New Institutionalism
20th Workshop Salzburg 2025
M@n@gement: SPECIAL ISSUE ON NEW INSTITUTIONALISM: ROOTS AND BUDS

Deadline: 30 October 2011
Guest Editors: Bernard Forgues, EMLYON, Royston Greenwood, University of Alberta, Ignasi Martí, EMLYON, Philippe Monin, EMLYON, and Peter Walgenbach, FSU Jena.


After 35 years of intensive growth, the field of New Institutionalism is still blossoming. Its "tools for the job" have become central in the organization theorist's repertoire. A wealth of journal articles, conference papers, and special issues are the best indicator of a sustained, healthy, dynamic interest in new institutional questions. The appeal and power of its conceptual apparatus is such that researchers have applied it to a wide variety of questions, settings, and levels of analysis. One could fear such proliferation would bring confusion and dilution. However, we do believe that institutional theory still has much to address and that the questions it addresses are interesting and important ones. We also think that the vast body of institutional research exhibits cohesion rather than fragmentation, as shown in Greenwood et al.'s (2008) Handbook.
 
Given this context, the purpose of this special issue is to publish and diffuse innovative contributions that examine facets of institutions in organizations and societies. We also believe that innovative empirical settings, or counter-intuitive cases are appropriate to further stretch the explanatory power of New Institutionalism.

Papers that address, but are not necessarily restricted to, the following topics are most welcome.
  1. Institutional complexity/institutional pluralism. It is now widely recognized that organizations experience a plurality of institutional pressures that may or may not be incompatible. But little is known about how organizations cope with complexity arising from incompatible prescriptions. How far does an organization’s structural position within a field affect the experience of such complexity, and how far does it affect an organization’s discretion in responding to it? How are field-level intermediaries affected by organizational responses and how do they respond in turn?
  2. Institutional logics. Moving beyond the idea that logics do not emerge from institutional fields, how are they instantiated and what are their behavioral consequences? Given plural logics and actors across levels, how do institutional logics shape fields?
  3. Power. Although conflicts of interest were central to old institutionalism, they were by and large left aside in new institutional work. How can power perspectives shed light on how actors bring to the fore, push and relocate vested interests in institutional struggles?
  4. Practices. The current emphasis on practices in strategy and organization studies might nourish further interest in how institutional processes are socially constructed. What do actors actually do to create, alter and reproduce institutions? How can we cross levels of analysis to move from the micro to the macro?
  5. Historian Time. Institutionalism is about lengthy processes. While institutions need time to emerge, grow and eventually decay, some empirical contributions have suffered from relatively narrow periods of observation. What would history as a discipline and new archivalism as a method contribute to new debates by building on decade-long if not century-long processes?
  6. Persistence. Institutionalism is essentially about stability and durability; some would say inertia. Predictably, new institutionalism scholars engaged enthusiastically into explaining change. Still, we think we have only scratched the surface of the roots of the concept: explaining the absence of change. Despite changing institutional conditions, why do things remain the same?
  7. Actorhood. Responding to questions about where are the people in studies of institutions, in the last two decades new institutionalism scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of actors on creating, transforming, or disrupting institutions. However, the very same idea of actorhood remains unquestioned, unexplored. How can we problematize actorhood? How is it constructed and conceptualized?
We invite both empirical and conceptual papers. All articles published in this special issue must make strong contributions. Papers that bring substantive as opposed to empirical contributions are most welcome.
 
All papers will undergo a standard double-blind review process and must meet the standards of the M@n@gement Editorial Policy (see www.management-aims.com/submission_en...).
 
All submitted articles must go through M@n@gement web-based reviewing system, operated by BePress at aims.bepress.com/management_submission/. Make sure you indicate "New Institutionalism Special Issue" as the first keyword in the Keywords field of the submission page.

Important dates:
Deadline: 30 October 2011
Publication: December 2012 (expected)

5/23/11

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