Amélie Boutinot

Taking Stock of Institutional Complexity: Anchoring A Pool of Institutional Logics into the Interinstitutional System with a Descendent Hierarchical Analysis

Institutional pluralism is an intriguing phenomenon for institutional scholars. How the balance among logics evolves within a field and what kind of trajectories a set of logics may experience over a long-term period remain unclear. In particular, extant literature tends too often to downplay institutional complexity by focusing on two dominant logics, and to ignore modes of interaction among logics other than competition. In order to address these issues, we offer a novel methodology for measuring institutional complexity – multiple institutional logics and their change. In particular, we highlight the utility of descendent hierarchical classification models, and demonstrate their relevance by analyzing articles published in a leading French trade journal over more than 100 years to study logics related to workplace in the construction industry. We identify a pool of six field-structuring logics over a period of one century; they reveal the composite nature of such logics, which we characterize as combining several higher institutional orders. Additionally, our results bring to light new mechanisms that can explain the composition of institutional logics.

Reputational Spillovers: Evidence from French Architecture

While the notion of reputation has attracted much scholarly interest, few studies have addressed the strategic issue of reputational multiplicity and managing the interactions among different types of reputations. We suggest that an organization can have several stakeholder-specific reputations—peer, market, and expert—and that reputational spillover effects (the continued influence of one reputation on another) matter at the organizational level. We test reputational spillovers on 42 French architecture companies over a period of 30 years. Our results show that over time, the three reputations interact with each other, generating positive spillovers, with the exception of market and expert reputations. We contribute by explaining how interconnected organizational reputations among different stakeholders can interact over time, how companies can strategically manage reputational spillovers, and how such spillovers influence organizations in creative and professional industries.

Exploring the Links between Reputation and Fame: Evidence from French Contemporary Architecture

Why are some organizations famous? We argue that fame results from a conjunction of several audience-specific reputations. Expert reputation (i.e. reputation among members of a knowledgeable group, such as a cultural elite or critics) acts as a mediator for achieving fame for organizations held in high esteem by their peers and clients. Based on a unique database of 103 architectural companies in France, our analysis uses structural equation modelling (SEM) combined with mediation effects to reveal that expert reputation can lead to fame by mediating peer and client reputations. We contribute to the literature by explaining why only some organizations already reputed among peers and clients are famous in society at large.

Governing workplace safety through apparatuses: A historical study of the French construction industry in the 20th century

Critical management studies have largely failed to offer a comprehensive understanding of the devising and implementation of workplace-safety policies and of the complex power arrangements these may imply. By primarily studying forms of control in relative isolation, these studies have instead produced various puzzles, namely, the persistence of a disciplinary treatment of workplace safety within the current neo-liberal era and the paucity of resistance to this. Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of apparatus and related analytical framework, we propose to remedy this through analysing the successive arrangements governing workplace accidents in the French construction industry during the 20th century. We evidence three successive regimes of control in which distinct apparatuses interact in various ways across different settings. Our study testifies to the composite nature of regimes of control governing workplace safety, and shows how it may impinge upon power relations, ultimately allowing more relevant struggles for a safer workplace to be envisaged. Additionally, by proposing an operationalization of the so-far-overlooked concept of apparatus, our study elaborates on the relevance of the governmentalist tradition for critical management studies.

The Role of Wikipedia on Corporate E-Reputation: Evidence from French Companies

Abstract This study complements previous research on e-reputation by exploring how social media influence corporate e-reputation by extending the circle of stakeholders who can influence, even indirectly, a company’s e-reputation. We also suggest a new way of measuring corporate e-reputation and its determinants. We quantitatively analyze the effect of Wikipedia and its key features on the corporate e-reputation of companies that are listed on the French stock market SBF 120®. Our results show that Wikipedia has an impact on corporate e-reputation across several dimensions, including the articles’ quality and reputation, the latter resulting from a combination of the authors’ rigor and diversity, and the immediacy of information provision.