Resumo

Título do Artigo

Strategic responses for dealing with conflicting institutional logics
Abrir Arquivo
Ver apresentação do trabalho
Assistir a sessão completa

Palavras Chave

Institutional theory
strategic response
decision-making

Área

Estratégia em Organizações

Tema

Estratégia Corporativa e de Stakeholders

Autores

Nome
1 - Fellipe Silva Martins
UNIVERSIDADE NOVE DE JULHO (UNINOVE) - Programa de Pós-graduação em Informática e Gestão do Conhecimento
2 - Christian Daniel Falaster
UNIVERSIDADE REGIONAL DE BLUMENAU (FURB) - PPGAd
3 - Cristiano Silva Martins
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos - Escuela de Periodismo y Comunicación de Unidad Editorial
4 - Pang Lien Hsu
FIA-Fundação Instituto de Administração - Pinheiros

Reumo

Current literature on conflicting institutional logics is scattered and no single work brings together the potential strategic responses for the various scenarios in which such conflicts have influence. Thus, a framework of strategic responses for dealing with conflicting institutional logics is proposed. Institutional logics are mechanisms that shape and give meaning to organizational practices. However, when two or more conflicting institutional logics are into play, there is a grey area of action, which impacts organizational sensemaking and implementation of strategy.
From an organizational standpoint, much has been debated about the interplay between different institutional logics and their combined effects. Such discussions range from purely theoretical approaches – and related aspects such as legitimacy and isomorphism – to more pragmatic approaches – such as how to choose and apply decisions that affect organization responses and routines. Both from an academic and practitioners’ stance, this imbroglio stems from the lack of a consistent framework of responses for such interactions among different institutional pressures.
Whereas institutional pressure hybridism is well studied, is not usually taken as a theoretical basis for organizational responses – although this seems to presently pick up momentum in publications. Therefore, whereas there is a categorization of possible strategies and examples of hybridization, there is a lack of studies that link hybridization of diverging institutional logics with potential strategic responses for the various scenarios in which such conflicts have influence,
As such, we review the current literature on conflicting institutional logics, derive a set propositions of how to deal with such conflicts and analyse potential scenarios using a fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) adapted for this purpose. FAHP was modified to deal with subjective answers from specialists and to cope with varying organizational levels (strategic, tactical, operational), and, more importantly, with pressures and divergence in the intsitutional logics.
Preliminary results demonstrate that the degree of divergence as well as the weight of such logics in the organization’s institutional space are the main triggers for the varying responses. The overview is that attempting to giving in to both institutional pressures will always yield suboptimal results. The question, then, is assessing to which extent organizations are willing to delve in this suboptimal realm or whether to mask this suboptimality by using surface isomorphism.
This study is an attempt at giving a more precise explanation of the interplay between different institutional pressures. This has long been a theoretical (as well as practical) necessity that has been hindered by the lack of connection between the pressures and responses. In this sense, the paper proposes a set of propositions to aid in further improvement of theory as well as measurement of said concepts and innovates by adapting a mechanism for assessing the weights of different institutional pressures, the degree of divergence thereof, and the resultants.
Aoki, M. (2015). Why is the equilibrium notion essential for a unified institutional theory? A friendly remark on the article by Hindriks and Guala. Journal of Institutional Economics, 11(3), 485-488. Battilana, J., & Dorado, S. (2010). Building sustainable hybrid organizations: The case of commercial microfinance organizations. Academy of management Journal, 53(6), 1419-1440. Smith, W. K., & Besharov, M. L. (2019). Bowing before dual gods: How structured flexibility sustains organizational hybridity. Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(1), 1-44.