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Roles of academic libraries have recently been regularly discussed among Library and Information Science (LIS) scientists and practitioners. A shift of roles induced by various factors forces academic libraries to reconsider their operational guidelines and plan future scenarios. This article provides an analysis of the framing of roles assumed by academic libraries and identifies key factors and agents that influence the process. Research consisted of an analysis of official strategic documents of Lithuanian state-owned universities that are of great importance to the strategic development of academic libraries and the anchoring of their roles. Applying Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) discourse theory and the concepts of new institutionalism as a theoretical approach, key factors and agents influential to the role of academic libraries were identified. Modernity, market, and quality as three interrelated discourses highlight the proposition that modernity is inseparable from the development of information technologies and infrastructure and that various professional networks in the library environment act as powerful institutional agents. Practices of market law application in universities have influence on the institutional logic of libraries which increasingly relies on the criteria of efficiency and rationality.

Undoubtedly, digital transformation is permeating all domains of business and society. We envisage this volume as an opportunity to explore how manifestations of digital transformation require rethinking of our understanding and theorization of institutional processes. To achieve this goal, a collaborative forum of organization and management theory scholars and information systems researchers was developed to enrich and advance institutional theory approaches in understanding digital transformation. This volume’s contributions advance the three institutional perspectives. The first perspective, institutional logics, technological affordances and digital transformation, seeks to deepen our understanding of the pervasive and increasingly important relationship between technology and institutions. The second perspective, digital transformation, professional projects and new institutional agents, explores how existing professions respond to the introduction of digital technologies as well as the emergence of new professional projects and institutional agents in the wake of digital transformation. The third perspective, institutional infrastructure, field governance and digital transformation, inquires how new digital organizational forms, such as platforms, affect institutional fields, their infrastructure and thus their governance. For each of these perspectives, we outline an agenda for future research, complemented by a brief discussion of new research frontiers (i.e., digital work and sites of technological (re-)production; artificial intelligence (AI) and actorhood; digital transformation and grand challenges) and methodological reflections.

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 explicate the role of institutional entrepreneurs who use accounting technology to accomplish change within a privatised telecommunications company.

The case study method is adopted. The authors draw on recent extension to institutional theory that gives greater emphasis to agency including concepts such as embeddedness, institutional entrepreneurs and institutional contradiction.

As part of the consequences of new public management reforms, we illustrate how institutional entrepreneurs de-established an older state-run bureaucratic and engineering-based routine and replaced it with a business- and accounting-based routine. Eventually, new accounting routines were reproduced and taken for granted by telecommunications management and employees.

As this study is limited to a single case study, no generalisation except to theory can be made. There are implications for privatisation of state sector organisations both locally and internationally.

The paper makes a contribution to elaborating the role of institutional entrepreneurs as agents of change towards privatisation and how accounting was used as a technology of change.

The underlying assumptions of Baumol’s theory of entrepreneurial allocation limits its potential to answer some key questions related to the entrepreneurship allocation. Hence, this paper aims to highlight the inherent limits of Baumol’s theory and suggest a new approach for understanding the entrepreneur-institution relationship and their functions.

This is a conceptual paper with a narrow focus on the literature.

The paper argues that Baumol’s adherence to neoclassic economics assumptions about entrepreneur and institution, such as entrepreneurs as rational choice taker with predetermined goals or institutions as exogenous, limits the potential of his theoretical framework to explain productive entrepreneurship in weak institutional settings. As such, underlying on Austrian economics assumptions about entrepreneur and his/her agency, this paper proposes a reconceptualization of productive entrepreneurship as an outcome of the interaction between entrepreneur and context.

Going beyond Baumol’s main proposition of one-sided influence of institutions on entrepreneurship allocation, this research highlights the influence of individual factors and entrepreneurial action on choosing entrepreneurial paths by entrepreneurs. So, future policies to stimulate productive entrepreneurship should consider these factors and go beyond Baumol’s mere focus on institutional improvement.

Going beyond one-sided influence of institutions on entrepreneurship allocation, this paper suggests an interaction centric approach which considers the role of actors and institutions as the co-creator of each other in the social process and argues that any effort for explaining the entrepreneurship should consider the co-creative nature of the actors and institutions as well as the endogenous nature of institutions. The proposed approach will help expanding entrepreneurship literature through finding answers to some key under-examined questions in the promising research stream of entrepreneurship allocation.

This paper aims to investigate how sports science was institutionalised and rapidly deinstitutionalised within a Premier League football club. Institutional theory has been critiqued for its lack of responsiveness to change, but recent developments within institutional theory such as the focus on deinstitutionalisation as an explanation of change, the role of institutional entrepreneurs and the increasing interest in institutional work facilitate exploration of change within institutions.

The authors deploy a longitudinal case study which ran from 2003-2011. Data was collected via observations, semi-structured interviews and through extensive literature reviews.

Via this longitudinal case study, the authors illustrate that the antecedents of deinstitution can lie in the ways by which an institution is established. In doing so, they highlight the paradoxical role potentially played by institutional entrepreneurs in that they can (unwittingly) operate as agents of institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation. Their study suggests that the higher the performance imperative within a field, the more likely the institution as a generic concept will be deinstitutionalised and the more likely to be appropriated and customised in order to gain inimitability and thus competitive advantage. Finally, the authors make an additional contribution by integrating the affective aspects of institutional work to their analyses; stressing the role played by emotions.

As with many case studies, the ability to generalise from one case, however detailed, is limited. However, it provides evidence as to the paradoxical role that can be played by institutional entrepreneurs – especially in highly competitive environments.

The study suggests that the HR function has a potential role to play with regards to institutional continuity through a focus on leader and institutional entrepreneur succession planning.

The paper makes an original contribution by highlighting both institutional and deinstitutional work within a single case. It highlights the paradoxical nature of institutional entrepreneurs in highly competitive environments and illustrates the importance of emotion to institutional maintenance and deinstitution.

This paper focuses on a project to develop a methodology for diagnosing and designing incentives to improve the Colombian basic education system's performance. We describe the system and then the model identifying the agents characterized and the relationships between them. With these elements we construct an Incentives map. In order to connect the decisions of the individual or institution agents to the performance of the system, we build a way of illustrating them. Finally, we present the results.

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 current case study investigated how intentional, systematic planning can help organizations harness the energy of these willing allies who may be motivated to support change. The focus of the study is the development of a peer-to-peer approach, involving “Equity Leaders (ELs),” that was part of a larger, multi-level organization change initiative that addressed personal, interpersonal and structural considerations at a mid-sized public university in northeastern USA.

The authors used multiple methods to collect data for the current study, including observations and interviews. Over the course of four years, the authors attended more than 50 EL meetings. In these meetings, the authors took notes regarding ELs' discussions on workshop development and planning, debates on workshop substances and ELs' personal reflections on these workshops. Following the fourth year of the program, the first two authors invited all current ELs to participate in semi-structured, open-ended interviews about their experience.

The case study shows that through careful planning, peer change can play multiple roles in pushing organizational changes. By embracing their formal responsibilities and yielding their informal power, change agents are able to cause radiating impact across as organizations. Organizations can also capitalize on the fact that employees are more likely to be engaged in the change effort when it is promoted by peers. Finally, the support and resources from the organizational leaders is important because these inputs not only legitimize change agents' roles but they also signify the importance of the actions.

This study has limitations. First, the authors recognize that this was a qualitative study grounded in a single context. Although the study explored a novel context for understanding change agents—a deliberately planned initiative targeting social norms through addressing subtle biases like microaggressions—the authors recognize that additional examination would be necessary to understand how implementation may work in different contexts or organization types. Second, the authors also acknowledge that the authors’ positionality, as females studying a change initiative targeting gendered and intersectional microaggressions, may have shaped the role as researchers.

The findings underscore the notion that allies can serve as organized peer change agents to affect organizational culture. In alignment with the principles in the social ecological framework, the approach involved selecting change agents who are internal to the organization, have informal influence or power and can broaden the impact to other parts of the organization. Moreover, the results underscore the need for organizations to provide essential support and resources that can assist change agents to bridge organizational goals and individual actions.

As institutional theory increasingly looks to the micro-level for explanations of macro-level institutional processes, institutional scholars need to pay closer attention to the role of emotions in invigorating institutional processes. I argue that attending to emotions is most likely to enrich institutional analysis, if scholars take inspiration from theories that conceptualize emotions as relational and inter-subjective, rather than intra-personal, because the former would be more compatible with institutional theory’s relational roots. I review such promising theories that include symbolic interactionism, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic perspectives, moral psychology, and social movements. I conclude by outlining several possible research questions that might be inspired by attending to the role of emotions in institutional processes. I argue that such research can enrich the understanding of embedded agency, power, and the use of theorization by institutional change agents, as well as introduce a hereto neglected affective facet into the study of institutional logics.