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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.

Although the digital era has given rise to major transformations in many industries, health care has been remarkably resistant to radical innovations coming outside the field. The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain how new ventures aim to break institutional arrangements (i.e. regulations, normative rules, and cultural-cognitive beliefs) protecting the field by introducing digitally enabled service innovations into health care markets.

The study is qualitative and interpretative in nature and utilizes case study as a research strategy. The paper is based on data that were collected through narrative interviews and document analysis from seven new ventures participating in a start-up accelerator program.

Results indicate that service innovations that require a change in the institutional structures of the health care system are enacted through three highly iterative key processes: institutional sensemaking that creates an understanding of prevailing institutional arrangements and that constructs meaning for institutional change efforts, theorization of change through linguistic device, and modifications of institutions by building legitimacy and mobilizing external constituencies.

The findings provide practical insights into how new ventures struggle, navigate, and negotiate on specific alternatives related to institutional change while pursuing the introduction of innovations to market.

This research extends the institutional perspective on service innovation by zooming into micro-level processes of institutional change driven by new ventures. The study develops the theory of institutional entrepreneurship by highlighting cognitive processes of change, and suggests incorporating “institutional thinking” more tightly into the study and management of service innovation.

This essay extends a Bourdieusian perspective on the microfoundations of institutions. Drawing on this perspective, the authors argue that the recursive dynamics of institutions and action orient actors toward the maintenance of distinct and contradictory practices within, rather than bridging across, different fields. The authors corroborate our argument with an illustration of how corporate executives strategize within the tax field compared to the philanthropy field. Specifically, the authors show how actors are simultaneously oriented by different capitals toward apparently contradictory strategies. This chapter provides promising avenues for future research on the microfoundations of institutions, inter-field dynamics, and critical accounting and business ethics studies.

This chapter grapples with questions of agency in the development of African higher education, with a special focus on the Association of African Universities (AAU), an organization outside of formal education policymaking on the continent. Through the lens of rhetorical institutionalism, findings illustrate how the AAU has adopted and adapted competing institutional logics to exert influence over development policymaking. Next, I will discuss how systems of persuasion were cultivated and symbols employed to establish the legitimacy of the organization in a heterogeneous institutional field that includes universities, development agencies, nongovernmental organizations, supranational arrangements, and the influence of international financial institutions. This enabled the AAU to extend institutional logics into African higher education. This case study seeks to upend the pervasive crisis narrative that perpetuates both the impotence of African institutions and the stewardship of outside development elites. Finally this chapter considers the implications of this critical case study for development discourse and practice.

Institutional theory is becoming one of the dominant theoretical perspectives in organization theory and is increasingly being applied in accounting research to study the practice of accounting in organizations. However, most institutional theory research has adequately theorized neither the institutionalization process through which change takes place nor the socio‐political context of the institutional formations. We propose a social theory based framework for grounding and expanding institutional theory to more fully articulate institutionalization processes. Specifically, we incorporate institutional theory and structuration theory and draw on the work of Max Weber in developing a framework of the context and the processes associated with creating, adopting and discarding institutional practices. We propose that the expanded framework depicts the socio‐economic and political context better and more directly addresses the dynamics of enacting, embedding and changing organizational features and processes. Expanding the focus of the institutional theory based accounting research can facilitate a more comprehensive representation of accounting as the object of institutional practices as well as provide a better articulation of the role of accounting in the institutionalization process.

Hybrid organizations face particular challenges and opportunities due to combining different logics within one organizational structure. While research on hybrid organizing has advanced considerably our understanding of how these organizations can cope with such tensions, institutional theory suggests that organizational legitimacy and success will also depend on processes that take place at the field level. We connect these two perspectives to examine how field hybridity influences organizational legitimacy. Specifically, we consider both a field’s maturity and its degree of hybridity as two important variables that determine the effects that field hybridity has on organizational legitimacy. Drawing from extant research and leveraging our empirical work in the fields of microfinance, social entrepreneurship and impact investing to provide illustrative examples, we propose a framework that considers both positive and negative effects of field hybridity on organizational legitimacy. We contribute to the literature on hybrid organizing in two ways. First, we show that hybrid organizations face different challenges and opportunities depending on the stage of development and degree of hybridity of the field they operate in. Second, we suggest that the effects of field hybridity on organizational legitimacy can be understood as trade-offs that organizations need to understand and approach strategically to leverage opportunities and mitigate challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to document organizations' self descriptions of why they initiated sustainable development (SD) reporting and explore these explanations using an institutional theory framework.

Constructs organizational narratives from semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with reporting champions who participated in an SD reporting workshop series. The narratives are analysed using institutional theory to explore how regulatory, normative and cognitive institutions combine with organizational dynamics to influence SD reporting activity.

For these particular organizations, choosing to engage in reporting appears not to be a rational choice. Rather reporting is initiated because it has come to be an accepted part of pursuing a differentiation strategy, it offers some contribution to existing business challenges, and organizations value the rewards it offers. This rationale constitutes a cognitive mechanism within institutional theory.

The paper provides useful information on initiating sustainable development reporting based on organizations' self descriptions.

This paper aims to explore the complete process and underlying mechanism that social enterprises obtain legitimacy during interactions with stakeholders from theoretical integration of institutional theory and organization ecology perspective.

Based on theoretical classification, this paper selects six typical Chinese social enterprises and conducts a multi-case analysis.

The study finds that social enterprises aim at legitimizing single entity or industry and shaping stakeholders’ cognitive boundary simultaneously. Therefore, by adopting constrained cooperation and competition activities, social enterprises use normative isomorphism to achieve personal legitimation and combining ecological niche construction, social enterprises achieve organizational legitimation. By adopting fragmented cooperation-dominant or competition-dominant activities, social enterprises use mimic isomorphism supplemented by competitive isomorphism or population structure creation to obtain industry legitimation. By adopting dynamically integrated coopetition activities, social enterprises use mimic isomorphism and reflexive isomorphism to reach field legitimation.

This paper proposes a mechanism model that the coopetition with stakeholders influences the legitimation process, identifies four stages of social enterprise’s legitimation process and the types of legitimacy obtained in each stage and fills the gap of Chinese indigenous social enterprise research.

Particularly in governance and policy processes, critique is embedded in highly institutionalized formats. In this chapter, the authors apply Boltanski’s concept of critical tests to examine accepted forms of expression in the context of an institutionalized policy setting, the annual Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The authors find that different policy actors’ uses of critique reflect embedded field positions and interests. While marginal actors drew upon existential tests to construct radical critique, the highly ritualized performance of critique called into question its efficacy in promoting change within the overall structure of a highly institutionalized event. The authors discuss inroads to studying the relations between critique, power, and microfoundations of institutions.

This essay raises a concern about the trajectory that new institutionalism has been following during the last decades, namely an emphasis on heterogeneity, change and agentic behavior instead of isomorphism and conformist behavior. This is a crucial issue from the perspective of the philosophy and methodology of science since a theory that admits both change and stability as a norm has less scientific weight then a theory that predicts a prevalence of passivity and isomorphism over change and strategic behavior. The former provides explanations and predictions while the latter does not.

The paper offers an analysis of the nature, characteristics, functions and boundaries of institutional theories in the spirit of philosophy and methodology of science literature.

The power of the former institutional theory developed by Meyer, Rowan, DiMaggio and Powell lies in its generalization, explanation and prediction of observable and unobservable phenomena: as a typical organizational theory that puts forward directional predictions, it explains and predicts the tendency for organizations to become more similar to each other over time and express less strategic and interest-driven behavior, conforming to ever-increasing institutional pressures. A theory of isomorphism makes scientific predictions while its modern advancements do not. Drawing on Popper's idea of the limit of domains of explanation and limited domains of theories we present two propositions that may direct our attention towards the strength or weakness of institutional theories with regard to their explanations of organizational processes and behavior.

The paper draws implications for further theory building in institutional analysis by suggesting the nature of institutional explanations and the place of institutional change in the theoretical apparatus. Once institutional theory explains the tendency of the system towards equilibrium, there is no need to explain the origins and causes of radical change per se. Institutional isomorphism theory explains and predicts how even after radical changes organizational fields will move towards isomorphism, that is, institutional equilibrium. The task is, therefore, not to explain agency and change but to show that it is natural and inevitable processes that organizational field will return to isomorphic dynamics and move towards homogenization no matter how much radical change occurred in this field.

The paper discusses the practical problems with instrumental utility of institutional theories. In order to be useful any theory must clearly delineate its boundaries and offer explanations and predictions and it is only the former 1977/1983 institutional theory that satisfies these requirements while modern advancements merely offer ambiguous theoretical umbrellas that escape empirical tests. For researchers therefore it is important to recognize which theory can be applied in a given limited domain of research and which one has little or no value.