AMJ Call for paper
发布时间：2008-01-24
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- 发布时间：
- 2008-01-24
- 文章标题：
- AMJ Call for paper
- 内容：
ORGANIZATIONS AND THEIR INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENTS: BRINGING MEANING, CULTURE AND VALUES BACK IN Sponsor: Academy of Management Journal Description: Since Meyer and Rowan's (1977) classic paper, much research has focused on how organizations adapt to institutional pressures. Research in this tradition has shifted from an early focus on explaining organizational similarity, to a more recent emphasis on how institutional pressures affect organizational change. While this research has generated an impressive volume of work, the 'new' institutionalism has been criticized because "it does not have the guts of institutions in it" (Stinchcombe, 1997: 17). That is, most research focuses on how the institutional environment affects organizational form and function, without also attending to the values, beliefs and meanings that underpin form and function. The 'guts of institutions' is the understanding that institutional pressures only work because they impact the collective understandings and commitments of individuals inside both organizations and institutions.
Our goal in this Special Research Forum, thus, is to understand how social structures and practices inside organizations "acquire meaning and stability in their own right rather than as instrumental tools for the achievement of specialized ends" (Lincoln, 1995: 1147). We invite papers that explicitly examine the phenomenological underpinnings of institutions inside organizations. Our aims are threefold:
First, we aim to examine the ideational dynamics of meaning, culture, symbols and values in organizations. We explicitly encourage studies that extend recent efforts to explore the role of meaning (Zilber, 2002), symbols (Creed, Scully & Austen, 2002) and values (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996) that explain how organizational practices acquire meaning and significance beyond their immediate productive value.
Second, we hope to reconnect institutional research with processes that occur inside the organization. While we now know how institutional pressures influence inter-organizational relations and structure organizational fields, considerably less attention has been paid to understanding how logics, fads and fashions and other macro-pressures are interpreted by actors inside the organization. We encourage here an extension of the tradition established by Gouldner (1954) and Selznick (1949) that examine how the infusion of values and meanings can subvert rationality and agency to produce unanticipated consequences in organizations.
Third, we emphasize the need to extend the range of methodological tools used to study the effects of meanings, culture and values in organizations. We seek papers that employ interpretive methods which focus on how "different meanings held by different persons or groups produce or sustain a sense of truth, particularly in the face of competing definitions of reality" (Gephart, 2004: 457). We encourage papers that employ case histories, interviews, ethnographies, ethno-statistics, grounded theory, sense-making, conversational analysis, narrative, semiotics, content analysis, rhetoric and other underrepresented methodologies.
Prospective contributors may wish to consider (but are not limited to) the following research questions:
What are the motivations of organizations that adopt highly institutionalized practices? Are the espoused motivations for adopting TQM, for example, expressed in terms of the need to conform or the need to improve performance? How is the adoption of management fads and fashions contested inside organizations?
How are institutional logics understood by actors inside organizations? How do actors reconcile competing logics? How, for example, are debates over the adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility framed by different constituents inside an organization; are they framed in terms of morality or share performance?
Why do organizations engage in practices that have no discernible relationship with technical efficiency? Why do for-profit corporations collect art? Why do they construct corporate histories? How are such practices framed by management? How are they understood by employees? What persuasive techniques are used by management to convince shareholders that adoption is in their interests?
How are institutional categories constructed and given meaning? What boundary work goes into creating categories that define access to economic and institutional resources? How, for example, does the creation of such categories as "technology", "affirmative action" or "human resources" construct actors and confer differential access to resources within organizations? What boundary work goes into expanding or contracting such categories?
What is the cultural basis of management? What core values make popular management parables more credible than empirical research among practitioners? What are the key ceremonial and ritualistic elements of leadership or management that offer purpose and meaning beyond bare claims to legitimacy? How are the ceremonial elements of organizations (i.e., annual meetings, letters to shareholders) interpreted by various audiences?
In sum, we are interested in bringing meaning, culture and values back into institutional theory and institutional processes back inside organizations as a way to deepen our understanding of how institutional pressures shape organizational behavior.
REFERENCES
Gephardt, R.P. 2004. Qualitative Research and the Academy of Management Journal. Academy of Management Journal, 47: 454-462.
Gouldner, A.W. 1954. Patterns of industrial bureaucracy. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press.
Greenwood, R. & C.R. Hinings. 1996. Understanding radical organizational change: Bringing together the old and the new institutionalism. Academy of Management Review, 21: 1022-1054.
Meyer, J.W. & B. Rowan. 1977. Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83: 340-363.
Lincoln, J. R. 1995. Book Review: The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Social Forces, 73: 1147-1148.
Selznick, P. 1949. TVA and the grassroots. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Seo, M., and W.E.D. Creed. 2002. Institutional contradictions, praxis, and institutional change. Academy of Management Review, 27: 222-247.
Stinchcombe, A. L. 1997. On the virtues of the old institutionalism. Annual Review of Sociology, 23: 1-18.
Zilber, T.B. 2002. Institutionalization as an interplay between actions, meanings and actors: The case of a rape crisis center in Israel. The Academy of Management Journal, 45: 234-254.Paper
Procedure:Submissions are due no later than August 31, 2008. Contributors should follow the direction for manuscript submission described in "Information for Contributors" in the front of each issue of AMJ and at http://aom.pace.edu/amjnew/contributorinformation.html
For queries about submission, contact AMJ's managing editor, Kathy Escher at amj-rynes@uiowa.edu. For queries about this special research forum write to one of the guest editors: Roy Suddaby (roy.suddaby@ualberta.ca), Kim Elsbach (kdelsbach@ucdavis.edu), Royston Greenwood (Royston.greenwood@ualberta.ca), John Meyer (meyer@stanford.edu) or Tammar Zilber (mstbz@mscc.huji.ac.il).Type: Special Topic Forum Deadline: August 31, 2008 Issue Date: May 21, 2009 Website: http://aom.pace.edu/amjnew/Research_Forums.html Contact Info: Roy Suddaby
phone: (780) 492-2386
email address: roy.suddaby@ualberta.ca