Proudly elitist and undemocratic?:The distributed maintenance of contested practices

This study examines the maintenance of highly institutionalized practices during periods of vehement contestation and changing external demands. Employing a cross-level longitudinal research design, we explore how the recruitment model of elite French Business Schools persisted, remaining fundamentally intact despite serious questions raised about its functional utility and social legitimacy. Comparing three periods of contestation, we document shifting coalitions of dispersed actors that were incentivized to "thematically" maintain the practices in the focal field with little formal orchestration. Our findings indicate that practices which contribute to social stratification often foster meta-routines that cajole constituencies in multiple fields to, collectively and self-interestedly, promote and regulate conservative change. We identify three meta-routines - referential comparison, generative improvisation, and distributed monitoring and policing - that introduced flexibility and encouraged "unforced" adaptations. In elaborating these meta-routines, we contribute to extant theory on the mechanisms of institutional maintenance, and shed further light on the role of complex embeddedness as a constraint on institutional processes

Organizational and field-level responses to institutional complexity : The case of french Grandes Ecoles de Commerce

Cette thèse cherche à mieux comprendre la manière dont les organisations font face à des logiques et attentes institutionnelles potentiellement contradictoires. Pour ce faire, la thèse étudie le cas des Grandes Ecoles de Commerce Françaises (GECF), qui font face depuis le milieu des années 1990 à une mondialisation croissante de l’enseignement supérieur en gestion. En raison de cette mondialisation, les GECF doivent gérer deux types de contraintes : d’une part, répondre aux exigences des organismes d’accréditations et des classements internationaux – qui véhiculent les standards du modèle de la business school (recherche, internationalisation, académisation) – et, d’autre part, préserver leur identité originelle et fondatrice, construite sur un modèle national, et qui constitue encore leur source de légitimité locale. Les problématiques générées par la présence de ces deux logiques institutionnelles dans le champ des GECF, nécessite de la part de ces dernières des arbitrages complexes, et une redéfinition de leur identité. En particulier, la thèse cherche à identifier les mécanismes entrepreneuriaux et identitaires à l’oeuvre dans les réponses des GECF aux pressions institutionnelles différentes et parfois contradictoires. Ecrite sous forme d’articles, la thèse s’intéresse aux origines des GECF et à l’émergence d’une logique institutionnelle propre, à la transformation de leurs pratiques et de leurs identités en réponse aux nouveaux standards internationaux et à l’incidence de ce processus sur les logiques institutionnelles présentes dans leur environnement.This dissertation explores how organizations cope with multiple and heterogeneous institutions, a situation recently referred to as ‘institutional complexity’. It is based on the study of French Business Schools, known as French Grandes Ecoles de Commerce (FGEC). Up until the mid 1990s, FGEC operated in a familiar and monolithic national institutional environment. Recent years have seen a rise in global standards for management education; a movement that has been particularly salient in Europe with the proliferation of MBAs, the development of accreditation and public ranking systems and the endorsement of the Bologna agreement in 1999, which aimed at developing a harmonized European higher education system. From that point onwards, FGEC have come under pressure to adapt to the growing internationalization of management education and adopt its dominant standards. While trying to redefine themselves as International Business Schools, FGEC continue to value their historical identity, which still forms the basis of their national legitimacy. This dissertation brings together a wide range of qualitative methods (participative observation, semi-structured interviews and documentary evidence), which are particularly suitable for understanding the social dynamics of institutional processes. The architecture of the dissertation goes from the micro to the macro level of analysis and combines three articles that should be considered together. The first article focuses on the case of one FGEC and explores how it attempted to promote an alternative definition of what an MBA program represents, by simultaneously combining the FGEC and the International Business School institutional logics. The second offers a comparative study of how four FGEC have interpreted and experienced the rising institutional complexity in their field, based on their identities. The third article offers a study of the FGEC population. It explores how and why FGEC emerged, established themselves as a particular form of management education, and developed by infusing practices from a competing logic, while remaining true to their traditional core

Countering Indeterminate Temporariness: Sheltering work in refugee camps

The experience of temporariness is increasingly prevalent across the world, both for transient populations such as refugees and in work life characterized by precarious employment relationships. In this article, we examine how local institutional work can shape people’s experience of indeterminate temporariness and mitigate its pernicious effects. Our qualitative, inductive study is set in refugee camps in Lebanon, where indeterminate temporariness created an oppressive experience of time among Syrian refugees. We document the efforts of an NGO to help refugees rebuild meaningful lives by developing small-scale entrepreneurial ventures – efforts we conceptualize as ‘sheltering work’. Our analysis points to the potential for sheltering work to alleviate the oppressive effects of temporariness by bounding, containing, and structuring individuals’ day-to-day lives. Although sheltering work reshaped refugees’ experience of time, it did not eradicate the oppressive effects of indeterminate temporariness; instead, oppressive and reclaimed experiences of time coexisted, with individuals shifting between them. Our study theorizes sheltering work as a potent form of modest, local institutional work in the face of immutable institutions, and elaborates how individual experiences of time influence embedded agency

Competing Through Categorization

We investigate how and why competing organizations position their similar products in categories of varying status. We studied the paired longitudinal case of the highly publicized contest between ESSEC and HEC, two French business schools, as they sought to position their core Grande Ecole program in the evolving international business education categorical structure. We conceptualize categorization as a competitive, relational process involving multiple actors and producing various meanings and perceptions. Our study (a) highlights the role of anticipated category status spillovers versus anticipated relative status within a category in producers’ entry decisions; (b) contrasts product- and audience-centric categorization strategies; and (c) shows the role of intermediaries in adjudicating categorization contests.Peer reviewe

Field-level evaluation practices and practice experimentation: Social impact bonds and market logic encroachment in the field of social integration

Publisher Copyright: © 2021, Emerald Group Holdings Ltd. All rights reserved.The authors contribute to practice-driven institutionalism by examining how the introduction of new field-level evaluation practices may facilitate encroachment of highly institutionalized organizational fields by new institutional logics. The authors conducted an inductive study of a trial of social impact bonds in the field of social integration services in Finland. Our analysis elaborates how new field-level evaluation practices created an experimental space that induced organizational practice experimentation, reconfigured relationships among field members, and lowered the barriers to entry for new organizations. The authors theorize how evaluation practices may create experimental spaces by suspending the carriers of established logics and legitimizing institutional innovations. The authors further elaborate how such spaces can bring about a parallel “shadow field” by inducing bottom-up experimentation aligned with a new institutional logic.Peer reviewe

Countering Indeterminate Temporariness: Sheltering work in refugee camps

The experience of temporariness is increasingly prevalent across the world, both for transient populations such as refugees and in work life characterized by precarious employment relationships. In this article, we examine how local institutional work can shape people?s experience of indeterminate temporariness and mitigate its pernicious effects. Our qualitative, inductive study is set in refugee camps in Lebanon, where indeterminate temporariness created an oppressive experience of time among Syrian refugees. We document the efforts of an NGO to help refugees rebuild meaningful lives by developing small-scale entrepreneurial ventures?efforts we conceptualize as ?sheltering work?. Our analysis points to the potential for sheltering work to alleviate the oppressive effects of temporariness by bounding, containing, and structuring individuals? day-to-day lives. Although sheltering work reshaped refugees? experience of time, it did not eradicate the oppressive effects of indeterminate temporariness; instead, oppressive and reclaimed experiences of time co-existed, with individuals shifting between them. Our study theorizes sheltering work as a potent form of modest, local institutional work in the face of immutable institutions, and elaborates how individual experiences of time influence embedded agency.Peer reviewe

Navigating the moral maze of an escape room: Bridging cultural spheres in a political art project

Organizations often combine cultural spheres to pursue goals which can elicit moral concerns and opposition in different actors. In this study we investigate challenges and moral transgressions that arise from blending distinct cultural spheres. We have conducted a longitudinal inductive study of an Escape Room art project that combined a humanitarian sphere with gaming and art. We found three categories of moral concerns, relating to the boundaries of cultural spheres, the integrity of each cultural sphere, and the integration of “voices” from each sphere. By distinguishing the operation of moral codes through moral intuitions through situated emotions, our study further clarifies the structural sources of moral transgressions