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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.

While many modern institutionalists have shown a renewed interest in Philip Selznick’s early work, previous efforts to reincorporate his perspective have given relatively little attention to values (which are the most central element of the theory itself). This paper addresses this disconnect by: (1) revisiting Selznick’s key arguments about values and explaining their various roles in his thought, (2) expressing a theoretical framework through which values could be “reinfused” into the contemporary institutional literature and, (3) developing six different proposals for theory and research which do just this. These proposals are offered as an a la carte menu of possibilities, rather than a programmatic agenda for reform. While we hope that our paper will facilitate a renewed focus on values within institutional theory, we do not see this as a theoretical imperative.

The paper aims to revive the Islamic economic system discourse given the increasing interest in the moral economy agenda.

Proponents of Islamic economics theorise that the Islamic system presents the ideal form of a socio-economic order. However, the reported huge gap between theoretical construct and real activities seems to support the critics’ claim that it is a mere utopian state that directly challenges the viability of the Islamic economy idea.

The fact of the matter is that homo economicus is overpowering homo Islamicus despite the presupposed position of homo Islamicus as the mainstay of Islamic economics.

To manifest the Islamic economic system notion further, it is argued that a shariah-based values infusion policy (VIP) needs to be formulated to actualise the predominance of homo Islamicus.

Owing to the overarching and holistic nature of the proposed public policy, the operations of individuals, firms and state agencies should have the tendency to reflect the expected behaviour of homo Islamicus better than the present state of affairs.

The success of the VIP would include the enhancement of social integration and cohesion.

The link between moral economy, homo Islamicus and public policy is clearly established. Thus, this research guides policy makers in promoting the Islamic economic system as a universally-aspired moral economy project.

Selznick (1957) differentiated between institutional leadership, concerned with organizational identity and character, and administrative management, concerned with organizational operations or efficiencies. We investigated the timing and extent of each of these by leaders of new ventures during market emergence. Examining the case of satellite radio, we analyzed 235 executive statements in 244 press releases, 1998–2005, for the start-ups, XM and Sirius. We found that leaders, across the organizational hierarchy and over time, interpreted entrepreneurial action in terms of the venture's identity, but institutional leadership was primarily associated with CEOs and administrative management with lower echelon executives. Institutional leadership was higher during market emergence and commercialization, while administrative management increased with the growth and establishment of satellite radio as a market category.

The environment of most organizations is beset by continuous change, instability, flux, and unpredictability. If organizations are to survive and prosper under such conditions, they must be capable of dynamic adaption and stable and reliable performance. Organization theory recognizes the importance of both imperatives, but typically assumes that they pull organizations in different directions. Building on Selznick’s theory of institutionalization, we argue that institutions can, should and sometimes do master the challenge of being responsive and stable, while avoiding the potentially destructive tendencies of rigidity and opportunism. Contrary to a prominent view that strong institutionalization leads to inertia, Selznick’s theory suggests that strong institutions are capable of preemptive adaptation to protect the character of their institutions. We describe this state as one of dynamic conservatism and explore four types of preemptive internal reform strategies: strategic retreat, self-cannibalization, experimentation, and repositioning. We conclude with a consideration of factors that might moderate the ability of strong institutions to proactively change in order to remain the same.

Institutional theory had been developed for the purpose of explaining widespread diffusion, mimetic adoption and institutionalization of organizational practices. However, further extensions of institutional theory are needed to explain a range of different institutional trajectories and organizational responses since institutionalized standards constitute a minority of all diffusing practices. The study presents a theoretical framework which offers guidelines for explaining and predicting various adoption, variation and post-adoption scenarios.

The paper is primarily conceptual in nature, and the arguments are developed based on previous institutional theory and organizational change literature.

The notion of institutional inertia is proposed in order to provide a more detailed explanation of when and why organizations ignore, adopt, modify, maintain and abandon practices and the way intra-organizational institutional pressures shape, direct and constrain these processes. It is specified whether institutional inertia will be temporarily eclipsed or whether it will actively manifest itself during adoption, adaptation and maintaining attempts. The study distinguishes between four institutional profiles of organizational practices – institutionalized, institutionally friendly, neutral and contested practices – which can vary along three dimensions: accuracy, extensiveness and meaning. The variation and post-adoption outcomes for each of them can be completely characterized and predicted by only three parameters: the rate of institutional inertia, institutional profile of these practices and whether they are interpretatively flexible. In turn, an extent of intraorganizational institutional resistance to new practices is determined by their institutional profile and flexibility.

It is expected that proposed theoretical explanations in this paper can offer insights into these empirical puzzles and supply a broader view of organizational and management changes. The study’s theoretical propositions help to understand what happens to organizational practices after they are handled by organizations, thus moving beyond the adoption/rejection dichotomy.

The paper explores and clarifies the nature of institutional inertia and offers an explanation of its manifestation in organizations over time and how it shapes organizational practices in the short and long run. It challenges a popular assumption in organizational literature that fast and revolutionary transition is a prerequisite for successful change. More broadly, the typology offered in this paper helps to explain whether and how organizations can successfully handle and complete their change and how far they can depart from institutional norms.

This introductory paper explains the aims of the larger volume, provides a brief overview of each individual contribution, and establishes some of the many connections between them. Philip Selznick’s legacy for organizational studies is vast, rich, and insufficiently appreciated. The papers in this volume pick up on different aspects of Selznick’s legacy and demonstrate the enduring value of his work.

Scholars have examined the importance of culture in entrepreneurship since at least the 1970s. Lounsbury and Glynn (2001) gave these efforts new impetus by explicitly theorizing entrepreneurship as a cultural process. In the intervening 20 years, work in this area has proliferated. To date, however, this work has emphasized the positive aspects of cultural entrepreneurship almost exclusively. Not all episodes of cultural entrepreneurship are positive, though, and not all entrepreneurial stories have a happy ending. Acknowledging this, we develop a framework for investigating the dark sides of cultural entrepreneurship. We posit four pathways through which cultural entrepreneurship might lead to negative outcomes. Along one dimension, we distinguish false promises and harmful practices. The second dimension differentiates between negative outcomes and negative spillovers. We illustrate our arguments with real-world examples, and discuss how our framework signals new research opportunities related to corruption and wrongdoing, as well as the potential for cultural entrepreneurship research to focus on authenticity as well as legitimacy.

This paper explores how Selznick’s approach to leadership can inform contemporary organizational theory and research. Drawing on Selznick’s writing in Leadership in Administration and related works, we characterize organizations as simultaneously technical entities pursuing economic goals and value-laden entities pursuing non-economic goals arising from their members and their role in society. These two aspects of organizations are deeply intertwined and in continual tension with one another, and the essential task of leadership is to uphold both – protecting and promoting values while also meeting technical imperatives. To do so, leaders establish a common purpose that includes values and ideals not just technical imperatives, they create structures and practices that embody this purpose, and they make organizational decisions and personal behavioral choices that are consistent with this purpose. We consider each task of leadership in turn, showing how Selznick’s ideas enrich and extend contemporary research on competing institutional logics, organizational design, culture, and identity, leadership, and meaningful work.

Much of contemporary institutional theory rests on the identification of structured, coherent, and encompassing logics, and from there proceeds to examine multilevel dynamics or the relationship between logics in a field. Less research directly studies the internal properties and dynamics of logics and how they are structured over time. In this paper, we propose a method for understanding the content and organization of logics over time. We advocate for an analysis of logics that is grounded in a repertoire view of culture (Swidler, 1986; Weber, 2005). This approach involves identifying the set of cultural categories that can make up logics, and measuring empirically the dimensions that mark a cultural system as more or less logic-like. We discuss several text analytic approaches suitable for discourse data, and outline a seven-step method for describing the internal organization of a cultural repertoire in term of its “logic-ness.” We provide empirical illustrations from a historical analysis of the field of alternative livestock agriculture. Our approach provides an integrated theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of logics across a range of settings.