Institutions are generally assumed to be stable, but recent research has focused on how that stability may be overturned to create institutional change. The assumption of stability has led to a lack of research on the flip side of change, maintenance, even though we cannot fully understand change without understanding the forces change agents work against. By examining more than a century of American public library discourse, I develop the construct of core ideas and a model of the maintenance of these institutions. Core ideas are those institutionalized ideas at the heart of a field that act as touchstones of a field's work and identity. Like other institutions, core ideas may be both added to and subtracted from a field and require maintenance through reinforcement and reinterpretation to endure. The model of maintenance of core ideas shows how core ideas are maintained in the face of social and technological change through use, as actors draw on core ideas to justify or deny accounts of practice, which reinforces, reinterprets, or undermines existing or proposed core ideas. In developing a model of maintenance I also examine how core ideas illuminate the internal workings of institutional logics and explore how the multivocality of core ideas allows and even supports multiple logics within a field.

This article unpacks the notion of institutional complexity and highlights the distinct sets of challenges confronting hybrid structural arrangements. The framework identifies three factors that contribute to the experience of complexity - namely, the extent to which the prescriptive demands of logics are incompatible, whether there is a settled or widely accepted prioritization of logics within the field, and the degree to which the jurisdictions of the logics overlap. The central thesis is that these "components" of complexity variously combine to produce four distinct institutional landscapes, each with differing implications for the challenges organizations face and for how they might respond. The article explores the situational relevance of an array of hybridizing responses and discusses their implications for organizational legitimacy and performance. It concludes by specifying the boundary conditions of the framework and highlighting fruitful directions for future scholarship.

Le résumé en français n'a pas été communiqué par l'auteur. / Our thesis has for purpose to explain how subcontracting SMEs evolving in changing and globalized space industry respond to institutional complexity whilst going international. We refer to the literature on SMEs’ internationalization: processual approaches, International Entrepreneurship, research investigating more specifically subcontracting firms and their modes of internationalization, as well to institutional logics perspective. We conducted a single-embedded qualitative case study in the space industry in France with five subcontracting SMEs, carried out 4 open-ended interviews, 35 semi-structured interviews, took part in 2 international events and 3 professional meetings and analyzed 830 pages of field material related to the space industry. Our analysis shows that social actors involved in space activities and SMEs perceive two institutional logics: Space as National Pride and Space as Global. These both logics drive institutional change which creates institutional uncertainty and institutional disequilibrium between French and international markets. Despite the same changing context, the five SMEs adapt different strategies reflected in different patterns of internationalization. We suggest that this variation may be explain by each SME’s receptivity to institutional change and more particularly by the meaning associated to the impact of change on firms’ activities perceived as: either local threat, status quo, ambiguity, international threat, or potential growth. Furthermore, we suggest that receptivity to institutional change and more particularly the attitude associated to the French space industry, with namely: loyalty to one big contractor, inconsistency, historical ties, new dynamic needed, and detachment may contribute to reinforce the type of strategy and to shape patterns of internationalization.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being implemented in various industries and shows promise within healthcare. AI has potential to perform tasks that a professional would traditionally do, and it thus looks to be a disruptive technology. Professional workers, like physicians, are likely to resist such implementations to protect the high status of their profession. As professional workers and healthcare hold significant roles in society, we found that research on how they are affected by AI is needed. This study takes place in the beginning of the introduction in Swedish hospitals. To gain insight into how physicians accept and relate AI to their professional work, we ask the question ‘Do physicians see AI as a threat to their professional role?’ With an abductive, qualitative case-study approach we have conducted eight semi- structured interviews with physicians with various experience and knowledge of working with AI. Theory of institutional work for maintenance allowed for more grounding in answering our question. Further, realisations from previous studies on change served to explain why our findings did not turn out as expected. We highlight a perspective of viewing technological change as a link in a chain of events, rather than studying one implementation at a time.

This dissertation consists of three separate, but related, studies on the institutionalization of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The first study examines the relationship between the national variables and the level of IFRS adoption. Theoretical insights regarding the level of national IFRS adoption come from the world-level institutional theory (Meyer et. al., 1997). Archival data are utilized for the study. The findings indicate that countries with weaker national governance structures and lower economic development demonstrate the highest level of commitment to IFRS. Nationalism was found to influence the extent of adoption. The study contributes to IFRS adoption literature by recognizing the multi-level possibilities of IFRS adoption and discovering the factors that drive the degree of IFRS adoption on a national level. The second study examines the ongoing change in the U.S. accounting regulation related to IFRS. The specific event investigated is an historic ruling by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) made in 2007 to accept IFRS filings from foreign issuers. This move toward acceptance of IFRS by the primary U.S. regulator is of academic interest because it represents an opportunity to study regulatory institutional change. The event is analyzed using a qualitative study of the rhetoric found in the comment letters submitted to the SEC. The following theoretical frameworks were used to interpret the qualitative findings: a model of institutional change (Greenwood et. al., 2002), the role of rhetoric in legitimating institutional change (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005), and the agents of change model (Djelic & Quack, 2003b). The conversation of opponents and proponents through the comment letters revealed the struggle of the participants to legitimize their positions. As expected, rhetorical themes associated with the moral and pragmatic legitimacy of their positions were utilized. Unexpectedly, the shifting site of regulation and the related power of SEC were troubling for proponents and opponents of the change. The study contributes to transnational accounting regulation literature in a number of ways. It presents a synthesis of different theoretical perspectives to investigate institutional change in accounting regulation. It also deepens the understanding of how institutional change is theorized by evaluating the rhetoric of domestic, foreign, and transnational participants. The third study evaluates the diffusion of IFRS in developing countries, using the specific case of Russia. The study investigates whether individual perceptions of various aspects of financial reporting and reforms are associated with IFRS adoption. Particularly of interest is whether there are differences between voluntary adopters and those for which adoption was mandated. The data were obtained from a 2007 survey exploring Russia's transition to IFRS. In general, adopters had a more positive view of transition toward IFRS and financial reforms in Russia. Further, the perceptions of reforms by adopters did not vary based on whether the adoption was required by a national or a foreign mandate. The study contributes both theoretically and empirically to the literature on IFRS in developing countries. Taken together, these three studies focus on issues that have not been addressed previously in the accounting literature. They will advance the international accounting literature on factors related to IFRS adoption, regulations, and influences.

Since the 1970s, the institution of fire management has been in a frustrated transition from fire suppression and control to ecologically informed fire management. Administrative boundaries, professional specializations and organizational incentives and funding mechanisms have stalled the adoption of landscape scale ecological fire restoration as a guiding paradigm. Using a case study approach, this dissertation examines the potential of a multi-scalar collaborative network, the US Fire Learning Network (FLN), to catalyze the changes necessary to overcome the frustrated transition. Established in 2002 in an agreement between the USDA Forest Service, The Nature Conservancy, and the US Department of Interior, the FLN operates at landscape, regional and national scales. In this multi-scalar context, the network utilizes planning technologies, communication modalities, and interpersonal interaction to link participants at each scale and motivate them to enhance their collaborative ecological restoration planning capacities. The network directly addresses the challenges of the frustrated transition by enabling practitioners to collaborate across administrative and disciplinary boundaries, develop expertise in ecological fire restoration planning and management, and to inform policy changes at the federal level that can create new incentives and funding mechanisms that support landscape scale ecological restoration. While institutional transformation has yet to occur, the FLN sets the stage to address the core challenges that fire management practitioners and organizations face as they engage in landscape scale ecological fire restoration. This work provides theoretical and practical insights to collaborative planning research by introducing new forms of collaborative practice, describing how collaborative planning can be conducted across multiple scales simultaneously, and establishing how multi-scalar collaborative networks may be able to catalyze institutional change necessary to respond to complex cross scalar environmental problems. / Ph. D.

This article contributes to a thriving line of research that examines issue interpretation and social accounts in order to study the adoption and diffusion of organizational concepts and management practices. It employs the empirical example of the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Austria between 1990 and 2005 to investigate the complex role institutional pressures and social positions of actors play in the local adoption of globally theorized ideas. More specifically, the study reveals distinct patterns in rhetorical CSR adoption that illustrate the initial hesitation and reluctance of an established elite in the Austrian business community towards the Anglo-American notion of 'explicit' CSR, while non-elite actors who were less favourably positioned in the social order readily embraced the concept. It is in such a sense that CSR is nevertheless instrumentalized to challenge, reinterpret, or explicitly evoke the autochthonous idea of institutionalized social solidarity. Conceptually, this research takes into account social structure, actors' positions in the social order, and resulting divergent adoption motivations - i.e. the individual, yet socially derived, relevance systems of actors - and relates them to mechanisms and processes of institutional change. (author's abstract)

What explains institutional change in authoritarian regimes presiding over fragmented societies? A popular assumption is that, because the state is so powerful, major institutional change takes place only when certain actors within the state system see such change as beneficial for their personal or collective interests. In other words, institutional changes are necessarily top-down and elitist in nature. Challenging that position, this thesis articulates a theory of gradual institutional change in authoritarian regimes, arguing that authoritarian institutions, as distributional instruments laden with power implications, are likely to be unstable and ambiguous, allowing social actors to advance their personal or collective interests through gradual institutional modifications. As these resistances accumulate, the costs for state actors to maintain their increasingly ineffective institutions rise to an unsustainable level, incentivising them to revise their core practices—and, by extension, sometimes expand existing rights or extend new ones to their citizens. This argument is supported by a systematic examination of the Chinese state’s historic attempts to promote the use of a standardised language form—putonghua—and simplified Chinese characters on a national scale, and a range of popular resistance efforts against them. Drawing upon newly available archival materials, survey data, and in-depth interviews, I conduct process-tracing case studies of three successive language management regimes—namely, top-down (from the 1950s to 1980s), incentivising (from the 1990s to mid-2000s), and selective (from the mid-2000s), demonstrating how they were challenged and gradually modified by their subjects. From this position I argue that the deployment of official language policy in the PRC is determined endogenously by the ambiguities of existing language institutions as well as exogenously by levels of economic development and communication technology. The casual arguments are then evaluated in light of evidence from the history of language management in the former Soviet Union and Tawian.

The establishment of the European External Action Service (EEAS) was the latest organisational innovation aimed at bridging the disjuncture between EU external relations and foreign policy structures. Almost immediately after its creation, it attracted wide-spread criticism of its functioning by the very same actors who had created it. This thesis develops a three-stage bureaucratic-institutionalist framework in order to explore the political contestation of this new organisation and its impact on the organisation and functioning of the EEAS. Inception, establishment and consolidation are the three phases of the organisation s life cycle under scrutiny. The thesis begins with the inception of the EEAS during the Convention on the Future of Europe from 2002-2003. Through the lens of rational choice historical institutionalism it analyses the positions of various actors in the Convention and the options that were considered during this phase. It then shows how disagreements between integrationist and more sceptical groups led to a vague compromise on the EEAS and its organisational design. The thesis continues with an analysis of the establishment phase, i.e. the negotiation process leading to the EEAS decision of 2010, throughout which the political conflict continued between the EU institutions on central design elements of the service such as status, scope and staffing. Theoretically, this conflict is captured through the politics of Eurocratic structure approach. In the final consolidation phase, the EEAS started to operate as a new administrative actor, but was heavily influenced by political and bureaucratic contestation. Bureaucracy theory helps to predict the organisational behaviour of the EEAS to a degree, but the thesis shows how the organisation was also shaped by bureaucratic politics between EU institutions and member states. The thesis concludes that a bureaucratic-institutionalist approach explains why the EEAS is a strongly contested bureaucracy and how the processes of contestation at the EU level hindered institutional design throughout the organisation s life cycle of inception, establishment and consolidation. It reveals limitations of this approach, such as the persistence of actors, the weight of decision precedent and the permeability of organisational development phases.

Au croisement de la sociologie du changement institutionnel, du travail administratif et de l’action publique environnementale, notre thèse appréhende de façon originale la question de l’autonomie du réformateur à partir d’un suivi ethnographique sur six ans du travail quotidien de cadres intermédiaires de l’administration responsables de la mise en œuvre d’une réforme des politiques territoriales de la nature : les directeurs de parcs nationaux. Après avoir démontré empiriquement, puis théoriquement à partir de leurs spécificités, l’inertie institutionnelle particulièrement forte de ces politiques publiques, nous soutenons la thèse suivante : même dans un contexte fortement contraint, l’autonomie du réformateur existe mais n'est jamais donnée ni acquise. Elle dépend étroitement de la pratique quotidienne du travail de réforme. Le réformateur doit la construire et l’entretenir. Certaines phases de la trajectoire de transformation institutionnelle s’avèrent cruciales pour cela : son démarrage et de courtes parenthèses où le réformateur peut travailler à ce que la dynamique du processus de réforme lui-même contraste fortement avec l’inertie de la politique publique. La gestion du processus de réforme, plus que sa substance, est ainsi au cœur de la construction de l’autonomie du réformateur et de l’ouverture d’une trajectoire d’innovation. Nous en montrons les modalités pratiques autour d’un travail d’interprétation, de composition et de modélisation par lequel la lecture de l’action en cours se fait de plus en plus à travers le prisme de l’expérience collective récente (de mise en œuvre de la réforme) et moins à travers celui de l’histoire lointaine sur lequel se fonde l’inertie institutionnelle. / Our research work brings together sociology of institutional change, studies of administrative work and studies of environmental policies. Drawing on a six years ethnographical study, we document the daily activities of directors of national parks (i.e. middle managers in French administration) in charge of implementing in new law to reform this nature conservation policy. We address the issue of reformer’s autonomy. We demonstrate empirically, then theoretically, that national parks, and more generally nature conservation policies, features high institutional inertia. Then we argue that, even in a context including strong constraints, reformers have autonomy. Yet autonomy is never pre-given nor can be taken for granted. It closely depends on reformers’ daily practices. Reformers need to build and to maintain their autonomy. Certain stages in institutional change linked to the implementation of the reform are critical to achieve this : the beginning of the reform process and then short periods when reformers can work to ensure that the dynamics of the reform process itself depart strongly from the usual inertia mechanisms of the public policy. Thus, the management of the reform process, more than its substance, is at the heart of the building of reformers’ autonomy and opens up a space for institutional innovation. We document the practical modalities of reformers’ work of interpretation, of composition and of modeling which contribute to the fact that ongoing action is increasingly being considered through the lens of the recent collective experience (since the beginning of the reform) rather than through the lens of the distant history on which institutional inertia is based.