Shahzad Ansari

Overcoming Inaction through Collective Institutional Entrepreneurship: Insights from Regime Theory

Studies on institutional change generally pertain to the agency-structure paradox or the ability of institutional entrepreneurs to spearhead change despite constraints. In many complex fields, however, change also needs cooperation from numerous dispersed actors with divergent interests. This presents the additional paradox of ensuring that these actors engage in collective action when individual interests favor lack of cooperation. We draw on complementary insights from institutional and regime theories to identify drivers of collective institutional entrepreneurship and develop an analytical framework. This is applied to the field of global climate policy to illustrate how collective inaction was overcome to realize a global regulatory institution, the Kyoto Protocol.

How are Practices Made to Vary? Managing Practice Adaptation in a Multinational Corporation

Research has shown that management practices are adapted and ‘made to fit’ the specific context into which they are adopted. Less attention has been paid to how organizations anticipate and purposefully influence the adaptation process. How do organizations manage the tension between allowing local adaptation of a management practice and retaining control over the practice? By studying the adaptation of a specialized quality management practice – ACE (Achieving Competitive Excellence) – in a multinational corporation in the aerospace industry, we examine how the organization manages the adaptation process at the corporate and subsidiary levels. We identified three strategies through which an organization balances the tension between standardization and variation – preserving the ‘core’ practice while allowing local adaptation at the subsidiary level: creating and certifying progressive achievement levels; setting discretionary and mandatory adaptation parameters; and differentially adapting to context-specific and systemic misfits. While previous studies have shown how and why practices vary as they diffuse, we show how practices may diffuse because they are engineered to vary for allowing a better fit with diverse contextual specificities.

Taming wicked problems : the role of framing in the construction of corporate social responsibility

While scholars have explained how business has increasingly taken on regulatory roles to address social and environmental challenges, less attention has been given to the process of how business is made responsible for wicked problems. Drawing on a study of ‘conflict minerals’ in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we examine the process through which companies became responsible for a humanitarian crisis. We contribute by: (1) bridging insights from contentious performance and deliberative approaches – to present a model of corporate political responsibilization for a wicked problem that explains how a ‘field frame’ of responsibility can emerge; (2) explaining shifting boundaries between public and private responsibilities and the changing role of the state as catalytic rather than coercive; and (3) showing how responsibility can be attributed to a target by framing an issue and its root cause in ways that allow such an attribution, and how the attribution can diffuse and solidify.

Fiddling While the Ice Melts? How Organizational Scholars Can Take a More Active Role in the Climate Change Debate

Organizational scholars have so far remained relatively passive around the debate on climate change. We argue that organizational scholars could and should get more involved and show how this could be done through the lenses of institutional, stakeholder, and complexity theories.

Beyond the hype: Taking business strategy to the “bottom of the pyramid”

Recent studies in strategy have highlighted both the successes and failures of applying conventional perspectives in strategic management to developing markets. Within this debate, Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) strategies, aimed at exploiting high-volume, low-margins strata at the bottom of these societies, have particularly drawn interest. We critically examine the emergence and evolution of BoP strategies and compare their anticipated outcomes to some of the empirical evidence. We then draw on the concept of global value chains to usefully extend the BoP concept, and suggest areas for further theory building and empirical research. We offer a typology of BoP ventures, and suggest appropriate levels of public–private engagement to achieve the desired social and economic outcomes.

Rethinking ‘Top‐Down’ and ‘Bottom‐Up’ Roles of Top and Middle Managers in Organizational Change: Implications for Employee Support

In this study we integrate insights from ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ traditions in organizational change research to understand employees’ varying dispositions to support change. We distinguish between change initiation and change execution roles and identify four possible role configurations in which top managers (TMs) and middle managers (MMs) can feature in change. We contend that both TMs and MMs can play change initiation and/or change execution roles, TMs and MMs have different strengths and limitations for taking on different change roles, and their relative strengths and limitations are compounded or attenuated based on the specific configuration of change roles. We subsequently hypothesize employee support for change in relation to different TM-MM change role configurations. Our findings show that change initiated by TMs does not engender above-average level of employee support. However, change initiated by MMs engenders above-average level of employee support, and even more so, if TMs handle the change execution.

The Persistence of a Stigmatized Practice: A Study of Competitive Intelligence

Studies on the diffusion of practices provide valuable insights into how organizations adopt, adapt, sustain and abandon practices over time. However, few studies focus on how stigmatized practices diffuse and persist, even when they risk tainting the adopters. To address this issue and understand how firms manage stigmatized practices, we study US organizations associated with the practice of competitive intelligence (CI) between 1985 and 2012. CI includes legitimate information gathering practices that are sometimes also associated with infringements and espionage. Our findings suggest that CI became highly diffused and persisted despite the risk of stigmatizing its adopters. We identified three factors to explain CIs persistence: (1) keeping it opaque to avoid the negative effects of stigmatization, (2) ‘constructing’ usefulness to justify its ongoing use by leveraging accepted beliefs and invoking fear of unilateral abandonment and (3) adapting it by developing multiple versions to increase its zone of acceptability. These three factors contribute to practice persistence by allowing firms to dilute the potential stigma from use of the practice. Our contribution lies in explaining the adoption, diffusion and ongoing use of a stigmatized practice whose benefits cannot be overtly acknowledged or made public.

Institutional change and the multinational change agent: A study of the temporary staffing industry in Spain

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in local institutional change. To what extent do multinational organizations help or hinder change, in particular new industry creation?Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a qualitative case study examining the role of multinational temporary work agencies in the development of temporary agency market in Spain.Findings – The authors find that while multinational firms were less constrained by the norms, values and logics of the home environment, they also encountered specific challenges in the implementation of new practices. First, high‐profile introduction of a novel practice requires checks and balances to manage unanticipated developments, such as undesirable activities by opportunistic actors that may derail the change process. Second, rapid growth is not conducive to concerted efforts at industry level, leaving the public identity of the institutional innovation extremely vulnerable. Third, h...

Letting users into our world: Some organizational implications of user-generated content

It has been well established that organizations often need to restructure themselves to meet new technological challenges. We review the organizational impact of a recent technological development, sometimes referred to as Web 2.0 that enables users to leverage the Internet and generate “user-generated content” by acting as a supplier, co-producer, or even innovator of products and services. We draw on the social studies of technology, including actor-network theory to develop a conceptual understanding of how this phenomenon is challenging deeply entrenched mental models among managers and management theorists as well as problematizing the way organizational boundaries are conventionally drawn.

Reputational Spillovers: Evidence from French Architecture

While the notion of reputation has attracted much scholarly interest, few studies have addressed the strategic issue of reputational multiplicity and managing the interactions among different types of reputations. We suggest that an organization can have several stakeholder-specific reputations—peer, market, and expert—and that reputational spillover effects (the continued influence of one reputation on another) matter at the organizational level. We test reputational spillovers on 42 French architecture companies over a period of 30 years. Our results show that over time, the three reputations interact with each other, generating positive spillovers, with the exception of market and expert reputations. We contribute by explaining how interconnected organizational reputations among different stakeholders can interact over time, how companies can strategically manage reputational spillovers, and how such spillovers influence organizations in creative and professional industries.