Search results for ""Author Michael Lounsbury""

This volume takes stock of entrepreneurship research within organizational sociology, critically examining the theoretical presuppositions of the field and situating extant research within the sociological canon. The contributors to this volume exemplify how the disciplinary lens of sociology provides a systematic foundation to understand the context, process, and effects of entrepreneurial activity. Topics explored include entry into entrepreneurship, immigrant entrepreneurship and enclaves, academic entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurialism related to new organizational forms. The breadth and depth of the research offered by the esteemed scholars that have contributed to this volume highlight the progressive nature of sociological research on entrepreneurship. Taken as a whole, the volume points the way towards a more comprehensive framework for the development of the sociology of entrepreneurship. "Research in the Sociology of Organizations" is an international series. It is especially concerned with specifying the unique contributions of sociological theories and research techniques to the analysis of organizations. Each volume aims to foster debate and dialogue about the value of new theories and research to the field of organizational sociology as well as the growing international community of organizational scholars.

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This Book Set of A & B. Since the mid-20th century, organizational theorists have increasingly distanced themselves from the study of core societal power centers and important policy issues of the day. This has been driven by a shift away from the study of organizations, politics, and society and towards a more narrow focus on instrumental exchange and performance. As a result, our field has become increasingly impotent as a critical voice and contributor to policy. For a contemporary example, witness our inability as a field to make sense of the recent U.S. mortgage meltdown and concomitant global financial crisis. It is not that economic and organizational sociologists have nothing to say. The problem is that while we have a great deal of knowledge about finance, the economy, entrepreneurship and corporations, we fail to address how the knowledge in our field can be used to contribute to important policy issues of the day. This double-volume brings together some of the very top scholars in the world in economic and organizational sociology to address the recent global financial crisis debates and struggles around how to organize economies and societies around the world.

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The Institutional Logics Perspective is one of the fastest growing new theoretical areas in organization studies (Thornton, Ocasio & Lounsbury, 2012). Building on early efforts by Friedland & Alford (1991) to "bring society back in" to the study of organizational dynamics, this new scholarly domain has revived institutional analysis by embracing a focus on the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of institutions. In doing so, it has embraced a more practice-centered approach to agency that emphasizes situated interactions, the importance of history, the role of both symbolic and material elements, and the study of cross-level processes and mechanisms. This two volume set, seeded by an ABC Network conference held in Banff, Alberta, CANADA in June 2012, provides a fresh set of papers by scholars at the cutting edge of research on institutional logics. As a whole, the papers provide many novel theoretical insights about institutional logics in action - focusing on their dynamics, complexity, and evolving relationship to actors as actors actively navigate their social worlds.

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Both history and current events attest to the continued significance of religion in society. Despite the role and importance of the institution of religion, and the profound influence that religious organizations continue to exert, it occupies a curiously marginal place in organization theory. At the same time, organization theory has been criticized for its narrow focus on corporations and there have been calls to study a much broader range of organizational forms (e.g., Bamberger and Pratt, 2010). Interestingly, the small number of studies on religious organizations to have published have had a disproportionate impact on the field. This suggests that religious organizations deserve more attention, and that attending to them will have significant benefits for our understanding of organizations. This volume brings together leading organization theorists with an interest in religion. The aim is to consolidate and make available in one place existing knowledge on religion and organizations, as well as encouraging more organization theorists to include religion as part of their research activities and agenda.

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This double volume presents a collection of 23 papers on how institutions matter to socio-economic life. The effort was seeded by the 2015 Alberta Institutions Conference, which brought together 108 participants from 14 countries and 51 different institutions. The resulting papers delve deeply into the practical impact an institutional approach enables, as well as how such research has the potential to influence policies relevant to critical institutional changes unfolding in the world today. In Volume 48A, the focus is on the micro foundations of institutional impacts. In Volume 48B, the focus is on the macro consequences of institutional arrangements. Looking across the two volumes, there are multiple theoretical, conceptual, methodological and practical points of convergence and divergence. Overall, the volumes highlight the many ways in which institutional processes and institutional researchers can contribute to our understanding of the micro foundations and macro consequences of institutions and their impacts on a wide variety of globally pressing issues, while also identifying a variety of fruitful directions for knowledge accumulation and development.

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The Institutional Logics Perspective is one of the fastest growing new theoretical areas in organization studies (Thornton, Ocasio & Lounsbury, 2012). Building on early efforts by Friedland & Alford (1991) to "bring society back in" to the study of organizational dynamics, this new scholarly domain has revived institutional analysis by embracing a focus on the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of institutions. In doing so, it has embraced a more practice-centered approach to agency that emphasizes situated interactions, the importance of history, the role of both symbolic and material elements, and the study of cross-level processes and mechanisms. This two volume set, seeded by an ABC Network conference held in Banff, Alberta, CANADA in June 2012, provides a fresh set of papers by scholars at the cutting edge of research on institutional logics. As a whole, the papers provide many novel theoretical insights about institutional logics in action - focusing on their dynamics, complexity, and evolving relationship to actors as actors actively navigate their social worlds.

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This work brings together empirical research and thematic commentaries which chart out research directions for politically-inflected studies of organizational and institutional change. The chapters give practical voice to the theoretical questions and research designs of an emerging agenda for organization theory that engages questions about broader social structure and organizations with theory in cultural analysis, stratification, and entrepreneurship. Cases include historical studies of the evolution of the fire insurance industry in the 19th century, studies of the organizational vitality of contemporary evangelical Protestantism, the emergence of gay and lesbian identity organizations, challenges in the institutional structuring of the mutual fund industry the post-Soviet Russia, stratification and status organizing processes in entrepreneurial organizations, studies of social movements and organizations, both external to and inside of organizations.

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The papers included in the volume explore how mobilizing Boltanski and Thévenot’s EW framework helps address questions regarding the premises and dynamics of agreement and disagreement in coordinated action, both within and across organizations, and by so doing, help advance our understanding of organizational processes more generally. The book is organized into four sections, each with contributions that address one of the four core theoretical objectives around which the volume is structured (1) to clarify how individuals manage the contradictions and compromises inherent to organizational pluralism; (2) to look at organizations critically by unpacking the roles of rhetoric and justification in the practice of critique; (3) to reconsider valuation and evaluation in organizations; and (4) to push the boundaries of the EW framework. These four objectives provide a scaffolding that helps further embed the framework in our contemporary thinking about organizations.

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Since the mid-20th century, organizational theorists have increasingly distanced themselves from the study of core societal power centers and important policy issues of the day. This has been driven by a shift away from the study of organizations, politics, and society and towards a more narrow focus on instrumental exchange and performance. As a result, our field has become increasingly impotent as a critical voice and contributor to policy. For a contemporary example, witness our inability as a field to make sense of the recent U.S. mortgage meltdown and concomitant global financial crisis. It is not that economic and organizational sociologists have nothing to say. The problem is that while we have a great deal of knowledge about finance, the economy, entrepreneurship and corporations, we fail to address how the knowledge in our field can be used to contribute to important policy issues of the day. This book brings together some of the very top scholars in the world in economic and organizational sociology to address the recent global financial crisis debates and struggles around how to organize economies and societies around the world.

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The year 2012 was the 40th anniversary of the publication of Cohen, March, and Olsen's influential article "The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice", which offered a major new perspective on organizational decision making. To celebrate this enduring paradigm, its impact on our understanding of organizational decision making, and the broad streams of research it has influenced, this collection of papers provides a rich demonstration of the influence that the GCM is continuing to have on current research. The chapters make original contributions to research on organizational decision making by developing new models and theoretical extensions based on or inspired by prior garbage can work, by applying garbage can concepts and interpretations to new problems and novel settings. The book includes a paper from Cohen, March and Olsen, who record their memories of initial encounters with garbage can ideas of organizational decision making, impressions of their current condition, and some thoughts on convolutions they may experience in the years ahead.

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Since the mid-20th century, organizational theorists have increasingly distanced themselves from the study of core societal power centers and important policy issues of the day. This has been driven by a shift away from the study of organizations, politics, and society and towards a more narrow focus on instrumental exchange and performance. As a result, our field has become increasingly impotent as a critical voice and contributor to policy. For a contemporary example, witness our inability as a field to make sense of the recent U.S. mortgage meltdown and concomitant global financial crisis. It is not that economic and organizational sociologists have nothing to say. The problem is that while we have a great deal of knowledge about finance, the economy, entrepreneurship and corporations, we fail to address how the knowledge in our field can be used to contribute to important policy issues of the day. This double-volume brings together some of the very top scholars in the world in economic and organizational sociology to address the recent global financial crisis debates and struggles around how to organize economies and societies around the world.

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The concepts of practice and institution are of longstanding importance across the social sciences. This double-volume builds directly on the scholarship of Theodore Schatzki and Roger Friedland, to map out new theoretical and empirical directions at the interface between the practice and institutional “logics” literatures in organizational sociology, bridging the two perspectives. Volume 70 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations focuses on theoretical development including two major, and complementary, theoretical statements by Schatzki and Friedland that engage key ontological issues which lay the groundwork for how their approaches to practice and institutions can be generatively connected.

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This double volume presents a collection of 23 papers on how institutions matter to socio-economic life. The effort was seeded by the 2015 Alberta Institutions Conference, which brought together 108 participants from 14 countries and 51 different institutions. The resulting papers delve deeply into the practical impact an institutional approach enables, as well as how such research has the potential to influence policies relevant to critical institutional changes unfolding in the world today. In Volume 48A, the focus is on the micro foundations of institutional impacts. In Volume 48B, the focus is on the macro consequences of institutional arrangements. Looking across the two volumes, there are multiple theoretical, conceptual, methodological and practical points of convergence and divergence. Overall, the volumes highlight the many ways in which institutional processes and institutional researchers can contribute to our understanding of the micro foundations and macro consequences of institutions and their impacts on a wide variety of globally pressing issues, while also identifying a variety of fruitful directions for knowledge accumulation and development.

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How does organizations' embeddedness in broader social and cultural communities influence their behavior? And how has this changed with recent communication technology advances and globalization trends? In this volume, we consider how diverse types of communities influence organizations, as well as the associated benefit of developing a richer accounting for community processes in organizational theory. One goal of the volume is to move beyond the focus on social proximity and networks that has characterized existing work on communities. The papers in this volume consider specific topics that expand the definition of community beyond geography to include how transnational communities form and affect organizations' perception, the development of a community-form (C-form) organization as an important organizational architecture for understanding twenty-first century business, and how virtual communities influence key organizational processes. While there has been a recent revival of research into the effects of both geographic and non-geographic communities on organizational behaviors, this volume is the first effort to bring both perspectives together in order to aid in the identification of common and disparate mechanisms across multiple types of communities and how community as an organizing logic sits vis-a-vis other logics related to the market, corporation, family and religion.

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The first of two volumes bringing together researchers from an array of disciplines including sociology, organization theory, strategy, and organizational behaviour, Entrepreneurialism and Society: New Theoretical Perspectives addresses the question of how entrepreneurship has transformed from an organizing activity into an ideology that is changing society. The authors investigate the transformation of entrepreneurship into a social phenomenon, leading to an understanding of how entrepreneurship is shaping the acceptance of inequality, new employment relationships, changed understandings of social outcomes, altered policies, and social precarity. Examining the role of organizations in society, Entrepreneurialism and Society invigorates academic research by developing new perspectives on how entrepreneurs and their organizations shape our social world.

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Between 1970 and 2000, Stanford University enabled and supported a vigorous interdisciplinary community of organizations training, research, and theory building. Important breakthroughs occurred in theory development, and a couple of generations of doctoral and post-doctoral students received enhanced training and an extraordinary opportunity to build collegial networks. The model spread to other universities and work done at that time and place continues to exercise influence up to the present time. This volume both summarizes the contributions of the main paradigms that emerged at Stanford in those three decades, and describes the sociological conditions under which this remarkable, generative, environment came about. A series of chapters by some of the key contributors to these paradigms, who studied at Stanford between 1970 and 2000, are followed by brief comments on the conditions that fostered the development of these different paradigms, and on the development of the paradigms themselves.

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Differences in management behavior across organizations are attributed to differences in priorities and objectives or differences in the style and preferences of the individuals involved. This volume challenges this image by attending to the extra-organizational and extra-individual forces that shape and constrain how work is structured in organizations. The authors focus their attention on work within and between organizations and emphasize the ways in which the jobs are defined, the power and autonomy they engender, the opportunities that are afforded, and the constraints that are imposed, are continuously contested not only at the individual level, but also at a more aggregate and collective level. This volume is the product of an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars convened with generous support of the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council. It presents new theoretical and empirical papers that examine aspects of the changing nature of jobs and work in organizations from multiple perspectives and methodologies.

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The book examines ongoing dynamics within the organizational fields of health and higher education, with a focus on collective (public universities and hospitals) and individual (professionals) actors, structures, processes and institutional logics. The fact that universities and hospitals share a number of important characteristics, both being hybrid organizations, professional bureaucracies, and operating within highly institutionalised environments, they are also characterised by their distinctive features such as the importance attributed to scientific autonomy and prestige (universities) and the needs and expectations of users and funders (hospitals). The volume brings together two relatively distinct scholarly traditions within the social sciences, namely, scholars - sociologists, educationalists, economists, political scientists and public administration researchers, etc. - involved with the study of change dynamics within the fields of health care and higher education in Europe and beyond. The authors resort to a variety of theoretical and conceptual perspectives emanating from the studies of organizational fields more generally and neo-institutionalism in particular.

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What is the relationship between philosophy and organization theory (OT)? While at first glance there might appear to be little, a closer look reveals a rich pattern of connections. More than any other type of human inquiry, philosophy helps make us self-aware of critical assumptions we tacitly incorporate in our organizational theorizing; it creates a deeper awareness of the 'unconscious metaphysics' underpinning our efforts to understand organizations. This volume includes papers that explore connections between several streams in philosophy and OT. As the titles of the papers suggest, most authors write about a particular philosopher or group of philosophers that make up a distinct school of thought, summarize important aspects of his/their work, and tease out the implications for OT. The central question authors explore is: 'what does a particular philosophy contribute to OT?' Either addressing this question in historical or exploratory terms, or in a combination of both, the end result is similar: particular philosophical issues, properly explained, are discussed in relation to important questions in OT.

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The concepts of practice and institution are of longstanding importance across the social sciences. This double-volume builds directly on the scholarship of Theodore Schatzki and Roger Friedland, to map out new theoretical and empirical directions at the interface between the practice and institutional “logics” literatures in organizational sociology, bridging the two perspectives. Volume 71 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations highlights a multitude of empirical directions suggesting particularly intriguing focal points for the emergent research agenda. The enclosed chapters grapple with issues related to the relationship of the symbolic and material aspects of culture and draw on a variety of empirical contexts (e.g. Islamic banking, Chinese manufacturing, and social innovation) to suggest different ways in which we might study social change at the interface of practice and institution.

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Universities are under pressure. All over the world, their resource environment is evolving, demands for accountability have increased, and competition has become more intense. At the same time, emerging countries have become more important in the global system, demographic shifts are changing educational needs, and new technologies threaten, or promise, to disrupt higher education. This volume includes cutting-edge research on the causes and consequences of such pressures on universities as organizations, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. It provides an empirical overview of pressures on universities in the Western world, and insight into what globalization means for universities and also looks at specific changes in the university environment and how organizations have responded. The volume examines changes internal to the university that have followed these pressures, from the evolving role of unions to new pathways followed by students and finally, asks about the future of the university as a public good in light of a transformation of student roles and university identities.

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The second of two volumes bringing together researchers from an array of disciplines including sociology, organization theory, strategy, and organizational behaviour, Entrepreneurialism and Society: Consequences and Meanings addresses the question of how entrepreneurship has transformed from an organizing activity into an ideology that is changing society. The authors investigate how the transformed meanings of entrepreneurship are causal in new social phenomenon such as organizational misconduct and driving inequality, but also how it may offer a promise to resolve those issues. Examining into the role of organizations in society, Entrepreneurialism and Society invigorates academic research by developing new perspectives on how entrepreneurs and their organizations shape our social world.

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