Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How do institutions influence and shape cognition and action in individuals and organizations, and how are they in turn shaped by them? Various social science disciplines have offered a range of theories and perspectives to provide answers to this question. Within organization studies in recent years, several scholars have developed the institutional logics perspective. An institutional logic is the set of material practices and symbolic systems including assumptions, values, and beliefs by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences. This approach affords significant insights, methodologies, and research tools, to analyze the multiple combinations of factors that may determine cognition, behaviour, and rationalities.In tracing the development of the institutional logics perspective from earlier institutional theory, the book analyzes seminal research, illustrating how and why influential works on institutional theory motivated a distinct new approach to scholarship on institutional logics. The book shows how the institutional logics perspective transforms institutional theory. It presents novel theory, further elaborates the institutional logics perspective, and forges new linkages to key literatures on practice, identity, and social and cognitive psychology. It develops the microfoundations of institutional logics and institutional entrepreneurship, proposing a set of mechanisms that go beyond meta-theory, integrating this work with macro theory on institutional logics into a cross-levels model of cultural heterogeneity. By incorporating current psychological understanding of human behaviour and linking it to sociological perspectives, it aims to provide an encompassing framework for institutional analysis, and to be an essential and accessible reference for scholars and advanced students of organizational behaviour, organization and management theory, business strategy, and cultural sociology.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Some critics in the field have claimed that organizational and institutional theory has stagnated since the 1990s. This book should to a large extent put that criticism to rest, at least concerning the scholarship from this past decade. The authors have collaborated to seamlessly follow on the heels of Roger Friedland and Robert Alford in their chapter "Bringing Society Back In" (in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, CH, Jun'92, 29-5991), as well as their own work (Thornton and Ocasio, "Institutional Logics," in Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, ed. by Royston Greenwood et al., 2008). Stressing that their book is not merely a literature review of institutional (as well as organizational) theory, the authors propose a new theoretical thread, laying the foundation, generously, for empirical research. Their contribution is timely and takes into consideration the changing nature of organizations within the past few decades, along with the political and economic climates. One of the biggest strengths is that their discussions are not limited to economic organizations but are all-inclusive, where the institutional logics perspective could be applied to any number of institutional and/or organizational settings. To say that this reviewer strongly recommends this book is an understatement. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students/faculty/professionals. L. L. Hansen Western New England University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Patricia H. Thornton is Adjunct Professor affiliated with the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Duke University Fuqua School of Business and affiliated faculty to the Program on Organizations, Business, and the Economy, Department of Sociology, Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University and has been a pioneer in the development of Action Learning in teaching entrepreneurship. Her research focuses on developing and testing theories on the impact of culture and institutional change on entrepreneurial decision making. She is published in the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Sociology, the Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Science, among others. Her book, Markets from Culture: Institutional Logics and Organizational Decision Making (Stanford University Press), was published in 2004. William Ocasio is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. He was educated at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, MIT, Harvard Business School, and Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in organizational behavior in 1992. Prior to coming to Kellogg, he was Assistant Professor of Strategy and Organizations at the MIT Sloan School of Management, from 1992-1995. From 1995-2001 he was Assistant Professor at Kellogg, and became a Full Chaired Professor in 2001. Michael Lounsbury is the Alex Hamilton Professor at the University of Alberta. His research has a general focus on the relationship between organizational and institutional change, technological and entrepreneurial dynamics, and the emergence of new industries and practices. He studies topics such as technology, entrepreneurship, and professionalism in varied contexts such as the fields of technology transfer, solid waste, and finance.