Suchergebnisse

In this article, the concept of membership is examined from an institutional perspective, focusing on the dynamics of membership in professional fields. It is argued that membership in professional fields is a product of interaction rituals that structure the boundaries of fields, work to distribute power differentially within fields, and consequently engender strategies of resistance on the part of those not privileged by existing conditions. This framework motivates an empirical examination of Canadian public accountants' membership strategies in the emerging field of environmental audit. Based on this study, a three-part typology of membership strategies in professional fields is proposed: association, stratification, colonization, each of which effects particular sets of interaction rituals, transforms subject positions in the professional field, and depends on specific sets of conditions.

Occupational communities represent bounded cultures populated by people with similar work identities that transcend organizational settings. In this paper, I examine the relationship between an occupational community's culture and its ability to control strategic resources that advantage its members. Drawing on an empirical examination of the Canadian forensic accounting, I argue that reputation acts as a strategic resource, not only for individual members, but for the community as a whole. The community's practice standards and membership rules work to heighten the importance of individual practitioners' reputations, which in turn benefits client communities by conferring legitimacy on their claims, and restricts entry into forensic accounting. The role of reputation in Canadian forensic accounting serves to illuminate the importance of resources that, rather than being held in some proprietary fashion, are shared among actors who are, ostensibly, in competition with one another.

This volume proposes a perspective of social-symbolic work that integrates diverse streams of research to examine how people purposefully work to construct organisational life and the identities, careers, boundaries, strategies, and social practices that define their organisations.

AbstractHow social problems are constructed within social partnerships has significant effects on the management, impact, and survival of those partnerships. To explore how social problems are constructed, we adopt a social-symbolic work perspective, which highlights the variety of forms of work involved in this process, how they interact, and the impact of context on that process. Empirically, we focus on two social partnerships in Turkey that both addressed gender inequality but constructed that problem in very different terms. Our study suggests that the differences in how they came to construct the problem of gender inequality in Turkey was tied to the qualities of two forms of social-symbolic work—relational work and practice work—in which they engaged: the partnership that constructed gender inequality as an embedded problem engaged in extensive relational work and deep practice work; in contrast, the partnership that constructed the problem as disembedded engaged in efficient relational work and shallow practice work. Further, we observed that the construction of the problem of gender inequality was tied to different outcomes: an embedded social construction of the problem was associated with holistic outcomes on a more limited scale; a disembedded construction of the problem was associated with simpler outcomes on a greater scale. The paper contributes to the literature on social partnerships by showing how social problems are constructed through partners' work and how this affects their impact and sustainability. It also extends the literature on social-symbolic work by highlighting the interplay of different forms of work in constructing social problems. Finally, it contributes to research on gender inequality and organizations by showing how the work of social partnerships can shape conceptions of gender inequality at the meso level.

The places in which organizational life occurs can have profound impacts on actors, actions, and outcomes but are largely ignored in organizational research. Drawing on ideas from social geography, we explore the roles that places play in institutional work. The context for our study is the domain of housing for the hard-to-house, within which we conducted two qualitative case studies: the establishment of Canada's first residential and day-care facility for people living with HIV/AIDS, and the creation of a municipal program to provide temporary overnight accommodation for homeless people in local churches. In examining these cases, we found that places played three key roles: places contained, mediated, and complicated institutional work. Each of these roles was associated with a distinct ontology of place: places as social enclosures, as signifiers, and as practical objects. Our findings have significant implications for how we understand the relationship between location and organizations and allow us to develop a process model of places, institutions, and institutional work.

Innovation is a critical issue for nonprofit organizations and the ability to innovate over time represents an important, unresolved challenge. In this article, we examine continuous innovation in nonprofits from a political perspective. We explore the role of power in shaping how and whether nonprofits are able to continuously innovate. More specifically, we examine how different forms of power are tied to different stages in the innovation process and the implications when those forms of power are under- or overdeveloped. We argue that certain characteristics of nonprofits can complicate the power dynamics associated with each stage of the innovation process. We propose that power imbalances in nonprofits can lead to four innovation pathologies: "nothing happens," "nothing changes," "nothing scales," or "nothing adapts." This article provides a framework to guide future research into nonprofit innovation as well as a practical tool for individuals and organizations who seek to facilitate continuous innovation.

We draw on an in-depth longitudinal analysis of conflict over harvesting practices and decision authority in the British Columbia coastal forest industry to understand the role of institutional work in the transformation of organizational fields. We examine the work of actors to create, maintain, and disrupt the practices that are considered legitimate within a field (practice work) and the boundaries between sets of individuals and groups (boundary work), and the interplay of these two forms of institutional work in effecting change. We find that actors' boundary work and practice work operate in recursive configurations that underpin cycles of institutional innovation, conflict, stability, and restabilization. We also find that transitions between these cycles are triggered by combinations of three conditions: (1) the state of the boundaries, (2) the state of practices, and (3) the existence of actors with the capacity to undertake the boundary and practice work of a different institutional process. These findings contribute to untangling the paradox of embedded agency—how those subject to the institutions in a field can effect changes in them. We also contribute to an understanding of the processes and mechanisms that drive changes in the institutional lifecycle.

In this paper, we draw on a case study of the development of commercial whale-watching on Canada's west coast to explore the role of macro-cultural discourse and local actors in the structuration of new institutional fields. We argue that the development of the commercial whale-watching industry in the area was made possible by broad macrocultural changes in the conceptualization of whales in North America. At the same time, however, the characteristics of the geographically distinct institutional fields that emerged depended on local action and the processes of structuration that those actions supported. The constitution of specific new fields required interested actors to engage in the institutional innovation and isomorphism that produced the unique networks of relationships and sets of institutions that constituted those fields.