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Leaders are important social actors in organizations, centrally involved in establishing and maintaining institutional values, a view that was articulated by Philip Selznick (1957) nearly a half-century ago, but often overlooked in institutionalists’ accounts. Our objective is to build on Selznick’s seminal work to investigate the value proposition of leadership consistent with institutional theory. We examine public interview transcripts from 52 senior executives and discover that leaders’ conceptualizations of their entities align with the archetypes of organization (i.e., economic, hierarchical, and power oriented) and institution (i.e., ideological, creative and collectivist) and cohere around a set of relevant values. Extrapolating from this, we advance a theoretical framework of the process whereby leaders’ claims function as transformational mechanisms of value infusion in the institutionalization of organizations.

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.

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.

The conception of markets as interfaces connecting semi-autonomous systems of producers and customers has led to an extensive use of social network analysis. So far, the network focus has been on connections among people, paying less attention to the crucial role played by connections between cultural elements (e.g., concepts, representations, ideas) in the way markets are formed and sustained. Such connections constitute “semantic networks” and are the focus of the present article. We attend to them by developing a network view of the cultural dimension of markets and apply it in an empirical setting where culture plays a crucial role – luxury watchmaking – to illustrate the impact of market semantic networks on a major outcome: price.

We extend the literature on network perception by introducing a novel view of how this perception is structured. We propose the concept of Cognitive Aggregated Social Structures (CASS) as a framework to capture perceptions of opaque networks – that is, networks where relations are difficult to observe due to their features, their members, and the characteristics of the environment in which they operate. We argue that actors simplify their perception of opaque network structures via “chunking,” that is, by cognitively representing network ties as between categories of actors rather than between specific network members. We test the validity of the CASS construct and its predictive power by showing how these representations affect actors’ perceptions of relevant network outcomes. Using data from a major inter-organizational technology consortium, we show that perceived density among “chunks” in the knowledge transfer network is positively related to perceived consortium performance. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the strategic management literature, highlighting potential contributions to strategic formulation and implementation, category emergence, industry evolution, and cognitive barriers to entry.

Management research has begun to explore how cultural entrepreneurs use established or declining societal traditions to create distinctive new ventures and products. In this study, we propose an alternative pathway for creating entrepreneurial opportunities, that is, through leveraging extinct societal traditions. Extinct societal traditions yield opportunities to create highly distinctive products and ventures, yet their use entails substantial challenges. To understand how entrepreneurs can successfully leverage extinct societal traditions, we investigate the case of The Merchant of Venice, an Italian venture established in 2013 that produces luxury perfumes based on the perfume-making tradition that flourished in Venice between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and disappeared afterwards. Our study illuminates how cultural entrepreneurs can leverage extinct societal traditions by (a) exhuming lost knowledge and practices, (b) validating them as an authentic and appreciable tradition of a given community and territory, and (c) elevating their meaningfulness as core to place identity. Our study contributes to the literature on cultural entrepreneurship and traditions by revealing the distinct challenges that resurrecting extinct traditions entail, enriching the understanding of types, goals, and processes of cultural entrepreneurship, and widening current knowledge of the roles of tradition custodians.