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Ideology is discussed as the missing link between material practices and symbolic constructions in defining institutional logics. Institutional streams are proposed as disembedded institutional logics traveling as ideologies that are taken for granted. They affect specific (inter)action contexts on a global level providing institutional entrepreneurs and workers with symbolic elements to translate into local institutional arrangements. Such translations can give rise to institutional change. Local translation of nonlocal elements advances the interests of the elites of the “sending” institutional context, as well as it may advance those of the receiving one. Dominant transnational streams may or may not coalesce to form a global world order.

The aim of this study is to apply the concept of social norm dynamics to explain how corporate governance soft law is enforced.

Using data of German listed stock companies and of economic media coverage between 2001 and 2010, the authors observe the complex relationship between sanctions and behavior in the social context of corporate governance soft law.

The authors find the public discussion of normative demands related to corporate governance issues increases if firms do not comply with the German Corporate Governance Code. The authors show that groups of actors, such as DAX companies, represent the addressees of normative demands, i.e. targets of expectations about what is appropriate and what is not. The authors also find that normative demands tend to be personalized, as public discussion is greater when initiated by a specific individual or firm. Finally, the authors demonstrate that social control in terms of public sanctioning positively influences a firm’s compliance with the soft law whereby negative statements (disapproval) outweigh the effects of positive statements (approval).

We corroborate the social character of normative demands in the context of corporate governance soft law, and contribute to a better understanding of why soft law can work, despite it having no legally binding force. The results of our study suggest that sanction mechanisms in the context of social norms underpin the strength of soft law as an alternative to, or extension of, hard law.

This chapter explores institution as a religious phenomenon. Institutional logics are organized around relatively stable congeries of objects, subjects, and practices. Institutional substances, the most general object of an institutional field, are immanent in the practices that organize an institutional field, values never exhausted by those practices, and practices premised on a practical belief in that substance. Like religion, an institution's practices are ontologically rational, that is, tied to a substance indexed by the conjunction of a practice and a name. Institutional substances are not loosely coupled, ceremonial, legitimating exteriors, but unquestioned, constitutive interiors, the sacred core of each field, unobservable, but socially real.

This chapter claims technology to be a principal mode of regulation in formal organizations alongside social structure and culture. Such a claim breaks with the conventional neo-institutional outlook that considers technology outside the object of institutional analysis of organizations. The distinctive regulative logic of computational technology is manifested in the increasing entanglement of domain-specific practices and their underlying cognitive and normative order with the decontextualized principles and methods that have traditionally been deployed in the management and control of work operations. Such entanglement and the effects it generates reflect the reshuffling of the regulative reach of technology, social structure and culture under the pressures exercised by the dynamics of current technological change and the impressive involvement of computational systems and artefacts in human affairs.

One of the dominant features of the age of globalization is the rampant expansion of organization. In particular, formal, standardized, rationalized, and empowered forms of organization expand in many domains and locales. We discuss these features of organization, showing that hyper-rationalization and actorhood are main themes of organization across presumably distinct social sectors and national societies. We explain the ubiquity of such organizational forms in institutional terms, seeing the global culture of universalism, rationality, and empowered actorhood as supporting the diffusion of managerial roles and perspectives.

In this article, my goal is to approach Thomas S. Kuhn's account of scientific development from the perspective of institutional theory. Reading it this way, his main work can be seen as a treatise on endogenous change of an institutional order, occurring under circumstances that do not allow the expectation of such discontinuities when deploying common institutional arguments. To elucidate the underlying mechanisms, I draw on ideology as the set of beliefs incorporated in the system of orientation Kuhn calls paradigm. From his dense description of paradigm shifts, I deduce five propositions on the role of ideology in radical institutional change. Subsequently, I reconcile these propositions with assumptions of institutional theory and identify, in addition to some convergences, points of divergence, which give impetus to extend conceptions of institutional change.

This article applies ideas drawn from the work of Archer and Wuthnow to strategic and organizational change in the UK brewing industry from 1950 to 1990. Changes to the management of public houses formed part of the ideology of a group of ‘modernizers’ linked to broader discourses. However, these changes brought in their trail logical entailments that were seized upon by other actors to foster the growth of managerial trade unionism. From Archer are drawn ideas about contradictions between ideas at the level of what she terms the ‘cultural system’ and their relationship to conflict at the sociocultural level. From Wuthnow is taken a focus on processes of the production of culture. These ideas can contribute to broader institutionalist approaches by, in particular, helping to deepen the ‘cultural turn’ and by providing an alternative to the focus on institutional entrepreneurship.

How are institutional logics transgressed in the organizational fields of open source software and of commercial proprietary software, respectively, by developing a new practice of commercial open source software? I argue that by combining a Critique of Ideology Critique and a Critique of New Institutional Organizational Theory, we become better equipped for understanding institutional change in organizations applying concepts such as institutional entrepreneurs, discursive devices, and meaning arenas. The analysis show that many institutional entrepreneurs apply discursive devices to convince actors in the two organizational fields of the legitimacy of the new practice. This happens in many different meaning arenas such as in the market, in the public discourse, and in concrete open source projects. I advance the assumption that a relation established between institutional entrepreneurs of different legitimacy in the two original fields renders possible their institutional work.

The work of Michel Foucault is taken as inspiration for a study of the organizational field of asylums, prisons, orphanages, and other carceral organizations operating in New York City in 1888. Foucault argues that institutional power is organized into dually ordered system of truth and power. Using text data describing the clients and institutional technologies (organizational “power signatures”) of 168 organizations, we apply structural equivalence methods to unpack speech activity, showing that as Foucault suggests, there may be dually ordered sub-domains of truth and power that help define the underlying logic of this institutional field.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect partner exits have on the survival chances of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). Moreover, the study aims at analyzing the influence of firm size, legal form, industry, type of change, and prior change on the effect of partner exits on the survival chances of SMEs.

An organizational ecology perspective to analyze the case of partner exits on the survival chances of SMEs is applied. Using event history models, the effect of such ownership changes is studied by the analysis of the life history of 19,629 SMEs in Germany between 1990 and 2005.

Results show that partner exits increase the mortality risk of organizations. This effect is moderated by specific organizational characteristics such as size, legal form and industry affiliation. Moreover, the harmful effect of partner exits increases if the partner was involved in the founding process of the organization. Finally, the results show that SMEs are not able to develop routines that reduce the effect of partner exits, on the contrary, the disruptive effect of partner exits increases with an increasing number of partner exits.

This paper shows how partner exits influence the survival chances of SMEs and how this negative effect is moderated by different firm characteristics. Moreover, the paper emphasizes the role of founders by showing that the exit of partners who were involved in the founding process of SMEs is especially harmful. Finally, focusing on multiple partner exits, the paper contributes to the question whether or not organizations learn how to manage fundamental change successfully.