Julien Jourdan

Institutional Logics as Strategic Resources

We propose that institutional logics are resources organizations use to leverage their strategic choices. We argue that firms with an awareness of multiple available logics, expressed by a larger stock of competences and a broader industrial scope are more likely to add an institutional logic to their repertoire and to become purist in this new logic. We also hypothesize that a favorable opportunity set as expressed by status leads high and low status firms to add a logic but not to focus exclusively on this new logic. We examine our hypotheses in the French industrial design industry from 1989 to 2003 in which a managerialist logic emerged and prevailed along with the pre-existing institutional logics of modernism and formalism. Our findings contribute to theory on the relationship between organizations’ strategy and institutional change and partially address the paradox of why high-status actors play a key role in triggering institutional change when such change is likely to undermine the very basis of their social position and advantage

The Price of Admission: Organizational Deference as Strategic Behavior

Why would market organizations engage in symbolic and material acts conveying appreciation and respect to other organizations that confirm their inferior position in an established hierarchy? The authors argue that deference is the price outsider organizations pay to pass categorical and symbolic boundaries and gain acceptance in contexts where insiders regard them as impure. Because not all organizations can or are willing to pay the price, deference varies according to positional, dispositional, and interactional characteristics. The authors examine and find support for the view of organizational deference as strategic behavior using empirical evidence on market finance organizations investing in film production in France over two decades. The analysis expands research on nonconflictual interactions and symbolic boundaries in market settings.