Reflexivity: The role of embedded social position and entrepreneurial social skill in processes of field level change

Abstract

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...

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