Rodolphe Durand

Institutional Change in Toque Ville: Nouvelle Cuisine as an Identity Movement in French Gastronomy

A challenge facing cultural‐frame institutionalism is to explain how existing institutional logics and role identities are replaced by new logics and role identities. This article depicts identity movements that strive to expand individual autonomy as motors of institutional change. It proposes that the sociopolitical legitimacy of activists, extent of theorization of new roles, prior defections by peers to the new logic, and gains to prior defectors act as identity‐discrepant cues that induce actors to abandon traditional logics and role identities for new logics and role identities. A study of how the nouvelle cuisine movement in France led elite chefs to abandon classical cuisine during the period starting from 1970 and ending in 1997 provides wide‐ranging support for these arguments. Implications for research on institutional change, social movements, and social identity are outlined.

Legitimating Agencies in the Face of Selection: The Case of AACSB

This article proposes that legitimating agencies such as accreditation organizations face selection pressures to both maintain their legitimacy among their constituents, but also to expand the domain of their activities. We argue that domain expansion raises three important research questions: first, the factors that lead legitimating agencies to expand their domain; second, the need to maintain legitimacy among existing constituents; and third, the establishment of legitimacy in the new domain. We use the domain expansion of the AACSB to develop propositions relevant to these three research issues. Quality concerns, process vs. content strategy, and institutional entrepreneurship are the main factors that impact the legitimation of legitimating agencies.

The Path of Most Persistence: An Evolutionary Perspective on Path Dependence and Dynamic Capabilities

This paper extends the dynamic capability view and research on organizational path dependence by arguing that path dependence can be a property of capabilities when a contingently-triggered capability path is subject to self-reinforcement (i.e. a set of positive and negative mechanisms that increases the attractiveness of a path relative to others). The paper introduces an evolutionary perspective, which specifies the underlying selection mechanisms of the property of path dependence in internal and external firm environments. This theorization sheds new light on three paradoxes that currently blur the theoretical contribution of path dependence to research at the managerial, organizational, and industry levels: (1) the problematic coexistence of path irreversibility and managerial intentionality; (2) the ambivalent strategic value of lock-in with regard to competitive advantage; and (3) the relative homogeneity in observed dynamic capabilities, despite their (possible) path dependence that should lead to a wider variety of outcomes owing to the presence of contingency. We highlight the contributions of this perspective to strategic management research and evolutionary theories.

Category Stretching: Reorienting Research on Categories in Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Organization Theory: Reorienting Research on Categories

We advocate for more tolerance in the manner we collectively address categories and categorization in our research. Drawing on the prototype view, organizational scholars have provided a ‘disciplining’ framework to explain how category membership shapes, impacts, and limits organizational success. By stretching the existing straightjacket of scholarship on categories, we point to other useful conceptualizations of categories – i.e. the causal�?model and the goal�?based approaches of categorization – and propose that depending on situational circumstances, and beyond a disciplining exercise, categories involve a cognitive test of congruence and a goal satisfying calculus. Unsettling the current consensus about categorical imperatives and market discipline, we suggest also that audiences may tolerate more often than previously thought organizations that blend, span, and stretch categories. We derive implications for research about multi�?category membership and mediation in markets, and suggest ways in which work on the theme of categories in the strategy, entrepreneurship, and managerial cognition literatures can be enriched.

Firm Selection: An Integrative Perspective

This paper highlights the variable intensity of selection pressure on firms. Failing to include a theory of selection pressure in assessing a firms performance can lead to ambiguous or incomplete judgements on the rationales of the firms success. Building on previous threads of literature (population ecology, evolutionary economics, and the dynamic resource-based view of the firn), this paper paves the way for a unified theory of selection through seven research propositions. Emphasis is placed on the fact that managers can use the determinants of selection strategically, either to avoid the direct pressure of selection or to pass it on competitors.

Sell-off or shut-down? Alliance portfolio diversity and two types of high tech firms’ exit

Alliance portfolio diversity (APD) – defined as differences between firms’ types of alliance partners (i.e. horizontal, upstream, and downstream) – is a strategic determinant of firm survival. This article analyzes APD in the context of high tech firms who rely on various partners to access complementary resources and secure their business survival, and argues that APD has different impacts on two main types of exit – sell-off and shut-down – which have been combined in previous research. Findings from a comprehensive study of French biotech firms from 1994 to 2002 show that the relationship between APD and shut-down is positive and linear whereas that between APD and sell-off is an inverted U-shaped. The article also finds evidence that the association between APD and firm exit mode is contingent on a firm’s resources and capabilities. The implications for research and managerial practice are discussed.

Advancing strategy and organization research in concert: Towards an integrated model?

Over the past three decades, two streams of research have grown significantly, both of which aim at understanding the sources and consequences of organizations’ superior abilities to meet or exceed expectations. On the one hand, institutional research has developed an ambitious theory of organizational behaviour based on the analysis of the conformity pressures that constrain decisionmakers, helping explain various types of decisions leading to legitimacy advantages for organizations (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Zucker, 1977). Depending on their industry standing (status, centrality, or affiliations), their control over resource suppliers, or their positioning relative to regulative and legal processes, firms adopt practices, structures and rules to increase their likelihood of survival (Deephouse, 1999; Deephouse and Suchman, 2008). They can also modify which logics they adopt in the face of changing environmental conditions, which may in turn confer legitimacy on pure players, entrants or hybrids (Battilana and Dorado, 2010; Thornton et al., 2012; Zietsma and Lawrence, 2010). On the other hand, strategy literature focuses on explaining why and how some firms achieve sustained over-performance, i.e. why and how their returns exceed their shareholders’ expectations. Although some attempts at rapprochement between these two perspectives have emerged recently (Ahuja and Yayavaram, 2011; Baum and Dobbin, 2000; Greenwood et al, 2010; Ingram and Silverman, 2002), it seems that more progress and crossfertilization exist between strategy research and the sociological approach to institutionalism. In this essay, I sketch out the conditions by which this might be possible, and what fruitful areas of investigation would then emerge for each stream. I propose a model of how they intersect that would account for many observable economic and social phenomena, and which I (tentatively) call the IOS (Institution, Organization and Strategy) model.

How to connect strategy research with broader issues that matter

The financial crisis and its various episodes, the persistent use of child labour by multinational corporations, the global sex trade with its horrible implications, environmental destruction exemplified by BP’s accident in the Gulf of Mexico, drugs and their globally organized production and sales, Fukushima and the risks of contemporary energy policies, dictatorships and oppression sustained by military and economic power in North Korea and Syria. These are major strategic issues of global relevance that need to be better understood – and dealt with. What they and many others have in common is that they are all about the strategic management of complex, intertwined organizational structures and processes. Furthermore, both their causes and consequences are organizational, and they usually involve an economic dimension that greatly influences various actors’ interests and manoeuvres. These crises have been addressed by economists, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, military experts and others, but with few exceptions strategy scholars have kept silent. There are of course reasons (or excuses) for why this is the case: strategic management scholarship is considered to have its place in explaining firm behaviour and industrial dynamics, in-depth research takes time which often prevents researchers from being able to comment on crises as they happen, academic publishing practices prolong these processes (it gets years to publish a paper), we as scholars can provide explanations, but the practitioners seldom understand them, the media are not used to using strategy scholars as experts, and so on. In this essay, we don’t buy these excuses at face value. Our message is simple: strategy scholars should be bold enough to look beyond the management of business firms to address contemporary issues of broader societal relevance. Relevance is a key question for management scholars in general and strategy scholars in particular. While there are different views on what relevance means (Augier and March, 2007), most have been concerned about the lack of ability of management research to provide knowledge that is useful for managerial practice (McGahan, 2007; Walsh et al., 2007). For example, Hambrick (1994: 15) famously criticized management research for developing into an ‘incestuous, closed loop of scholarship’. More recently, Walsh (2011) provides an overview of the presidential addresses in recent years that all seem to indicate that management research has failed in its quest 452827 SOQ10310.1177/1476127012452827Vaara and DurandStrategic Organization 2012

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

Where Do Market Categories Come From and How? Distinguishing Category Creation From Category Emergence

This paper reviews several streams of research on market category formation. Most past research has largely focused on established category systems and the antecedents and consequences of categorical positioning (i.e., categorical purity vs. spanning; combination vs. replacement) but relatively ignored the formative processes leading to new categories. In this review, we address this lacuna to posit that scholarship would benefit from clearly disentangling category emergence from category creation. We analytically describe the differences between the two and elaborate the boundary conditions that guide and define which process is more likely to occur in a given market. Our review contributes to illuminating the role of organizational agency and strategic actions in market categories and their formation, which deserve greater attention as a result of their theoretical and practical implications.