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Since waiting in a queue may induce both negative and positive effects on customers’ quality perceptions of which the queue is formed, an optimal queuing wait which is long enough but not too long to have positive effects on the pursued service is critical for successful queuing management. This study examined the existence of an optimal queuing wait at theme parks by merging the interpretative approach of institutional norms with the measuring application of the adapted Return Potential Model from crowding studies. Using quota and systematic sampling techniques, survey data were collected from 1,440 visitors to five leading theme parks in Taiwan. An optimal queuing wait represented by an institutional norm among visitors with moderate consensus for the longest acceptable waiting time (LAWT) was revealed in this study. As a critical reversal point of visitors’ quality perception, significant ascent of visitors’ crowding perception did occur when their actual waiting times exceeded their LAWT.

This paper proposes a holistic institutional approach to provide insight into the policy reforms necessary to progressively achieve compliance with internationally recognized labor-related human rights. Drawing on institutions theory from political economy, the paper reframes international legal norms as holistic institutions, comprised of rules, social norms, and actual behaviors, the so-called rules of the game. In this way, problems in implementing labor-related human rights that may result in violations of international law are also considered as employment practices and, like other employment practices, are embedded in a web of formal and informal rules – institutions that govern work and employment. Based on the understanding that institutions contribute to violations, this holistic institutional approach also includes a framework to improve regulation and compliance based on Harold Koh's compliance theory from international law. The approach is illustrated using the example of forced obligatory overtime in textile assembly (maquilas) in Honduras and Nicaragua.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of three major professional sport leagues in South Korea to investigate the general beliefs, values, and norms influencing the institutional isomorphism of CSR engagement.

Nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with three league chiefs of CSR initiatives and senior managers of related divisions to explore the general beliefs, values, and norms that are institutionalized in their CSR practices. The Gioia method of inquiry and data analysis was employed.

Using institutional theory, the current research found evidence of all three institutional pressures of institutional isomorphism that contribute to the institutionalization of CSR practices in professional South Korean sport. The data revealed that CSR has been institutionalized in these leagues through isomorphic pressures – coercive, mimetic, and normative – as antecedents to their CSR practices.

The current research identified that conforming to the institutional norms may not only act as a force causing the organization to behave in a socially responsible manner, but also to provide the organization with competitive advantages.

The authors extend the current literature in sport CSR by using institutional theory as a framework to uncover organizational CSR motives. In particular, this is the first study to provide evidence of how three isomorphic pressures work to institutionalize CSR practices in South Korean professional sports leagues.

COVID-19 affects the peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation industry. With regard to prospect theory, individuals’ negative emotions, such as institutional distrust, are easily evoked and impede consumption intention in an environment of permeating uncertainty and risks. While existing research indicates the negative effects of institutional distrust, scant research has explored its antecedents and intervention mechanisms. This study thus aims to unveil the influencing factors and explore mitigating mechanisms of customers’ institutional distrust of P2P accommodations.

Online reviews data were used to identify the underlying critical issues. The authors developed a model to depict how institutional distrust is formed under the boundary condition of subjective norm by the results. The model was verified using a questionnaire survey. Finally, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted to ensure its robustness.

The external environment and internal platform effectiveness are two critical aspects affecting institutional distrust of P2P accommodations. The external environment influences institutional distrust through perceived threat, explaining the formation mechanism of customers’ institutional distrust through customers’ internal psychology. Furthermore, the authors found subjective norm moderating the effect of perceived threat on customers’ institutional distrust.

This is one of the first studies, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to explore institutional distrust of P2P accommodations after COVID-19. The finding contributes to studies on P2P accommodation by uncovering the contingent role of subjective norm in influencing customers’ institutional distrust.

This is a pioneering study that explores the antecedents and mitigating mechanisms of institutional distrust of P2P accommodations during the new normal of COVID-19.

The aim of this paper is to conceptualize time as an important dimension of institutions and, more specifically, to develop the analysis of institutions, time, and temporal misfits. The paper explores these matters in the context of an inter‐institutional project where actors, who represent different organizational fields and respond to different institutional requirements with regards to time and timing, need to collaborate.

The paper centers on three critical incidents taken from a study of a large‐scale telecom project in Norway. The paper is based on an analysis of public documents and 35 interviews with key stakeholders and managers in the focal project.

This research shows that temporal misfits are a critical, yet understudied, element of project organizing. The paper suggests and discusses three primary measures – detecting, correcting, and escaping – that project management makes use of to resolve temporal misfits among the actors involved. To advance the analysis of problems facing projects in institutionally‐bounded settings, the paper proposes a typology of temporal misfits (phase and tempo) and different types of complexity (analyzable and systemic).

Although purposeful in many instances, especially in collaborations across institutional boundaries, timing norms may cause profound organizational problems due to temporal misfits among the actors involved. The paper argues that project managers need to identify and be prepared for such organizational problem by being equipped with a repertoire of resolution strategies to handle them. New concepts and approaches are needed to identify and deal with temporal misfits among important stakeholders in projects.

A number of previous studies on project organizing have emphasized the critical aspects of studying institutions and time; but to date, no comprehensive efforts have been made to combine these ideas in empirical investigations. This study emphasizes the criticality of timing norms and temporal misfits to enhance our understanding of the linkages between projects, institutions, and time.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how small firms in the tattooing industry actively shape institutional expectations of value for consumers in a changing industry.

The paper draws upon interviews with key actors in the firms under study to explore their experiences with consumers and other constituents in determining how competitive advantage is constructed in this environment. These data are complemented data with interviews with governmental representatives and material from secondary sources.

The results reveal efforts of firms to construct and increase organizational legitimacy through the prominence of discourses of professionalism based on artistry and medicine/public health. These bases of competitive differentiation are not the clear result of exogenous pressure, rather they arise through the active efforts of the firm to construct value guidelines for consumers and other constituents.

Strategic management in small firms is a complex and dynamic process that does not necessarily mirror that of large organizations. Constructing competitive advantage is an interacting process between key actors of small firms and various constituents.

The paper extends the application of institutional theory in strategic management by illuminating the active role that firms play in creating industry norms, especially in industries where norms are not well established or no longer entrenched. Moreover, exploring an alternative site of study offers a means through which to see well‐studied issues in new ways.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a new analysis and understanding of the notion of deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization of taken-for-granted practices as a natural consequence of ever-increasing entropy seems to directly contradict the major institutional thesis, namely, that over time isomorphic forces increase and, as a result, possibilities for deinstitutionalization decrease culminating in the impossibility of abandoning in highly institutionalized fields.

This paper is conceptual in nature. Oliver’s 1992 paper on deinstitutionalization is taken as a key text on the subject and as a starting point for building an alternative theory of deinstitutionalization. More broadly, institutional theory and organizational literature on diffusion/adoption are reviewed and synthesized.

The authors argue that possibilities for deinstitutionalization have been overestimated in institutional literature and offer a revisited account of deinstitutionalization vs institutional isomorphism and institutionalized vs highly diffusing-but-not-institutionalized practices. A freedom for choice between alternative practices exists during the pre-institutional stage but not when the field is already institutionalized. In contrast, institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices are immutable to any sort of functional and political pressures and they use to persist even when no technical value remains, thus deinstitutionalization on the basis of a functional dissatisfaction seems to be a paradox.

By revisiting the nature and patterns of deinstitutionalization, the paper offers a better conceptual classification and understanding of how organizations adopt, maintain and abandon organizational ideas and practices. An important task of this paper is to reduce the scope of application of deinstitutionalization theory to make it more focused and self-consistent. There is, however, still not enough volume of studies on institutional factors of practices’ abandonment in institutional literature. The authors, therefore, acknowledge that more studies are needed to further improve both the former deinstitutionalization theory and the framework.

The authors offer a solution to this theoretical inconsistency by distinguishing between truly institutionalized practices and currently popular practices (highly diffused but non-institutionalized). It is only the latter that are subject to the norms of progress that allow abandoning and replacing existing organizational activities. Deinstitutionalization theory is, thus can be applied to popular practices that are subject to reevaluation, abandonment and replacement with new optimal practices while institutions are immutable to these norms of progress. Institutions are immutable to deinstitutionalization and the deinstitutionalization of optimal practices is subject to the logic of isomorphic convergence in organizational fields. Finally, the authors revisit a traditional two-stage institutional diffusion model to explain the possibility and likelihood of abandonment during different stages of institutionalization.

This paper aims to investigate how the technical logics of a World Bank-led performance management reform interacted with the social, political and historical logics within a developing country (DC) regulatory organisation. The institutional environment both within and outside the organisation was considered to understand the performance management reform experience.

An interview-based, longitudinal, qualitative case study approach was used to locate accounting in its technical, social and political space. A large regulatory organisation in Bangladesh was investigated as a case study to reveal how traditional organisational practices and public sector norms mediated a performance management reform. Informed by the institutional logics (IL) and economies of worth perspectives, interviews were used to locate IL at macro-level and associated organisational actors’ strategic responses that ultimately shaped the implementation of a performance management system (PMS).

This paper reveals how accounting, as a social and political practice, influences accountability reform within a regulatory organisation. It provides an account of both the processes and resultant practices of an accounting reform initiative. While a consultative and transparent performance management process was intended to enhance accountability, it challenged the traditional organisational authority structure and culture. The new PMS retained, modified and adjusted a number of its characteristics over time. These adjustments reflected an amalgamation of the influence of institutional pressures from powerful constituents and the ability of the local agents (managers) in negotiating and mediating the institutionalisation of a new PMS.

The findings of this paper carry major implications for policy makers, particularly with respect to the design of future reform programs on PMS.

This paper offers a theoretical mapping of IL and its organisation-level interpretations and practices. Thus, the authors locate power and influence at field and firm levels. The findings of this study reflect historical, political and cultural backgrounds of the case study organisation and how these contextual forces were active in shaping the meaning of reform logics. Though the institutional environment and agents were unique to the case study organisation, this research offers a “process generalisation” that reveals how a best practice PMS was translated and transformed by the traditional organisational practices in a DC regulatory context.

This paper aims to improve the knowledge about the strategic actions of institutional entrepreneurs in the configuration of the institutional pillars of an emerging field such as the Spanish renewable energy sector, as well as to illustrate the role of these actors in the fight against climate change.

The paper presents a single case study conducted in a company that entered the renewable energy sector in the ‘90s, and currently is a national and international reference in the generation of thermosolar power. The results of this case study are analysed and interpreted according to the New Institutional Sociology.

The paper identifies and analyses the strategic actions developed by the company to configure the regulative, normative and cognitive pillars of its institutional context, such as the establishment of inter-actors relationships, the mobilisation of constituent actors, the use of sanctions and rewards, the employment of consultants and the public dissemination of knowledge and social awareness.

The paper contributes to the development of the specialised literature about the institutional entrepreneurship which is very scarce in relation to the actions of institutional entrepreneurs in emerging fields. Likewise, this study allows managers to know the role of those entrepreneurs to configure the behaviour patterns that could be accepted and assumed by those entering the sector later on.

Through utilizing social capital as an overarching concept, the purpose of this article is to investigate cross-country rates of business formation in the formal vs informal sectors. Plus, empirically assess the impact of social capital constructs on the national rates of entrepreneurship.

Adopting a regression-oriented methodology, partial least squares (PLS), the study used a sample comprising 50 nations. National rates of registered and nonregistered business creation were utilized as endogenous variables. To determine the indigenous variables, constructs of social capital were measured which is consistent with the World Value Survey (WWS).

The results of this study show that in the formal and the informal sectors, social networking enables business creation with varying levels of impact. It establishes that institutional trust has a negative effect on informal business creation and a positive effect on business registration; interpersonal trust drives entrepreneurship in the informal sector but has less impact on business registration; norms of trustworthiness are related to business registration than informal business creation.

The findings of this research have theoretical and practical implications. They stimulate academic debate on the application of social capital constructs at the national level. The indications that social capital promotes business formation in both the informal and formal sectors can influence entrepreneurship policy development in many countries.

The originality of the results of this study lies in how it conceptualizes social capital as having direct impact on business creation in the informal vs formal sector. Thus, the findings elevated the conceptualization of social capital to the national level thereby enhancing knowledge on the entrepreneurship process as well as developmental economics.