Multiple Institutional Logics in Organizations: Explaining Their Varied Nature and Implications

“…their simultaneous pursuit of different and oftentimes competing missions, these organizations tend to experience divergent pressures from different stakeholders and face unique challenges in managing the associated complexity (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Pache & Santos, 2013; Zhao & Lounsbury, 2016).”

“Whereas this literature tends to see plurality and complexity as problematic (Besharov & Smith, 2014), our account suggests that in tackling grand challenges multiple logics are likely to be beneficial and generative.”

“…complex, leaders face pressures to address multiple competing demands that are core to their strategy and inconsistent with one another, including tensions between social missions and profits, or global demands and local needs (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Greenwood et al., 2011; Kraatz & Block, 2008).”

“Extant literature has treated professional background and past experience as constraining (Pache and Santos, 2013b; Besharov and Smith, 2014), leading individuals to either adhere to one side of a hybrid (individuals as segregated) (e.”

“Recently, institutional plurality, where multiple institutional logics are at play, has been promoted as an important perspective from which to study hybrid organizations (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Kraatz & Block, 2008).”

“A decade later, the paradoxical challenges facing organizations have become more numerous and strategic (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Smith & Lewis, 2011).”

“…are motivated by compassion, rather than wealth creation (Grimes et al., 2013; Miller et al., 2012) and the ventures combine social welfare and commercial institutional logics within the organization (Battilana and Lee, 2014; Besharov and Smith, 2014; Haigh and Hoffman, 2012; Smith et al., 2013).”

“…agency (Battilana & D’Aunno, 2009; Garud, Hardy, & Maguire, 2007; Walker, Schlosser, & Deephouse, 2014), organizations’ private and social missions (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Donaldson & Preston 1995; Smith, Gonin, & Besharov, 2013), and designed versus emergent structures (de Rond & Bouchikhi,…”

“Alternatively, organizations situated at the interstices of multiple fields, such as social enterprises, face competing demands from these various fields (Besharov and Smith, 2014; Tracey et al., 2011).”

“Similar to Selznick’s, these authors’ main interest lies in understanding how conflict affects or transforms organizations (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Mair et al., 2015) or the organization’s environment understood as organizational fields (Lawrence et al., 2002; Mair & Hehenberger, 2014).”

“When this boundary condition is relaxed, we are faced with the potential existence of multiple institutional logics (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Greenwood et al., 2011).”

“…of research on organizational hybrids (e.g., Battilana & Lee, 2014), management within competing institutional logics (e.g., Reay & Hinings, 2009; Besharov & Smith, 2014; Mitchell, Agle, Chrisman & Spence, 2011), and the management of multiple organizational identities (Pratt & Foreman, 2000)…”

“…Lok, 2010; Lok, 2010) and organizational (Pache & Santos, 2010; Tracey, Phillips, & Jarvis, 2011) levels of analysis, as well as at multiple levels (Besharov & Smith, 2014), researchers tend to assume that logics are reflectively managed, and this has led to calls for the emphasis on reflexivity…”

“, 2014); micro-finance enterprises (Battilana and Dorado, 2010); universities (Townley, 1997), hospitals (Miller and French, 2016) and orchestras (Besharov and Smith, 2014).”

“…of Business Venturing 31 (2016) 643–662 wider array of societal-level institutional influences, embedded in the logics of state, market, and religion, that may affect social entrepreneurial efforts (Besharov and Smith, 2014; Greenwood et al., 2011; Thornton et al., 2012; Zhao et al., 2016a, 2016b).”

“…embeddedness in multiple fields does not necessarily imply that the cues arising from different fields are always and necessarily in conflict (Besharov and Smith 2014), prior research and historical evidence suggest that industry and community peers frequently provide inconsistent behavioral…”

“…Colorado opened the door for the growth of organizations—specifically, wind developers and clean energy SMOs—that combined economizing and ecologizing logics in their cores and therefore can be viewed as hybrid organizations (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Besharov & Smith, 2014; Pache & Santos, 2010).”

“Not unlike institutional logics (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Thornton & Ocasio, 2008), they can be strategies and sources of legitimacy, order or security (Giddens, 1984; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Seo & Creed, 2002).”

“Not all hospitals are equally embedded in business and patient care logics, therefore they are likely to face differential pressures associated with each, depending on the centrality of the influence of each logic (Besharov and Smith 2014).”

“Thus, while federated structures provide the benefits of flexibility and responsiveness, these are generally gained at the expense of coordination and collaboration among different units, which may engage in self-interested behavior to further their own goals (Battilana and Dorado, 2010; Besharov and Smith, 2014).”

“Together scholars have noted how these factors can create potential organizational tensions (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Jay, 2013; York, Hargrave, & Pacheco, 2016).”

“Nevertheless, these differences are conceptually useful to understand the positioning of social enterprises as hybrid organizations beyond the way in which social and commercial logics are balanced (Besharov & Smith, 2014).”

“(Re)framing strategies can vary based on the centrality and compatibility of logics to which organizations have made prior commitments (Besharov and Smith, 2014), on the degree of disruptiveness of field-level changes (Hoffman, 1999), and on an organization’s relative position in the field (Greenwood et al.”

“Studies to date have focused on the existence of tension between social and financial goals (Besharov and Smith 2014), how this is perceived by an enterprise’s leaders (Hahn et al. 2014), andhow itmanifests inorganizational structure (Raisch et al. 2009).”

“Recent research on organizational hybridity (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Battilana, Sengul, Pache, & Model, 2015; Besharov & Smith, 2014), for example, explicates a similar call for TMTs to reconcile competing organizational frames in service of doing good and doing well.”

“Scholars have begun to address what factors determine the degree to which a hybrid organization, which is subject to multiple institutional logics, steers toward one logic or another (Pache and Santos, 2010; Besharov and Smith, 2014).”

“Third, we contribute to institutional theory by showing how interactions between organizations and the field help to explain how multiple logics guide different organizational behaviors (Besharov & Smith, 2014).”

“Social issues are often characterized by high levels of complexity and contestation (Besharov & Smith, 2013).”

“Consistent with theoretical work on institutional logics, which distinguishes between the norms and beliefs that constitute field-level logics (Friedland and Alford, 1991; Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012) and their instantiations in guiding principles and practices within organizations (Hallett and Ventresca, 20…”

“Just as the external environment is full of diverse constituents, the internal environment of organizations is composed of individuals, groups, and departments with different interests and logics of action (Pache and Santos, 2010; Crilly, Zollo, and Hansen, 2012; Besharov and Smith, 2014).”

“, mission drift and accountability challenges).(12) Growth in the number of social hybrid organizations”

“In spite of its social goals and ambition, SRI is a financial investment practice and thus deeply rooted in the financial logic; that logic is dominant and central in the construction of an SRI fund (Besharov and Smith, 2014).”

“…2012), namely the market and social welfare logics (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Pache & Santos, 2013), with their core activities blending economic and social principles (Battilana & Lee, 2014; Besharov & Smith, 2014; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Galaskiewicz & Barringer, 2012; Haveman & Rao, 2006).”

“Our insights also have implications for research on conflict in hybrids (Ashforth and Reingen 2014; Battilana and Dorado 2010; Glynn 2000), highlighting the analytical leverage of logic combinability, not just compatibility and centrality (Besharov and Smith 2014), in settings involving more than two logics.”

“These findings suggested that some environmental managers were becoming carriers of the values reflected in the environmental logic, which was emerging as a more central logic (Besharov & Smith, 2014).”

“…platform-centric ventures from other multilogic-based ventures (e.g. social enterprises), where different logics present at the level of organisational goals may not have such a ‘common denominator’, creating hybrid organisational responses (Besharov and Smith 2014; Purdy and Gray 2009).”

“Third, our paper calls for future research into how decision makers cope with logic multiplicity (Vurro, Dacin & Perrini, 2010; Thornton, Ocasio & Lounsbury, 2012; Meyer & Höllerer, 2016) when addressing grand challenges in society (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Ferraro, Etzion & Gehman, 2015).”

“To address this critical gap in knowledge of EEs, in this paper, institutional theory (Thornton and Ocasio 2008) and theories of multiple logics (Besharov and Smith 2014) are introduced to the EE literature.”

“Compatibility of logics refers to the extent to which logics provide congruous prescriptions for action (Besharov and Smith, 2014; Greenwood et al., 2011).”

“…fields and organisations (e.g. Greenwood et al., 2010; Kraatz & Block, 2008) and groups and individuals (e.g. Bertels & Lawrence, 2016; Besharov & Smith, 2014; Glaser et al., 2017), have the capacity to carry more than one paradigm simultaneously and to shield shady action behind powerful logics…”

“, 2000; Lounsbury, 2007), co-exist (e.g., Reay and Hinings, 2009; Schneiberg, 2007; Purdy and Gray, 2009; Dunn and Jones, 2010; Jones et al., 2012; Besharov and Smith, 2014), or give rise to hybrid forms (e.”

“When there is a clear dominant logic, then there is no conflict, as Besharov and Smith (2014) have pointed out.”

“Finally, our integration strategy extends current writing on organizational responses to competing logics (Besharov and Smith, 2014) by advancing the possibility that organizational actors can creatively develop new practices that increase alignment by actively improving the compatibility of…”

“The logics of exploration and exploitation are contradictory in the sense that they represent different conceptions of businesses and call for divergent managerial practices (Besharov & Smith, 2014).”

“The burgeoning literature on institutional logics has described and contrasted multiple types of logics (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Friedland & Alford, 1991; Lounsbury, 2002; Pache & Santos, 2013; Thornton et al., 2012), which are formed around “a cornerstone institution that represent the cultural…”

“Bloomfield, M. J. (2012). Is forest certification a hegemonic force? The FSC and its challengers.”

“They are not, however, perceived as competing logics: the compatibility and centrality of both social and economic goals are typically aligned (Besharov & Smith, 2014), although there is evidence that this alignment may be subject to significant tensions (Gospel & Pendleton, 2013).”

“…conflict over organizational commitments to institutional elements, such as the nature of the opposition between different internalized logics (Pache & Santos, 2010) or the degree to which divergent logics inside organizations are essential to an organization’s functioning (Besharov & Smith, 2014).”

“Hybrid organizations may be distinguishable by several organizational arrangements reflecting the institutional logics enacted by individuals (Besharov and Smith, 2014), for example, the adoption of specific organizational structure (including legal form such as the B-corp in the United States or…”

“Many of the characteristics of these logics are mutually exclusive, complicating the transformation and making the blending of the logics unlikely (Besharov and Smith, 2014).”

“Problems derived from incorporating members with experience in for-profit entities can be especially challenging, since these members may introduce conflicts related to the defining elements of the SEO: its values and mission (Besharov and Smith 2014).”

“…that organizations must operate ‘within multiple institutional spheres’ (Kraatz & Block 2008, p. 243) and are hence subject to the pressures of potentially contradictory ‘institutional logics’ from their environment that are mediated by internal organizational constituents (Besharov & Smith, 2014).”

“Shape Variation in a Hybrid Form Whereas most prior work on hybridity at the organizational level treats the phenomenon as relatively static (e.g., Besharov and Smith 2014) or investigates how it shifts over relatively short periods of time (e.g., Ashforth and Reingen 2014; Jay 2013; Ramus et al.…”

“Institutional logics provide a coherent set of organising principles for a specific realm within society (Besharov and Smith 2014) and can be extended to the organisational level or to the supply chain level.”

“The two primary dimensions that impact the structure of a social enterprise, and therefore the management of dual logics, are first logic compatibility (Besharov & Smith, 2014) and, second, how the logics are structurally diffused.”

“Such ventures blend aspects of the social and commercial sectors, resulting in hybrid organizational arrangements that combine aspects of typical businesses and nonprofits (Battilana and Lee 2014, Besharov and Smith 2014, Pache and Santos 2013).”

“…work can examine how firms develop internal capabilities and organizational learning (Crossan, Lane, & White, 1999) to better cope with informal institutional processes (Easterby-Smith & Lyles, 2011; Lyles, 2014) and multiple institutional logics (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Zhou, Gao, & Zhao, 2017).”