Overview

Guest editors:

Stephane Tywoniak and Jennifer Bartlett
Queensland University of Technology

This special issue of Journal of Management & Organization (volume 17/5 - September 2011) aims to widen understanding of the processes of stability and change in today's organizations, with a particular emphasis on the contribution of institutional approaches to organizational studies.

Institutional perspectives on organization theory assume that rational economic calculations such as the maximization of profits or the optimization of resource allocation are not sufficient to understand the behavior of organizations and their strategic choices. Institutionalists acknowledge the great uncertainty associated with the conduct of organizations, and suggest that taken-for-granted values, beliefs, and meanings within and outside organizations also play an important role in the determination of legitimate action. 

An overview of core research questions in institutional theory reveals a tension between stability and change in organizations. Over the past three decades, the analysis of organizations through the institutional lens has oscillated between these two polar attractors. On the one hand researchers acknowledge the role of taken-for-granted assumptions in promoting organizational inertia and stability, and the influence of external pressures for conformity to societal norms of legitimacy that lead organizations to converge on mimetic practices and structures. On the other hand, attention has more recently been drawn to the role of organizational innovators or institutional entrepreneurs in bringing about new industries, products, or organizational forms. 

This tension between stability and change has highlighted the need for processual research, and has provided the opportunity to import processual concepts and theories such as structuration or sensemaking. Recent theoretical developments highlight the continual building and re-building of organizations through the work of purposeful and knowledgeable agents. However, important research questions pertaining to organizational stability and change remain under-studied, including: processes of institutionalization and de-institutionalization, the role of power and organizational machinations, the contribution of processes of learning and sensemaking, and the role of ethics, identity, meaning and culture. 

This special issue invites original contributions that contribute to the conversation about the tensions between stability and change in organizational research. Themes for contributions include but are not limited to: 

• Processes of organizational building, maintenance, and decay
• Institutionalization and de-institutionalization
• Power, politics and machinations in and around organizations
• Values, ethics, identity, meaning and culture
• Processes of sensemaking and learning
• Discourse, rhetoric and communication as institutional resources and practices
• Critical, 'fringe' or heterodox perspectives
• Methodological innovations