Stephanie Bertels

Organizational responses to institutional complexity stemming from emerging logics: The role of individuals

In this article, we address two important gaps in the study of organizational responses to institutional complexity. First, we examine how organizations respond to institutional complexity associated with newly emerging logics that lack well-defined sets of practices; although previous research has examined logics new to a field, those logics have tended to be well-established in other domains. Based on the responses of 10 Canadian public schools to the emerging logic of Aboriginal distinctiveness, we identify four organizational responses (reinterpretation, advocacy, isolation, and integration) that we argue are distinctive of emerging logics. Second, we explore how individuals in organizations shape organizational responses to institutional complexity. We show how individuals’ sensemaking and institutional biographies combine to affect the kinds of action in which organizations engage (discursive or practical) and the scope of that action (expansive across the organization or confined to a subset of actors).

The Varied Work of Challenger Movements: Identifying Challenger Roles in the US Environmental Movement

Organizations within challenger movements often exhibit differences in what they do, with whom they interact, and how they understand or present themselves. This article attempts to understand what underlies such heterogeneity in challenger movements. Adopting a mixed method approach, we explore the heterogeneous nature of the work undertaken by institutional challengers in the US environmental movement. Drawing on the tools of social network analysis, we develop a method to identify a set of distinct social positions. Next, drawing upon qualitative data on identity and work from websites and interviews with senior managers in environmental non-governmental organizations, we identify configurations of social position, identity, and work that result in a distinct set of challenger roles. Our analysis reveals how identity and social position can both enable and constrain individual organizations within a challenger movement in terms of their ability to undertake different types of institutional work. We also identify a form of work thus far not explicitly identified in prior studies of institutional work–indirect work, which we theorize may be an important potential moderator to the effectiveness of direct forms of institutional work.

Cultural Molding, Shielding, and Shoring at Oilco: The Role of Culture in the Integration of Routines

We explore how organizational culture shapes an organization’s integration and enactment of an external routine that is not a cultural fit. Attending to employees’ use of culture as a repertoire of strategies of action, we found that the use of familiar cultural strategies of action shaped the routine’s artifacts and expectations even before it was performed, a process we call cultural molding. Subsequently, employees drew differently on cultural strategies of action as they performed the routine, generating patterns of workarounds or hindered performances. In response to these patterns, they undertook additional cultural work to either shield their workarounds and protect them from scrutiny or shore up hindered performances. We contribute to the routine dynamics literature by highlighting the effortful cultural work involved in integrating coveted routines, furthering our understanding of routines as truces and the embeddedness of routines.

Taking Stock, Looking Ahead Editors’ Introduction to the Inaugural Organization & Environment Review Issue

In summer 2015, the Organizations and the Natural Environment Division of the Academy of Management will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its first formal conference program back in 1995. Over the past two decades, a vibrant and engaged scholarly community has generated thousands of empirical and conceptual studies on the complex relationships between organizations and their natural and social environments. Each individual study focuses on specific research questions crafted to meet the rigorous requirements of academic journals. However, too often our journal publishing and professional norms push us to focus on small, incremental contributions to knowledge. Anniversaries can remind us to pause, take stock, and build on the past to shape a new future. The Organization & Environment (O&E) editorial board decided to provide a venue for this anniversary celebration: a special issue where as a community of scholars we can reflect on where we have been, what we have learned, and what remains to be understood to both further our field and help society address pressing environmental challenges. In this first review issue of O&E, we hoped to draw insight and inspiration from in-depth reviews of specific topics. Our call for articles invited authors to reflect on the state of theory, empirical research, and practice in relation to key questions at the interface of organizations and the natural environment. We sought out comprehensive and analytical reviews of recent research that synthesized, integrated, and extended our thinking. We encouraged authors to anchor their thoughts in detailed retrospection on past and current research, and to identify the key theoretical, empirical, methodological, or practical challenges of future O&E research. There was an enthusiastic response from the community of scholars and in the end, we have assembled a group of six articles.1 Each offers a stand-alone review of a particular phenomenon within the O&E domain. Together they showcase the wide range of scholarship addressing topics ranging from the macro to the micro foundations of our field. Beginning at the macro end of the spectrum, Hoffman and Jennings (2015) alert us to the challenges of our own making as they introduce the concept of the Anthropocene to our scholarly conversation. By asking us to contemplate the implications of the permanent and unprecedented stratospheric and geologic impacts that we as humans are having on our planet, they connect the

The institutional work of exploitation: Employers' work to create and perpetuate inequality

Social inequality is underpinned by exploitative labour institutions, yet the agency of employers in establishing and maintaining such institutions remains underexplored. We thus adopt the lens of institutional work in analysing South African mining employers’ purposive efforts to ensure reliable access to cheap labour from the 1860s through until the infamous Marikana Massacre in 2012. We find that while labour is scarce, employers engage in forcing: creating exploitative institutional devices through conscripting and controlling. But as labour becomes abundant (and political winds shift), employers engage in freeing: liberalizing institutional controls to give workers ‘choice’, while simultaneously outsourcing responsibilities and costs associated with the unjust employment relationship to others, including workers themselves. We thus explain how employers purposefully create and perpetuate their advantage in interaction with labour market dynamics, contributing to our understanding of inequality and the role of actors’ intentions in impacting social systems.