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

Violence against doctors is increasing worldwide. will the pandemic revert the trend?

In China the marketisation of health care, media criticism and public shaming led to a spiral of aggressions, write Milo Shaoqing Wang, Mia Raynard and Royston Greenwoo

Institutional Strategies in Emerging Markets

We review and integrate a wide range of literature that has examined the strategies by which organizations navigate institutionally diverse settings and capture rents outside of the marketplace. We synthesize this body of research under the umbrella term institutional strategies, which we define as the comprehensive set of plans and actions directed at strategically leveraging and shaping the socio-political and cultural institutions within an organization’s external environment. Our review of institutional strategies is focused on emerging market contexts, settings that are characterized by weak capital market and regulatory infrastructures and fast-paced turbulent change. Under such challenging conditions, strategies aimed at shaping the institutional environment may be especially critical to an organization’s performance and long-term survival. Our review reveals that organizations engage in three specific and identifiable sets of institutional strategies, which we term: relational, infrastructure-building, and socio-cultural bridging. We conclude by highlighting fruitful avenues for cross-disciplinary dialogue in the hope of promoting future research on emerging markets and defining the next frontier of institutional theory in organizational analysis

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