Title: "Changing the Cassette: Altering Understandings, Relationships, and Rules in Institutional Fields"
Abstract: Institutional fields consist of the understandings, rules, and relationships that provide structure and meaning to organizational life. While institutional fields are generally considered to provide stability, a growing body of work has focused on how institutional fields change over time. Much of this work focuses on how institutional entrepreneurs work to strategically alter shared understandings that characterize the field. We seek to build on this research by exploring the tactics used by institutional entrepreneurs to alter not only understandings, but also relationships and rules. Using a case-study, we examine the effort of a non-governmental organization to transform the institutional field of Nicaraguan dairy farming. We find that the institutional entrepreneur used tactics to alter understandings, relationships, and rules, and that these efforts were mutually reinforcing. We find that understandings, relationships, and rules interact and influence field members’ acceptance or rejection of change. We seek to contribute to theory by broadening the lens through which institutional field change is understood to include a more explicit focus on regulations and rules, as well as understand how these different tactics interrelate.
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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