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The endurance of shared meanings that shape individual behaviors is a central feature of organizational life, but organization science reduces the persistence of institutions to the absence of change. We argue that institutions can endure precisely because how they are instantiated in wider meaning structures changes. We conceptualize and operationalize such dynamic persistence by combining scholarship on institutional change, which emphasizes that changing meanings influence how organizations operate because institutions are dynamic rather than static; and cultural sociology, which has used co-occurrences to show how ideas are embedded in meaning structures. We examine institutions and their instantiations through dynamic topic modeling. We develop diagnostic measures that allow tracking change in large corpora. We illustrate our argument and method using a 140-year corpus of reports of the City of Vienna to show that the persistence of public housing as an institution was only possible due to periodically changing instantiations and affiliations with broader meanings. Our paper contributes a dynamic and contextual approach to studies of institutional persistence that will allow future research to test theory-led expectations about persistence and change in big text data. We conclude with insights for studying temporal and geographic heterogeneity when institutions change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Weber (1905), the process of rationalization is usually portrayed as a shift from value-driven, arbitrary, or intuitive decision-making and symbols to calculative means-ends relationships whose efficiency and effectiveness are to be optimized. Organizational sociologists have long used this image of rationalization as a trope with very dramatic properties: "disenchanting," dehumanizing, and in conflict with a more social orientation of organizations. We depart from this normative, 'grand' conception of rationalization, offering instead an empirically motivated interpretation of rationalization. We view rationalization as a social mechanism associated with multiple processes and competing contents. Using a longitudinal study of 200 randomly sampled nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, we demonstrate the fluid meanings of rationalization. Whereas the more rational nonprofits from early in the 21st century were managerial, technocratic, and inward-looking, the rational nonprofits of 2015 are financially transparent, collaborative, and outcome-oriented. Even as external technological and institutional pressures remain potent drivers of change, internal structures make organizations more susceptible to absorb and transform ideas of rationalization. Rather than replacing past practices, new managerial practices become intercalated with the old. In advancing a more fluid account of rationalization's meaning, we contribute to a deeper understanding of institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations exposed to controversial reform trends may have to present inconsistent accounts of their commitment to reform. Neo-institutional theory highlights varying degrees of decoupling in response to external reform pressures, but I argue that the direction of decoupling also matters: facing complex institutional environments, many organizations in fact underemphasize compliance vis-à-vis audiences. I investigate decoupling of accounts given the burgeoning rationalization of U.S. charities using a random sample of nonprofit organizations incorporated in the San Francisco Bay Area. In light of the magic that motivates volunteers, staff, and supporters in the nonprofit sector, disenchanting managerial reform is a contentious issue. Comparing repeated survey data with website text, I find that inconsistency between the adoption of rational practices and rational discourse is hence frequent, especially if an organization faces commercial audiences and has tangible goals. Environmental factors, such as being rated externally or having abstract constituencies, are better predictors of the direction of decoupling than such internal features as leadership and workforce professionalism. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the conditions of decoupling in complex environments, the reliability of publicly available text data for predicting organizational behavior, and the interaction of disenchanted and enchanted elements in formal organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of organizations has been shown to causally affects a community's connectedness, crime, entrepreneurship, and crisis resilience. But extant studies of communities conceal how organizations pursue the production of two types of urban integration. Organizations may produce social integration, creating social ties among constituents, as well as systemic integration, connecting constituents to institutional resources. We argue that organizations' ability to produce social and systemic integration is principally due to the degrees to which organizational members draw on suite-level expertise ("I know the system") and street-level expertise ("I know the people") when they make decisions. Representative survey data of nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area collected over 15 years shows that nonprofits' pursuit of urban integration depends on these forms of expertise. Comparative interviews explain why professional staff and managers boost systemic integration, whereas volunteer staff and members foster social integration. The paper contributes to scholarship in organizational and urban sociology by examining how organization-level features influence the pursuit of urban integration and by shedding light on unintended consequences of professionalism. Our results challenge the stylized fact that nonprofits necessarily create community and suggest alternative ways to understand and operationalize how organizations are embedded in their urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networks have been widely studied. Currently, increasing attention is given to brokerage as a key component to the functionality of networks and joint action more general-ly. In particular, brokerage as a process is becoming a more prominent research theme. The process perspective is especially important in context conditions that are 'fuzzy', that is con-tentious, fast changing or flexible, or marked by a large number of stakeholders. To advance our understanding of brokerage as a key process for joint action, we explore it in four such contexts: social innovation, online networks, sustainable business, and urban governance. Brokerage in the Process of Social Innovation Presenter: Gorgi Krlev; U. of Heidelberg Bridging Organizational Knowledge Online: How Bridging Members in Online Groups Increase Knowledge Presenter: Bas Reus; Vrije U. Amsterdam Presenter: Christine Moser; Vrije U. Amsterdam Presenter: Peter Groenewegen; Vrije U. Amsterdam Uniformity versus Plurality in Collaborative Strategies: The Sustainable Coffee Program Presenter: Iteke Van Hille; Vrije U. Amsterdam Presenter: Frank G.A. De Bakker; IESEG School of Management Presenter: Peter Groenewegen; Vrije U. Amsterdam Presenter: Julie E. Ferguson; U. of Amsterdam The Distribution of City Climate Action: How Civic Capacity Enables Green Building Certification Presenter: Christof Brandtner; Stanford U. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational theories hold that audiences view pure organizations as legitimate and are thus more likely to support them. But hybrids of prototypical organizations'such as those combining features of corporations and charities'are common. Knowing how audiences actually discern organizations is challenging because observational data conflate competing perceptions of legitimacy. I propose an institutional theory of organizations as assemblies of building blocks whose evaluation depends on context and combination. I test this idea using a conjoint experiment to gauge audience reactions to simulated organization in the social sector. Respondents do not penalize impure organizations. Instead, in the social sector, audiences prefer 'the best of both worlds.' The combination of charitable, participatory, and rational practices explains the non-linear effect of nonprofitness on audience support. This effect is due to an interplay of pragmatic and moral legitimacy rather than an affordance of typicality. The paper contributes to a practice-based view of institutional theory, highlights limitations of audience-side explanations of hybridity, and reveals the cultural underpinnings of nonprofit organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognized that firms are increasingly pressured not only to generate profit and shareholder value for owners and investors, but also to become more socially responsible in response to demands from other stakeholders such as consumers, activists, and regulators. There are many reasons to expect conflict between social and economic goals, and historically there have been great tensions. So it is an unexpected turn that in recent decades firms increasingly depict the diverse goals of multiple stakeholders as synergistic. Analyzing 300 annual reports from a sample of 80 large U.S. public firms between 1960 and 2010, we find the rise of discourse emphasizing a "win-win" discourse of blended social and economic value, which includes both the social benefits of economic activities and economic gains from social responsibility. In a departure from Weber's critique of rationalizing pressures as a dehumanizing iron cage, we observe that the rationalization of social realms of life serves to partly tame narratives of instrumental economic rationality. We hypothesize that the rationalization of social arenas enables previously incommensurable social and economic domains to be framed as consistent rather than competing. In line with this argument, we find evidence that depictions of blended value are fueled by firms' exposure to a broader spectrum of rationalized social pressures. The findings contribute to organizational theory and the sociology of value by highlighting that the rationalization of social arenas enables linkages to economic spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]