across the organizational hierarchy and over time, interpreted entrepreneurial action in terms of the venture's identity, but institutional leadership was primarily associated with CEOs and administrative management with lower echelon executives. Institutional leadership was higher during market emergence and commercialization, while administrative management increased with the growth and establishment of satellite radio as a market category.

This paper explores how Selznick’s approach to leadership can inform contemporary organizational theory and research. Drawing on Selznick’s writing in Leadership in Administration and related works, we characterize organizations as simultaneously technical entities pursuing economic goals and value-laden entities pursuing non-economic goals arising from their members and their role in society. These two aspects of organizations are deeply intertwined and in continual tension with one another, and the essential task of leadership is to uphold both – protecting and promoting values while also meeting technical imperatives. To do so, leaders establish a common purpose that includes values and ideals not just technical imperatives, they create structures and practices that embody this purpose, and they make organizational decisions and personal behavioral choices that are consistent with this purpose. We consider each task of leadership in turn, showing how Selznick’s ideas enrich and extend contemporary research on competing institutional logics, organizational design, culture, and identity, leadership, and meaningful work.

Leaders are important social actors in organizations, centrally involved in establishing and maintaining institutional values, a view that was articulated by Philip Selznick (1957) nearly a half-century ago, but often overlooked in institutionalists’ accounts. Our objective is to build on Selznick’s seminal work to investigate the value proposition of leadership consistent with institutional theory. We examine public interview transcripts from 52 senior executives and discover that leaders’ conceptualizations of their entities align with the archetypes of organization (i.e., economic, hierarchical, and power oriented) and institution (i.e., ideological, creative and collectivist) and cohere around a set of relevant values. Extrapolating from this, we advance a theoretical framework of the process whereby leaders’ claims function as transformational mechanisms of value infusion in the institutionalization of organizations.

Megachurches represent an interesting empirical and conceptual phenomenon. Empirically, megachurches (Protestant churches with average weekly attendance of greater than 2,000 members) are growing at a time when overall church participation in the United States is steady or declining. Conceptually, megachurch pastors can be viewed as institutional leaders who attempt to reconcile new technologies and large congregations within a highly institutionalized setting. While many of these megachurches have a denominational affiliation, some do not. In this essay, we describe the literature on megachurches and offer observations about the megachurch as an institution. Drawing from preliminary analysis of a sample of over 1,400 megachurches (identified from the Hartford Institute for Religious Research), we also draw tentative conclusions about the characteristics of the pastors of megachurches, and one growing institutional maintenance practice: writing texts. We propose that examining megachurches can help extend the current research on institutional leadership, institutional work, and institutional support mechanisms.

The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused significant disruptions to academic activities in educational institutions across countries of the world. In the context of transnational higher education (TNHE), the pandemic has led to major shifts in face-to-face teaching and learning, students’ support services and student engagement. While a number of scholarly studies have examined the effect of the pandemic on education provision across different educational levels, not much has been done to address existing gaps in how academic leaders could support the transformation of the TNHE sector to respond to current disruptions. In order to address these gaps, the current study adopts a case study approach to examine the complex and evolving academic leadership roles in TNHE institutions in Ghana with respect to remote teaching and learning and virtual team activities. The current study addresses the following questions: What academic leadership approaches are essential to developing innovative practices in host TNHE in order to meet the learning needs of students during and after the pandemic? How can transformational leadership approaches interface with institutional theory to provide new direction for transforming TNHE during and after the pandemic? How can academic leadership roles support the transformation of TNHE during and after the COVID-19 pandemic? As a major contribution for addressing gaps in academic leadership roles in TNHE environments especially during COVID-19, the current study proposes an eight-component transformation model. The study concludes by arguing that the challenges facing TNHE especially during the current period of disruptions will require a transformative and innovative academic leadership approach that would ensure that education delivery addresses current and future students’ learning needs.

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.