M Lounsbury
Biographic Data
| ID | 125445 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Lounsbury |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Lounsbury |
| SIGNATURE | LOUNSBURY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1234-0972 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 918 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Scaling a tech-mediated community: Prefigurative enrolling atop evolving institutional logics
How a community scales yet retains its fundamental character is a perennial puzzle - doubly so for a decentralized technology-mediated community. Based on our longitudinal case study of Ethereum, we argue that scaling can be done via a set of co-constitutive change processes called prefigurative enrolling. Our historical assessment of this case was assisted by structural topic modeling (STM) of blogs, crypto media, and news outlets. This revealed…
Wasted? The Downstream Effects of Social Movement–Backed Occupations
Studies examining the impact of social movements on organizations have focused primarily on what leads to initial concessions in response to movement targeting. A key remaining question is what comes next, or how do movement priorities become institutionalized within organizations and across fields via downstream processes? We argue that central actors in these downstream efforts are members of occupations that have been created out of movement p…
« Attrape-moi si tu peux ! »: Proposition méthodologique de capture de logiques institutionnelles en matière d’engagement social au sein du sport professionnel français
La création de Structures Dédiées à l’Engagement Social (SDES) telles que les fondations et/ou les fonds de dotation par les clubs professionnels français pour développer leur stratégie sociétale est une pratique en voie d’institutionnalisation. Ce phénomène questionne le(s) rôle(s) de ces SDES, raison pour laquelle nous mobilisons le concept de logiques institutionnelles (LI), emprunté à la théorie néo-institutionnelle, afin de montrer comment l…
The Problem of Institutional Trust
Two Decades of the Theory of Cultural Entrepreneurship: Recollection, Elaboration, and Reflection
In this paper, we reflect on the origins and development of our theory of cultural entrepreneurship. We highlight the serendipity that was part of its genesis, and note how our arguments and thinking evolved over time with the literature. We conclude by suggesting some fruitful lines of scholarly focus moving forward, and emphasize the importance of context and cultural process in understanding our own ideational development as well as those of a…
Culture, innovation and entrepreneurship
New Directions in the Study of Institutional Logics: From Tools to Phenomena
In this article, we take stock of the institutional logics perspective and highlight opportunities for new scholarship. While we celebrate the growth and generativity of the literature on institutional logics, we also note that there has been a troubling tendency in recent work to use logics as analytical tools, feeding disquiet about reification and reductionism. Seeding a broader scholarly agenda that addresses such weaknesses in the literature…
Culture, innovation and entrepreneurship
Innovation and entrepreneurship lie at the heart of the modern economy. Yet, while scholars have long examined the economic drivers of innovation and entrepreneurship, less is known about the cultural forces that shape these dynamics. To the extent that the existing literature has considered how culture shapes innovation and entrepreneurship, it has been viewed as a constraining force which limited and hindered the creation of novelty. This is es…
Cultural Entrepreneurship: A New Agenda for the Study of Entrepreneurial Processes and Possibilities
This Element provides an overview of cultural entrepreneurship scholarship and seeks to lay the foundation for a broader and more integrative research agenda at the interface of organization theory and entrepreneurship. Its scholarly agenda includes a range of phenomena from the legitimation of new ventures, to the construction of novel or alternative organizational or collective identities, and, at even more macro levels, to the emergence of new…
Social Movements and the Dynamics of Institutions and Organizations
Advances to the Institutional Logics Perspective
Optimal distinctiveness: Broadening the interface between institutional theory and strategic management
Research summary : A ttaining optimal distinctiveness—positive stakeholder perceptions about a firm's strategic position that reconciles competing demands for differentiation and conformity—has been an important focal point for scholarship at the interface of strategic management and institutional theory. We provide a comprehensive review of this literature and situate studies on optimal distinctiveness in the broader scholarly effort to integrat…
Pathways of Institutional Change: An Integrative Review and Research Agenda
The study of institutional change is a core research area in organization theory and is of increasing relevance for scholarship in other disciplines. In this article, we review the substantial number of studies that have examined the ways by which institutions are created, modified, or transformed, highlighting the lack of integration of prior works that emphasize exogenous shocks, institutional entrepreneurship, and practice-based change. Drawin…
The Institutional Logics Perspective
This essay discusses a new approach to institutional analysis—the institutional logics perspective (ILP). This perspective is a meta‐theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of social science theories to better understand the effects of cultural institutions on individuals, organizations, and societies. We describe the history of the development of the ILP, define its core concepts and mechanisms, and review and discuss foundational…
Entrepreneurial Stories and Legitimacy
Entrepreneurial stories are crucial to how entrepreneurs construct and situate their identity within a particular institutional field in order to legitimate themselves and their novel products or practices. Such communications are at the core of what Lounsbury and Glynn refer to as cultural entrepreneurship which more generally refers to the processes by which entrepreneurs draw upon various cultural resources (e.g., stories) to construct their i…
Taking religion seriously in the study of organizations
Taking religion seriously in the study of organizations
Despite its central importance in nearly all societies, religion has been largely neglected in the study of organizations and management. In this introduction to the volume on religion and organization theory, we argue that such neglect limits unnecessarily the relevance and scope of organization and management theory (OMT) and that there is therefore great value in connecting organizational research with a deeper appreciation and concern for rel…
Introduction to the Institutional Logics Perspective
This chapter introduces the institutional logics perspective as an analytical framework for institutional analysis. It lays out the goal of the book as a primer and programmatic statement that distinguishes the perspective from neo-institutional theory and proposes novel theory to flesh out the meta-theory initially suggested by Friedland and Alford (1991). Second, it discusses the suitability of the perspective for inter-disciplinary integration…
Defining the Interinstitutional System
The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process
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 …
Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses
Organizations face institutional complexity whenever they confront incompatible prescriptions from multiple institutional logics. Our interest is in how plural institutional logics, refracted through field-level structures and processes, are experienced within organizations and how organizations respond to such complexity. We draw on a variety of cognate literatures to discuss the field-level structural characteristics and organizational attribut…
The Wizards of Oz: Towards an Institutional Approach to Elites, Expertise and Command Posts
Over the past half century, organizational studies scholarship has increasingly drifted away from addressing broader societal and political issues, as well as an interest in developing policy-relevant recommendations. In this paper, we argue that the time is ripe for a systematic re-engagement with how the dynamics of economy and society are fundamentally shaped by various elites, new forms of expertise, and their command posts — centers of socie…
Weber: Sintering the Iron Cage Translation, Domination, and Rationality Stewart Clegg
This article emphasizes how Weber's approach to bureaucracy was first and foremost a cultural theory. In addition, it shows how the very notion of rationality for Weber was multiplex and culturally embedded. Conceptualizing organizational environments as comprised of multiple modes of rationality and forms of domination can lead to an understanding of the ‘iron cage’ as more porous than is traditionally thought, thus opening up new lines of multi…
Analysing, Accounting for and Unmasking Domination: On Our Role as Scholars of Practice, Practitioners of Social Science and Public Intellectuals
Over the last 30 years, there has been an increasing interest in organizational analysis for the work of Pierre Bourdieu. However, the consequent body of literature often lacks an integrated comprehension of Bourdieusian theory and therefore fails to fully exploit its potentialities. In this essay, we argue for a more systematic engagement with the work of Bourdieu by organizational scholars and emphasize the opportunity to develop cumulative res…
Social Movements and Institutional Analysis
Calls for reintroducing agency, politics and contestation into institutional analysis are now legion, spanning nearly two decades since DiMaggio’s (1988) classic piece, and gaining new urgency as scholars struggle to explain institutional emergence and change. Institutionalists face persistent difficulties in these tasks. Working from arguments about isomorphism, diffusion, or path dependence, they often invoke ad hoc explanations like exogenous …
The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process
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 …
Social movements, field frames and industry emergence: A cultural-political perspective on US recycling
This article examines how social movements contribute to institutional change and the creation of new industries. We build on current efforts to bridge institutional and social movement perspectives in sociology and develop the concept of field frame to study how industries are shaped by social structures of meanings and resources that underpin and stabilize practices and social organization. Drawing on the case of how non-profit recyclers and th…
New Directions in the Study of Institutional Logics: From Tools to Phenomena
In this article, we take stock of the institutional logics perspective and highlight opportunities for new scholarship. While we celebrate the growth and generativity of the literature on institutional logics, we also note that there has been a troubling tendency in recent work to use logics as analytical tools, feeding disquiet about reification and reductionism. Seeding a broader scholarly agenda that addresses such weaknesses in the literature…
Ending the Family Quarrel: Toward a Reconciliation of “Old” and “New” Institutionalisms
Over the past couple of decades, research in organizational sociology has shifted away from the contextual richness of action perspectives toward more structuralist paradigms. DiMaggio and Powell's distinction between what they label the "old" and "new" institutionalisms highlights this general trend. The present authors offer a critical review of this generational paradigm debate among institutional theorists and challenge DiMaggio and Powell's …
Sources of Durability and Change in Market Classifications: A Study of the Reconstitution of Product Categories in the American Mutual Fund Industry, 1944-1985
Categories are key elements of classification systems that segregate things into groups and impose coherence. Sociologists have studied how categories shape action in a wide variety of contexts hut have spent much less time investigating the sources of category durability and change. We address this gap by investigating how existing product categories are reconstituted by field-level industry media. While standard accounts of industry media sugge…
Social Capital: Theory and Research
Leading scholars in the field of social networks from diverse disciplines present the first systematic and comprehensive collection of current theories and empirical research on the informal connections that individuals have for support, help, and information from other people. Expanding on concepts originally formulated by Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman, this seminal work will find an essential place with educators and students in the fields …
The Problem of Institutional Trust
Exploring the Institutional Tool Kit: The Rise of Recycling in the U.S. Solid Waste Field
A typology of four institutional research perspectives in organizational sociology is offered with the intention of broadening what our subfield considers "institutional": (a) social organization, (b) work and organization, (c) interactionism, and (d) cultural system. The case of the emergence of recycling in the U.S. solid waste field is drawn on to illustrate differences among these perspectives. The article advocates the view that organization…
Ending the Family Quarrel: Toward a Reconciliation of “Old” and “New” Institutionalisms
Over the past couple of decades, research in organizational sociology has shifted away from the contextual richness of action perspectives toward more structuralist paradigms. DiMaggio and Powell's distinction between what they label the "old" and "new" institutionalisms highlights this general trend. The present authors offer a critical review of this generational paradigm debate among institutional theorists and challenge DiMaggio and Powell's …
Exploring the Institutional Tool Kit: The Rise of Recycling in the U.S. Solid Waste Field
A typology of four institutional research perspectives in organizational sociology is offered with the intention of broadening what our subfield considers "institutional": (a) social organization, (b) work and organization, (c) interactionism, and (d) cultural system. The case of the emergence of recycling in the U.S. solid waste field is drawn on to illustrate differences among these perspectives. The article advocates the view that organization…
Cultural entrepreneurship: Stories, legitimacy, and the acquisition of resources
We define cultural entrepreneurship as the process of storytelling that mediates between extant stocks of entrepreneurial resources and subsequent capital acquisition and wealth creation. We propose a framework that focuses on how entrepreneurial stories facilitate the crafting of a new venture identity that serves as a touchstone upon which legitimacy may be conferred by investors, competitors, and consumers, opening up access to new capital and…
Institutionalizing Civic Engagement: Shifting Logics and the Cultural Repackaging of Service-Learning in US Higher Education
Institutionalists in organizational sociology have developed a good deal of evidence about the role of field logics in shaping the practices of organizations. In this paper, we extend this imagery to multiple fields, highlighting how shifting logics in a superordinate field enable the infrastructural development of a subordinate field. In particular, we track how initially marginal, anti-institutional service-learning practices became a legitimat…
Social Capital: Theory and Research
Leading scholars in the field of social networks from diverse disciplines present the first systematic and comprehensive collection of current theories and empirical research on the informal connections that individuals have for support, help, and information from other people. Expanding on concepts originally formulated by Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman, this seminal work will find an essential place with educators and students in the fields …
The New Structuralism in Organizational Theory
Over the past decade, a new structuralism has begun to emerge in organizational theory. This exciting new research program draws inspiration from the social structural tradition in sociology, but extends that tradition by more broadly conceptualizing social structure as comprised of broader cultural rules and meaning systems as well as material resources—revealing the subtleties of both overt and covert power. Building on the insights of Bourdieu…
Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 19: Social Structure and Organizations Revisited
The Making of Green Knowledge: Environmental Politics and Cultural Transformation
Social movements, field frames and industry emergence: A cultural-political perspective on US recycling
This article examines how social movements contribute to institutional change and the creation of new industries. We build on current efforts to bridge institutional and social movement perspectives in sociology and develop the concept of field frame to study how industries are shaped by social structures of meanings and resources that underpin and stabilize practices and social organization. Drawing on the case of how non-profit recyclers and th…
Sources of Durability and Change in Market Classifications: A Study of the Reconstitution of Product Categories in the American Mutual Fund Industry, 1944-1985
Categories are key elements of classification systems that segregate things into groups and impose coherence. Sociologists have studied how categories shape action in a wide variety of contexts hut have spent much less time investigating the sources of category durability and change. We address this gap by investigating how existing product categories are reconstituted by field-level industry media. While standard accounts of industry media sugge…
Vive La Résistance: Competing Logics and the Consolidation of U.S. Community Banking
We investigate how competing logics facilitate resistance to institutional change, focusing on banking professionals' resistance to large, national banks' acquisitions of smaller, local banks. Acquisitions led to new bank foundings, particularly when out-of-town banks were the acquirers and a community's local population of bank professionals was large. We argue that the national banks' efforts to introduce a banking logic emphasizing efficiencie…
New Practice Creation: An Institutional Perspective on Innovation
Neoinstitutionalists have developed a rich array of theoretical and empirical insights about how new practices become established via legitimacy and diffusion, but have paid scant attention to their origins. This blind spot has been reinforced by recent work on institutional entrepreneurship which has too often celebrated the actions of a single or small number of actors, and deflected attention away from the emergent, multilevel nature of how ne…
A Tale of Two Cities: Competing Logics and Practice Variation in the Professionalizing of Mutual Funds
This article examines practice diffusion in an environment where competing logics exist, specifically investigating how trustee and performance logics that were rooted in different locations (Boston and New York) led to variation in how mutual funds established contracts with independent professional money management firms. This focus on competing logics redirects institutional research away from isomorphism and the segregation of institutional a…
Social Movements and Institutional Analysis
Calls for reintroducing agency, politics and contestation into institutional analysis are now legion, spanning nearly two decades since DiMaggio’s (1988) classic piece, and gaining new urgency as scholars struggle to explain institutional emergence and change. Institutionalists face persistent difficulties in these tasks. Working from arguments about isomorphism, diffusion, or path dependence, they often invoke ad hoc explanations like exogenous …
Weber: Sintering the Iron Cage Translation, Domination, and Rationality Stewart Clegg
This article emphasizes how Weber's approach to bureaucracy was first and foremost a cultural theory. In addition, it shows how the very notion of rationality for Weber was multiplex and culturally embedded. Conceptualizing organizational environments as comprised of multiple modes of rationality and forms of domination can lead to an understanding of the ‘iron cage’ as more porous than is traditionally thought, thus opening up new lines of multi…
Analysing, Accounting for and Unmasking Domination: On Our Role as Scholars of Practice, Practitioners of Social Science and Public Intellectuals
Over the last 30 years, there has been an increasing interest in organizational analysis for the work of Pierre Bourdieu. However, the consequent body of literature often lacks an integrated comprehension of Bourdieusian theory and therefore fails to fully exploit its potentialities. In this essay, we argue for a more systematic engagement with the work of Bourdieu by organizational scholars and emphasize the opportunity to develop cumulative res…
The Wizards of Oz: Towards an Institutional Approach to Elites, Expertise and Command Posts
Over the past half century, organizational studies scholarship has increasingly drifted away from addressing broader societal and political issues, as well as an interest in developing policy-relevant recommendations. In this paper, we argue that the time is ripe for a systematic re-engagement with how the dynamics of economy and society are fundamentally shaped by various elites, new forms of expertise, and their command posts — centers of socie…
Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses
Organizations face institutional complexity whenever they confront incompatible prescriptions from multiple institutional logics. Our interest is in how plural institutional logics, refracted through field-level structures and processes, are experienced within organizations and how organizations respond to such complexity. We draw on a variety of cognate literatures to discuss the field-level structural characteristics and organizational attribut…
Introduction to the Institutional Logics Perspective
This chapter introduces the institutional logics perspective as an analytical framework for institutional analysis. It lays out the goal of the book as a primer and programmatic statement that distinguishes the perspective from neo-institutional theory and proposes novel theory to flesh out the meta-theory initially suggested by Friedland and Alford (1991). Second, it discusses the suitability of the perspective for inter-disciplinary integration…
Defining the Interinstitutional System
The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process
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 …
Taking religion seriously in the study of organizations
Taking religion seriously in the study of organizations
Despite its central importance in nearly all societies, religion has been largely neglected in the study of organizations and management. In this introduction to the volume on religion and organization theory, we argue that such neglect limits unnecessarily the relevance and scope of organization and management theory (OMT) and that there is therefore great value in connecting organizational research with a deeper appreciation and concern for rel…
The Institutional Logics Perspective
This essay discusses a new approach to institutional analysis—the institutional logics perspective (ILP). This perspective is a meta‐theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of social science theories to better understand the effects of cultural institutions on individuals, organizations, and societies. We describe the history of the development of the ILP, define its core concepts and mechanisms, and review and discuss foundational…
Entrepreneurial Stories and Legitimacy
Entrepreneurial stories are crucial to how entrepreneurs construct and situate their identity within a particular institutional field in order to legitimate themselves and their novel products or practices. Such communications are at the core of what Lounsbury and Glynn refer to as cultural entrepreneurship which more generally refers to the processes by which entrepreneurs draw upon various cultural resources (e.g., stories) to construct their i…
Political science (30 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (21 works) · Social science (17 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Public relations (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Business (10 works)