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The study of institutional change is a core research area in organization theory and is of increasing relevance for scholarship in other disciplines. In this article, we review the substantial number of studies that have examined the ways by which institutions are created, modified, or transformed, highlighting the lack of integration of prior works that emphasize exogenous shocks, institutional entrepreneurship, and practice-based change. Drawing on the institutional logics perspective, we then develop a novel typology of pathways of change that more comprehensively brings together this diverse literature, accounts for the richness and heterogeneity of institutional change processes unveiled by studies to date, and provides a more synthetic framework to guide future research. Based on our analysis and theorizing, we discuss important new scholarly directions that will enhance our understanding of different kinds of institutional change processes and outcomes, as well as contribute to further development of the institutional logics perspective.

This paper contributes to extending institutional theory by theorizing institutional maintenance as a process of repair and empirically examining repair work in a professional setting. Our in-depth, longitudinal case study illustrates how Italian professions—led by two professional associations—rebuffed the decisive intervention of the Italian Government to coercively reform the professional service sector and reconstituted institutional arrangements that had been severely disrupted. The paper advances theory on the resilience of institutions by showing that maintenance repair work enables powerful incumbents to reverse change and re-establish the status quo.

Although scholars contend that family and corporate heritage can be strategically deployed to gain a competitive advantage, few studies have examined the specific ways in which family firms leverage on these distinctive attributes in their marketing activities. The authors’ examination of a sample of official corporate websites reveals that family firms adopt different branding strategies to communicate the familial component of their businesses. The authors labeled these strategic variations as family preservation, family enrichment, and family subordination. This study advances extant research by exploring the various family-based branding strategies that family firms can draw on to differentiate themselves from their competitors.