Management and Organizational Studies

Organizational behavior research grounded in institutional theory examines how organizations are shaped by the rules, norms, and taken-for-granted assumptions that prevail in their social environments, and how people inside those organizations navigate, contest, and sometimes remake those structures. Scholars study phenomena like how professionals reconcile competing logics when a hospital adopts market-oriented practices, how leaders construct coherent identities during disruptive change, and how certain actors—institutional entrepreneurs—manage to shift the very rules that govern an industry. A central tension in the field is explaining how institutions are simultaneously stable enough to constrain action and malleable enough to be transformed by it. Active research is pushing into questions about how digital platforms and algorithmic management alter traditional professional authority, and how sensemaking processes unfold when organizations face genuinely ambiguous or contradictory institutional demands.

Works

88,410

Total citations

2,168,161

Keywords

Institutional TheoryOrganizational ChangeInstitutional EntrepreneurshipSensemakingIdentity WorkInstitutional Logics