Nina Granqvist

Temporary Organizing and Institutional Change

The relationship between the temporary and the permanent is a central issue in studies of temporary organizing. Recent research highlights that projects, as key forms of temporary organizations, both constitute and are constituted by their wider institutional contexts. However, there is still a lack of more detailed understanding of the actors and their activities through which projects produce and advance institutional change. To address this issue, we draw on extensive fieldwork to study the activities that constitute establishment of the Innovation University. This endeavour gained the status of a spearhead project and advanced nationwide university reform in one northern European country. Our central contribution is two-fold. We sediment a more robust approach to institutions within project literature by defining them as widely shared beliefs and practices that actors enact and (re)produce through their various activities. On this basis, we develop a model of an institutional project for regulative change and show that it is more parallel and multiplex and less sequential in nature than existing studies might convey. Our model also creates new understanding of the role of the ‘lock-ins’ shaped by projects to promote regulative change and casts light on the temporal linkages and temporal boundary objects in institutional projects. In closing, we discuss several future avenues for research in both project literature and institutional theory.

Great Expectations: Discourse and Affect During Field Emergence

Abstract Studies show that discourses are important in legitimating emerging fields. However, we still lack understanding of how potential participants’ interpretations of discourses shape their involvement in emerging fields – particularly when the field’s definition is ambiguous. Drawing on an in-depth study of the emerging nanotechnology field we show that individuals’ affective responses to discourses play an important role in their decisions to participate. We find that discourse, expectations, affective responses, and participation in emerging fields are mutually constituted, and develop a model that shows these interconnections. Theoretically, our study expands understandings of discourse and field emergence by incorporating affect.

The International Expansion of an Art Museum: Guggenheim’s Global–Local Contexts

During the past decades, art museums have begun to open foreign outposts. Museums provide an interesting context to study how institutional complexity shapes internationalization. Although museums encounter strikingly similar challenges to multinational enterprises, they have largely been overlooked in international business research. Inspired by a narrative approach, we undertake a qualitative study of the internationalization of the Guggenheim Foundation. Examining the interplay between different narratives, we uncover a non-linear, irregular process of internationalization with “experimental” market entries. Our analysis shows how the Foundation’s past international market entries and heritage shaped its subsequent moves, and how its internationalization process was characterized by unpredictability and complex political negotiations where non-business actors had a powerful voice. We expand recent theorizing on non-profits as area of future research.

Call for papers for a special issue on culture, innovation and entrepreneurship

Deadline: 15 October 2017 While the study of innovation and entrepreneurship is a diverse, multi-disciplinary endeavor, the role of culture is often neglected or under-emphasized (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). However, building on the cultural turn across the social sciences and humanities (Weber & Dacin, 2011; Friedland & Mohr, 2004), there has been a recent flowering of conversations on how culture shapes innovation and entrepreneurship. This work has drawn on various cultural theories and concepts including boundaries, logics, schemas, scripts, and values (e.g., Gehman, Treviño, & Garud, 2013; Perkmann & Spicer, 2014; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012; Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010), narratives, vocabularies, discourse and framing (e.g., Bartel & Garud, 2009; Cornelissen & Werner, 2014; Dalpiaz, Tracey, & Phillips, 2014; Grodal & Granqvist, 2014; Kahl & Grodal, 2016; Zilber, 2007), identity, categories, and practices (e.g., Durand, Granqvist, & Tyllström, 2017; Kennedy & Fiss, 2013; Lounsbury & Crumley, 2007; Navis & Glynn, 2010). While these recent advances are encouraging, the work has been scattered and these various contributions are yet to be synthesized into a more coherent and cumulative research program. In this Special Issue of Innovation: Organization & Management, we therefore aim to further advance this agenda and to this end seek empirical and theoretical papers that highlight how culture shapes innovative and entrepreneurial processes within and across organizations. In particular, we seek to draw on recent advances in cultural analysis and theory to begin to cultivate a more coherent conversation around culture, innovation and entrepreneurship. Instead of conceptualizing culture as an external constraint, contemporary cultural approaches share an emphasis on understanding how organizations draw upon and employ cultural materials in more pragmatic and strategic ways (Rindova, Dalpiaz, & Ravasi, 2011). Research further explores how cultural elements are produced and taken into use in various situations (Garud, Schildt, & Lant, 2014; Granqvist, Grodal, & Woolley, 2013). Previous studies often draw on the notion of culture as an existing ‘toolkit’ (Swidler, 1986), but also make use of practice theory (Bourdieu, 1984), communicative theories of institutions (Cornelissen, Durand, Fiss, Lammers, & Vaara, 2015), and other strands of cultural analysis that endogenize various forces ‘as themselves culturally constructed’ (Weber & Dacin, 2011, p. 287). While there remain important differences across contemporary

Emergence of Practice for Exchange

This study explores how a new practice for exchange emerges. While exchange is a foundational element of economic activity, and much researched in several traditions and disciplines, previous resea...