Institutional Work

Thomas B. Lawrence is the Weyerhaeuser Professor of Change Management and Director of the CMA Centre for Strategic Change and Performance Measurement in the Faculty of Business Administration at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Roy Suddaby is Associate Professor of Management and Rice Faculty Fellow at the Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta, Canada. Bernard Leca is Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Strategy at Groupe ESC Rouen, France.

• List of figures; List of tables; List of contributors; 1. Introduction: theorizing and studying institutional work Thomas B. Lawrence, Roy Suddaby and Bernard Leca; Part I. Essays on Institutional Work: 2. Institutional work and the paradox of embedded agency Julie Battilana and Thomas D'Aunno; 3. Leadership as institutional work: a bridge to the other side Matthew S. Kraatz; 4. Bringing change into the lives of the poor: entrepreneurship outside traditional boundaries Ignasi Marti and Johanna Mair; 5. Institutional work as the creative embrace of contradiction Timothy J. Hargrave and Andrew H. Van de Ven; Part II. Studies of Institutional Work: 6. Building the iron cage: institutional creation work in the context of competing proto-institutions Charlene Zietsma and Brent McKnight; 7. Scandinavian institutionalism - a case of institutional work Eva Boxenbaum and Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen; 8. Institutional maintenance as narrative acts Tammar B. Zilber; 9. Maintaining an institution in a contested organizational field: the work of AACSB and its constituents Christine Quinn Trank and Marvin Washington; 10. Institutional 'dirty' work: preserving institutions through strategic decoupling Paul M. Hirsch and Y. Sekou Bermiss; 11. Doing which work? A practice approach to institutional pluralism Paula Jarzabkowski, Jane Matthiesen and Andrew H. Van de Ven; Index.

Review of the hardback: 'Max Weber told us that institutions cannot be understood without considering the historical aggregation of individual activities. For many years, though, institutional theory had done little with this insight, focusing instead on the role of institutions as powerful social constraints. Priorities have clearly changed and this volume belongs with the contemporary lively 'deconstruction' of the institutional 'iron cage.' It is a welcome and timely contribution, demonstrating through a series of rich empirical explorations that institutions are created, changed and maintained through work, activities, practices, and discourses. We need more books of this kind, emphasizing the conflictual, messy, contradictory, ambiguous, processual, and ongoing nature of institutional work.' Marie-Laure Djelic, ESSEC Business School