Julie Battilana

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.

Agency and Institutions: The Enabling Role of Individuals’ Social Position

Although early neo-institutional studies did not explicitly tackle the issue of agency, more recent studies about institutional entrepreneurship have brought it to the forefront. Institutional entrepreneur-ship has been presented as a promising way to account for institutional change endogenously. However, this notion faces the paradox of embedded agency. To overcome this paradox, it is necessary to explain under what conditions actors are enabled to act as institutional entrepreneurs. Some neo-institutional theorists have already addressed this issue. Their studies focus mainly on the organizational and organizational field levels of analysis. In this paper, I aim to complement their work by examining under what conditions individuals are more likely to engage in institutional entrepreneurship. By doing so, I take into account the individual level of analysis that neo-institutional theorists often tend to neglect. Relying on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of fields, I propose that individuals’ social position is a key variable in understanding how they are enabled to act as institutional entrepreneurs despite institutional pressures.

Advancing Research on Hybrid Organizing – Insights from the Study of Social Enterprises

AbstractHybrid organizations that combine multiple organizational forms deviate from socially legitimate templates for organizing, and thus experience unique organizing challenges. In this paper, we introduce and develop the concept of hybrid organizing, which we define as the activities, structures, processes and meanings by which organizations make sense of and combine multiple organizational forms. We propose that social enterprises that combine the organizational forms of both business and charity at their cores are an ideal type of hybrid organization, making social enterprise an attractive setting to study hybrid organizing. Based on a literature review of organizational research on social enterprise and on our own research in this domain, we develop five dimensions of hybrid organizing and related opportunities for future research. We conclude by discussing how insights from the study of hybrid organizing in social enterprises may contribute to organization theory.

Importation as Innovation: Transposing managerial practices across fields

This article examines transposition as a source of innovation. Transposition is the act of applying a practice from one social context to another.We trace how and why three individuals transposed the American practice of diversity management into Denmark in 2002. The analysis outlines how they came up with the idea to transpose diversity management to Denmark and what motivated them to do so. Based on our analysis, we propose an institutionalist account of innovation in which transposition across fields characterized by different dominant institutional logics plays a prominent role.We identify a number of facilitating conditions for such transposition to occur and we explain how it can subsequently lead to innovation.

The embeddedness of social entrepreneurship: Understanding variation across local communities

Social enterprise organizations (SEOs) arise from entrepreneurial activities with the aim to achieve social goals. SEOs have been identified as alternative and/or complementary to the actions of governments and international organizations to address poverty and poverty-related social needs. Using a number of illustrative cases, we explore how variation of local institutional mechanisms shapes the local “face of poverty” in different communities and how this relates to variations in the emergence and strategic orientations of SEOs. We develop a model of the productive opportunity space for SEOs as a basis and an inspiration for further scholarly inquiry.

Overcoming Resistance to Organizational Change: Strong Ties and Affective Cooptation

We propose a relational theory of how change agents in organizations use the strength of ties in their network to overcome resistance to change. We argue that strong ties to potentially influential organization members who are ambivalent about a change fence-sitters provide the change agent with an affective basis to coopt them. This cooptation increases the probability that the organization will adopt the change. By contrast, strong ties to potentially influential organization members who disapprove of a change outright resistors are an effective means of affective cooptation only when a change diverges little from institutionalized practices. With more divergent changes, the advantages of strong ties to resistors accruing to the change agent are weaker, and may turn into liabilities that reduce the likelihood of change adoption. Analyses of longitudinal data from 68 multimethod case studies of organizational change initiatives conducted at the National Health Service in the United Kingdom support these predictions and advance a relational view of organizational change in which social networks operate as tools of political influence through affective mechanisms. This paper was accepted by Jesper Sorensen, organizations.

The Circulation of Ideas across Academic Communities: When locals re-import exported ideas

The circulation of ideas across academic communities is central to academic pursuits and has attracted much past scholarly attention. As North American-based scholars with European ties, we decided to examine the impact of Organization Studies in North American academia with the objective of understanding what, if anything, makes some Organization Studies articles more likely to have impact in North America than others. To set the stage for better understanding the role of Organization Studies in this academic community, we first present the key characteristics of North American academia. Secondly, relying on archival data spanning the first 29 years of Organization Studies (1980 to 2008, inclusive), we identify an apparent dynamic of select re-importation of exported ideas. Put otherwise, top North American journals tend to re-import ideas authored (and exported) by select North American scholars in Organizations Studies. Thirdly, we discuss the implications of this process on the field of organization studies and on the circulation of ideas across academic communities.

Building an Infrastructure for Empirical Research on Social Enterprise: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract Purpose Despite the increase in empirical studies of social enterprise in management and organization research, the lack of a cohesive knowledge base in this area is concerning. In this chapter, we propose that the underdevelopment of the attendant research infrastructure is an important, but oft-overlooked, barrier to the development of this body of empirical research. Design/methodology We explore this proposition through a review of 55 empirical studies of social enterprises published in the last fifteen years, in which we examine the mix and trajectory of research methods used and the research infrastructure on which these studies depend. Findings We find that empirical research has used social enterprise largely as a context for theory development, rather than deductively testing, and thus building upon, existing theories. The latter pattern is due largely to the absence of two key dimensions of infrastructure: well-defined samples, and consistent, operational measures of social enterprise success. Finally, we identify present trends along both dimensions that contribute to changing the research infrastructure for empirical social enterprise research. Originality/value Our analysis highlights the critical need for research infrastructure to advance empirical research on social enterprise. From this perspective, research infrastructure-building provides an important opportunity for researchers interested in social enterprise and others interested in enabling high-quality empirical research in this setting.

Blurring the Boundaries: The Interplay of Gender and Local Communities in the Commercialization of Social Ventures

This paper examines the critical role of gender in the commercialization of social ventures. We argue that cultural beliefs about what is perceived to be appropriate work for each gender influence how founders of social ventures incorporate commercial activity into their ventures. Specifically, we argue and show that although cultural beliefs that disassociate women from commercial activity may result in female social venture founders being less likely to use commercial activity than their male counterparts, these effects are moderated by cultural beliefs about gender and commercial activity within founders’ local communities. The presence of female business owners in the same community mitigates the role of founders’ gender on the use of commercial activity. We examine these issues through a novel sample of 584 social ventures in the United States. We constructively replicate and extend these findings with a supplemental analysis of a second sample, the full population of new nonprofit organizations foun...

New Venture Milestones and the First Female Board Member

We explore the antecedents of the addition of the first woman to the boards of directors of entrepreneurial ventures. Building on research on resource dependency, we propose that new ventures are m...