T hrough a grounded analysis of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA's) enterprise information system (IS) implementation in the months immediately following the go-live, we show how NASA can be characterized as an institutionally plural organization, rife with diverse institutional logics, some consistent and some contradictory to each other. The enterprise system is introduced in accordance with the logic of managerial rationalism, but some of the institutional logics that organizational actors draw upon and reproduce contradict the logic of managerial rationalism in certain situations. In these situations, organizational actors loosely couple elements of their practices from the practices implied by the enterprise system, thus satisfying the demands associated with both institutional fields. We identify four generalizable forms of loose coupling that result from these institutional contradictions: temporal, material, procedural, and interpretive, and discuss their effects on both the system implementation and local practices. Further, we show how, through the use of institutional logics, researchers can identify fundamental institutional contradictions that explain regularities in the situated responses to enterprise system implementations-regularities that are consistently identified in the literature across a variety of organizational contexts.

Different forms of stakeholder pressures drive different environmental strategies in organizations. This article differentiates between internal and external normative stakeholder pressures to test their potentially unique effects on environmental strategies. The findings suggest that internal, normative stakeholder pressures primarily drive substantive commitments to environmental practices, reflecting an internalized, voluntary commitment to the natural environment and dedication to environmental leadership by the firm. External, normative pressures instead primarily drive symbolic commitments to environmental practices, aimed at managing the image of the organization to establish and reinforce an appearance of commitment to the natural environment. This novel perspective accounts for the institutionally plural contexts of organizations and their environments, in which internal pressures directly drive substantive environmental commitments and external pressures drive symbolic responses. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

In this study, we explore the role of Chief Digital Officer (CDO) through the perspectives of CDOs in thirty-five organizations. In enacting their emerging role, CDOs must navigate the existing institutionalized context of established information technology (IT) roles and respective jurisdictional claims. We find that CDOs intentionally draw on the term “digital” to distance themselves from existing executive roles in order to gain legitimacy. CDOs as institutional entrepreneurs take a focal role in both: (1) articulating and developing the emerging “digital” logic of action and (2) enacting this digital logic through strategies such as grafting, bridging, and decoupling to navigate tensions between the existing and emerging approaches to innovation with digital technologies.

No abstract

With the rapid pace of technological development, individuals are frequently challenged to make sense of equivocal innovative technology while being given limited information. Virtual worlds are a prime example of such an equivocal innovative technology, and this affords researchers an opportunity to study sensemaking and the construction of perspectives about the organizational value of virtual worlds. This study reports on an analysis of the written assessments of 59 business professionals who spent an extended period of time in Second Life, a popular virtual world, and discursively made sense of the organizational value of virtual worlds. Through a Toulminian analysis of the claims, grounds, and warrants used in the texts they generated, we identify 12 common patterns of sensemaking and indicate that themes of confirmation, open-ended rhetoric, demographics, and control are evident in the different types of claims that were addressed. Further, we assert that the Toulminian approach we employ is a useful methodology for the study of sensemaking and one that is not bound to any particular theoretical perspective.

In this study of the U.S. automobile industry, we highlight the way the division of innovative labor across firms in the supply chain can be influenced by a particular form of digital innovation known as “digital control systems.” Digital control systems are becoming ubiquitous in complex products, and these digital innovations integrate other components across a product structure and introduce a level of indeterminacy and unpredictability in the organization of the interfirm division of innovative labor. Much of organizational scholarship holds that accompanying a shift toward increasingly modular product structures, component suppliers are engaging in relatively more design and invention around the components that they supply. We find that the evolution of digital controls may reverse this pattern, because in the wake of a major shift in the digital controls technology, suppliers actually engage in relatively less component innovation in comparison with their large manufacturing customers. To explain this shift, we characterize complex product structures in terms of two distinct product hierarchies: the inclusionary and the digital control hierarchy. In using this distinction to analyze the evolution of automotive emission control systems from 1970 to 1998, we reconcile two competing views about the interfirm division of innovative labor.

No abstract

No abstract