Roy Suddaby

Theorizing Change: The Role of Professional Associations in the Transformation of Institutionalized Fields

This study examines the role of professional associations in a changing, highly institutionalized organizational field and suggests that they play a significant role in legitimating change. A model...

Rhetorical Strategies of Legitimacy

This paper describes the role of rhetoric in legitimating profound institutional change. In 1997, a Big Five accounting firm purchased a law firm, triggering a jurisdictional struggle within accounting and law over a new organizational form, multidisciplinary partnerships. We analyze the discursive struggle that ensued between proponents and opponents of the new organizational form. We observe that such rhetorical strategies contain two elements. First are institutional vocabularies, or the use of identifying words and referential texts to expose contradictory institutional logics embedded in historical understandings of professionalism, one based on a trustee model and the other based on a model of expertise. A second element of rhetorical strategies is theorizations of change by which actors contest a proposed innovation against broad templates or scenarios of change. We identify five such theorizations of change (teleological, historical, cosmological, ontological, and value-based) and describe their characteristics.

Institutional work – Refocusing institutional studies of organization

In this paper, we discuss an alternative focus for institutional studies of organization - the study of institutional work. Research on institutional work examines the practices of individual and collective actors aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions. Our focus in this paper is on the distinctiveness of institutional work as a field of study and the potential it provides for the examination of new questions. We argue that research on institutional work can contribute to bringing the individual back into institutional theory, help to re-examine the relationship between agency and institutions, and provide a bridge between critical and institutional views of organization.

Challenges for Institutional Theory

This essay offers a critical summation of the use of neo-institutionalism to study organizations. While institutionalism has succeeded in becoming the dominant theory to study macro-organizational phenomena, there is a danger that the theory has been stretched far beyond its core purpose—to understand how organizational structures and processes acquire meaning and continuity beyond their technical goals. I discuss some possible reasons for this displacement and identify four nascent threads of research that hold strong potential for bringing institutional theory back to its core assumptions and objectives; categories, language, work, and aesthetics.

Colonizing Knowledge: Commodification as a Dynamic of Jurisdictional Expansion in Professional Service Firms

This paper provides a field level analysis of the process by which management knowledge is produced. Two linked dynamics are identified as important components of this process. The first is the commodification of management knowledge, or the tendency to reduce knowledge to a routinized and codified product. We argue that the commodification of management knowledge is a cyclical process that has been institutionalized by the interests of distinct categories of social actors. The second dynamic, termed colonization, refers to the migration of Big Five professional service firms into adjacent professional jurisdictions. Colonization is the result of intensification of commodification and has produced intense conflict and change in the organizational field of management knowledge production.

Professionals and field-level change: Institutional work and the professional project

This article explicates the causal connections between changes in professional jurisdictions and changes in organizational fields. The authors argue that professional projects carry within them projects of institutionalization. They focus attention on the critical but often invisible role that professionals play in institutional work, or the creation, maintenance and transformation of institutions. The key contribution of this article is to explicate the professional project as an endogenous mechanism of institutional change. Based on a review of prior research on institutional change in which professionals play a central role, the authors observe four essential dynamics through which professionals reconfigure institutions and organizational fields. First, professionals use their expertise and legitimacy to challenge the incumbent order and to define a new, open and uncontested space. Second, professionals use their inherent social capital and skill to populate the field with new actors and new identities. Third, professionals introduce nascent new rules and standards that recreate the boundaries of the field. Fourth, professionals manage the use and reproduction of social capital within a field thereby conferring a new status hierarchy or social order within the field. Cet article explique les liens de causalité entre les évolutions au niveau des champs d’application professionnelle et les évolutions au niveau des organisations. Nous pensons que les projets professionnels portent intrinsèquement des projets d’institutionnalisation. Nous mettons l’accent sur le rôle critique mais souvent invisible que les professionnels jouent dans le travail institutionnel, ou la création le maintien et la transformation d’institutions. La contribution principale de cet article est d’expliquer le projet professionnel en tant que mécanisme endogène des changements institutionnels. Sur la base de recherches antérieures sur les changements institutionnels dans lesquels les professionnels jouent un rôle central, nous constatons quatre dynamiques essentielles à travers lesquelles les professionnels reconfigurent les institutions et le champ organisationnel. Premièrement, les professionnels utilisent leur expertise et leur légitimité pour contester l’ordre établi et pour définir un nouvel espace ouvert et incontesté. Deuxièmement, ils utilisent leur capital social intrinsèque et leurs compétences pour introduire de nouveaux acteurs sur le terrain. Troisièmement, ils introduisent de toutes nouvelles règles et standards qui redéfinissent les limites du champ. Quatrièmement, ils gèrent l’utilisation et la reproduction de capital social au sein d’un champ et ainsi confèrent une nouvelle hiérarchie des statuts ou ordre social au sein du champ. Este artículo explica las conexiones causales entre cambios en las jurisdicciones profesionales y cambios en los campos organizacionales. Nuestro argumento es que los proyectos profesionales llevan consigo proyectos de institucionalización. Nos enfocamos en el rol crítico, pero frecuentemente invisible, que desempeñan los profesionales en el trabajo institucional, o en la creación, mantenimiento y transformación de instituciones. El aporte clave de este trabajo es el explicar el proyecto profesional como un mecanismo endógeno de cambio institucional. Valiéndose de la revisión de una previa investigación sobre cambio institucional en el que los profesionales desempeñan un rol principal, observamos cuatro dinámicas esenciales a través de las cuales los profesionales reconfiguran instituciones y campos organizacionales: (1) Los profesionales utilizan su experiencia y legitimidad para cuestionar la estructura existente y definir un espacio nuevo, abierto y no refutado. (2) Los profesionales utilizan su habilidad y capital social intrínsecos para establecer este campo con nuevos actores y nuevas identidades. (3) Los profesionales presentan nuevas reglas y estándares emergentes que revitalizan los límites del campo. (4) Los profesionales gestionan el uso y la reproducción del capital social dentro de un campo, otorgando así una nueva jerarquía de estado o estructura social dentro del campo.

WHERE ARE THE NEW THEORIES OF ORGANIZATION

This Special Topic Forum was inspired by the observation that most of the theories of organization used by contemporary management researchers were formulated several decades ago, largely in the 1960s and 1970s, and that these theories have persisted, largely intact, since that time. This is so, in spite of massive growth and change in the size, prevalence and influence of organizations in modern society. Organizational theory, as Davis (2010: 691) has observed, can sometimes appear like a “living museum of the 1970s.” Where, we asked, are the new theories of organization?

Rhetorical history as a source of competitive advantage

This paper develops a framework for understanding history as a source of competitive advantage. Prior research suggests that some firms enjoy preferential access to resources as a result of their past. Historians, by contrast, understand past events as more than an objective account of reality. History also has an interpretive function. History is a social and rhetorical construction that can be shaped and manipulated to motivate, persuade, and frame action, both within and outside an organization. Viewed as a malleable construct, the capacity to manage history can, itself, be a rare and inimitable resource.

History as social memory assets: The example of Tim Hortons

Abstract Strategic management research has demonstrated that firm-specific resources can confer a distinct competitive advantage. This research, however, tends to assume that the resources are fixed and immutable and that they operate inside the organization. We offer a competing view in which resources are socially constructed and operate primarily on external stakeholders. Drawing from emerging research in social memory studies, we argue that historical narratives are an emerging means of socially constructing firm-specific social memory assets that can be used to create competitive advantage. We illustrate our argument through an analysis of how Tim Hortons, a now iconic Canadian company, uses historical and tradition-based narratives to construct its brand identity.

Strategy-as-practice meets neo-institutional theory

Strategy-as-practice and neo-institutionalism offer alternative approaches to studying organizations. In this essay, we examine the foundational assumptions and methods of these perspectives, unveiling different ways in which they could complement each other. In particular, we elaborate three areas of overlap: a focus on what actors actually do, their shared cognitions, and the role of language in creating shared meanings. We show how the two perspectives can inform each other and offer significant learning to organization studies more broadly.