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Ongoing discussions of the paradox of embedded agency may benefit from considering embedded agency from the perspective of the actors themselves. Drawing upon opinions of school principals who are encouraged to take initiative in their spheres of authority and yet still are subject to centralized performance assessments, the author redefines embedded agency as a matter of orientation. Secondly, the author presents a new typology for the notion of embedded agency and the way it is practiced in daily life. Finally, the author considers the tension that is inherent to the modern workplace, which is agentic and yet highly structured. From the perspective of school principals, the author shows how the professional role identity of mid-level managers is scripted and thus dictates the domains in which they can present a sense of agency.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how fairness evaluations are constructed in a B2B context.

This paper conducts a field study of Air Greenland and its internal and external customers based on strong structuration theory (Stones, 2005). The authors employ context and conduct analysis to analyze how fairness evaluations emerge across four levels of structuration.

The paper finds that fairness evaluations emerge as a result of the interaction between external institutional pressures, agents' internal structures, and situated reflection and outcomes. The construction of fairness evaluations was embedded in contradictory institutional structures, where groups of actors constructed different evaluations of fair profits, procedures and prices. Actors furthermore worked on changing position-practice relations which shifted relations, external structures and affected outcomes and fairness evaluations.

This paper offers a conceptualization of embedded agency as emerging across the four levels of structuration. This contributes to debates in strong structuration theory through conceptualizing and analyzing how actors may be both be constrained and oriented by structures while reflexively adapting structures across the four levels of structuration. The paper extends extant pricing fairness research by illustrating how actors' construction of fairness flexibly develop fairness evaluations while responding to legitimacy and societal demands, including the needs of particular customer groups.

Welfare reforms introduced conditionality into cash transfers often by diverse welfare-to-work programs achieving its vast legitimization. Meanwhile in-kind poverty alleviation policies maintained their universal character in the forms of national budgeting of municipal services. Utilizing justification work, the authors aim at showing how conditionality of in-kind support is replacing universalism. The authors ask which justification work assist administrators in shaping the relationship between in-kind and cash transfer and the changing meanings of poverty alleviation practices.

The authors conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with senior administrators in Israeli local governments analysing them along principles of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010). Further, seeking to elicit the justification work, the authors added some guidelines from the discourse interaction approach.

The findings identified administrators' justification work as taking two major shapes. The first is an emphasis on conditionality in their in-kind support projects, which is limited in time, contingent upon co-operation and sometimes even enhancing choice for those in need. The second is the manifestation of pride anchored in the skilful budget management enabling the achievement of conditional in-kind support projects based on the effort involved.

The authors did not prompt the interviewees for the proportions of specific categories, such as whether they are attending and benefitting of the in-kind support programs. This is a limitation of this study that prevented the authors from contrasting perceived achievements against the actual coverage of their projects.

It is important that government funding is increased for municipal anti-poverty policies engaging municipal administrator in the struggle for full and better coverage so that capability deprivation is combatted by a combination of cash transfer and quality social services that are universal and at the same time secure mentoring and supervision to all households in need.

Future research should present the analysis that associates different budgets of each city with its anti-poverty polices and its different socio-economic ranking. Critical social-policy scholars may apply this study’s findings in future analyses of municipal administrators' power position as reinforced by national level policy makers, particularly when introducing controversial policies.

Anti-poverty policy and the specific combination between conditional cash transfers and in-kind support have been explained at the level of political–economic decision making. The authors conceptualize the need to explain anti-poverty policy by focussing on municipal administrators’ embedded agency, particularly around controversial issues. By building the professional self of municipal welfare administrators, inter alia by ignoring past meanings of in-kind support as depriving recipients of autonomy, conditionality is extended into in-kind services.

Life science innovation is a complex domain of professional work including scientific know-how, regulatory expertise, and commercialization and marketing skills. While the investment in basic life science research has soared over the last decades, resulting in a substantial growth in scientific know-how, the life science industry (and most notably pharmaceutical companies) unfortunately reports a meagre innovative output. In order to counteract waning innovation productivity, new organizational initiatives seek to better bridge and bond existing life science resources. The purpose of this paper is to report a case study of bio venture hub initiative located in a major multinational pharmaceutical company.

Drawing on institutional work literature, an empirical study based on case study methodology demonstrates that new life science collaborations demand both external and internal institutional work to challenge conventional wisdom, making the legal protection of intellectual properties a key factor in the field and that in turn complicates much firm collaborations. Such institutional work questions existing practices and opens up new pathways in life science innovation work.

The bio hub initiative, which in considerable ways breaks with the traditional in-house and new drug development activities located in enclosed R&D departments and in collaboration with clinical research organizations, demands extensive institutional work and political savoir-faire to create legitimacy and operational stability. Not only are there practical, legal, and regulatory issues to handle, but the long-term legitimacy and financial stability of the bio hub initiative demands support from both internal and external significant actors and stakeholders. The external institutional work in turn demands a set of skills in the bio venture hub’s management team, including detailed scientific and regulatory expertise, communicative skills, and the charisma and story-telling capacities to convince and win over sceptics. The internal institutional work, in turn, demands an understanding of extant legal frameworks and fiscal policies, the ability to handle a series of practical and administrative routines (i.e. how to procure the chemicals used in the laboratory work or how to make substance libraries available), and to serve as a “match-maker” between the bio venture hub companies and the experts located at the hosting company.

The case study provides first-hand empirical data from an unique initiative in the pharmaceutical industry to create novel collaborative spaces where small-sized life science companies can take advantage of the mature firm’s expertise and stock of know-how, also benefitting the hosting company as new collaborations unfold and providing a detailed understanding of ongoing life science innovation projects. In this view, all agencies embedded in institutional field (i.e. what has been addressed as “institutional work” – the active work to create, maintain, or disrupt institutions) both to some extent destabilize existing practise and create new practices better aligned with new conditions and relations between relevant and mutually dependent organizations. The empirical study supports the need for incorporating the concept of agency in institutional theory and thus contributes to the literature on institutional work by showing how one of the industries, the pharmaceutical industry, being strongly fortified by intellectual property rights (i.e. a variety of patents), inhibiting the free sharing of scientific and regulatory know-how and expertise, is in fact now being in the process of rethinking the “closed-doors” tradition of the industry. That is, the institutional work conducted in the bio venture hub is indicative of new ideas entering Big Pharma.

This study seeks to provide an examination of a health policy network operating in a single, small community along the US‐Mexican border. The purpose of the paper is to discuss why and how this network evolved, and then to present findings on how the network was structured. Analysis will focus especially on agency involvement, or “embeddedness” in the network, and its relationship to attitudes held by network members regarding trust, reputation, and perceived benefit.

Data were collected from 15 public and nonprofit agencies trying to work collaboratively to influence local policy and services regarding the prevention of obesity‐related chronic disease, especially diabetes. Embeddedness was measured in three different ways and both confirmed and unconfirmed networks were assessed. Network analysis methods were utilized as well as nonparametric correlation statistics.

The network was found to be densely connected through unconfirmed linkages, but much less so when these links were confirmed. Strongest findings were found for shared information. Measures of agency embeddedness in the network were strong predictors of agency reputation, but findings for trust and perceived benefit were generally weak.

From a practice perspective, the study points to the problems in building and sustaining community‐based chronic disease health networks, especially in a small community with substantial health needs. The research also contributes to theory on embeddedness and to methodology for collecting and analyzing data on community health networks.

This paper aims to offer an incremental contribution, augmenting the notion of situated rationality as proposed by terBogt and Scapens (2019). Through insights from empirical data, the authors explore the role of situated rationalities of key individual actors in processes of management control change.

A qualitative research approach was adopted with qualitative data collected in a single public service organisation through face-to-face interviews, organisation documentation and observations.

The findings present the important role of key individual actors in bringing about a new situated rationality in a housing department. External austerity forces combined with actors’ experience rationalities acted as a stimulus to change existing management control practices in the management of public services.

The paper conceptualises “experience” rationality, capturing the experiences of a key actor, including elements of leadership style. Drawing on a story of a complex process of management control change, this paper thus reveals interactions between generalised practices and situated rationalities which were not highlighted by the extended framework of terBogt and Scapens.

Research was conducted to investigate whether, and how, political accountability might stabilise when agents are faced with profound changes in external structures such as competition laws and austerity policies.

We performed a field study from 2007 to 2015 in a regional hub in Finland and worked with data from document analysis, interviews and meeting observations. We have used embedded research design, where we apply methodological bracketing as well as composite sequence analysis for field research.

Accountability declined when irresistible external structures were the dominant influence on the unreflective actions of agents-in-focus. With time, however, the agents started acting critically by drawing on structures that could facilitate strategic actions to stabilise political accountability.

The field research and interpretation of the data were limited to the organisation analysed; however, the theoretical arguments allow for analytical generalisations.

The research demonstrates how public officials and political decision-makers can eventually adopt a strategic approach when faced with irresistible change in external structures.

The research demonstrates how public officials and political decision-makers can eventually adopt a strategic approach when faced with irresistible changes in external structures.

The study locates political accountability in the context of strong structuration theory and discusses how it is redefined by external structures.

The goal of this chapter is to review the potential of institutional logics theory for the study of higher education. After providing a concise introduction to institutional logics, the chapter reviews the small number of studies in higher education that have adopted this approach. It is concluded that most uses of New Institutionalism in the field are still based on its original formulation in the late 1980s, which emphasized the importance of compliance and isomorphism; it is suggested that logics theory could provide a more nuanced and flexible framework, which takes into account the role of (embedded) human agency and the multi-level nature of societal dynamics. The last section of the chapter therefore provides a few directions for future research grounded in logics theory. We distinguish in this respect between the investigation of the field-level coexistence and the interaction between managerial and professional logics; studies of how higher education institutions manage conflicting institutional pressures, for example, through selective compliance; and analyses of the emergence of hybrid practices in academic work and higher education management.

This study aims to investigate how actors’ responses to competing logics (academic and business logics) in budgetary practices in a university setting in Tanzania were shaped by state pressure, market pressure and organizational characteristics (funding certainty and changes in university ownership) and how actors’ agency was exercised in enacting competing logics.

The data for this study were collected from interviews, observations, informal discussions and document review. The data analysis processes were guided by institutional logic concepts and the role of actors’ agency.

The findings demonstrate how academic logic traditionally subsisted in a university setting in which there was funding certainty. Changes in the university’s ownership resulted in funding uncertainty. Market and state pressure increased the intensity of funding uncertainty, which supported business logic. While market logic supported the emergence of business logic, state pressure altered the balance of the competing logics. University actors responded by selective coupling and compartmentalizing where both elements of academic and business logics were enacted. While managers prioritized business logic, academics prioritized academic logic. However, the role of agency was exercised in actors’ responses, subverting both academic and business logics.

Managers should appropriately enact both elements of competing logics to avoid marginalization of some of the core university activities. In addition, profitable business ideas should be considered, identified, planned and implemented successfully. Moreover, there is a need to change the historically contingent and culturally situated environment when enacting competing logics. Furthermore, the state influence on universities should be considered to prevent unnecessary uncertainties in budgetary practices.

The paper demonstrates how selective coupling and compartmentalizing strategies were used by actors to enact both elements of competing logics in budgetary practices in a university setting. It further shows how actors’ agency influenced and subverted competing logics. The paper, thus, responds to the recent calls to investigate the influence of institutional logics on control practices, and the role of actors in strategically handling different logics in developing countries (Damayanthi and Gooneratne, 2017; Argento et al., 2020; Anessi-Pessina et al., 2016; Grossi et al., 2020). It further suggests new analysis of academic and business logics in their context.