Search results

For the financial service industry, company–customer conflict is a topic that deserves special attention. This study explores the impacts of ethics institutionalization on the life insurance agents' ethical decision-making under the company–customer conflicts.

Two types of company–customer conflicts are studied. In one situation, selling the life insurance product is profitable to the life insurance company, but the product is unsuitable for the customer. In another situation, selling the life insurance product is unprofitable to the life insurance company, while the product will fully satisfy the customer's interests. The study selects Taiwan's full-time life insurance agents as a sample.

The main results show that implicit ethics institutionalization has a stronger influence on teleological evaluations and deontological evaluations. This study then finds that different types of company–customer conflicts would change the influences of teleological evaluations on ethical intentions and cause different influences of implicit ethics institutionalization on teleological evaluations and deontological evaluations.

Ethics institutionalization and company–customer conflicts are important issues in the literature. This is the first study to discuss the roles that ethics institutionalization and company–customer conflicts play in the ethical decision-making of life insurance agents.

It was common for newcomers to organizations to feel anxiety and uncertainty. Yet, gaining the newcomers’ trust may contribute to solving these problems. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impacts of explicit ethics institutionalization and management accountability on newcomer trust in manager and company.

A sample of novice salespeople in the life insurance companies in Taiwan was used to investigate the relationships among the constructs.

It was found that newcomers’ recognition of explicit ethics institutionalization was positively associated with the newcomers’ perception of management accountability, and the perception was positively related to trust in manager and company.

Explicit ethics institutionalization and management accountability could play an important role in enhancing newcomer trust. Thus, it was suggested that researchers and managers should focus on these issues and considered how explicit ethics institutionalization and management accountability could be enhanced in the workplace.

Newcomer distrust may lead to newcomer job dissatisfaction and newcomer turnover behaviors. This research examines the mediating role of management accountability in the relationship between explicit ethics institutionalization and newcomer trust.

Understanding how organisations can institutionalise the outcomes of process improvement initiatives is limited. This paper explores how process changes resulting from improvement initiatives are adhered to, so that the changed processes become the new “norm” and people do not revert to old practices. This study proposes an institutionalisation process for process improvement initiatives.

Firstly, a literature review identified Tolbert and Zucker’s (1996) institutionalisation framework as a suitable conceptual framework on which to base the enquiry. The second phase (the focus of this paper) applied the findings from two case studies to adapt this framework (its stages and related factors) to fit process improvement contexts.

The paper presents an empirically and theoretically supported novel institutionalisation process for process improvement initiatives. The three stages of the institutionalisation process presented by Tolbert and Zucker (1996) have been respecified into four stages, explaining how process changes are institutionalised through “Planning”, “Implementation”, “Objectification” and “Sedimentation” (the original first stage, i.e. “Habitualisation” being divided into Planning and Implementation). Some newly identified Business Process Management (BPM) specific factors influencing the institutionalisation processes are also discussed and triangulated with the BPM literature.

The study contributes to the BPM literature by conceptualising and theorising the stages of institutionalisation of process improvement initiatives. In doing so, the study explicitly identifies and considers several key contextual factors that drive the stages of institutionalisation. Practitioners can use this to better manage process change and future researchers can use this framework to operationalise institutionalisation of process change.

This is the first research study that provides an empirically supported and clearly conceptualised understanding of the stages of institutionalising process improvement outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of micro‐environmental international entrepreneurship and the macro‐environmental market forces on domestic institutionalization of the industrial sector. In doing so, the paper examines the moderating effect of the degree of internationalization on the relationship between domestic market forces and domestic sectoral institutionalization.

Based upon the creation of the item pools “domestic sectoral institutionalization”, “market forces” and “degree of internationalization” derived from previous research, an applied Delphi technique and a representative sample of 149 exporters in Turkey, a survey using a web‐based questionnaire was conducted. All scales were designed and a number of hypotheses were validated. Results were analyzed by the principal components of factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and moderated hierarchical regression.

The empirical analysis resulted in an interaction effect of two sub‐elements of the market forces (trust and organization) and internationalization. The findings imply that internationalization can make an important contribution to the institutionalization of the domestic industrial sector. The paper confirms the findings of previous research on the significant importance of trust for institutionalization. Summarizing, it was found that internationalization significantly and positively moderates the effect of trust on institutionalization. Interestingly, however, internationalization negatively moderates the effect of organization on institutionalization implying that the learning process and experiences created by internationalization cause a higher level of structural adaptation.

This paper innovatively sheds light upon the interrelationship between macro environmental market forces, internationalization of entrepreneurship and domestic institutionalization. In doing so, it relates various disciplines, as national and international entrepreneurial behavior, with sociological aspects such as institutionalization for the sake of achieving important macro economic objectives, especially for countries in transition. The comprehensive, reliable and valid research methodology can be applied when researching this topic with important economic implications for transitional economies in other research settings.

While institutional theory is used widely in the information system (IS) literature to study implementation of systems, the actual process of institutionalization has received less attention. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap in the literature by using three concepts drawn from the theory, namely, institutional isomorphism, institutional logic and institutional entrepreneurship, and the interplay between them to explore the role of the dominant institutional entrepreneur in the institutionalization of a public system, as an instance of e‐government initiatives.

In an interpretive case study, this study examined the institutionalization process of an e‐procurement system over a four‐year period (2007‐2011) in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta.

This study reveals that different institutional isomorphism mechanisms emerge during the process and institutional logics evolve over time. More interestingly, it uncovers the dominant role of an institutional entrepreneur, the city's mayor, who mobilized resources and support to drive the institutionalization process. At the beginning stage, institutionalization is best described as a process of instilling values, cultivated by the mayor, followed by a process of creating reality through a typification process, whereby the e‐procurement system is embedded in the existing practices and institutionalized.

As an interpretive study, the findings are generalized to theoretical concepts rather than the population. The interrelationship between the three concepts of institutional theory represents plausible rather than deterministic links. It also offers practical insights, such as e‐procurement implementation strategy.

This paper goes beyond simply using institutional theory as an interpretive lens by examining the interrelationship between the mechanisms of institutionalization. It shows that the main catalyst of the institutionalization process is the institutional entrepreneur who managed the institutional isomorphism and was instrumental in changing the institutional logic. It also presents lessons from a successful case where corrupt practices were highly institutionalized at the beginning but were decreased through the system.

Development and expansion of the communication management function in organizations has recently been discussed in relation to the concept of institutionalization. Empirical evidence has illustrated that the role of communication executives and communication managers varies between organizations, and could also be subjected to change within an organization. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize institutionalization of communication management as a process. It aims to develop a theoretical framework that integrates important factors that influence and regulate this process.

A literature review resulted in a number of factors potentially influencing the institutionalization process. These factors were attributed to three main theoretical areas and four different levels of analysis, using institutional theory as a guiding framework. The theoretical areas and analysis levels, were proposed to be mutually interdependent, and were compiled in a theoretical framework, illustrated in a model.

The theoretical framework includes three main areas: organizational structure, social capital, and perceptions of the profession; and four levels of analysis: the societal, the organizational field, the organizational and the individual levels.

This paper contributes to the study of institutionalization of communication management in organizations by providing a theoretical framework, which can be used to further investigate the development of the communication function and the role of communication executives and communication managers in organizations. By conceptualizing institutionalization of communication management as a process, and exploring and defining the important elements that influence and regulate this process, an important theoretical contribution to the field is made.

Although drawing from neoinstitutional theoretical apparatus and ontology, management fashion theory is understood as a theory that explains the transitory nature of popular ideas and practices while institutional theory explains their stabilization, persistence and further institutionalization. In a nutshell, it seems that being opposed to each other, these two theories describe and predict different, incommensurable diffusion trajectories and organizational behaviour patterns. The purpose of this paper is to unify these two competing perspectives.

This paper makes an attempt toward further unification of management fashion theory with new institutionalism by offering an alternative understanding and conceptualization of institutional change and deinstitutionalization and by distinguishing emerging concepts from already popular fashions.

Most emerging concepts never achieve popularity and disappear while few of them achieve massive media attention and diffuse widely becoming new management fashions. Once these concepts have achieved a wide popularity institutional forces would favor them and lead to further institutionalization. Institutional change is understood not as a deinstitutionalization of existing management fashion in terms of erosion, discontinuity or disappearance but as a decline in its media coverage while media attention focuses on new fashionable concept. The former management fashion gets institutionalized, institutional change occurs in terms of shifting attention toward new fashion and diffusion and institutionalization cycle restarts. Institutional prediction of isomorphism and institutionalization as irreversible tendencies thus can be unified with MF prediction about the bell-shaped curves in fashions’ popularity. Therefore, postulates and predictions of management fashion theory can be derived from new institutionalism and vice versa.

The paper aims to cover, generalize and explain different trajectories of various management and organizational concepts, deducing theoretical propositions from both institutional theory and management fashion theory. Theoretical and methodological ideas offered in this paper can be helpful in future research on management fashions and diffusion. Studies on the evolution of management concept can benefit from proposed categorization and causal relationships between different stages of the life cycle.

Unifying seemingly conflicting and disparate perspectives and views allows making organization theory more coherent in terms of both explanatory power and ontological commensurability. Following other mature sciences, we share the same notion of progress, namely, the aim of achieving unification and demonstrating that different organizational theories still describe the same reality.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the institutionalization of an accrual accounting system in the Indonesian public sector.

The authors undertake a case study to gain insights relating to the critical features of the institutionalization process of the accrual accounting system (AAS) in one Indonesian public sector municipality. The data are drawn from official documents of the Indonesian Government and from publicly available information about the accrual adoption processes. The authors also interviewed key actors who were involved in the accrual accounting policy formulation, standards development and implementation. The data under investigation cover the period from 1983 to 2010.

The IPM of Dambrin, Lambert and Sponem is employed to evaluate the process by which an AAS was idealized, standardized, implemented and used in one Indonesian municipality. Scott's pillars of legitimization also inform rationales behind practice. This study reveals how the decision of the Indonesian Government to adopt accrual accounting in 2003 was part of greater political and economic reforms following the financial and political crisis that occurred in 1998. Idealized in the early 1980s by technocrats in the Ministry of Finance, accrual accounting practices were deferred and then enabled by a series of national political events. Their ultimate internalization into our municipality was led by new legislation but also influenced by the habits and histories of the Indonesian local context and was as a result decoupled in many respects from ideals, discourses and techniques established for it.

The findings should be understood in the economic, social and historical context of Indonesia. Findings offered here may differ from other applications due to the nature of the economic, social and political contexts.

Uniquely employing the IPM model, and drawing from a context which has undergone significant political change but which has benefitted from little research, this study contributes to an understanding of the institutionalization and legitimization process of an accrual accounting system in an emerging‐economy public sector. Findings demonstrate how notions of politics and power inform the complexity of institutionalization in this unique political‐economic environment.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a new analysis and understanding of the notion of deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization of taken-for-granted practices as a natural consequence of ever-increasing entropy seems to directly contradict the major institutional thesis, namely, that over time isomorphic forces increase and, as a result, possibilities for deinstitutionalization decrease culminating in the impossibility of abandoning in highly institutionalized fields.

This paper is conceptual in nature. Oliver’s 1992 paper on deinstitutionalization is taken as a key text on the subject and as a starting point for building an alternative theory of deinstitutionalization. More broadly, institutional theory and organizational literature on diffusion/adoption are reviewed and synthesized.

The authors argue that possibilities for deinstitutionalization have been overestimated in institutional literature and offer a revisited account of deinstitutionalization vs institutional isomorphism and institutionalized vs highly diffusing-but-not-institutionalized practices. A freedom for choice between alternative practices exists during the pre-institutional stage but not when the field is already institutionalized. In contrast, institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices are immutable to any sort of functional and political pressures and they use to persist even when no technical value remains, thus deinstitutionalization on the basis of a functional dissatisfaction seems to be a paradox.

By revisiting the nature and patterns of deinstitutionalization, the paper offers a better conceptual classification and understanding of how organizations adopt, maintain and abandon organizational ideas and practices. An important task of this paper is to reduce the scope of application of deinstitutionalization theory to make it more focused and self-consistent. There is, however, still not enough volume of studies on institutional factors of practices’ abandonment in institutional literature. The authors, therefore, acknowledge that more studies are needed to further improve both the former deinstitutionalization theory and the framework.

The authors offer a solution to this theoretical inconsistency by distinguishing between truly institutionalized practices and currently popular practices (highly diffused but non-institutionalized). It is only the latter that are subject to the norms of progress that allow abandoning and replacing existing organizational activities. Deinstitutionalization theory is, thus can be applied to popular practices that are subject to reevaluation, abandonment and replacement with new optimal practices while institutions are immutable to these norms of progress. Institutions are immutable to deinstitutionalization and the deinstitutionalization of optimal practices is subject to the logic of isomorphic convergence in organizational fields. Finally, the authors revisit a traditional two-stage institutional diffusion model to explain the possibility and likelihood of abandonment during different stages of institutionalization.

The purpose of the paper is to develop a new framework depicting the incorporation of concepts such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) within corporate communication as a process that called “institutionalization by translation”. The paper aims to develop a micro‐meso‐macro‐perspective to analyze why and how organizations institutionalize CSR with which effects.

The paper brings together institutional, sensemaking and communication theories. The paper builds on neo‐institutionalism to frame the external conditions that foster or hinder the institutionalization of CSR on the macro‐ and meso‐level. And the paper uses sensemaking and communication theories to describe this process on the meso‐ and micro‐level. The paper illustrates the analysis by describing the CSR strategies of a large European energy company.

CSR can be regarded as an empty concept that is based on moral communication and filled with different meanings. The analysis describes how CSR is internally translated (moralization and amoralization), which communication strategies are developed here (symbolic, dialogic, etc.) and that CSR communications are publicly negotiated. The analysis shows that the institutionalization of CSR bears not only opportunities, but also risks for corporations and can, therefore, be described as a “downward spirale of legitimacy and upward spiral of CSR institutionalization”. Finally, alternative ways of coping with external demands are developed (“management by hypocrisis” and “defaulted communication”).

The paper shows risk and explains more effective ways of building organizational legitimacy.

The originality lays in the macro‐meso‐micro‐perspective on the institutionalization of CSR. It allows the description of this process and its effects from the background of constraints and sensemaking and offers a new perspective on organizational legitimacy building.