For love and money: Organizations’ creative responses to multiple environmental logics

Abstract

The recent "inhabited institutions" research stream in organizational theory reinvigorates new institutionalism by arguing that organizations are not merely the instantiation of environmental, institutional logics "out there," where organizational actors seamlessly enact preconscious scripts, but are places where people and groups make sense of, and interpret, institutional vocabularies of motive. This article advances the inhabited institutions approach through an inductive case study of a transitional housing organization called Parents Community. This organization, like other supportive direct service organizations, exists in an external environment relying increasingly on federal funding. Most scholars studying this sector argue that as federal monies expand to pay for these organizations' services, non-profit organizations will be forced to become ever more bureaucratic and rationalized. However, I find that three key service departments at Parents Community respond in multiple ways to this external environment, depending on each department members' creative uses of institutional logics and local meanings, which emerge from their professional commitments, personal interests, and interactional, on-theground decision making. By looking carefully at these three departments' variable responses to the external environment, we have a better map for seeing how human agency is integrated into organizational dynamics for this and other organizations.Over the past 20 years, the United States has witnessed explosive growth in the amount of federal money flowing to free-standing, nonprofit social service organizations, also known as supportive direct service organizations, public benefit service organizations, and the nonprofit human services sector (

Strictly limited choice or agency? Institutional duality, legitimacy, and subsidiaries’ political strategies

“…Instead of isomorphism and ceremonial adoption, more recent literature calls for different responses to competing pressures (Battilana and Dorado, 2010;Binder, 2007;Greenwood et al, 2010). These approaches generally call for more "agency".…”

Green entrepreneurship in the sharing economy: utilising multiplicity of institutional logics

“…economic and social logics) which should be taken into consideration by sharing platforms to achieve their growth objectives (Hamari et al 2015). This points out to the condition of institutional complexity facing sharing platforms, where different logics may coexist, compete or blend (Greenwood et al 2011;Battilana and Dorado 2010;Binder 2007;McPherson and Sauder 2013;Zilber 2002). The literature, however, provides no or little insights into how these complexities are dealt with by sharing platforms and their entrepreneurial teams to succeed and grow.…”

Entrepreneurial NPOs in Russia: Rationalizing the Mission

“…However, earlier theoretical conceptualizations of nonprofits' response to external environment in Russia have paid little attention to explore the intrinsic nonprofit rationality. We would like to argue that, in order to understand how organizations engage in financial transactions with different institutional agents, we need to recognize that they ''inhabit'' their own institutional scripts (Binder 2007), an account of what they are and what they do, what they may strive to preserve while ensuring sustained performance and legitimacy. In fact, institutional theory provides us with analytical tools to carry out analysis of such scripts by offering conceptualization of institutional logics, developed within the framework of understanding isomorphism and hybridity.…”