Bernard Leca

How Actors Change Institutions: Towards a Theory of Institutional Entrepreneurship

As well as review the literature on the notion of institutional entrepreneurship introduced by Paul DiMaggio in 1988, we propose a model of the process of institutional entrepreneurship. We first present theoretical and definitional issues associated with the concept and propose a conceptual account of institutional entrepreneurship that helps to accommodate them. We then present the different phases of the process of institutional entrepreneurship from the emergence of institutional entrepreneurs to their implementation of change. Finally, we highlight future directions for research on institutional entrepreneurship, and conclude with a discussion of its role in strengthening institutional theory as well as, more broadly, the field of organization studies.

Institutional work – Refocusing institutional studies of organization

In this paper, we discuss an alternative focus for institutional studies of organization - the study of institutional work. Research on institutional work examines the practices of individual and collective actors aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions. Our focus in this paper is on the distinctiveness of institutional work as a field of study and the potential it provides for the examination of new questions. We argue that research on institutional work can contribute to bringing the individual back into institutional theory, help to re-examine the relationship between agency and institutions, and provide a bridge between critical and institutional views of organization.

A critical realist approach to institutional entrepreneurship

Recent works in institutional analysis have challenged the traditional deterministic view, whereby institutional pressures explain actors’ actions and behaviours, and have called for the restoration of agency to this analysis. This presents institutional analysis with a major challenge: how to consider simultaneously the influence of both actors’ actions and the structures in which they are embedded, without conflating them? This issue is especially crucial when trying to analyse institutional entrepreneurs’ strategies. In this paper, we outline a non-conflating model of institutional entrepreneurship, by drawing on critical realism. We illustrate this model by mean of an illustrative case study.

Measuring the Unmeasured: An Institutional Entrepreneur Strategy in an Emerging Industry

The organizational literature on emerging industries has emphasized the need for institutional entrepreneurs - actors who give the new activity legitimacy and determine its patterns of behaviour. However, little empirical research has been carried out on the strategies that institutional entrepreneurs employ in order to achieve legitimacy for their activity. In this article, we suggest that an institutional entrepreneur can use the development of measurement tools as a strategy to develop its own legitimacy and power. By looking at a French entrepreneurial company’s development of tools to measure corporate social performance, we analyse how measurement tools influence the legitimacy of an industry and the systemic power within it. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for research into measurement tools in the areas of management or business and society.

Institutional Work: Current Research, New Directions and Overlooked Issues

The study of institutional work has emerged as a dynamic research domain within organization studies. In this essay, we situate the papers published in the Special Issue. We first review the evolution of institutional work as a scholarly conversation within organization studies. We then introduce the papers in the Special Issue, focusing in particular on where they fit into the current scholarly conversation and how they move us in important new directions. Finally, we discuss a set of neglected issues that deserve further attention.

Analysing, Accounting for and Unmasking Domination: On Our Role as Scholars of Practice, Practitioners of Social Science and Public Intellectuals

Over the last 30 years, there has been an increasing interest in organizational analysis for the work of Pierre Bourdieu. However, the consequent body of literature often lacks an integrated comprehension of Bourdieusian theory and therefore fails to fully exploit its potentialities. In this essay, we argue for a more systematic engagement with the work of Bourdieu by organizational scholars and emphasize the opportunity to develop cumulative research on domination within and between organizations. The means by which systems of domination are reproduced without conscious intention by agents is a central issue for Bourdieu and arguably the primary reason for the development of his theoretical framework. It is thus through the study of domination that one can acquire a panoramic vision of Bourdieusian concepts that have been otherwise too often tackled separately. Moreover, domination is also a key entry to the understanding of how social scientists produce their own knowledge and of their role as members of society. We emphasize that as scholars, we have a moral responsibility to be reflexive about our practice and the social worlds we study in order to ultimately use the knowledge we produce to inform and direct social progress.

Building Critical Performativity Engines for deprived communities: : The construction of popular cooperative incubators in Brazil

Although worker cooperatives offer an organizational model that critical management scholars could adopt to demonstrate the utility of their normative ideals, little is known about how academia can contribute to the creation of worker cooperatives. Building on the concept of performativity and the case of the Technological Incubators for Popular Cooperatives in Brazil, we provide an account of constructing incubators for worker cooperatives across multiple universities. Our study uncovers the challenges that scholars face in performing the model of worker cooperatives by cognitively embedding actors within both economic and cooperative principles through teaching. Our results clarify the role of feedback loops, knowledge circulation, and the building of ‘chains of translation’ in the concrete manufacturing of worker cooperatives, and we show how universities can help develop a multilevel, flexible, and complex support network that enhances the performativity of the worker cooperative model. We advance the concept of a ‘critical performativity engine’ to describe the process whereby the first method for incubating cooperatives was developed and then translated across settings.

Institutional Resilience in Extreme Operating Environments The Role of Institutional Work

This study shows how institutional work contributes to institutional resilience in extreme operating environments (EOEs). The authors draw from a longitudinal analysis of the operations of Desjardins International Development (DID), a French Canadian nongovernmental organization (NGO) that, both before and after the major earthquake of 2010, supported the implementation of cooperative banking in Haiti. Building on a unique access to DID’s internal documents as well as on 49 interviews with DID employees, the authors highlight the ways in which political, technical, and cultural forms of institutional work triggered the emergence of social capital, which in turn supported the rise of new forms of institutional work that enabled institutional resilience. The results show how organizational activities focused on shaping institutions may have unintended effects that enable institutional resilience in EOEs, and demonstrate how the accumulation of institutional work by an organization contributes to the enhancement of its social capital.

Grandeur et décadence du salon de Paris: une étude du processus de désinstitutionnalisation d'un évènement configurateur de champs dans les activités culturelles

This article examines the deinstitutionalization of a Field Configuring Event (FCE) and the consequences of this deinstitutionalization for an organizational field. To this end, we carried out a historiographical study of the deinstitutionalization of the Paris Salon. This pivotal FCE was the central event of the Beaux-Arts field in France for over two centuries before its progressive decline at the end of the 19th Century. From a theoretical point of view, our results show that the deinstitutionalization process of FCEs is the result of the interaction and dynamics of several factors, notably, the internal contradictions of the FCE, the emergence of alternatives resulting from institutional developments, and the constitution of a critical mass, followed by the development of institutional pressures that encourage the abandonment of the FCE. This study also enables us to analyze the impact of an FCE’s decline on the structure, distribution and nature of power, and especially on temporality within a field. Finally, it contributes to the study of the deinstitutionalization process in general. From a managerial point of view, this study suggests that promoters must organize themselves to integrate innovation, in order to avoid the decline of the FCE.

Justification, Evaluation and Critique in the Study of Organizations: An Introduction to the Volume

This volume presents state-of-the-art research and thinking on the analysis of justification, evaluation and critique in organizations, as inspired by the foundational ideas of French Pragmatist Sociology’s economies of worth (EW) framework. In this introduction, we begin by underlining the EW framework’s importance in sociology and social theory more generally and discuss its relative neglect within organizational theory, at least until now. We then present an overview of the framework’s intellectual roots, and for those who are new to this particular theoretical domain, offer a brief introduction to the theory’s main concepts and core assumptions. This we follow with an overview of the contributions included in this volume. We conclude by highlighting the EW framework’s important yet largely untapped potential for advancing our understanding of organizations more broadly. Collectively, the contributions in this volume help demonstrate the potential of the EW framework to (1) advance current understanding of organizational processes by unpacking justification dynamics at the individual level of analysis, (2) refresh critical perspectives in organization theory by providing them with pragmatic foundations, (3) expand and develop the study of valuation and evaluation in organizations by reconsidering the notion of worth, and finally (4) push the boundaries of the framework itself by questioning and fine tuning some of its core assumptions. Taken as a whole, this volume not only carves a path for a deeper embedding of the EW approach into contemporary thinking about organizations, it also invites readers to refine and expand it by confronting it with a wider range of diverse empirical contexts of interest to organizational scholars.