Despite the centrality of fields as a concept in organizational research, the processes by which fields form and change have not been studied in great depth. By situating action in time and space, field-configuring events (FCEs) offer valuable settings for researchers seeking insight into such processes. This paper develops a theory of accounts as a way to understand a mechanism by which institutional entrepreneurs seek to shape fields and influence the institutions that govern them. Actors produce and distribute justified accounts - narratives that describe the way work in the field ought to be done - and attempt to persuade powerful actors in the field to adopt them as conventions. FCEs can thus be understood as loci for conventionalizing accounts. The theory of accounts and field-level change is illustrated with a case study of a turning point FCE during which competing institutional entrepreneurs in the field of 'non-profit technology assistance providers' present alternative accounts. Successful institutional entrepreneurship comes from recognizing political opportunities to align one's account with the dominant orders of worth in the field, thereby convincing powerful actors to accept one's account as convention. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2008.

A growing body of research has emerged on "mixed-form" markets-markets for goods and services in which for-profit, nonprofit, and government providers coexist. This article seeks to understand the dynamics between nonprofit and for-profit organizations operating within the same market. The authors propose a five-step theoretical framework that includes both nonprofit and for-profit actors to capture what is fundamentally a temporal process: market identification; market growth; increasing cost for goods/services; increasing price for goods/services; and cross-sector competition. The authors use data from extended qualitative investigations in distinct service markets to analyze the unique contributions and capacities of each organizational form, and the transformation of market structure over time. The authors conclude that the dynamic interplay between nonprofit and for-profit forms within markets produces three possible outcomes: stratified, displaced, and defended markets.A growing body of research has emerged on "mixed-form" markets-markets for goods and services in which for-profit, nonprofit, and government providers coexist. This literature begins from the observation that many service markets-health care, education, culture, research, social services-contain providers of all three forms (e.g., Steinberg, 1987, p. 120). This empirical fact has both helped drive the development of theories explaining the existence of nonprofit organizations and generated numerous empirical studies Note: The authors would like to thank the NVSQ editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. A previous version of this article was presented at the

Although scholars have examined the different pathways to participation in social movements, far less research has looked at the endurance of activists once they mobilize. This article specifically explores the relationship between the pathways to mobilization and retention. Our data show that both social ties and individual motivations play a role in mobilizing participants of social movements. Contrary to what one might expect, we find that those activists who were mobilized with personal connections were less likely to be working for the organization a year later versus those who came to the organization as strangers. We find instead that self-starters—those canvassers who entered the canvass through their own volition—stayed on longer. Although those canvassers who came to the job through network ties were less likely to be working for the organization a year later, they were more likely to be engaged in other civic and political groups and they were more likely to be leaders of these groups.

Many technologies in our everyday lives are expressions of deliberate and protracted political struggles among interested groups. While some technologies are inherently political, other technologies become politicized through competition among different groups and organizations. How do seemingly apolitical technologies become politicized? In this article, the author examines the case of the “circuit riders,” a progressive technology movement in the United States that promotes information technology use among nonprofit and grassroots organizations, to show how a particular technology is politicized through field-level interactions. Applying and contributing to actor—network theory, the author finds that translation takes place as an organizational process by which actors associate the ideals of the technology in question with their political ideals and then attempt to enroll other actors to accept the resultant associations. Successful association depends on both discursive and organizational practices.

No abstract