We explore how new types of hybrid organizations (organizations that combine institutional logics in unprecedented ways) can develop and maintain their hybrid nature in the absence of a "ready-to-wear" model for handling the tensions between the logics they combine. The results of our comparative study of two pioneering commercial microfinance organizations suggest that to be sustainable new types of hybrid organizations need to create a common organizational identity that strikes a balance between the logics they combine. Our evidence further suggests that the crucial early levers for developing such an organizational identity among organizational members are hiring and socialization policies.

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Although early neo-institutional studies did not explicitly tackle the issue of agency, more recent studies about institutional entrepreneurship have brought it to the forefront. Institutional entrepreneurship has been presented as a promising way to account for institutional change endogenously. However, this notion faces the paradox of embedded agency. To overcome this paradox, it is necessary to explain under what conditions actors are enabled to act as institutional entrepreneurs. Some neo-institutional theorists have already addressed this issue. Their studies focus mainly on the organizational and organizational field levels of analysis. In this paper, I aim to complement their work by examining under what conditions individuals are more likely to engage in institutional entrepreneurship. By doing so, I take into account the individual level of analysis that neo-institutional theorists often tend to neglect. Relying on Bourdieu's conceptualization of fields, I propose that individuals' social position is a key variable in understanding how they are enabled to act as institutional entrepreneurs despite institutional pressures. Key words. Bourdieu; divergent organizational change; human agency; institutional entrepreneurship; social position.The importance and endurance of the agency versus structure debate in social sciences is indicated by the number of different names it goes by: person versus situation, strategic choice versus environmental determinism, and voluntarism versus determinism. This debate is directly related to the assumptions made by organization scholars about human nature (Burell and Morgan, 1979;Astley and Van de Ven, 1983). In organization Volume 13(5): 653-676

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We develop an institutionally oriented theory of how and why local communities continue to matter for organizations in a global age. Since globalization has taken center stage in both practitioner and academic circles, research has shifted away from understanding effects of local factors. Our approach runs counter to the idea that globalization is a homogeneity-producing process, and to the view that society is moving from particularism to universalism. We argue that with globalization, not only has the local remained important, but in many ways local particularities have become more visible and salient. We unpack the market, regulative, social, and cultural mechanisms that result in this enduring community influence while reviewing classic and contemporary research from organizational theory, sociology, and economics that have focused on geographic influences on organizations. In this paper, our aim is to redirect theoretical and empirical attention back to understanding the determinants and importance of local influences. We suggest that because organizations are simultaneously embedded in geographic communities and organizational fields, by accounting for both of these areas, researchers will better understand isomorphism and change dynamics. #

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