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Describes the “Coaching for Retail Professionals” training aimed at all BT employees. Reports that successful personal development resulted in a six per cent increase in productivity and is now part of the induction programme for every employee. Concludes that the programme is improving internal communication and that “being nice to people not only can be but ought to be profitable”.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review and explore how organizations knowledgeably respond to unfavorable institutional environments that exert institutional pressures and thereby limit their decision-making and eventually their actual behavior.

Based on a thorough structuration and analysis of the literature in management and related fields, the authors present a comprehensive synthesis of organizational knowledgeable responses to institutional pressures.

Based on the review, the authors categorize organizational knowledgeable responses into three major types – passively responding to avoid non-conformity, reactively mitigating institutional pressures and proactively developing institutional environments toward less interfering setups.

The authors discuss the enabling conditions for the categorized organizational knowledgeable responses as well as limitations to their application. They identify research gaps and formulate research questions to offer promising avenues for future work. The authors expect this detailed synthesis to lay the framework for investigating how the knowledge-based view of the organization influences its knowledgeable response to institutional pressure.

The authors elaborate on distinct passive, reactive and proactive strategies, which firms can apply to cope with institutional pressures. The contribution of this study will be of relevance to practitioners managing organizations in the face of unfavorable institutional setups, as well as to policymakers engaged in the development of institutions and interacting with affected organizations.

This study provides a valuable overview on developments in institutional theory, particularly on contributions to the “nascent literature” that examines heterogeneous organizational knowledgeable responses to institutional pressures.

Volumes 70 and 71 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations combine to comprise cutting edge theory and empirical scholarship at the interface of practice and institution in organization studies. As we highlight, this interface has spurred particularly generative conversations with many open questions, and much to explore. We provide a review of scholarly developments in practice theory and organizational institutionalism that have given rise to this interest in building a bridge between scholarly communities. As signaled by recent efforts to construct a practice-driven institutionalism, we highlight how connecting practice theory with the institutional logics perspective provides a particularly attractive focal point for scholarship at this interface due to a variety of shared ontological and epistemological commitments, including the constitution of actors and their behavior. Collectively, the papers assembled unlock exciting opportunities to connect distinct, but related scholarly communities on practice and institution, seeding scholarship that can advance our understanding of organizational and societal dynamics.

Volumes 70 and 71 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations combine to comprise cutting edge theory and empirical scholarship at the interface of practice and institution in organization studies. As we highlight, this interface has spurred particularly generative conversations with many open questions, and much to explore. We provide a review of scholarly developments in practice theory and organizational institutionalism that have given rise to this interest in building a bridge between scholarly communities. As signaled by recent efforts to construct a practice-driven institutionalism, we highlight how connecting practice theory with the institutional logics perspective provides a particularly attractive focal point for scholarship at this interface due to a variety of shared ontological and epistemological commitments, including the constitution of actors and their behavior. Collectively, the papers assembled unlock exciting opportunities to connect distinct, but related scholarly communities on practice and institution, seeding scholarship that can advance our understanding of organizational and societal dynamics.

Drawing on close readings of Schatzki and Friedland, this paper explores the nexus of practice, logics, and values, and especially the implications of practice-driven institutionalism for the concept of values and vice versa. In essence, the article searches for values in practice-driven institutionalism and articulates how they might be found, deploying practice theory, institutional logics, and values work as guides. The article’s core argument is that both practice theory and institutional logics ascribe an important conceptual role to values, but neither has developed a theory of values that is wholly compatible with the onto-epistemological commitments of practice-driven institutionalism. The article introduces burgeoning scholarship on values work and argues that this approach offers a bridge between practice theory and institutional theory and, by extension, provides conceptual resources and an important research lacuna for those interested in practice-driven institutionalism.

This paper is based on a presentation at a conference in 2019, which called on participants to explore the merits of more practice-theoretical conceptualizations of institutions and institutional logics. The main body of the paper is a lightly edited version of the presentation, which explores three interwoven topics: First, why an avowedly practice-theoretic institutionalism might be analytically fertile; second, what horizons might be generated for institutional logicians by an intensified embrace of practice theory; and third, what these analytic potentialities might entail for the “peopling” of institutional theory. The tone and purpose of the paper are exploratory; though provisional conclusions are elaborated in an analytic epilogue. Purposefully provocative claims include that institutional logics may possess some form of intentionality, or a distinctive orientation toward the world, and that such orientations may differentially encourage jurisdictional expansion.

Despite its central importance in nearly all societies, religion has been largely neglected in the study of organizations and management. In this introduction to the volume on religion and organization theory, we argue that such neglect limits unnecessarily the relevance and scope of organization and management theory (OMT) and that there is therefore great value in connecting organizational research with a deeper appreciation and concern for religion. We begin by speculating about some of the reasons why organization and management theorists are hesitant to study religion, and go on to discuss some nascent points of contact between religion and OMT. We conclude with a discussion of the articles in this volume, which represent an attempt to remedy this unfortunate blind spot within OMT scholarship.

This paper sketches an alliance between Roger Friedland’s institutional theory and the author’s own account of social practices. In addition to taking up such general issues as what theory alliances and institutions are, this paper draws the two theories together by conceptualizing institutional orders as components of the practice plenum and exploring convergences between institutional logics and practice organizations. This paper also neutralizes apparent divergences between the two theories concerning levels of society and affirms Friedland’s thesis that institutional change is tied to politics in a particular French, post-Heideggerian sense of politics.

In 1886, Thomas Greenwood had been rightly critical of the lack of public libraries in London. Eight years later, he was able to describe a changed situation. Following further adoptions of the Acts purpose‐built public libraries were to be found at Battersea, Bermondsey, Camberwell, Chelsea, Lambeth and St. Martin‐in‐the‐Fields, for example. Greenwood wrote appreciatively of further developments:

This paper explores the role of institutional objects in the constitution of institutional logics. Institutional objects depend for their objectivity on the goods produced through those objects, such as economic models, passports, or sacred texts. The authors theorize institutional logics as grammars of valuation that institutionalize goods through institutional objects. The authors identify four value moments through which goods are objectified: institution, the instituting of a good, a belief and an imagination of its objective goodness; production, how the good is produced, what practices are productive of the good; evaluation, how good is the good, the practices and objects through which worth in terms of that good is determined, and territorialization, the domain of reference of the good, to what objects and practices a good can and does refer in its instantiations. The authors assess the adequacy of our model through an institutional object based on the good of “market value” – i.e., an options pricing model. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for institutional logical theory and the sociology of valuation.