Mia Raynard

Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses

Organizations face institutional complexity whenever they confront incompatible prescriptions from multiple institutional logics. Our interest is in how plural institutional logics, refracted through field-level structures and processes, are experienced within organizations and how organizations respond to such complexity. We draw on a variety of cognate literatures to discuss the field-level structural characteristics and organizational attributes that shape institutional complexity. We then explore the repertoire of strategies and structures that organizations deploy to cope with multiple, competing demands. The analytical framework developed herein is presented to guide future scholarship in the systematic analysis of institutional complexity. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research.

Concealing or Revealing the Family? Corporate Brand Identity Strategies in Family Firms

Although scholars contend that family and corporate heritage can be strategically deployed to gain a competitive advantage, few studies have examined the specific ways in which family firms leverage on these distinctive attributes in their marketing activities. The authors’ examination of a sample of official corporate websites reveals that family firms adopt different branding strategies to communicate the familial component of their businesses. The authors labeled these strategic variations as family preservation, family enrichment, and family subordination. This study advances extant research by exploring the various family-based branding strategies that family firms can draw on to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Institutional Strategies in Emerging Markets

AbstractWe review and integrate a wide range of literature that has examined the strategies by which organizations navigate institutionally diverse settings and capture rents outside of the marketplace. We synthesize this body of research under the umbrella term institutional strategies, which we define as the comprehensive set of plans and actions directed at leveraging and shaping socio-political and cultural institutions to obtain or retain competitive advantage. Our review of institutional strategies is focused on emerging market contexts, settings that are characterized by weak capital market and regulatory infrastructures and fast-paced turbulent change. Under such challenging conditions, strategies aimed at shaping the institutional environment may be especially critical to an organizations performance and long-term survival. Our review reveals that organizations engage in three specific and identifiable sets of institutional strategies, which we term relational, infrastructure-building, and socio...

Legacies of Logics: Sources of Community Variation in CSR Implementation in China

This paper explores how legacies of past logics spawn variation in the institutional landscapes of different geographic regions in China. Of particular interest is how this variation influences the ways that actors interpret and respond to broader societal and world society pressures. Employing a cross-level comparative research design, we examine the enduring legacies of previous state logics, which have given rise to distinctive material and symbolic resource environments in different regional communities across China. To the extent that institutional contexts direct the attention of actors toward particular environmental stimuli and provide the symbolic and material resources to respond, a better understanding of how contexts differ provides more accurate causal explanations of the variability of organizational behavior. We explore this phenomenon in the context of recent government-mandated corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in China. Our examination of public and private CSR initiatives, along with the CSR activities of a sample of 714 listed Chinese companies, suggests that legacies from past state logics become embedded in local institutional infrastructures and shape how abstract, multifaceted CSR initiatives are interpreted and implemented.

Deconstructing complexity: Configurations of institutional complexity and structural hybridity

This article unpacks the notion of institutional complexity and highlights the distinct sets of challenges confronting hybrid structural arrangements. The framework identifies three factors that contribute to the experience of complexity—namely, the extent to which the prescriptive demands of logics are incompatible, whether there is a settled or widely accepted prioritization of logics within the field, and the degree to which the jurisdictions of the logics overlap. The central thesis is that these “components” of complexity variously combine to produce four distinct institutional landscapes, each with differing implications for the challenges organizations face and for how they might respond. The article explores the situational relevance of an array of hybridizing responses and discusses their implications for organizational legitimacy and performance. It concludes by specifying the boundary conditions of the framework and highlighting fruitful directions for future scholarship.

Deconstructing Complexity: How Organizations Cope with Multiple Institutional Logics

We present a framework that deconstructs institutional complexity and articulates the range of hybrid arrangements that organizations adopt to cope with multiple institutional demands. The framewor...

Institutional Imprints: The Enduring Effects of Past Political Regimes on CSR in China (WITHDRAWN)

This study explores how Chinese organizations are conceptualizing and responding to recent corporate social responsibility initiatives. While an established body of research has been devoted to unpacking the economic factors that motivate CSR activities, comparatively few studies have examined how legacies of past institutional arrangements may influence the ways that firms respond to CSR pressures. This oversight is surprising given that it is widely acknowledged that “socially responsible behavior may mean different things in different places to different people and at different times” (Campbell, 2007: 950). Employing a mixed-method research design that relies heavily on historical research, I attempt to shed some light on the relationship between past political imprints and contemporary variations in the ways that organizations are conceptualizing and responding to CSR pressures. The study contributes to theories of imprinting by drawing attention to how contextual conditions within which imprints are ...