Content area
Abstract
My dissertation is structured around three papers that focus, through different lenses, on organizational reactions to and organizational coping with institutional complexity.
The first paper is based on an interpretive and ethnographic case of unsuccessful bridging institutional entrepreneurship, whereby an institutional blueprint, underpinned by two institutional logics, was introduced and did not gain external validation. It examines how one FGEC tried and failed to promote an alternative definition of what an MBA program represents, by combining two institutional logics at once. This paper shows that institutional entrepreneurs who work within a long-established organization and a highly normative institutional environment are caught between a rock and a hard place. They have to fight on two fronts to overcome both organizational and institutional level inertia. Facing internal and external doubts, this paper illustrates that the focal organization complements discursive techniques with social defense and coping mechanisms to protect it against the exacerbation of external pressures and emerging internal tensions. When institutional entrepreneurship fails, a high level of discursive activity is required, again, to enable the organization to recover from failure and reconnect with dominant norms. In coping with failed institutional entrepreneurship, organizational leaders need to induce internal and external audiences to perceive an inevitable change of direction as a normal and logical step in the implementation of a new strategic intent. This paper contributes to the institutional complexity and institutional entrepreneurship literatures.
The second paper is based on comparative and longitudinal case studies of four Grandes Ecoles. It aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussion about the interplay between organizational identity and institutional theory. More specifically, it aims to show how organizational identities impact and are themselves impacted by organizational responses to institutional complexity. It brings together macro and micro components of identity, considering! 17!them as nested (the occupational level, the organizational level and the institutional level), showing that identities at each level simultaneously enable and constrain identities at other levels, affecting the process through which organizations respond to multiple institutional logics. First, identity discrepancies are fault lines that motivate responses to institutional complexity. Second, identities and interactions among components at different levels filter and shape organizational perceptions of institutional complexity, and responses to it. Finally, organizational identity is not static, but is itself impacted and hybridized at different levels, as a result of the schools' responses to institutional complexity. This paper contributes to organizational identity and institutional complexity literatures.
The third paper draws on multiple sources of data (mainly authoritative historical works and interviews) to examine the emergence, development and change of a locally instantiated logic within the community of French Grandes Ecoles of Commerce (FGEC). By tracking the coevolution of the infrastructure and logic underpinning the FGEC community, this paper explore show the FGEC logic developed and evolved through boundary-shaping processes and through organizational responses to institutional complexity. Importantly, the findings reveal that logics are not immutable – rather, they change and evolve over time. This study contributes to extant research by showing (1) how institutional logics become locally instantiated within a community of organizations, (2) how a locally encoded logic evolves in response to broader changes in the institutional environment, and (3) how organizational responses to multiple competing logics act to recursively change an incumbent logic. This paper contributes to institutional complexity, institutional entrepreneurship and intra-logic evolution literatures.
