Institutional Guardianship: the Role of Agency in Preserving Threatened Institutional Arrangements

Thesis advisor: Mary Ann GlynnInstitutional Theory has responded to early criticism that actors are characterized as passive "cultural dopes" primarily through work on Institutional Entrepreneurship, which implicitly links actors' agency to institutional change or creation. In this dissertation, I decouple change from agency, examining how actors work to maintain existing institutional arrangements that have come under threat. Through inductive, qualitative analysis of the creation of the Securities Exchange Commission in 1934, focusing primarily on the legislative history, I ground my analysis in the speech events of the actors involved in stabilizing the securities markets as an institution after the Crash begun in 1929, identifying different forms of Institutional Guardianship aimed at preserving different aspects of the institution. I then generalize across actors to present an abstracted model of Institutional Guardianship.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010.Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management.Discipline: Organization Studies

Being the change: Resolving institutional contradiction through identity work

We show how gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) ministers in two main-line Protestant denominations in the United States experience and address a salient institutional contradiction between their role in the church and their marginalized GLBT identities. Drawing on this analysis, we offer a theoretical model of the microprocesses through which marginalized actors who are committed to the institution in which they are embedded can begin to think and act as agents of institutional change. This model enunciates the importance of embodied identity work in resolving the experience of institutional contradiction and marginalization. © Academy of Management Journal

From Cruise Director to Rabbi: Authoring the Agentic Self through Conventions of Narrative Necessity

The concept of (self-)identity has become increasingly central to institutional theory’s microfoundations, yet remains relatively underdeveloped. In this chapter, the authors use an autobiographical interview with a gay Protestant minister in the US to explore the role of narrative conventions in the construction of self-identity. The analysis of this chapter offers the basis for a new understanding of the relation between institutions, self-identity, and agency: how we agentically engage institutions depends not only on who we narrate ourselves to be, but also on how we narrate ourselves into being. This suggests that narration as a specific modality of micro-institutional processes has important performative effects

Visualizing proximity data

We would like to thank Russ Bernard and two anonymous reviewers whose helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper have improved its clarity and focus. 1 In this paper, we explore the use of graph layout algorithms (GLAs) for visualizing proximity matrices such as obtained in cultural domain analysis. Traditionally, multidimensional scaling (MDS) has been used for this purpose. We compare the two approaches in order to identify conditions when each approach is effective. As might be expected, we find that MDS shines when the data are of low dimensionality and are compatible with the defining characteristics of Euclidean distances, such as symmetry and triangle inequality constraints. However, when working with data that do not fit meet these criteria, GLAs do a better job of communicating the structure of the data. In addition, GLAs lend themselves to interactive use, which can yield a deeper and more accurate understanding of the data.

Inhabited Ecosystems: Propelling Transformative Social Change Between and Through Organizations

Two research streams examine how social movements operate both “in and around” organizations. We probe the empirical spaces between these streams, asking how activism situated in multi-organizational contexts contributes to transformative social change. By exploring activities in the mid-1990s related to advocacy for domestic partner benefits at 24 organizations in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, we develop the concept of inhabited ecosystems to explore the relational processes by which employee activists advance change. These activists faced a variety of structural opportunities and restraints, and we identify five mechanisms that sustained their efforts during protracted contestation: learning even from thwarted activism, borrowing from one another’s more or less radical approaches, helping one another avoid the traps of stagnation, fostering solidarity and ecosystem capabilities, and collaboratively expanding the social movement domain. We thus reveal how activism situated in multi-organizational contexts animates an inhabited ecosystem of challengers that propels change efforts “between and through” organizations. These efforts, even when exploratory or incomplete, generate an ecosystem’s capacity to sustain, resource, and even reshape the larger transformative social change effort