Organizational Structure books

This double volume presents a collection of 23 papers on how institutions matter to socio-economic life. The effort was seeded by the 2015 Alberta Institutions Conference, which brought together 108 participants from 14 countries and 51 different institutions. The resulting papers delve deeply into the practical impact an institutional approach enables, as well as how such research has the potential to influence policies relevant to critical institutional changes unfolding in the world today. In Volume 48A, the focus is on the micro foundations of institutional impacts. In Volume 48B, the focus is on the macro consequences of institutional arrangements. Looking across the two volumes, there are multiple theoretical, conceptual, methodological and practical points of convergence and divergence. Overall, the volumes highlight the many ways in which institutional processes and institutional researchers can contribute to our understanding of the micro foundations and macro consequences of institutions and their impacts on a wide variety of globally pressing issues, while also identifying a variety of fruitful directions for knowledge accumulation and development.

This double volume presents a collection of 23 papers on how institutions matter to socio-economic life. The effort was seeded by the 2015 Alberta Institutions Conference, which brought together 108 participants from 14 countries and 51 different institutions. The resulting papers delve deeply into the practical impact an institutional approach enables, as well as how such research has the potential to influence policies relevant to critical institutional changes unfolding in the world today. In Volume 48A, the focus is on the micro foundations of institutional impacts. In Volume 48B, the focus is on the macro consequences of institutional arrangements. Looking across the two volumes, there are multiple theoretical, conceptual, methodological and practical points of convergence and divergence. Overall, the volumes highlight the many ways in which institutional processes and institutional researchers can contribute to our understanding of the micro foundations and macro consequences of institutions and their impacts on a wide variety of globally pressing issues, while also identifying a variety of fruitful directions for knowledge accumulation and development.

This double volume presents a collection of 23 papers on how institutions matter to socio-economic life. The effort was seeded by the 2015 Alberta Institutions Conference, which brought together 108 participants from 14 countries and 51 different institutions. The resulting papers delve deeply into the practical impact an institutional approach enables, as well as how such research has the potential to influence policies relevant to critical institutional changes unfolding in the world today. In Volume 48A, the focus is on the micro foundations of institutional impacts. In Volume 48B, the focus is on the macro consequences of institutional arrangements. Looking across the two volumes, there are multiple theoretical, conceptual, methodological and practical points of convergence and divergence. Overall, the volumes highlight the many ways in which institutional processes and institutional researchers can contribute to our understanding of the micro foundations and macro consequences of institutions and their impacts on a wide variety of globally pressing issues, while also identifying a variety of fruitful directions for knowledge accumulation and development.

Understanding of the history and development of organization theory has recently made new advances through new work emerging on the history of management thought as well as through the institutionalization of critical approaches to organizations and organizational knowledge. There is a need to revisit the historical schools and their meaning for the contemporary debates in organizational theorizing, as well as to take a critical approach to the succession of paradigms. In addition, there is a continuing need in organization theory to distinguish between different metatheoretical influences behind new theories. In sum, a new version of the total historical development of organization is needed. This book addresses that need by directly using the historical sources of organization, instead of offering a secondary reading of the classics. It also shows how turns in social and cultural history intertwine with the changes in philosophical assumptions and social theoretical paradigms, without resorting to a simplified linear narrative. The book critically engages with both continuity and discontinuity between the different theoretical perspectives.

Differences in management behavior across organizations are attributed to differences in priorities and objectives or differences in the style and preferences of the individuals involved. This volume challenges this image by attending to the extra-organizational and extra-individual forces that shape and constrain how work is structured in organizations. The authors focus their attention on work within and between organizations and emphasize the ways in which the jobs are defined, the power and autonomy they engender, the opportunities that are afforded, and the constraints that are imposed, are continuously contested not only at the individual level, but also at a more aggregate and collective level. This volume is the product of an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars convened with generous support of the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council. It presents new theoretical and empirical papers that examine aspects of the changing nature of jobs and work in organizations from multiple perspectives and methodologies.

The book examines ongoing dynamics within the organizational fields of health and higher education, with a focus on collective (public universities and hospitals) and individual (professionals) actors, structures, processes and institutional logics. The fact that universities and hospitals share a number of important characteristics, both being hybrid organizations, professional bureaucracies, and operating within highly institutionalised environments, they are also characterised by their distinctive features such as the importance attributed to scientific autonomy and prestige (universities) and the needs and expectations of users and funders (hospitals). The volume brings together two relatively distinct scholarly traditions within the social sciences, namely, scholars - sociologists, educationalists, economists, political scientists and public administration researchers, etc. - involved with the study of change dynamics within the fields of health care and higher education in Europe and beyond. The authors resort to a variety of theoretical and conceptual perspectives emanating from the studies of organizational fields more generally and neo-institutionalism in particular.