Marc Ventresca

The Embeddedness of Organizations: Dialogue & Directions

We review research on organizations to highlight prevailing and emerging conceptions for embeddedness. An integrated framework that considers the sources, mechanisms, outcomes, and strategic implications of embeddedness is presented. Also, promising research directions for embeddedness approaches, including cross-level issues (such as collective cognition and nesting), as well as issues related to temporality, networks, and methodology are identified.

Organizations, Policy, and the Natural Environment: Institutional and Strategic Perspectives.

As institutional approaches have become established within organizational analysis, critics from within and without have consistently pointed to an area of weakness: the lack of attention to agency and conflict. With Organizations, Policy, and the Natural Environment, Hoffman and Ventresca have marshaled an effective response to this chronic complaint. Through a conference that was the basis for this important edited volume, these two organizers brought together institutional researchers with experts from the field of strategy. The encounter was disciplined by a clear empirical focus on a topic that would seem to be friendly terrain to institutional arguments: environmental policy. Evidence of imitation driven by uncertainty, conformity in response to regulation, and decoupling of policy from practice should all be expected here, given the combination of strong political and moral demands for environmental protection and a frequent lack of effective technologies and economic incentives. In a series of rich empirical papers, however, these expectations are both confirmed and confounded.This book brings together emerging perspectives from organization theory and management, environmental sociology, international regime studies, and the social studies of science and technology to provide a starting point for discipline-based studies of environmental policy and corporate environmental behavior. Reflecting the books theoretical and empirical focus, the audience is two-fold: organizational scholars working within the institutional tradition, and environmental scholars interested in management and policy. Together this mix forms a creative synthesis for both sets of readers, analyzing how environmental policy and organizational practices are shaped, spread and contested.

The New Structuralism in Organizational Theory

Over the past decade, a new structuralism has begun to emerge in organizational theory. This exciting new research program draws inspiration from the social structural tradition in sociology, but extends that tradition by more broadly conceptualizing social structure as comprised of broader cultural rules and meaning systems as well as material resources—revealing the subtleties of both overt and covert power. Building on the insights of Bourdieu and related work in social theory and cultural sociology, new structuralist empirical research focuses on concrete manifestations of culture in everyday practice and has pioneered the measurement of cultural aspects of social structure using a variety of relational methods. In this essay, we revisit mid-century social structural approaches to organizations, review the development of organization theory as a management subfield that increasingly focused on instrumental exchange, highlight key aspects of the new structuralism in organizational theory, and discuss promising new research directions.

The Institutional Framing of Policy Debates: Economics Versus the Environment

By framing the economics versus environment debate as a mixed-motive situation, opportunities become visible that allow greater benefits to all interests in the debate. Yet, social, cultural, and institutional arrangements frame how these interests see these opportunities, creating a barrier to mixed-motive analyses. In this article, the authors use an institutional perspective to analyze how the economics versue environment debate emerges from institutions as presently structured. They present an analysis of its present framing based on three aspects of institutions—regulative, normative, and cognitive—and consider the prescriptive implications they expose at the managerial and organizational level of action. The authors conclude with an analysis of possible solutions to overcome them.

Situating Organizational Action: The Relational Sociology of Organizations

This paper advances a relational sociology of organization that seeks to address concerns over how organizational action is understood and situated. The approach outlined here is one which takes ontology seriously and requires transparency and consistency of position. It aims at causal explanation over description and/or prediction and seeks to avoid pure voluntarism or structural determinism in such explanation. We advocate relational analysis that recognizes and engages with connections within and across organization and with wider contexts. We develop this argument by briefly reviewing three promising approaches: relational pragmatism, the social theorizing of Bourdieu and critical realism, highlighting their ontological foundations, some similarities and differences and surfacing some methodological issues. Our purpose is to encourage analysis that explores the connections within and between perspectives and theoretical positions. We conclude that the development of the field of organization theory will benefit from self conscious and reflexive engagement and debate both within and across our various research positions and traditions only if such debates are conducted on the basis of holistic evaluations and interpretations that recognize (and value) difference.

How Institutions Form Loose Coupling as Mechanism in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy

This article uses a mid-century text to reengage a late-1970s concept to answer a new century question. The authors return to Alvin Gouldner’s classic (1954) study Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy to reexamine the “coupling” concept in contemporary institutionalism in a way that engages the following question: How do new institutional forms emerge? Based on Gouldner’s detailed observations of work in a gypsum mine, the authors argue that coupling processes are key mechanisms in the emergence of institutional forms. Examining coupling as a dynamic process and activity helps us to understand how the institution of bureaucracy emerged in the gypsum mine and interacted with previous social orders of authority and control. Gouldner’s account of coupling at the mine is a story of formal and informal power struggles and active conflict over meaning, bringing the process of local institutional formation into sharp relief.

Contested Industry Dynamics

Research on legitimacy in studies of organizations, institutions, and industries is marked by a proliferation of terms and categories and often confounds issues of evaluation, contestation, and legality, particularly in addressing industries and legitimacy. We connect an institutional conception of societal logics with standard conceptions of industry belief systems to present a framework and research strategy for examining the multilevel enactment of belief systems and discursive struggles central to the legitimacy dynamics of industries. We illustrate this framework with evidence from the U.S. tobacco and gambling industries to identify and interpret recurring legitimacy struggles. As such, we offer an example of how to better understand legitimacy issues by expanding the levels through which we examine processes of debate and evaluation.

Global Institutions and Networks Contingent Change in the Structure of World Trade Advantage, 1965-1980

The authors motivate social capital arguments at the world-system level through the analysis of world-trade flows and nation status, 1965 to 1980, with specific attention to contextual changes in global trade and stratified effects on participation in trade within it. They generate measures of structural autonomy based on world-trade data from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Index and incorporate these measures into robust regression models of the determinants of nation status. The authors find support for the overall positive effects of structural autonomy on nation status in 1965 and 1970 but find that these effects dissipate by 1980. They then use quantile regressions to find that only high-status countries experience significant returns on structural autonomy in any of the 3 observation years. The authors combine network and institutional perspectives on trade to argue that changes in the context of world trade between 1965 and 1980 affect the benefits that social capital can reap and for whom.

THE CREATION AND DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

In this study, we review the literature on the creation and diffusion of innovation in the private sectors (industry and services) in developing countries. In particular, we collect evidence on what are the barriers to innovation creation and diffusion and the channels of innovation diffusion to and within developing countries. We find that innovation in developing countries is about creation or adoption of new ideas and technologies; but the capacity for innovation is embedded in and constituted by dynamics between geographical, socio-economic, political and legal subsystems. We contextualize the findings from the review in the current theoretical framework of diffusion of innovations, and we emphasize how the institutional context typical of developing countries impacts the diffusion itself.

The Emerging Market for Frugal Innovation: Fad, Fashion, or Fit?

There is growing interest among both private and public sectors to serve the underserved in emerging or developing countries leading to, what we call the market for frugal innovation. This paper is divided into two parts. First, we discuss the rhetoric surrounding frugal innovation and attempt to understand the discourse surrounding it as fad, fashion, or fit. Second, we seek to map the emergence of this market by suggesting drivers and the making of a social movement involving different actors pursuing both contentious and complementary approaches to achieve the same outcome, i.e. one of creating value for underserved populations. An understanding of how the rhetoric and market for frugal innovation has emerged will be useful in opening a research agenda. Consequently we cover opportunities and challenges to growth of the market as well as draw implications to academic theory and practice.