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The main purpose of this paper is to document the first author's experience of using institutional ethnography (IE) to “take sides” in healthcare research. The authors illustrate the points with data and key findings from a study of cardiovascular disease prevention.

The authors use Dorothy E Smith's IE approach, and particularly the theoretical tool of “standpoint”.

Starting with the development of the study, the authors trouble the researcher's positionality, highlighting tensions between institutional knowledge of “prevention” and other locations where knowledge about patients' health needs materialises. The authors outline how IE's theoretically and methodologically integrated toolkit became a framework for “taking sides” with patients. They describe how the researcher used IE to take a standpoint and map institutional relations from that standpoint. They argue that IE enabled an innovative analysis but also reflect on the challenges of conducting an IE – the conceptual unpicking and (re)thinking, and demarcating boundaries of investigation within an expansive dataset.

This paper illustrates IE's relevance for organisational ethnographers wishing to find a theoretically robust approach to taking sides, and suggests ways in which the IE approach might contribute to improving services, particularly healthcare. It provides an illustration of how taking a patient standpoint was accomplished in practice, and reflects on the challenges involved.

The objective of this study is to understand the institutional dynamics of the public transport system in Jaipur. The institutional dynamics of the public transport system includes an understanding of the role of the formal and informal institutions (i.e. the actors) and the relationship between the public bus, external and private city bus operators.

The research methodology to achieve the objectives of the study included an institutional mapping method to develop an in-depth understanding of the existing institutional framework for the public transport, secondary data and primary survey processed through focused interviews of Jaipur City Transport Services Limited (JCTSL) and the Regional Transport Office (RTO) officials, representatives of the external operator, drivers and conductors’ union and private city bus service operators. The cooperation level between these organizations was measured on a five-point Likert scale.

The study indicated significant issues: poor cooperation levels between JCTSL and the RTO; the absence of a horizontal relationship between JCTSL and the RTO; conflict of powers, the competition of public and private minibus service; delays in smart city projects; absence of an integrated transport authority.

In the Indian context, this study can help other Indian cities which are facing similar problems due to the fragmented institutional framework for public transport services and financial losses to the public bus operators due to the direct competition from paratransit or private bus services.

This paper examines the historical evolvement of competing institutional logics (i.e. religion, profession, state, market and community) underpinning Islamic accounting standardisation projects and power relations between internal actors representing these logics.

The paper adopts a case-study approach and analyses two Islamic accounting standardisation projects implemented at the national and international levels. Documentary review and semi-structured interviews are used for data collection. Analysis is informed by the “Institutional Logics Perspective” and Bourdieu's notion of “power as capital in a field”.

Research findings illustrate how some local actors pre-dispose themselves in promoting strict compliance to IFRS, while others endeavour to ensure compliance to “Islamic Sharia requirements” in financial reporting. In this power dynamic, there is an ongoing “constructive resistance” actively exerted by the latter group against the former, preserving the existence of religion-based reporting demands in Islamic accounting standardisation approaches. The paper also highlights chronological “dynamic” accounts that explain the evolvement of institutional logics prevailing in these projects over different historical stages at both national and international levels.

This paper's findings contrast and challenge the existing assumption that the “epistemic community” promoting IFRS agenda always faces “passive responses” from local actors. Moreover, the paper's offering of a dynamic view to institutional logic mapping extends the previously used “static analyses” of logics prevailing in Islamic accounting standardisation projects.

There is growing contestation between states and private actors over cybersecurity responsibilities, and its governance is ever more susceptible to nationalization. The authors believe these developments are based on an incomplete picture of how cybersecurity is actually governed in practice and theory. Given this disconnect, this paper aims to attempt to provide a cohesive understanding of the cybersecurity institutional landscape.

Drawing from institutional economics and using extensive desk research, the authors develop a conceptual model and broadly sketch the activities and contributions of market, networked and hierarchical governance structures and analyze how they interact to produce and govern cybersecurity.

Analysis shows a robust market and networked governance structures and a more limited role for hierarchical structures. Ex ante efforts to produce cybersecurity using purely hierarchical governance structures, even buttressed with support from networked governance structures, struggle without market demand like in the case of secure internet identifiers. To the contrary, ex post efforts like botnet mitigation, route monitoring and other activities involving information sharing seem to work under a variety of combinations of governance structures.

The authors’ conceptual framework and observations offer a useful starting point for unpacking how cybersecurity is produced and governed; ultimately, we need to understand if and how these governance structure arrangements actually impact variation in observed levels of cybersecurity.

The purpose of this paper is to extend our understanding of corporate governance, social issues and capital markets by distinguishing between the socially responsible investing phenomenon and mainstream investing with respect to social issues. It attempts to clarify the domain by casting it in the theoretical frame of prospect theory and mental modeling. With a qualitative study done among large institutional investors in the Canadian securities industry, the article derives a proposed mental model of these institutional investors' cognitive model of social issues as they impact investments.

The institutional investors in this study know exactly where value is derived from social investments suggesting that there may be more alignment between directors, investors and societal expectations than has been previously suggested.

The limited number of organizations in the study reduces the generalizability of the findings.

Managers and directors must have an understanding of how shareholder value and responsibilities intersect. In our research, we have found that these executives positioned their firms as leaders on the social responsibility front. Interestingly, their major shareholders also understood how responsibility and shareholder value intersected and as a result, financial performance was not sacrificed.

The findings from this research shed light on previous scholars' questions regarding the alignment of interests between managers, directors and social expectations. The firms analyzed make strategic investments that are considered to meet social expectations but that are also perceived to add value to the organization making the firm more attractive to institutional investors.

This paper aims to determine the extent to which graduate student funding portfolios vary across and within engineering, life sciences and physical sciences academic fields for degree recipients. “Graduate student funding portfolios” refers to the percentages of students funded by fellowships, research assistantships, teaching assistantships, personal means and other sources within an organizational unit.

Using data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates data set, the authors analyze doctoral students’ self-reported primary mechanisms of funding across and within academic fields varying along the Biglan taxonomy. The authors used cluster analyses and logistic regression to investigate within-field variation in funding portfolios.

The authors show significant differences in doctoral student funding portfolios across dimensions of the Biglan taxonomy characterizing academic fields. Within those fields, the authors demonstrate considerable variation in funding; institutions cluster into different “modes” of funding portfolios that do not necessarily map onto institutional type or control variables.

Despite tremendous investment in graduate students, there has been little research that can help characterize at the program-level how graduate students are funded, either by internal or external mechanisms. As programs continue to feel the pressures of more limited resources coupled with increasing graduate enrollment demands, investigating graduate student funding at a macro level is becoming increasingly important so programs may better understand constraints and predict shifts in resource availability.

This study aims to elucidate institutional analysis as an effective approach to investigating and designing the multilevel policymaking system of online social networks (OSN) for achieving a participatory model.

The institutional mapping approach has been used to analyze Iran’s OSN multilevel policymaking system. A combination of two matrices, including institutions-institutions and institutions-functions, was used to perform the institutional mapping. Two main steps were taken to draw the mentioned matrices. First, a review of related studies in Iran’s OSN policymaking system was conducted and the policy functions mentioned in these studies were identified and categorized using the meta-synthesis. Second, based on analyzing two policy documents of Iran’s OSN, institutions and their interactions were identified and policy functions were allocated to institutions.

Based on the results, the most important policy functions in the current OSN policymaking system in Iran are support, regulatory, monitoring and evaluation, business environment development, culture building and promotion, organizing licenses and permissions, policymaking and legislation. Also, the results show that there are shortcomings in this system, some of the most important of which are lack of transparency in regulatory, little work in culture building and promotion, neglect of the training of specialized human resources and research and development, slow development of the business environment and neglecting the role of nongovernmental organizations in policymaking.

By examining and analyzing how different institutions operate within a multilevel policymaking system, the policymaking process and its overall effectiveness can be enhanced. This analysis helps identify any inconsistencies, overlaps or conflicts in the roles and policies of these institutions, leading to a better understanding of how a multilevel policymaking system is organized.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the value of process mapping to libraries as a first step in promoting a culture of organizational assessment. In addition, this paper offers a case study of the University of Michigan Library’s experience in building up a process mapping skill set and the workflow improvements resulting from these efforts.

This case study is a description and assessment of a program to train library employees on process mapping.

Process mapping in library settings empowers librarians and staff to identify and implement elements for improvements in routine work. When given the tools to assess processes, employees at the University of Michigan made several such improvements.

While library staff tend not to be familiar with process mapping, these skills are critical for retaining institutional knowledge, training staff, and identifying areas for improvement in common and rarely used workflows alike.

Process improvements were identified and implemented at the University of Michigan Library when the staff mapped the processes of their daily work.

This paper presents a new mixed methods approach which allows researchers to scan industry sectors for institutional change periods and to locate periods of significant institutional change agency.

The approach is grounded on the institutional logics perspective and on institutional entrepreneurship theory and combines an automated quantitative content analysis with a cognitive mapping exercise.

The paper describes the development of this approach and its application to the urban water management sector of Australia. Three periods of significant institutional change agency are identified, described and discussed.

The paper puts forward a new methodological approach that enables a robust and objective identification of actor-driven institutional change periods which can be used as a precursor for more targeted qualitative inquiries into institutional change research.

Institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that brings attention to people’s everyday work while simultaneously highlighting broader sites of administration and governance that may be organising that work. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the integration of institutional ethnography in health information practice research represents an important shift in the way that Library and Information Science professionals and researchers study and understand these practices.

This paper first explores the key tenets and conceptual underpinnings of Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography, illuminating the importance of moving between translocal and the local contexts and identifying ruling relations. Drawing from a library and information science study that combined interviews and textual analyses to examine the social organisation of family caregivers’ health-related information work, the paper then explores the affordances of starting in the local particularities and then moving outwards to the translocal.

The paper concludes with an overall assessment of what institutional ethnography can contribute to investigations of health information practices. By pushing from the local to the translocal, institutional ethnography enables a questioning of existing library and information science conceptualisations of context and of reappraising the everyday-life information seeking work/non-work dichotomy. Ultimately, in considering both the local and the translocal, institutional ethnography casts a wider net on understanding individuals’ health information practices.

With only two retrieved studies that combine institutional ethnography with the study of health information practices, this paper offers health information practice researchers a new method of inquiry in which to reframe the application of methods used.