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Economic theory posits a universal sociocultural orientation toward pricing complicated only by systematic cognitive biases. While institutional and organizational theorists have challenged the purported homogeneity of market logics, they have not linked market heterogeneity to price outcomes. If market logics are internally complex with multiple orientations toward pricing, skilled actors should be able to influence prices through market logics. This study utilizes qualitative analysis of interview data with a stratified random sample (75 percent response rate) of key participants to examine how investment banks (underwriters) instantiate a hybrid market logic in the Initial Public Offering (IPO) market. Underwriters exploit their status position to promulgate IPO pricing methods contradicting neoclassical rationality, behavioral models of pricing, and the underwriters’ own calculative mode of behavior. They successfully create this hybrid logic for issuers while hiding the nature of their market power through deceptive use of vocabulary from the market logic itself. Hence, the internal complexity of market logics directly impacts financial prices, with skilled actors achieving superior outcomes. This study concludes with an assessment of the implications for price theory, developing propositions to guide future research on market logics and pricing.

This book chapter takes an institutional perspective on competing logics in global markets concerned with sustainability values and how market actors in the form of buyers and sellers attempt to solve these conflicting situations. We do this by identifying competing institutional logics in global market contexts aiming for sustainability values, together with techniques for navigating these competing institutional logics in the organizational field studied. As an empirical illustration, we use a case study of buyers and sellers in two different markets where sustainability has come into focus for their market relationships. This viewpoint allows us to better understand how global market actors deal with the competing institutional logics in their market context. We make three contributions with this research: firstly, we identify the institutional logics in global markets towards sustainability; secondly, we demonstrate how global market actors prioritize among the competing logics and their market relationships and thirdly, we outline what this means for the relationship between buyers and sellers in global markets towards sustainability.

Economic theory posits a universal sociocultural orientation toward pricing complicated only by systematic cognitive biases. While institutional and organizational theorists have challenged the purported homogeneity of market logics, they have not linked market heterogeneity to price outcomes. If market logics are internally complex with multiple orientations toward pricing, skilled actors should be able to influence prices through market logics. This study utilizes qualitative analysis of interview data with a stratified random sample (75 percent response rate) of key participants to examine how investment banks (underwriters) instantiate a hybrid market logic in the Initial Public Offering (IPO) market. Underwriters exploit their status position to promulgate IPO pricing methods contradicting neoclassical rationality, behavioral models of pricing, and the underwriters’ own calculative mode of behavior. They successfully create this hybrid logic for issuers while hiding the nature of their market power through deceptive use of vocabulary from the market logic itself. Hence, the internal complexity of market logics directly impacts financial prices, with skilled actors achieving superior outcomes. This study concludes with an assessment of the implications for price theory, developing propositions to guide future research on market logics and pricing.

This paper explores the role of institutional objects in the constitution of institutional logics. Institutional objects depend for their objectivity on the goods produced through those objects, such as economic models, passports, or sacred texts. The authors theorize institutional logics as grammars of valuation that institutionalize goods through institutional objects. The authors identify four value moments through which goods are objectified: institution, the instituting of a good, a belief and an imagination of its objective goodness; production, how the good is produced, what practices are productive of the good; evaluation, how good is the good, the practices and objects through which worth in terms of that good is determined, and territorialization, the domain of reference of the good, to what objects and practices a good can and does refer in its instantiations. The authors assess the adequacy of our model through an institutional object based on the good of “market value” – i.e., an options pricing model. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for institutional logical theory and the sociology of valuation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate efforts to manage institutional complexity in a state-owned enterprise, the roles of explicated values in these efforts and how these values interact with each other and other influential management controls.

Exploratory case study in StateEnt, a state-owned enterprise that faces institutional complexity. The analysis is based on interviews, observations and documents and concepts from the management control literature and institutional logics are applied.

Findings from this study suggest that a structural differentiation have separated two logics in different departments and two of the explicated values have become symbols of these logics taking on various roles in negotiations. Tension between the departments is heightened because the departments legitimize logic enactment through mobilizing different socio-technical dyads of management control. The division of responsibility between these departments still ensures that they need to collaborate and make compromises. The study also finds that exogenously imposed constraints have a significant influence on organizational activities, which is further strengthened due to internally developed management controls embedded in the same logic.

The study contributes with deeper understanding of values as control, and how these interact with other control forms to influence organizational activity. Herein, the importance of regulatory controls in state-owned enterprises is also highlighted. A limitation of this study is the limited size of the organization under investigation.

The explicit emphasis on values as a control in studies on management control issues in institutionally complex environments is underemphasized in the literature.

Work integration social enterprises (WISEs) address the chronic unemployment of disadvantaged populations. However, WISEs face challenges, in part, because they embody both social mission and market logics which potentially contradict one another. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the founders of WISEs perceive the relationship between logics and how they manage any resulting tensions, to help determine if they are effective vehicles for alleviating unemployment.

This study used in-depth interviews with social entrepreneurs in nationally recognized WISEs to assess how they perceived and managed logic tensions.

A total of eight out of the ten WISEs emphasized one dominant logic and did not perceive significant internal conflict. Only two cases experienced prolonged and ultimately irreconcilable tensions between their social mission and market goals, when social entrepreneurs were guided by the blended logics of providing training and services to disadvantaged populations within a for-profit legal form.

Future research is required to determine the generalizability of these findings due to small sample size, an exclusive focus on the founder’s perspective and an exclusive focus on WISEs.

Findings contribute to greater understanding of logic tensions in WISEs and the opportunities and limitations that result from aligning dominant logic(s) and organizational form.

This research suggests that the founders of WISEs perceive market and social mission logics as options to be selected, and that WISEs struggle to succeed as organizations with two dominant logics. The market appears as yet unprepared to support singlehandedly organizations with a social mission of work integration.

Studies on China suggest that institutional environment plays a significant role in business activities; however, the issue of how firms attend to institutional environment is largely under-explored. This paper responds to the oversight by examining the potential ways in which firms can demonstrate heterogeneity in terms of vigilance to government policy. Drawing from the attention-based view of firms and the institutional logic perspective, the authors aim to propose that firms with market logic or non-market logic will show difference in vulnerability to policy change. Further, firm ownership type and policy-leveraging capability would moderate the relationship between institutional logic and attention to policy environment.

The empirical background of this study is based on Chinese pharmaceutical firms. The new reform on health-care system launched by Chinese government in 2009 provides a fertile context to observe firms’ attention to government policy. The hypotheses are tested by using data of 145 Chinese pharmaceutical public firms from 2009 to 2013.

The results generally support the hypotheses: market logic has a positive effect on attention to policy, whereas non-market logic has a negative effect. The impact of market logic is weakened when firms have a higher policy-leveraging capability (in terms of getting government subsidies); the non-market logic effect is strengthened both when firms are state-owned enterprises and have a higher policy-leveraging capability.

Instead of focusing on how institutional environment have an influence on firm behavior as previous studies do, this paper examines the interaction between institution and firms by exploring how firms pay attention to government policy. Under the context of China, this study sheds light on how institutional logic plays a role in determining cognitive resource allocation of firms.

In the discussion on service‐dominant logic and its consequences for value creation and marketing the inner meaning of the value‐in‐use notion and the nature of service marketing have not been considered thoroughly. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the meaning of a service logic as a logic for consumption and provision, respectively, and explore the consequences for value creation and marketing.

Being a research‐based paper, the topic is approached by theoretical analysis and conceptual development.

Discussing the differences between value‐in‐exchange and value‐in‐use, the paper concludes that value‐in‐exchange in essence concerns resources used as a value foundation which are aimed at facilitating customers' fulfilment of value‐in‐use. When accepting value‐in‐use as a foundational value creation concept customers are the value creators. Adopting a service logic makes it possible for firms to get involved with their customers' value‐generating processes, and the market offering is expanded to including firm‐customer interactions. In this way, the supplier can become a co‐creator of value with its customers. Drawing on the analysis, ten concluding service logic propositions are put forward.

The analysis provides a foundation for further development of a service logic for customers and suppliers, respectively, (“service logic” is preferred over the normally used “service‐dominant logic”) as well for further analysis of the marketing consequences of adopting such a business and marketing logic.

Marketing practitioners will find new ways of understanding customers' value creation and of developing marketing strategies with an aim to engage suppliers with their customers' consumption processes in order to enhance customer satisfaction.

For a scholarly audience, the paper provides a more truly service‐centric understanding of value creation and of its marketing consequences. For a practitioner audience, it offers service‐based means of further developing marketing practices.

This case study highlights state-logic influence on hybrid organizations and institutionally complex environments through acts of regulation (and deregulation).

This study presents a 30-year narrative case focused on the significant social achievements of the Bonneville Power Administration within the Northwest United States. It combines the analysis of historical documentation, annual reports issued by the organization and interviews with firm management to observe the wax and wane of regulatory influence through time.

The presented case suggests two ways regulation projects state-logic influence onto hybrid organizations. First, it imposes a “floor” level of baseline social activity that must be met despite pressure from market logic stakeholders. Second, it imposes formal administrative procedures that require interaction with, and often approval from, key social stakeholders. Administrative procedures provide a series of public forums used to promote additional social resource allocation in excess of baseline regulatory mandates.

A narrative case covering a 30-year period will by necessity have to prioritize breadth of analysis over depth. This is a limitation of the analysis presented, but it also provides an opportunity to observe the oscillating impact of state and market-logic influence through time.

The study findings have several implications for the growing accounting literature on institutional complexity and hybrid organization. First, the authors highlight the ways regulation shapes institutionally complex spaces and, as a result, the hybrid organizations formed within those environments. Second, the exogenous nature of regulatory mandates indicate hybrid firms could emerge as both a voluntary and an involuntary adaptation to institutionally complex environments. Finally, this study highlights opportunities to further one’s understanding how state logics influence hybrid organizations through the study of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

Project marketing is the specific activity of companies selling projects-to-order. Interpersonal practice is known to be important in this type of marketing. While this interpersonal practice has been little studied, some previous research suggests that changes in the institutional macro environment have affected it. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to study today’s interpersonal practice in project business and how the institutional environment conditions it.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with marketing managers at project-based firms in different business sectors in France and Sweden. Data collection and analysis was informed by grounded theory.

The paper identifies three types of interpersonal practice in project marketing, referred to as the transactional, the work-based and the socializing. Changes in these are explained in relation to the three institutional logics identified in the data: the market institutional logic of business ethics, the corporate institutional logic of rationalization and the family institutional logic of gender equality.

Future studies can continue and broaden this work as it regards how the institutional conditioning of interpersonal practice varies with context.

By clearly categorizing the three types of interpersonal practice and their relative role today, companies can orient the activities of salespeople, business developers and other project marketers.

The paper highlights how business ethics and gender equality have changed interpersonal practices in project marketing.

The paper contributes to the current debate on project marketing by identifying three types of interpersonal practice and by illustrating how institutional logics condition and change these. The paper shows that extra-business activities are needed less than previous research has argued with regard to maintaining customer relationships in-between projects.