Organizational Responses to Institutional Complexity: Looking inside Pluralistic Organizations

This study contributes to research on institutional complexity by theorizing configurations of an institutional context and empirically elaborating on respective types of organizational responses. We analyze hybrid responses within organizations to further understand how institutional logics are enacted in organizational attributes of positioning, structures, and governance mechanisms. Higher education in France and Germany provides a particularly complex institutional context. Both countries are considered as late movers towards the emerging field-level logic of managed education, while the old logics of professional dominance, and democratization and state involvement are still in play. Based on longitudinal case studies in three universities, we find that ambiguities and conflicts between institutional logics lead to three different patterns forms of hybridization: cross-sectorial fragmentation, longitudinal sequencing, and local blending. Our data suggests that a complete organizational transformation towards the new logic of managed education is based on unique conditions, and institutional pluralism prevails on the intra-organizational level.

Vortrag+Diskussion (phd Workshop)