Despite growing interest in sustainable operations and supply management (SOSM) from both academics and practitioners, literature examining the area remains fragmented. This thesis presents the findings of a study investigating the influence of exogenous pressures and endogenous capability-building, independently and interactively, on sustainable operations and supply management practice adoption. Exogenous pressures, such as regulation and consumer demands, may influence the decision to adopt specific SOSM practices. For example, within the fashion industry, media exposés have heightened consumer awareness of unethical practices creating pressure for fashion retailers to address these concerns within their supply chains more fully. Endogenous pressures, in this case relating to capability-building, may also influence the SOSM practices that organisations choose to adopt, such as the implementation of recycling strategies or energy efficiency initiatives which can reduce both the cost and environmental impact of the focal organisation.

This thesis employs a new institutional sociology perspective to investigate factors influencing accounting education practices in Libyan universities. For this purpose, two pieces of empirical work, a case study and an analysis of accounting textbooks used in Libyan universities, were conducted. The case study was undertaken at one Libyan university and included interviews of accounting academics, document analysis and observations. The findings of the case study informed the second part of the empirical work of this thesis analysing the accounting textbooks used in Libyan universities through interviews with accounting academics and a content analysis of accounting textbooks. The main findings of this thesis indicate that accounting education practices in Libyan universities are largely shaped by coercive pressure emanating from the Libyan political context and political regime and a lack of funding that has fundamentally transcended normative or mimetic isomorphism from international accounting education practices. The influence of this coercive pressure also has led to embedded institutional logic of having a second job and not conducting research as the dominant logic of Libyan accounting academics. Hence, there is a lack of a systematic development and update of the accounting curriculum, syllabus and textbooks in Libyan universities leading to an outdated syllabus that is irrelevant to the needs of Libyan accounting students or to the profession. In addition, the teaching methods adopted to deliver the accounting syllabus are traditional methods such as lectures and tutorials that are led by teachers with little interaction with students which limits the skills development of Libyan accounting students.

For the past twenty years, environmental organizations have been the main force in Taiwan¡¦s environmental movement. Meanwhile, the institutionalization of environmental organizations had placed them in a dilemma of organizational sustaining and mission pursuing. To continue its influence on public policy and environmental awareness, environmental organizations need to perform harder and better. In recent years, the government has cast environmental organizations in more roles, as well as allowed them to play a more important role in policy consulting. Many environmental organizations have thus become intermediate social institutions and should be held accountable. Moreover, since all environmental organizations have ecology as its stakeholder and many organizations are advocacy-orientated, their process performance needs to be evaluated in the accountability procedure. From a self-regulation perspective, environmental organizations should also develop behavioral norms for self-governance to earn social recognition and trust. In practice, however, laws concerning the accountability of environmental organizations or other NPOs are not well formulated. The intent of this study is mainly to develop an accountability framework workable for self-assessment in environmental organizations. Taking a broad perspective, accountability is here defined as ¡§accounts for the results and process of organizational activities are provided, by which nonprofit organizations are responsive to expectations generated within and outside the organization so as to gain legitimacy in society.¡¨ Synthesizing large literature on theoretical, practical accountability and role expectancy on environmental organizations, the framework, based on institutional theory, was constructed to evaluate accountability in ¡§regulative¡¨, ¡§normative¡¨, ¡§cognitive¡¨ and ¡§organizational characteristics¡¨ dimensions, totally consisting of 92 items. Survey data from the leaders of environmental organizations were collected to examine the evaluative framework¡¦s feasibility by their assessing each item¡¦s reasonability, acceptability, practicability, and importance. As a result, 45 priority items out of 92 were selected, which identify the evaluative contents for an ¡§accountable¡¨ environmental organization, and can be taken as a useful checklist in future to scrutinize organizations¡¦ accountability and performance. Moreover, additional results from in-depth interviewing environmental organizations¡¦ leaders showed that they generally regard regulative accountability as acceptable, normative accountability as reasonable but difficult to achieve, and cognitive accountability as important in delineate organizations¡¦ mission and identity as well as adapting themselves to the society. Among the major findings of this studyare that environmental organizations accept their social responsibility and acknowledge the benefit of performance evaluation, but organizations and the society know little about the concept of accountability. These organizations also believed that the present social institutions and organizational conditions are unhelpful or even harmful for them to take accountability actions. These reasons incline environmental organizations to agree to more external regulation than self-regulation. In the meantime, the above situations mostly hinder launching accountability and performance evaluation in organizations. To drive self-regulation in environmental organizations, institutional building is suggested; that is to couple organizations¡¦ performance evaluation and advancement with self-assessment by expanding knowledge on accountability among the society and making institutional incentives available.

The aim of the study was to investigate how a community motivates and ensures the implementation of its values and how this document affected personnel of meaning, vision and daily operations. The study was based on semi-structured interviews, in which nine respondents were interviewed in a city in southern Sweden. Interviews dealt with three different themes, all concerned organization or set of values. The analysis was based partly on how organizations and institutions build up and maintain their legitimacy. The analysis was also explained by the new institutional theory and its concepts isomorphism. In conclusion, the study shows that the concept of value system is very subjective and means different things depending on which profession you belong to. The study also showed that officials of the municipality indicate that the values discussed continuously in operation. This picture did not fit at all agree with the care assistants who considered values almost never discussed. The study also showed that the implementation was not as successful as desired, then no time for reflection was. The study showed that the reason that there was an opportunity to reflect due to the time and resources were too scarce. Throughout officials related concepts in the study more to an organizational plan, when care assistants instead relate everything to the actual meeting with the care recipient. Instead of using values as a benchmark they instead used of the "inner compass" that consists of subjective norms and values.

This study investigates the degree of professionalization of human resource departments (HR departments) based on the contingency theory and institutional theory. Previous studies indicate that organizational structures are influenced by rational and institutional determinants. The requirement for increasing efficiency in organizations will drive the organizations to fit the rational determinants and demonstrate assorted structures. In contrast to the rational model, the motivation for acquiring legitimacy will drive organizations to conform to the institutional determinants and demonstrate similar structures under institutional pressure. Nevertheless, efficiency and legitimacy are not always contradictory. Organizations that share the same environment are believed to become structurally similar. By investigating the influence factors on the professionalization of HR departments, as well as how and why these influences work, this study can clarify the possible role of HR department in an organization. Extensive surveys and interviews have been conducted for this study. Specifically, one hundred and forty-four (144) questionnaires are collected from 517 Taiwanese public companies, representing a response rate of 27.85 %. Additionally, interviews are performed with qualified senior HR managers in selected companies. These interviews act to complement the surveys. The results show that the degree of professionalization in HR departments is influenced by both contingency and institutional factors. Environmental uncertainty and cost-driven strategy are two important contingency determinants. There are two possible institutional determinants. One is the mechanism of imitation by industrial trait, and the other is the normative pressure from professional HR groups. Furthermore, results demonstrate that the degree of professionalization of HR departments is higher in the electronic industry. This phenomenon may be due to the organization to deal with the high environmental varieties, to imitate successful organizations and to be influenced by professional HR groups. Since imitation is a strategy to face uncertainty, the higher degree of professionalization of HR department in this industry is not only a rational arrangement, but also helps the organization to acquire legitimacy. These findings reveal that HR department plays the roles to help the organization to increase efficiency and also to serve the motivation for legitimacy. The possible rationales for variations in the degree of professionalization among HR departments are discussed in this study. Finally, it points out that the increased professionalization will become increasingly important for Taiwanese HR departments as international competitions grow in the future.

Institutional theory is utilized to understand the role of the state in determining who among overlapping professions are allowed to compete in healthcare markets. Hypotheses are tested using a professional licensing policy innovation that influences the evolution of markets for healthcare services. This first paper demonstrates how the power of incumbent and challenging professional associations, the characteristics of a state's labor market, and previous adoptions by neighboring states affect a state's propensity to embrace or resist state legislation of professionally-contested healthcare licensing legislation over a 10-year observation period. The results of this research have implications for understanding state healthcare market innovations, the power of professional associations, and institutional theory. Two subsequent papers address the effects of this competition on training programs in the challenging profession.

Primarily, this research provides insight on a management accounting change in a Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) from institutional perspective. Comprising a qualitative field study, the research examines and explains how and why a management accounting change occurred in the SOE, which is the oldest and largest beer producer in China. The study focuses on the introduction and usage of a Balanced Scorecard (BSC), at both the headquarters and the factory level of the organization. The framework of institutionalization proposed by Burns and Scapens (2000) is utilized as the theoretical framework for this research. The major findings take the form of a comparison between the usage of the BSCs at the headquarters and at the factories. It is found that higher resistance to change occurred in the factories than at headquarters and resulted in the rules required by these management accounting practices to be only loosely coupled with routines embedded in everyday working activities, as the factories carried on brewing their beer. In contrast, behaviors at headquarters were more tightly coupled with the rules of the revised accounting practices. This diversity in the effect of the change process may be explained by the new management accounting practices entailing rules that fit better with the activities and routines carried out at headquarters, and so being more easily institutionalized. In contrast, institutionalization has not had much success in the factories primarily because of a lack of fit between complying with the new rules and maintaining the success of brewing operations, and because of historical circumstances that the factories have had some independence in operational matters, although part of an organizational hierarchy. Given the location of this study in a Chinese setting, the findings may contribute that, despite its Western roots, institutional theory may explain the low success rate of the implementation of the BSC in China.

By integrating signaling research with an institutional perspective we examine how country of origin, corporate governance, and host market effects impact foreign IPO performance. Using a sample of 202 foreign IPOs listed in the U.S. or U.K in 2002-2007 results indicate both the legal environment surrounding these organizations in their countries of origin and board independence impact the success of foreign firms at IPO. However, the institutional environment of the chosen IPO market impacts the salience of country and corporate governance signals for foreign IPO firms suggesting a more contextualized framework of IPO valuation is necessary.

This research was motivated by the desire to understand how regulatory reforms affect the task environment in an emerging market. Regulatory reforms in emerging markets have been used amongst others to correct market failures, increase competition or grow economic sectors. However, on occasion unintended consequences arise from these interventions leading to “liabilities of foreignness” for some of the entities operating in the institutional environment. To this end, this study aimed to establish if these effects were prevalent in the South African mining environment by studying two cases of companies operating in the sector, represented by a foreign and a domestic entity.An exploratory qualitative research design was followed since the researcher was unsure whether the phenomena being observed constituted LOFs or not. A literature study was conducted in order to define the construct of liabilities of foreignness and its impact on the task environment. Therefore the objective of the study was to;Establish the effect of institutional reforms in facilitating the development of LOFs in emerging markets.The research did show the regulatory reforms to alter the business environment somewhat, therefore leading to LOFs in the task environment. However, no entities appeared to be benefiting from the current regulatory reforms, as suggested by the literature. This is possibly due to organisational learning or the efficacy of the individual entities in applying coping strategies to mitigate against LOFs in the institutional context. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

This study applies a theoretical framework from institutional organization theory (Scott, 2001) to examine the problem of managing government contracting, conceptualized as the "smart buyer problem" by Kettl (1993). Kettl argued that, while embracing the market-based promises of contracting, governments have failed to develop the capacity to address even the most fundamental contracting questions, such as what to buy, who to buy from and what was bought? He suggests that the problem is partly attributable to bureaucratic barriers to information sharing in government agencies that prevent them from becoming learning organizations. This study explores the proposition that institutional characteristics within acquisition organizations may contribute to this problem. Governments do not behave as a single buyer with clearly defined buying objectives. Multiple organizations, each shaped by institutional factors, lay claim to processes relating to Kettl's smart buyer questions. As key organizational participants become aligned with their own regulative, normative, and socio-cognitive institutional "pillars," smart buying behavior may become confounded by institutional factors and constraining organizational structures. For this study, an organizational field consisting of the program office, contracting office, and budget office was selected as the level of analysis. A qualitative multi-approach methodology was developed to analyze data from public sources, including government policy documents, audit reports, and other published information related to five individual cases. Data from autoethnographic accounts, interviews, content analyses, and the case studies helped frame the institutional characteristics of these offices. The study confirmed that the three offices are key participants in acquisition programs, although their roles are not always formally recognized. Strong evidence was found that they each possess unique institutional characteristics. These differences could be creating conditions of divergence and misalignment with the acquisition objectives, raising the possibility of conflicting institutional demands, competing challenges for legitimacy, and institutional change. Policy initiatives to formally recognize the roles and responsibilities of these offices and the use of working-level oversight boards, project teams, and interagency contracting may help mitigate these institutional differences. The study points to the importance of recognizing participants' institutional characteristics when planning and managing an acquisition program. / Ph. D.