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We explore a case example of hybridity between a large worker-owned cooperative and a union through three lenses: organizational forms, multiple institutional logics, and organizational identity. We delineate three types of organizational hybridity: (1) stretching an existing organizational form; (2) creating a new organizational form; and (3) and retaining multiple discrete organizational forms in a common venture. The cooperative–union hybrid shares members from the two contributing organizations, and so can be classified as a matrix sub-form of multi-organizational hybridity. This study describes how the coop-union hybrid manages the multiple logics and identities retained from both contributing organizations. It considers the hazards of combining these logics and identities, and offers some suggestions on how to avoid potential difficulties. Finally, given the complexity and inefficiencies of the matrix form, we explore whether matrix hybridity is a transitional or permanent form in this particular instance of a cooperative–union venture.

We examine the emergence of an organizational form, charter schools, in Oakland, California. We link field-level logics to organizational founding identities using topic modeling. We find corporate and community founding actors create distinct and consistent identities, whereas more peripheral founders indulge in more unique identity construction. We see the settlement of the form into a stable ecosystem with multiple identity codes rather than driving toward a single organizational identity. The variety of identities that emerge do not always map onto field-level logics. This has implications for the conditions under which organizational innovation and experimentation within a new form may develop.

We focus on the internal workings of a university organization’s response to institutional plurality. In the field of higher education, both organizations and individuals are prescribed competing demands due to academic logic and the logic of managerialism. We interpret six individual experiences of institutional plurality and illuminate how social position, disposition, emotions, and apprehension regarding plurality affect their response to shifting emphases in the logics of the university. In addition, we show that although there may appear to be harmony in the organizational-level response to institutional plurality, turmoil may be affecting the organization’s members, highlighting the importance of looking at how people experience institutional logic multiplicity.

This paper aims to propose a social enterprise legitimation mechanism by combining the established logic and transformational logic to test the validity of the conceptual model.

The authors construct the theoretical framework based on integrating organizational identity theory, attention-based view and collected 128 social enterprises data during the post-pandemic period in China. The authors applied multiple hierarchical regression analysis and mediation analysis to test the research hypothesis.

The results show that strong organizational identity contributes significantly to the cognitive legitimacy of social enterprise. Besides, we found that social welfare logic and digital transformation can positively mediate the correlation between organizational identity and cognitive legitimacy.

Social enterprises enhance legitimacy significantly by social welfare logic comparing with commercial logic, which indicates that social enterprises should allocate more internal resources and attention to present the organization's social value through various distributions. More importantly, social enterprises should embrace digital transformation to enhance transparency and efficiency, decrease transaction costs, enlarge organizational social impact to strengthen cognitive legitimacy.

The paper first proposed and empirically tested that digital transformation is an important mechanism to enhance the social enterprise's cognitive legitimacy.

This study investigates (1) the processes through which social enterprises develop resilient organizational logics and (2) the key resilience factors in the organizational logics of successful social enterprises. The organizational logic is conceptualized here as the dynamic system of roles, rules and social expectations that result from the organization's business model, impact model and organizational form.

This study adopts an inductive approach to identify emerging resilience factors and processes in an exemplary case of social entrepreneurship (a work integration venture). The longitudinal data collection on this case took place from 2011 to 2016, based on approximately 440 h of participant observation and 10 semi-structured interviews.

The inductive analysis suggests that social enterprises develop resilient organizational logics through multi-level recursive processes of bridging institutional work. These processes enable the development of an organizational logic that is internally robust while linking distant practices, needs and expectations. The authors conceptualize these characteristics into a novel construct, the organizational logic's bridging power, which is operationalizable through two dimensions (hybridity-based and cocreation-based bridging power) and five sub-dimensions.

Like in all inductive studies, further research is needed to validate the proposed model. The new proposed construct “organizational logic's bridging power” is, interestingly, a meta-theoretical concept encouraging cross-fertilization between the literature on institutional logics and that on value cocreation.

The process development model proposed by this study highlights the importance of network-level institutional work for developing cocreation-based resilience. Furthermore, this study shows how institutional theories could be complemented with other bodies of knowledge in order to understand social enterprise resilience.

How do organizations manage multiple logics in response to institutional complexity? In this paper, we explore how intraorganizational problems related to multiple logics may be addressed via the mechanism of institutional bricolage – where actors inside an organization act as “bricoleurs” to creatively combine elements from different logics into newly designed artifacts. An illustrative case study of a global brewery group’s development of such an artifact – a Responsible Drinking Guide Book – is outlined. We argue that intraorganizational institutional bricolage first requires the problematization of organizational identity followed by a social process involving efforts to renegotiate the organization’s identity in relation to the logics being integrated. We show that in response to growing pressures to be more “responsible,” a group of organizational actors creatively tinkered with and combined elements from social responsibility and market logics by drawing upon extant organizational resources from different times and spaces in an effort to reconstitute their collective organizational identity.

Building on recent theoretical insights from the institutional logics perspective, we examine organizational dynamics in the loosely coupled field of corporate diversity management to develop a theory of the process of logic instantiation. We consider a case in which firms subscribed to the same institutional logic, the business performance logic for diversity management, but varied in adoption of diversity mentoring practices. Employing an inductive and iterative approach to analyze over 50 interviews with diversity managers at large U.S. corporations, we explain how four organizational factors mediated the process of logic instantiation in these firms: (1) the diversity manager’s interpretation and framing of the business performance logic, (2) the formal diversity goals of the firm, (3) the relative organizational power of the diversity manager, and (4) the accepted definition of “diversity.” We discuss implications for theories of social action and diversity management.

The institutional logics perspective highlights how organizations are embedded within broader systems of meaning and how this embeddedness activates salient institutional logics in organizations that can enable or constrain organizational decisions, practices, and actions. We investigate a core premise of the institutional logics perspective, that of the alignment of institutional logics and organizational practices and design, in the organizational adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices. We hypothesize that, in the adoption of practices, organizations will house those practices in structural units that align with the logic emphasized by the practice: when adopting practices reflecting a market logic, organizations will locate them in mainline business units, such as marketing; conversely, when adopting practices reflecting a community logic, organizations will locate them in non-mainline business units, such as corporate or philanthropic foundations. Using survey and archival data from 161 Fortune 500 (F500) firms, we find support for our hypotheses. Our findings reveal how institutional logics serve as underlying lynchpins, connecting organizational practices to organizational design so as to reinforce and enable each other.

Recent research develops theory and evidence to understand how organizations come to be seen as “actors” with specified features and properties, a core concern for phenomenological institutionalism. The authors use evidence from changes in research designs in the organizational study of institutional logics as an empirical strategy to add fresh evidence to the debates about the institutional construction of organizations as actors. The case is the research literature on the institutional logics perspective, a literature in which organizational and institutional theorists grapple with long-time social theory questions about nature and context of action and more contemporary debates about the dynamics of social orders. With rapid growth since the early 1990s, this research program has elaborated and proliferated in ways meant to advance the study of societal orders, frames, and practices in diverse inter- and intra-organizational contexts. The study identifies two substantive trends over the observation period: A shift in research design from field-level studies to organization-specific contexts, where conflicts are prominent in the organization, and a shift in the conception of logic transitions, originally from one dominant logic to another, then more attention to co-existence or blending of logics. Based on this evidence, the authors identify a typology of four available research genres that mark a changed conception of organizations as actors. The case of institutional logics makes visible the link between research designs and research outcomes, and it provides new evidence for the institutional processes that construct organizational actorhood.

In this chapter, I develop a theoretical framework to address the financial–social performance debate in strategy research, drawing on literatures on institutional logics and organizational forms.

I test the theoretical framework using an exploratory empirical approach based on ideal types with global microfinance data. A joint consideration of financial and social performances of microfinance organizations (MFOs) helps classify them into four ideal types – self-sustainable, mission-drifting, failing, and subsidized. I examine how an MFO’s organizational form and the configurations of institutional logics of the nation within which it is embedded jointly explain which ideal type the MFO falls into.

Based on a study of 1455 MFOs in 98 countries between 1995 and 2007, I show that the interactions between national institutional logics and organizational forms add significant predicting power in estimating MFOs’ ideal types. Explaining the intricate relationships between the financial and social performance of MFOs thus requires a simultaneous consideration of both the configuration of national logics and organizational forms.

The theoretical framework introduced in this chapter builds on recent developments in the institutional logics perspective and research on organizational forms, extending our understanding of the financial–social performance relationship among organizations. It also advances the social entrepreneurship literature by focusing our attention on various institutions at both national and organizational levels that may facilitate or inhibit social venture efficacy.