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The authors set out to study institutional work under complexity building on the struggle for legitimacy of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community in Israel as their case study. The authors took a discursive approach and were interested in what actors claim they do. The findings suggest that actors manipulate the intentions and outcomes of their acts, thereby claiming for actorhood or negating it. These differential constructions are not random but echo the norms of the discursive spaces within which they are presented and interact with other actors’ work. Overall, the authors argue that actorhood is not a pre-condition for institutional work, nor is it its outcome, but rather an integral part thereof.

The adoption of social procurement, the emerging practice of using a firm's spending power to generate social value, requires buying firms to navigate conflicts of institutional logics. Adopting an institutional work perspective, this study aims to investigate how buying firms change their existing procurement institutions to adopt and advance social procurement.

The authors conducted an in-depth case study of a social procurement initiative in the UK. This case study comprised of 16 buying firms that were actively participating in the social procurement initiative at the time of data collection (2020–2021). The data were largely captured through a set of 41 semi-structured interviews.

Four types of institutional work were observed: reducing institutional conflicts, crossing institutional boundaries, legitimising institutional change and spreading the new institutional logic. These different types of institutional work appeared in a sequential way.

This study contributes to various strands of literature investigating the role of procurement in generating value and benefits within societies, adopting an institutional lens to investigate the buying firms' purposeful actions to change procurement institutions. Secondly, this study complements the existing literature investigating the conflicts of institutional logics by illustrating the ways firms address such institutional conflicts when adopting and advancing social procurement. Finally, this work contributes to the recently emerging research on institutional work that examines the creation and establishment of new institutions by considering the existing procurement institutions in the examination of institutional work.

E-health tools for patients aim to change current care practices. However the role of IT in transforming health care is not straightforward. The purpose of this paper is to understand how this change process unfolds and what characterizes the process by which visions of new care practices become inscribed into digital tools.

The study adopted a qualitative research design and it is based on an interpretive case study on the digitalization of a tool for diabetes care used in a hospital in Norway. Data have been collected via interviews and observations. Digitalization activities are understood as institutional work in order to examine the relation between the decisions taken in the design process and the intended change of the practices of diabetes care.

The study identifies three types of activities of institutional work: inscription of self-reflection, inscription of legitimation and inscription of new usage. The analysis of these activities shows how the vision of patients’ more active, learning and reflection-oriented role is inscribed into digital technology; how institutional work strives both for change and for legitimation thus smoothing the transition to a new institutional arrangement; and how institutional work relates to digital materiality.

The study contributes to the institutional theory literature by conceptualizing digitalization as institutional work toward changing institutions. It also contributes to the IS literature on digitalization by providing an analysis of how the affordances of digital materials support the work toward new institutions.

In this study, we develop further understanding of how institutional change is created within a mature and local industry. In this pursuit, we examine how a collaborative large project governance model was institutionalized at an industrial sector-level through both industry-level activities and “institutional projects”.

This study builds on the foundations of institutional fields and institutional change, suggesting that projects are not only shaped by their contexts but also produce institutional change themselves. We conducted extensive fieldwork on the institutionalization of a collaborative project governance model in Finland.

The findings illustrate how institutional change in governance of large and complex inter-organizational projects is created at the institutional field level. The institutionalized collaborative project governance model includes aspects of both relational and contractual governance. The change was facilitated by temporal links between the institutional projects as well as vertical links between the institutional projects and the field-level development programs.

This is one of the first studies to address how a collaborative large project governance model becomes the norm at the institutional field level beyond the boundaries of an individual project or organization.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how sustainability reporting managers (SRMs) institutionalise sustainability reporting within organisations.

In total, 35 semi-structured interviews with SRMs in Australia and New Zealand were analysed using an institutional work perspective.

SRMs’ institutional work can be categorised into four phases with each phase representing a different approach to sustainability reporting. Organisations transition from phase one to four as they achieve a higher level of maturity and a deeper embedding and routinisation of sustainability reporting. These include educating and advocacy work undertaken by engaging with managers (phase one), transitioning to a decentralised sustainability reporting process (phase two), transitioning to leaner, focussed, materiality driven sustainability reporting (phase three), and using sustainability key performance indicators and materiality assessment reports for planning, decision-making, goal setting, performance appraisal, and incentives (phase four). However, SRMs face challenges including their inexperience, limited time and resources, lack of management commitment to sustainability reporting and low external interest in sustainability reporting. The study identifies ten reasons why material issues are not always (adequately) disclosed.

This study recommends more training and development for SRMs, and that regulation be considered to mandate the disclosure of the materiality assessments in sustainability reports.

This research extends the existing literature examining how sustainability reports are prepared and sheds further light on how a materiality assessment is undertaken. The study identifies ten reasons for the non-disclosure of material matters, including but not limited to, legitimacy motives. Researchers can use these reasons to refine their methods for evaluating published sustainability reports. At a theoretical level, the study provides four observations that institutional researchers should consider when examining forms of institutional work.

The purpose of this study is to understand the efforts of key social actors in influencing the reform of Iranian public universities budgeting system, from incremental to performance-based budgeting (PBB), the tensions that arose as competing efforts of institutional change were undertaken, and ultimately the impact of these efforts on the extent to which the Iranian government transitioned to a system of PBB in public universities.

Data comprises of semi-structured interviews with managers and experts involved in the budget setting process and an analysis of budgetary policy documents, reports and archival material such as legislation. An institutional work lens is employed to interpret the findings.

While actors advocating the change were engaged in institutional work directed at disrupting the old budgetary rules by disassociating the rules moral foundations and creating new budgetary rules (through new legislation), universities undertook subtle resistance by engaging in extended evaluation of the new proposed PBB rules thereby maintaining the old budgetary rules. The reforms undertaken to introduce PBB in Iranian universities achieved minimal success whereby incremental budgeting continued to constitute by far a larger percentage of the budget allocation formula for university budgets. This finding illustrates change and continuity in university budgetary systems resulting from institutional work of actors competing to control the basis of resource allocation under the proposed PBB system by proposing contradicting models.

The findings highlight the importance of understanding the interplay of institutional work undertaken by competing social actors as they seek to advance their goals in shaping budgetary reforms in the public-sector. Such an understanding may inform policy makers who intend to introduce major reforms in public-sector budgeting approaches.

Unlike prior studies that largely focused on how organization-level budgeting practices responded to changes in public budgeting rules (i.e. at the site of implementation of the rules), this paper highlights how strategies of change and resistance are played out at the site of setting budgetary norms.

Combining institutional work and actor engagement (AE) literature, this paper aims to elucidate how the collective action of market shaping occurs through the interplay between market shapers’ institutional work and engagement of other market actors. While markets are shaped by actors’ purposive actions and recent literature notes the need to also mobilize AE, the underlying process remains nebulous.

This paper is conceptual but supported by an illustrative case study: the Winding Tree. This blockchain-based, decentralized travel marketplace shapes a market by decoupling existing resource linkages, creating new ones and stabilizing others through a dynamic, iterative process between the market shaper’s institutional work and others’ AE.

The paper develops a dynamic, iterative framework of market shaping through increased resource density, revealing the interplay between seven types of market shapers’ institutional work distilled from the literature and changes in other market actors’ engagement dispositions, behaviors and the diffusion of AE through the market.

This research contributes to the emergent market shaping and market innovation literature by illustrating how the engagement of market actors is a fundamental means of market shaping. Specifically, it advances understanding of how market shapers’ institutional work leads to new resource linkages and higher resource density in emergent market systems through AE. The resultant framework offers an original, critical foundation for future market shaping research.

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 aims to examine an important mechanism in the policy-led institutional transitions in China, namely, Te Shi Te Ban (Special Treatments for Special Matters) – an institutional device that facilitates policy implementation. The discussions are contextualized based on the latest chapter of China’s institutional transition, known as the reform initiative of Fang Guan Fu (i.e. the FGF reform: delegate power, streamline administration and optimize government services), which is a policy regime introduced in 2018 to improve the state-market relationship for better socioeconomic development.

Based on the theoretical lens of proto-institutions and institutional work and using real-life examples from mass media, this perspective paper examines the effects of the Special Treatments in the institutional transition under the FGF Reform.

The Special Treatments are the proto-institutions purposively adopted by the regulators in China to innovate, supervise and renovate the rules and norms during policy implementation. They produce both incremental and radical institutional effects which allow for a more efficient and effective policy-led institutional transition.

This study contributes to institutional theory in the Chinese management context. Foremost, this study introduces the concept of proto-institutional work and shows how proto-institutions can serve as a mechanism to support and manage the process of institutional transition. In addition, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to study the FGF Reform – the latest reform initiative in China and theorize an under-researched but important mechanism in its institutional environment – the Special Treatments for Special Matters.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question of how continuity and change coexist in the work of institutional actors who can combine maintenance, disruption and/or creation. Past studies mention this coexistence without an explanation.

The paper develops a perspective through literature review.

Institutional actors are both socialized into the norm-oriented space of continuity and maintenance through their reciprocal relations and associated social knowledge and roles and disciplined into the goal-oriented space of change and disruption/creation through their power relations and associated expert discourse and subject positions. Their institutional existence indicates a particular combination of reciprocity and power and thus their work includes changing degrees of maintenance, disruption and creation, depending on the nature of this combination.

The paper points out research directions on the relational conditions of the actors, which facilitate or constrain their work toward institutional continuity or change.

Organizations whose concern is to continue the existing practices in a stable environment should emphasize reciprocal relations whereas organizations whose concern is to change those practices for more effectiveness in a dynamic environment should emphasize power relations. Also, too much emphasis on either relations leads to inflexibility or instability.

The paper provides an explanation on the sources of coexistence of continuity and change in institutional work. It also contributes to the discussions on contingency of institutions, resistance productive of institutional change, reflexivity of institutional actors and intersubjective construction of institutional work.