Aim The study aim was to explore the issues and challenges facing undergraduate nursing education in one Canadian province from an institutional theory perspective. The research questions were: What is the institutional field of nursing education? What are the issues and challenges facing nursing education? How is the institutional field of nursing education contributing to the issues and challenges? How are the issues and challenges contributing to the institutional complexity? Background Nursing education is essential for the health care of society, yet face various issues and challenges at the system level. Institutional theory has been used in higher education to better understand how higher education institutions are structured and operate. Institutional theory has not been used in nursing education. The issues facing nursing education have been examined from a critical or descriptive perspective, but a system-level perspective is missing. Institutional theory could fill this gap and examine the institution of nursing and how its structure, behaviours, and rules influence those issues and challenges. Methods An exploratory single-case study with embedded units design was used. Theoretical propositions from institutional theory informed the sample, recruitment, data collection, and data analysis. In 2019, representatives from organizations comprising the institutional field of nursing education and senior-level administrators were interviewed and relevant documents were collected and reviewed. The data were analyzed using deductive and inductive thematic analysis, building a case description, and visual analysis techniques. Findings The findings from sixty documents and seven interviews suggested the institutional field of nursing education is composed of postsecondary institutions, health service organizations, the regulatory body, the ministry for health, and the ministry for postsecondary education. The issues and challenges facing nursing education included demands on curricula, teaching and learning values versus practice, the relationship between education and practice, limiting financial supports, clarity of the RN role, and need for faculty. The institutional field of nursing education is complex and includes dominant organizations, such as the regulatory body and health service organization, and the non-dominant organization, postsecondary institutions. Discussion / Conclusion The use of institutional theory was beneficial to explore the issues and challenges facing undergraduate nursing education from a system-level perspective and captured the complexity within the system. The institutional field including the influences of structure, dominance, and complexity impact the issues and challenges facing nursing education. The institutional perspective of the issues and challenges diverges from previous examinations. In addition, the use of institutional theory in higher education offers strategies for advocacy in nursing education. Recommendations for nursing education practice, policy, and research include: (a) awareness of the organizations comprising the institutional field of nursing education, (b) including the nursing education accreditation body and the professional association within the interorganizational structures, (c) acknowledgement of the sources of dominance within the field, and (d) developing strategies for academic nurse leaders to navigate the complexity of nursing education. The most urgent consideration arising from this research is the dominant forces from regulation and health service organizations and the subsequent non-existence of the professional voice of nursing for nursing education within the institutional field. / Graduate

Sports clubs today are exposed to multiple, sometimes contradictory, forces and expectations. This study is about sports coaches and their problems with and experiences of multiple institutional logics in Swedish sports. The aim of the study was therefore to provide further knowledge about the relationship between sports coaches’ leadership and institutional complexity. The study focused on the context of football in northern Sweden. The research questions that were examined were about institutional pressures, legitimacy, institutional logics, sports clubs’ impact and coaches’ strategies to manage institutional complexity. The data was collected through the means of qualitative interviews with 12 active football coaches. The results showed that the football coaches experience multiple institutional pressures and legitimacy claims. The coaches engage with 4 different coexisting institutional logics depending on the situation. Despite the fact that the institutional complexity is institutionalized in the context, it is sometimes viewed as problematic due to lack of control and support by the sports clubs. This indicated that the coaches are relatively autonomous and free to plan the activities as they wish and pursue the goals they see appropriate. Furthermore, the sports clubs have an important role in helping the coaches manage the institutional complexity and provide guidelines.

Prisons are a specific type of organization with distinct challenges for their management. Most importantly, prisons - as well as understandings of how to 'successfully' manage them - are embedded in a pluralistic environment that consists of a variety of stakeholders with different ideas and expectations with regard to role and governance of prisons. This study addresses the question of which different understandings of 'good' prison management can be found in the Austrian discourse and how the expected complexity constituted by contradictory expectations is manifested in the shared narratives of prison managers. I draw on an institutional theory perspective in order to reconstruct the distinct constellation of institutional logics at the field level as well as at the individual level. Empirically, the study has four central elements: First, I identify the institutional logics at the field level as well as the relevant actors in the field. Second, I reconstruct the prevalent institutional logics as well as the metaphors in use at the individual level. Third, I compare field level and individual level. Finally, I am particularly interested in whether and how metaphors are used by prison managers to enact institutional logics and establish relationships between them. To answer the questions concerning the field level, I focused on articles in five Austrian newspapers from 1970 to 2015. Regarding the individual level, I conducted eight narrative interviews with (former) Austrian prisons managers. Methodologically, I combine a variety of different analytical approaches, namely content analysis, metaphor analysis, and objective hermeneutic analyses. The findings reveal two different 'types' of logics, namely governance and purpose logics. These logics differ in their content (what they claim jurisdiction over), their structure (their relationships within and across types), and in the metaphors used (purpose logics have a more restricted set of metaphors, while governance logics have a more differentiated set). Further, the empirical analyses show that metaphors play a variety of roles with regard to logics. They may either specify individual logics, set up competing logics against each other, stress complementarities between logics, or create relationships between otherwise unrelated logics. Summing up, this dissertation contributes, first, to literature on cross-level relationships of institutional logics by linking field-level results with individual-level results. Second, it extends literature on institutional pluralism and institutional complexity by arguing that constellations of logics do not only exist at different levels but there may also be different types of logics within a constellation. Third, I contribute to rhetorical approaches in institutional theory by showing how metaphors are a way of manifesting institutional pluralism. Fourth, for the practice of prison management, the study has implications for the planning and realization of change management efforts.

This study examines university English-medium Instruction (EMI) reform implementation approaches from a comparative organizational perspective. Over the last decade, the number of master’s degree programs instructed exclusively in English in non-Anglophone Europe increased dramatically. Europe is an interesting case as it actively promotes multilingual learning; however, many European policies over the last twenty years accelerated the rise of monolingual EMI reforms, especially at the graduate-level. The purpose of this exploratory study is to contribute to our understanding of how widespread EMI reforms impact structures and behaviors at the organizational level in European universities in ways that respond to the organization’s embedded policy contexts. This research aims to advance our understandings of comparative EMI reforms and also, drawing on the concepts of neoinstitutional theory, develop our knowledge of how these processes might be theorized and expanded. I combine the theoretical frames of translation and institutional logics to analyze empirical case studies of the implementation of the EMI reform concept in three Northern European universities in leading EMI provider countries: the University of Oslo in Norway, the University of Göttingen in Germany, and Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The theoretical concept of institutional complexity is used to analyze the contending tensions universities confront when deciding the best way to design and implement EMI reforms. The three-axis comparative framework developed in this study represents a novel approach to examining variations in EMI reform implementation. Variations in organizational EMI implementation approaches (collegial, targeted, and market) are understood by analyzing comparatively how the three universities interpreted axial tensions between institutional logics for the best way to organize their EMI reform approaches: for academic or economic purposes; cooperative or competitive purposes; and local or global purposes. This comparative case study underscores the importance of examining a university’s embedded environment (both European and local levels) to understand university response to widespread EMI reform trends and highlights the significance of contextual dynamics to European EMI program development policy. The study concludes with policy recommendations and future directions.

Cette thèse cherche à mieux comprendre la manière dont les organisations font face à des logiques et attentes institutionnelles potentiellement contradictoires. Pour ce faire, la thèse étudie le cas des Grandes Ecoles de Commerce Françaises (GECF), qui font face depuis le milieu des années 1990 à une mondialisation croissante de l’enseignement supérieur en gestion. En raison de cette mondialisation, les GECF doivent gérer deux types de contraintes : d’une part, répondre aux exigences des organismes d’accréditations et des classements internationaux – qui véhiculent les standards du modèle de la business school (recherche, internationalisation, académisation) – et, d’autre part, préserver leur identité originelle et fondatrice, construite sur un modèle national, et qui constitue encore leur source de légitimité locale. Les problématiques générées par la présence de ces deux logiques institutionnelles dans le champ des GECF, nécessite de la part de ces dernières des arbitrages complexes, et une redéfinition de leur identité. En particulier, la thèse cherche à identifier les mécanismes entrepreneuriaux et identitaires à l’oeuvre dans les réponses des GECF aux pressions institutionnelles différentes et parfois contradictoires. Ecrite sous forme d’articles, la thèse s’intéresse aux origines des GECF et à l’émergence d’une logique institutionnelle propre, à la transformation de leurs pratiques et de leurs identités en réponse aux nouveaux standards internationaux et à l’incidence de ce processus sur les logiques institutionnelles présentes dans leur environnement. / This dissertation explores how organizations cope with multiple and heterogeneous institutions, a situation recently referred to as ‘institutional complexity’. It is based on the study of French Business Schools, known as French Grandes Ecoles de Commerce (FGEC). Up until the mid 1990s, FGEC operated in a familiar and monolithic national institutional environment. Recent years have seen a rise in global standards for management education; a movement that has been particularly salient in Europe with the proliferation of MBAs, the development of accreditation and public ranking systems and the endorsement of the Bologna agreement in 1999, which aimed at developing a harmonized European higher education system. From that point onwards, FGEC have come under pressure to adapt to the growing internationalization of management education and adopt its dominant standards. While trying to redefine themselves as International Business Schools, FGEC continue to value their historical identity, which still forms the basis of their national legitimacy. This dissertation brings together a wide range of qualitative methods (participative observation, semi-structured interviews and documentary evidence), which are particularly suitable for understanding the social dynamics of institutional processes. The architecture of the dissertation goes from the micro to the macro level of analysis and combines three articles that should be considered together. The first article focuses on the case of one FGEC and explores how it attempted to promote an alternative definition of what an MBA program represents, by simultaneously combining the FGEC and the International Business School institutional logics. The second offers a comparative study of how four FGEC have interpreted and experienced the rising institutional complexity in their field, based on their identities. The third article offers a study of the FGEC population. It explores how and why FGEC emerged, established themselves as a particular form of management education, and developed by infusing practices from a competing logic, while remaining true to their traditional core.

Bakgrund: Sedan slutet av 1980 - talet har skolmarknaden genomgått stora förändringar i och med konkurrensutsättningen, kommunaliseringen av skolan, friskolereformen och det fria skolvalet. Från att tidigare endast varit en del av den offentliga logiken har den kommunala gymnasieskolan nu även blivit en del av marknadslogiken vilket har medfört ett ökat behov för skolan att marknadsföra sin verksamhet. Att kombinera två institutionella logiker kan ge upphov till institutionell komplexitet vilken är viktig för organisationer att förstå och hantera för att på så sätt kunna överleva på marknaden. Syfte: Syftet med denna undersökning är att bidra med ökad kunskap om hur den institutionella komplexiteten tar sig uttryck i marknadsföringsarbetet i den kommunala gymnasieskolans kontext. Genomförande: Studien tar sin utgångspunkt i det fenomenologiska perspektivet och är en kvalitativ enfallsstudie med ett iterativt angreppssätt. Studiens urval består av fem strategiskt utvalda respondenter inom den valda fallorganisationen och data har samlats in genom semistrukturerade intervjuer. Slutsats: Den institutionella komplexiteteten tar sig uttryck i marknadsföringsarbetet genom att den skapar utmaningar som uppvisas i organisationens interna dynamiker missnöje, gemensamma värderingar, maktförhållanden och handlingsförmåga. Organisationen hanterar dessa utmaningar till en viss grad, men för att ytterligare minska den institutionella komplexiteten måste organisationen inse och acceptera de konkurrerande logikernas samexistens. En prioritering av logikerna behöver göras för att därefter forma en marknadsföringsstrategi och därmed agera proaktivt. En vidare rekommendation är att anställa ytterligare en resurs till att enbart arbeta med marknadsföring för att på så sätt även kunna minska den institutionella komplexiteten. / Background: Since the end of the 1980s, the school market has undergone major changes in the face of competition, the municipalization, the reform of the private schools and the free choice of school. Before the reforms, the public school has only been a part of the public institutional logic but is now also a part of the market institutional logic which has lead to an increased need for the public school to market their business. Combining two institutional logics may lead to institutional complexity which is important for the organization to understand and manage in order to survive. Aim: The aim of the study is to contribute to an increased knowledge of how the institutional complexity is expressed in the markering within the public school context. Completion: The study takes its starting point in a phenomenological perspective and is a qualitative single case study with an iterative approach. The study´s sample consists of five strategically selected respondents within the chosen case organization and data has been collected through semi structured interviews. Conclusion: The insitutional complexity is expressed through the marketing and challanges are perceived in the internal dynamics of the organisation which are interest dissatisfaction, value commitment, shared values and power dependencies. The challenges are handled by the orgaisation to a certain extent, but in order to further reduce the institutional complexity, the organization has to realize and accept the competing institutional logics coexistence. A priorititazion between the logics must be made so that a strategy can be fomulated which will help the organization to act in a more proactive way. Further, a recommendation to hire a person responsible for marketing is given in order to reduce the institutional complexity, institutional confusion anc enabling a proactive way of working.

La présente thèse étudie comment certaines organisations parviennent à accorder des logiques institutionnelles différentes dans le contexte de partenariats intersectoriels. L’étude utilise des données longitudinales sur trois partenariats entre entreprise à but lucratif et entreprise à but non lucratif. Les partenariats étudiés s’attaquent à trois causes différentes : maladie infantile, éducation, et conditions de travail. Les données proviennent de sources multiples, notamment des entretiens approfondis, des sources telles que les archives organisationnelles, les rapports annuels, des rapports officiels sur des projets, et des contenus de médias sociaux. Le premier article décrit comment les logiques contradictoires d’un partenariat entre entreprise et ONG (organisation non gouvernementale) peuvent être réconciliées. Le deuxième article de cette thèse étudie le résultat de la confrontation des logiques institutionnelles des organisations engagées dans ces partenariats, et identifie deux scénarios : l’hybridation et la coexistence. L’article explore en outre la transformation des ONG d’organisations informelles en organisations plus formelles du fait de leur interaction avec les entreprises. Le troisième article analyse du point de vue théorique la combinaison des logiques institutionnelles au niveau de l’échange entre les partenaires. En prenant en compte 1) la tension entre les logiques institutionnelles, et 2) l’interdépendance résultant des échanges entre les organisations considérées, on aboutit à une typologie et des propositions qui prédisent les résultats de la confrontation. Globalement, cette thèse montre que la dynamique de réconciliation dans les situations de complexité institutionnelle peut être mieux comprise en observant comment les partenaires négocient la portée de leurs échanges dans le partenariat, et comment l’obtention des premiers résultats dans le cadre du partenariat influence les phases ultérieures de la collaboration. Les résultats de la recherche enrichissent la littérature sur les collaborations inter-organisationnelles ainsi que celle sur les logiques institutionnelles parce qu’ils soulignent l’importance de la dépendance des ressources dans l’interprétation de la complexité institutionnelle. / This dissertation investigates how organizations reconcile different institutional logics in the development of cross sector partnerships. It is based on longitudinal data from three cases of partnership between firms and NPOs. These partnerships addressed three distinct sets of social challenges: childhood disease, education and labor force conditions. The data is collected from multiple sources, including in-depth interviews and archival material such as organizational records, annual reports, formal project reports, and social media content. The first essay explains how reconciliation between competing logics of partners can be achieved in a firm-NPO partnership. It focuses on the mechanisms that enable partnership to exist despite different institutional logics of partners. The second essay of this dissertation explores the outcome of competition between the institutional logics of the organizations involved in these partnerships and it identifies different scenarios, namely hybridization and co-existence, as the result of confrontation between different institutional logics of partners. It further explores the transformation of NPOs from informal entities into a more formally organized entity as a result of their interaction with firms. The third essay of this research theorizes the impact of institutional logics at the level of exchange between partners. Taking into account 1) the tension between institutional logics and 2) the interdependence of organizations resulting from their exchanges, it develops a typology and propositions predicting the outcomes of the confrontation. Overall, the findings of this study suggest that the dynamics of reconciliation in situations of institutional complexity can be better understood by examining how partners negotiate the scope of activities in their partnership, and by exploring how the development of valuable outcomes for both parties during the initial stages of the partnership impacts subsequent stages of the collaboration. The research findings contribute to the literatures on inter-organizational collaboration and institution logics by highlighting the role of resource dependence in understanding institutional complexity.

While most studies take a dyadic view when examining the environmental difference between the home country of a multinational enterprise (MNE) and a particular foreign country, they ignore that an MNE is managing a network of subsidiaries embedded in diverse environments. Additionally, neither the impacts of global environments on top executives nor the effects of top executives’ capabilities to handle institutional complexity are fully explored. Thus, using a three-essay format, this dissertation tried to fill these gaps by addressing the effects of institutional complexity and top management characteristics on top executive compensation and firm performance. Essay 1 investigated the impact of an MNE’s institutional complexity, or the diversity of national institutions facing an MNE’s network of subsidiaries, on the top management team (TMT) compensation. This essay proposed that greater political and cultural complexity leads to not only greater TMT total compensation but also to a greater portion of TMT compensation linked with long-term performance. The arguments are supported in this essay by using an unbalanced panel dataset including 296 U.S. firms with 1,340 observations. Essay 2 explored TMT social capital and its moderating role on value creation and appropriation by the chief executive officer (CEO). Using a sample with 548 U.S. firms and 2,010 observations, it found that greater TMT social capital does facilitate the effects of CEO intellectual capital and social capital on firm growth. Finally, essay 3 examined the performance implications for the fit between managerial information-processing capabilities and institutional complexity. It proposed that institutional complexity is associated with the needs of information-processing. On the other hand, smaller TMT turnover and larger TMT size reflect larger managerial information-processing capabilities. Consequently, superior performance is achieved by the match among institutional complexity, TMT turnover, and TMT size. All hypotheses in essay 3 are supported in a sample of 301 U.S. firms and 1,404 observations. To conclude, this dissertation advances and extends our knowledge on the roles of institutional environments and top executives on firm performance and top executive compensation.

In recent years, institutional theorists have been increasingly interested in institutional change, seeking to understand the contextual factors and agents responsible for alterations to existing institutional arrangements. Institutional theory’s historical focus on isomorphism has made it challenging to account for actors’ motivations to pursue change projects. It is generally believed, though, that agents are mobilized through exposure to multiple institutional logics. Recently, scholars have begun to recognize that competition among multiple logics may not quickly produce a ‘winning logic’; rather, such logics may co-exist for prolonged periods in a context of ‘institutional complexity’. The turn toward institutional complexity reveals that preoccupation with the ‘paradox of embedded agency’ has left the development of change projects themselves under-theorized: What happens when organizational actors must interpret puzzling institutional contexts and generate alternatives? In seeking to understand organizational actors’ efforts to cope with conflicting logics in a context of scientific uncertainty, this study aligns with this growing interest in institutional complexity. Drawing on concepts from sensemaking theory, this research illuminates how actors with divergent interests, enacting their organizational roles, cope with competing logics and interact around a change project that emerges as a result of their efforts at coping. It thus contributes to institutionalist understandings of institutional complexity and change and adds to an emerging body of research linking institutional theory and sensemaking. The empirical setting for this single-case study is the ‘sustainable seafood’ discourse that began in the early 1990s when the cod collapsed off North America’s eastern seaboard. Prolonged scientific uncertainty regarding the collapse made generation of preferred alternatives problematic; this resulted in lengthy sensemaking efforts by multiple stakeholder groups, drawing on different institutional logics to produce divergent and competing interpretations and action scripts. Tracing the evolution of this discourse through documents, observations, and interviews empirically reveals processes of interrelated sensemaking, and further, exposes sensegivers as bricoleurs who use institutional elements creatively to affect the sensemaking of others.

Our research contributes to knowledge on strategic organizational responses by addressing a specific type of institutional complexity that has, to date, been rather neglected in scholarly inquiry: conflicting institutional demands that arise within the same institutional order. We suggest referring to such type of complexity as "intra-institutional" - as opposed to "inter-institutional." Empirically, we examine the consecutive spread of two management concepts - shareholder value and corporate social responsibility - among Austrian listed corporations around the turn of the millennium. Our work presents evidence that in institutionally complex situations, the concepts used by organizations to respond to competing demands and belief systems are interlinked and coupled through multiwave diffusion. We point to the open, chameleon-like character of some concepts that makes them particularly attractive for discursive adoption in such situations and conclude that organizations regularly respond to institutional complexity by resorting to discursive neutralization techniques and strategically producing ambiguity. (authors' abstract)