This dissertation was motivated by a dramatic story of institutional change in the BC
coastal forest industry after years of active resistance to such change. Individuals, organizations,
stakeholders of those organizations, members of the organizational field, and changes in the
broader external environment all played a part in bringing the change about. The highly
publicized nature of the issue, and the 'extreme' characteristics of the setting offered a unique
opportunity to address the research question: "How does institutional change occur within
organizations and fields?". This dissertation has focused on identifying determinants and
processes of institutional change at multiple levels of analysis.
Rich data from multiple sources was collected over the period from 1980 to 2001 in the
BC coastal forestry context. These data included interviews with organizational field members,
field notes/texts from public speeches, presentations, and a protest trip, media accounts,
organizational documents and websites, and other academic reports. These multiple sources
were triangulated and analyzed qualitatively using a grounded theory approach featuring
recursive iterations between data and theory. Issues examined included a) organizational
responses to stakeholder influence attempts (Chapter 3), b) intra-organizational learning and
change processes at the institutionally entrepreneurial firm (Chapter 4), and c) multilevel
determinants and processes of institutional change (Chapter 5, synthesizing the insights of
Chapters 3 and 4).
This dissertation contributes new insights and offers refinements to existing perspectives
on institutional change, organizational learning and stakeholder theory. Specifically, changes in
field membership, relational patterns, interpretations and stakeholder salience were found to
interact with one other to create the conditions for institutional change. While prior literature has identified contextual conditions as impacts on organizational responses to institutional pressures
(Oliver, 1991), in this study it was found that contextual conditions were in part enacted by a
focal firm's attentional and relational patterns. Furthermore, some members of an organization
had divergent interpretations and distinctive relationships. When these members had social skills
for meaning-making, and were able to obtain sufficient power or endorsement, organizational
level change could occur. Such change in an institutionally entrepreneurial firm could trigger
change in the organizational field. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/14916 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Zietsma, Charlene Ellen |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
Page generated in 0.0019 seconds