Royston Greenwood

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 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.

Understanding Strategic Change: the Contribution of Archetypes

We examined the concept of archetype, implicit in a number of contemporary approaches to the study of organizational design and change. Despite an emerging interest in archetypes, the concept has r...

The Multiplicity of Institutional Logics and the Heterogeneity of Organizational Responses

This paper shows that organizations in market settings face complex institutional contexts to which they respond in different though patterned ways. We show how both regional state logics and family logics impact on organizational responses to an overarching market logic. Regional logics are particularly potent when the activities of firms, especially of large firms, are concentrated in regions whose governments champion regional distinctiveness and where the regional activities of the firm are significant. Family logics affect the decision to downsize, especially in smaller firms. This paper advances institutional theory by showing the influences of nonmarket institutions on market behavior, contributes to the growing recognition of community influences, and highlights the importance of historical context.

Organizational Design Types, Tracks and the Dynamics of Strategic Change

Change and stability in organizations is to be understood through the twin concepts of design archetypes and tracks. Organizations operate with structural designs which are given meaning and coherence by underlying interpretive schemes. Particular interpre tive schemes coupled with associated structural arrangements constitute a design archetype. The temporal relationship between an organization and one or more archetypes defines an organizations track. Prototypical tracks include inertia, aborted excursions, re-orientations and unresolved excursions. The particular track followed by an organization will be a function of the degree of alignment or compatibility between structures and contingency constraints, the pattern of commitment to prevailing and alternative interpretive schemes and the incidence of interest dissatisfaction of powerful groups.

Sedimentation and Transformation in Organizational Change: The Case of Canadian Law Firms

This paper identifies two archetypes in large Canadian law firms to show how ideas of professionalism and partnership are changing, due in part to shifts in discourses in the wider institutional context. These changes in discourse themselves alter the interpretation of organizational structures and systems. This theme is explored through the concept of tracks and sedimentation. We explore the emergence of an organizational archetype that appears not to be secure, and which results in sedimented structures with competitive commit ments. The geological metaphor of sedimentation allows us to consider a dia lectical rather than a linear view of change. Case studies of two law firms show how one archetype is layered on the other, rather than representing a distinct transformation where one archetype sweeps away the residues of the other.

“P2-Form” Strategic Management: Corporate Practices in Professional Partnerships

Strategic management in complex organizations involves understanding the appropriate relationship between a corporate center and its principal business units. The reported study examined that relat...

The Professional Partnership: Relic or Exemplary Form of Governance?

The creation of the public corporation in the 19th century drove out the partnership as the predominant form of organizational governance. Yet, within the professional services sector, partnerships have survived and prospered. Moreover, professional services firms that chose to abandon the partnership form tended to become private rather than public corporations. Drawing upon several theories, we compare the efficiency of the partnership relative to corporate forms of governance in the context of the professional services sector. We argue that the professional partnership minimizes agency costs associated with both the private and public corporation. We also argue from tournament theory and property rights theory that partnerships have superior incentive systems for professionals in particular and knowledge workers more generally. However, drawing upon structural-contingency theory, we identify limiting conditions, which affect the relative efficiency of the partnership. We argue that the corporation, especially the private corporation, will be the preferred form of governance where the limiting conditions are prevalent. Nevertheless, we also argue that under specific conditions the partnership form of governance will persist and prosper because it remains unusually suited to the management of knowledge workers.

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.