Tammar B. Zilber

Institutionalization as an Interplay Between Actions, Meanings, and Actors: The Case of a Rape Crisis Center in Israel

In this article, I present an analysis of institutionalization as an interplay between three interrelated yet separate components—actors, actions, and meanings. Drawing on ethnographic data of a rape crisis center in Israel, where the entry of therapeutically oriented members resulted in the infusion of new meanings into originally feminist practices, I examine the role of organization members as carriers of institutions and their (possible) agency in infusing actions with meanings through interpretation; how meanings connect actors with actions; and institutional meanings as political resources.

Institutional Multiplicity in Practice: A Tale of Two High-Tech Conferences in Israel

In this paper I uncover the routine, ongoing practices that sustain institutional multiplicity. Drawing on a comparative study of the two high-tech conferences held in Israel in 2002, I examine how diverse institutions are discursively handled in field-configuring events. Institutional multiplicity was expressed at this site through two identity discourses, one that situated the industry within a national context and another that oriented it toward the global markets. In addition, the conferences were constructed around different best-practice discourses that focused on guidelines for either investment or management. These four discourses reflected and further affected power relations between the fields actors, and they were differentially distributed across separate social spaces between the conferences and within them. The contribution of this study to our understanding of institutional multiplicity lies in demonstrating how it is maintained in practice, politically negotiated between actors, and refracted across separate social spaces.

The Relevance of Institutional Theory for the Study of Organizational Culture

In this paper I attend to the ways current developments within institutional theory—namely the discursive and practice based schools—may contribute to the study of organizational culture. I suggest that the two theories have enough in common to allow fruitful dialogue, and focus on three areas in which we can apply some of the conceptual tools and questions developed in institutional theory to the study of organizational culture. In particular, institutional theory may help students of organizational culture to explore how cultures within organizations are worked out in relation to cultures outside organizations, how organizational cultures are being transformed and translated through time, and what are the roles of actors in the work of organizational cultures.

Narrating Human Actions The Subjective Experience of Agency, Structure, Communion, and Serendipity

In this article, the authors offer a model for the exploration of the ways social actors narrate the forces that have driven their lives. They position this exploration in light of the notions of agency, structure, communion, and serendipity, as formulated in various social-science theories of human action, viewed as part of the cultural repertoire of discourses available to narrators. The authors suggest a model for understanding the interrelationships between agency, structure, communion, and serendipity—as worked out in the subjective experience of life-story narrators—and exemplify the model through the analysis of one womans life story.

Conversation at the Border Between Organizational Culture Theory and Institutional Theory

This paper reflects our conversation at the border - a dividing line but also a potential meeting place – of organizational culture theory and institutional theory. First, we discuss the border between institutional theory and organizational culture theory by exploring two notions central to both - taken for grantedness and meanings. We ask what is taken for granted about institutions and organizational culture and how institutions and organizational cultures materialize? Our conversation reveals that although the notion of the taken for granted is important to institutional theory and organizational culture theory, what this means and implies is quite different for each. We also found that even though institutions and cultures involve meaning and evolve through meaning making, the two are understood and hence explored methodologically in quite different ways. So what seemed to be similar in these two theoretical frameworks actually differentiates them. Nevertheless, and still optimistically, we move on to suggest possible ways to bridge organizational culture theory and institutional theory, specifically through the notion of identity - both individual, organizational and interorganizational.

Beyond a single organization: challenges and opportunities in doing field level ethnography

– The purpose of this paper is to offer a road map for carrying out field-level ethnography, focussing on the inter-organizational space collectively constructed and shared by communities of organizations. , – The argument is developed through a critical and integrated review of relevant literature. , – Field-level ethnographic work requires researchers to define the field they are exploring, locate their specific research site within it, capture the field through ethnographic practices that take into account the unique characteristics of this local field as a social phenomenon, and deploy various conceptualizations of inter-organizational spheres in order to enrich their analysis and interpretations. , – This paper offers practical insights for practitioners of field-level ethnography. , – As organizations are open-systems that reside and take part in much broader, inter-organizational spaces, the author makes a case for going beyond the more common practice of carrying out ethnographic field work in a single organization, to doing field-level ethnography. The paper discusses various theorizations of the inter-organizational sphere, suggest how to carry field-level ethnography in practice, and note its peculiar challenges.

Know Thy Place: Location and Imagined Communities in Institutional Field Dynamics

The author explores the relevance of “place” in institutional field dynamics by examining how actors working in the Israeli high-tech industry construct the meaning and implications of its location. She finds that place is a rich construct that goes far beyond geography and includes culture, character, and values. The discourse of space is plurivocal, offering multiple, sometimes contradictory or ambivalent depictions of the meaning and consequences of location and of the local and global more generally. Place is therefore not given. It is used by institutional actors in different, sometimes contradictory ways, in their abiding efforts to define their identity as part of institutional work.