This article explicates the causal connections between changes in professional jurisdictions and changes in organizational fields. The authors argue that professional projects carry within them projects of institutionalization. They focus attention on the critical but often invisible role that professionals play in institutional work, or the creation, maintenance and transformation of institutions. The key contribution of this article is to explicate the professional project as an endogenous mechanism of institutional change. Based on a review of prior research on institutional change in which professionals play a central role, the authors observe four essential dynamics through which professionals reconfigure institutions and organizational fields. First, professionals use their expertise and legitimacy to challenge the incumbent order and to define a new, open and uncontested space. Second, professionals use their inherent social capital and skill to populate the field with new actors and new identities. Third, professionals introduce nascent new rules and standards that recreate the boundaries of the field. Fourth, professionals manage the use and reproduction of social capital within a field thereby conferring a new status hierarchy or social order within the field.

General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. AbstractWe examine the micro-foundations of field-level organizational change by analyzing the role of social skill and social position in individuals. Our core argument is that differences in an individual's social skill and in their social position produce different degrees of reflexivity or awareness of existing social arrangements. We demonstrate how the interaction of social skill and social position produce distinct types or categories of reflexivity, each of which contributes to institutional stability or change.Keywords: agency, institutions, organizational fields, reflexivity, social position, social skill 1 Understanding the sources of profound organizational change -i.e. the creation of new organizational forms, new modes of production or social and technological innovation -is a fundamental issue for organizational theory. Researchers have consistently moved to increasingly higher levels of analysis in their efforts to explain how change can occur in highly institutionalized settings. Over the past four decades the analytic focus has shifted away from the organization and moved to studying the organizational environment as a fundamental determinant of the direction, pace and content of change. As a result, considerable attention has been devoted to viewing change through the interpretive lens of the sector (Scott & Meyer, 1983), the population (Hannan & Freeman, 1977), the network (DiMaggio, 1991; Powell, White, Koput, & Owen-Smith, 2005) and, increasingly, the organizational field (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983;Fligstein, 2013).Used largely within the context of institutional theory, the organizational field is defined, variously, as "key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies and other organizations that produce similar services or products" (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) or "organizations that interact frequently and fatefully with each other" (Scott, 1994). A key distinguishing feature of the construct, however, is the phenomenological understanding that the social and cultural environment created by communities of organizations and their ideational expectations of each other is every bit as important in understanding processes of change as the technical environment of material resources (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). In counterpoint to most economic based theories of organizational change, institutional theory argues that organizational change is often the 2 result of social pressures to conform to field based norms of legitimacy rather than economic pressures.Institutional theory, thus, has become highly influential in management theory because it has the ability to explain why and how organizations often change in ways that defy traditional economic explanations (Suddaby, 2013). Early articulations of the theory focused attention on how field norms pressured organizations to adopt changes that produced increasing similarity (DiMaggio & Po...

Although institutions are subject to constant change, we retain a stable image of them. Consequently, should they be considered as objects or processes? Notwithstanding its success, institutional theory still faces theoretical challenges to account simultaneously for change and stability, agency and structure. Following recent calls to integrate other perspectives on how we think about institutions, we draw on institutional analysis – a stream that has flourished in Europe and Latin America – to propose a radical and comprehensive conception of the institution as a locus of tension between the instituting (by which institutions are formed) and the instituted (temporarily stabilized forms). Since there is permanent tension between them, the institution itself can never be a stable object. It is constantly evolving, being either reinforced or destabilized. This research enriches the theoretical dialogue between organizational institutionalism and institutional analysis, two streams that have hitherto displayed little cross-fertilization. First, it contributes to rethinking the nature of institutions by emphasizing the role of the social imaginary, thus improving our understanding of the under-theorized role of imagination in institutionalization processes. Second, by placing the dynamic tension between the instituted and the instituting at the core of institutional theories, we answer calls to reclaim their missing critical dimension. Furthermore, this results in a methodological implication: the clinical approach of institutional analysis involving the intervention of researchers allows us to further embed institutional theories in organizational practice.

Purpose-We study how communication agencies became important sites for the rise of measurement expertise in the government of consumer conduct following the development of online consumption. Our examination focuses on the processes by which digital measurement developed (within the agencies) as a new legitimate form of expertise, able to produce relevant and detailed knowledge about the government of web-users. Design/methodology/approach-We carried out a field examination in France, predicated on 100 interviews with actors involved in communication consultancy. Drawing on the concepts of governmentality and inter-jurisdictional experimentation, we examine how digital measurement expertise acquired legitimacy within agencies. We also analyze how contemporary technologies of measurement and surveillance, as operated by in-house digital experts, provide advertising specialists and advertisers with increasingly precise data on consumer conduct and thought. Findings-The constitution and legitimization of digital measurement expertise was characterized by experimentation, culminating in the production of persuasive claims of tangibility concerning communication impact, and in relative agreement on the relevance of digital expertise in operating increasingly powerful technologies of measurement and surveillance. Originality/value-While the role of experts in promoting and implementing neoliberal governmentality is emphasized in the literature, our study indicates that considerable work is needed to develop and legitimize expertise consequent with neoliberalism. Also, our analysis highlights that the spread of digital measurement expertise and knowledge production in the government of web-users constitutes a noteworthy step in the neo-liberalization of society. Behind the front of "free" conduct lies an increasingly powerful network of technologies and expertise aimed at rendering consumer conduct knowable and predictable.

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