Roy Suddaby
Biographic Data
| ID | 377651 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Roy Suddaby |
| GIVEN NAMES | Roy |
| FAMILY NAME | Suddaby |
| SIGNATURE | SUDDABY R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Victoria |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5245-0706 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 328 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Organizing the Good Death: Ethics and Values-Work in the Sower Hospice
Historical imagination: A historical institutionalist perspective
Institutional biography and the institutionalization of a new organizational template: Building the global branded hotel chain
This article expands understanding of how institutional biography informs institutional change by examining Conrad Hilton’s role in building the global branded hotel chain (1946–1969). We show how an individual’s institutional biography can play a pivotal role in their development as an institutional entrepreneur and the institutionalisation of a new organisational template. Biography, informed by the institutions individuals experience in their …
Configurations of Craft: Alternative Models for Organizing Work
The concept of craft has long lived in the margins of organizational research and has typically been equated with a primitive form of manufacturing. Craft, however, seems to have had a resurgence, and is now increasingly associated with alternative approaches to work and organization in contemporary society. Yet, despite growing research on the phenomenon, insights have remained fragmented due to a lack of common theoretical infrastructure. In an…
Solomons for our times
Research Handbook of Responsible Management
Historical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy
We define philanthropy as voluntary giving by households or corporate bodies to promote charitable causes, projects, and organizations or, alternatively, as “voluntary action for the public good.” Entrepreneurial philanthropy refers specifically to “the pursuit by entrepreneurs on a not-for-profit basis of big social objectives through active investment of their economic, cultural, social and symbolic resources.” Government projects financed by t…
On the Spatiality of Institutions and Knowledge
The relationship between geography and the creation, use, and reproduction of knowledge has been at the core of this book series. The previous twelve volumes have focused, among other topics, on the role that creativity, culture, power, networks, science and universities have in cultivating an understanding of how the social process of knowing unfolds in space. They all draw attention to ways in which this process is situated in places and how le…
Knowledge and Institutions
This open access book bridges the disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences to explore the role of social institutions in shaping geographical contexts, and in creating new knowledge. It includes theorizations as well as original empirical case studies on the emergence, maintenance and change of institutions as well as on their constraining and enabling effects on innovation, entrepreneurship, art and cultural heritage, often at regional…
Political ideology and the discursive construction of the multinational hotel industry
How might political ideology help to shape an organizational field? We explore the discursive construction of the multinational hotel industry through analysis of one of its leading actors, Hilton International (HI), conceived by Conrad Hilton as a means of combatting communism by facilitating world peace through international trade and travel. While the politicized rhetoric employed at hotel openings reflected institutional diversity, it resonat…
History as Organizing: Uses of the Past in Organization Studies
Research on the "uses of the past" in organizations and organizing is flourishing. This introduction reviews this approach to integrating history into organization studies and explores its paths forward. We begin by examining the intellectual origins of the approach and by defining why and how it matters to the study of management and organizations. Specifically, we emphasize the performative role of history in making and unmaking organizational …
Legitimacy
Legitimacy has emerged as a pivotal but often confusing construct in management research. The popularity of the concept and its widespread application to so many theoretical and empirical contexts has layered the construct of legitimacy with considerable surplus meaning. The object of this paper is to bring clarity and theoretical discipline to an important but misunderstood construct. We demonstrate through a description of the historical evolut…
The strategic use of historical narratives: A theoretical framework
History has long been recognised as a strategic and organisational resource. However, until recently, the advantage conferred by history was attributed to a firm’s ability to accumulate heterogeneous resources or develop opaque practices. In contrast, we argue that the advantage history confers on organisations is based on understanding when the knowledge of the past is referenced and the reasons why it is strategically communicated. We argue tha…
Scripting professional identities: How individuals make sense of contradictory institutional logics
This article examines how individual accountants subjectively interpret competing logics of professionalism as they transform from practicing accountants to managerial roles and as their organizations transform from traditional professional partnerships to more corporate organizational forms. Based on a longitudinal ethnography of professionals in a Big Four accounting firm we analyse the process by which individual professionals make sense of th…
Re-visiting the historic turn 10 years later: Current debates in management and organizational history – an introduction
The establishment of Management & Organizational History (MOH) emerged out of earlier calls for a ‘historic turn’ in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) and a (somewhat mooted) critique of existing approaches to the study of history in the field. While MOS was seen as universalist, presentist, and scientistic, attempts at historical analysis were seen by some, in the words of Alfred Kieser, as generally “myopic fact collecting without a met…
Theorization as institutional work: The dynamics of roles and practices
This study unpacks the construct of theorization – the process by which organizational ideas become delocalized and abstracted into theoretical models to support their diffusion across time and space. We adopt an institutional work lens to analyse the key components of theorization in contexts where institutional work is in transition from changing institutions to maintaining them. We build on a longitudinal inductive study of theorization by the…
Historical Institutionalism
An unfortunate outcome of the shift from 'old' to 'new' institutionalism is that neo-institutional theory has become ahistorical. In their search for scientific legitimacy, contemporary organizational institutional theory has become overly scientifistic in an effort to make universal knowledge claims that are independent of spatial and temporal context. This has left the field with a flat and mechanistic understanding of institutions that has, la…
Institutional Work: Refocusing Institutional Studies of Organization
In this paper, we discuss an alternative focus for institutional studies of organization - the study of institutional work. Research on institutional work examines the practices of individual and collective actors aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions. Our focus in this paper is on the distinctiveness of institutional work as a field of study and the potential it provides for the examination of new questions. We argue that r…
History as social memory assets: The example of Tim Hortons
Strategic management research has demonstrated that firm-specific resources can confer a distinct competitive advantage. This research, however, tends to assume that the resources are fixed and immutable and that they operate inside the organization. We offer a competing view in which resources are socially constructed and operate primarily on external stakeholders. Drawing from emerging research in social memory studies, we argue that historical…
Professionals and field-level change: Institutional work and the professional project
This article explicates the causal connections between changes in professional jurisdictions and changes in organizational fields. The authors argue that professional projects carry within them projects of institutionalization. They focus attention on the critical but often invisible role that professionals play in institutional work, or the creation, maintenance and transformation of institutions. The key contribution of this article is to expli…
Rhetorical history as a source of competitive advantage
This paper develops a framework for understanding history as a source of competitive advantage. Prior research suggests that some firms enjoy preferential access to resources as a result of their past. Historians, by contrast, understand past events as more than an objective account of reality. History also has an interpretive function. History is a social and rhetorical construction that can be shaped and manipulated to motivate, persuade, and f…
Challenges for Institutional Theory
This essay offers a critical summation of the use of neo-institutionalism to study organizations. While institutionalism has succeeded in becoming the dominant theory to study macro-organizational phenomena, there is a danger that the theory has been stretched far beyond its core purpose—to understand how organizational structures and processes acquire meaning and continuity beyond their technical goals. I discuss some possible reasons for this d…
Institutional Work: Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies of Organizations
The 'institutional' approach to organizational research has shown how enduring features of social life - such as marriage and bureaucracy - act as mechanisms of social control. Such approaches have traditionally focused attention on the relationships between organizations and the fields in which they operate, providing strong accounts of the processes through which institutions govern action. In contrast, the study of institutional work reorients…
Introduction: Theorizing and studying institutional work
T he concept of institutional work describes “the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions” (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006: 215). Institutional work represents an exciting direction for institutional studies of organization, not because it represents a “new” idea, but because it connects a set of previously disparate ideas, and in doing so points to new questions and opens up space fo…
The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism
Professionals and field-level change: Institutional work and the professional project
This article explicates the causal connections between changes in professional jurisdictions and changes in organizational fields. The authors argue that professional projects carry within them projects of institutionalization. They focus attention on the critical but often invisible role that professionals play in institutional work, or the creation, maintenance and transformation of institutions. The key contribution of this article is to expli…
History as Organizing: Uses of the Past in Organization Studies
Research on the "uses of the past" in organizations and organizing is flourishing. This introduction reviews this approach to integrating history into organization studies and explores its paths forward. We begin by examining the intellectual origins of the approach and by defining why and how it matters to the study of management and organizations. Specifically, we emphasize the performative role of history in making and unmaking organizational …
Colonizing Knowledge: Commodification as a Dynamic of Jurisdictional Expansion in Professional Service Firms
This paper provides a field level analysis of the process by which management knowledge is produced. Two linked dynamics are identified as important components of this process. The first is the commodification of management knowledge, or the tendency to reduce knowledge to a routinized and codified product. We argue that the commodification of management knowledge is a cyclical process that has been institutionalized by the interests of distinct …
History as social memory assets: The example of Tim Hortons
Strategic management research has demonstrated that firm-specific resources can confer a distinct competitive advantage. This research, however, tends to assume that the resources are fixed and immutable and that they operate inside the organization. We offer a competing view in which resources are socially constructed and operate primarily on external stakeholders. Drawing from emerging research in social memory studies, we argue that historical…
The strategic use of historical narratives: A theoretical framework
History has long been recognised as a strategic and organisational resource. However, until recently, the advantage conferred by history was attributed to a firm’s ability to accumulate heterogeneous resources or develop opaque practices. In contrast, we argue that the advantage history confers on organisations is based on understanding when the knowledge of the past is referenced and the reasons why it is strategically communicated. We argue tha…
Re-visiting the historic turn 10 years later: Current debates in management and organizational history – an introduction
The establishment of Management & Organizational History (MOH) emerged out of earlier calls for a ‘historic turn’ in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) and a (somewhat mooted) critique of existing approaches to the study of history in the field. While MOS was seen as universalist, presentist, and scientistic, attempts at historical analysis were seen by some, in the words of Alfred Kieser, as generally “myopic fact collecting without a met…
Political ideology and the discursive construction of the multinational hotel industry
How might political ideology help to shape an organizational field? We explore the discursive construction of the multinational hotel industry through analysis of one of its leading actors, Hilton International (HI), conceived by Conrad Hilton as a means of combatting communism by facilitating world peace through international trade and travel. While the politicized rhetoric employed at hotel openings reflected institutional diversity, it resonat…
Theorization as institutional work: The dynamics of roles and practices
This study unpacks the construct of theorization – the process by which organizational ideas become delocalized and abstracted into theoretical models to support their diffusion across time and space. We adopt an institutional work lens to analyse the key components of theorization in contexts where institutional work is in transition from changing institutions to maintaining them. We build on a longitudinal inductive study of theorization by the…
Historical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy
We define philanthropy as voluntary giving by households or corporate bodies to promote charitable causes, projects, and organizations or, alternatively, as “voluntary action for the public good.” Entrepreneurial philanthropy refers specifically to “the pursuit by entrepreneurs on a not-for-profit basis of big social objectives through active investment of their economic, cultural, social and symbolic resources.” Government projects financed by t…
Research Handbook of Responsible Management
Introduction to the Journal of Organizational Behavior's special issue on professional service firms: Where organization theory and organizational behavior might meet
The uniqueness of professional service firms (PSFs) has been well established. Accounting, law, engineering, and management consulting firms are known to differ significantly from both traditional manufacturing and service organizations in their organizational and managerial arrangements. Their performance depends heavily on the reputation and status of their workforce. They utilize unique employment practices and leadership behaviors, and typica…
Institutional biography and the institutionalization of a new organizational template: Building the global branded hotel chain
This article expands understanding of how institutional biography informs institutional change by examining Conrad Hilton’s role in building the global branded hotel chain (1946–1969). We show how an individual’s institutional biography can play a pivotal role in their development as an institutional entrepreneur and the institutionalisation of a new organisational template. Biography, informed by the institutions individuals experience in their …
Legalistic organizations: A comment on empirical investigations into procedural justice in organizations
Legalistic organizations: A comment on empirical investigations into procedural justice in organizations
Colonizing Knowledge: Commodification as a Dynamic of Jurisdictional Expansion in Professional Service Firms
This paper provides a field level analysis of the process by which management knowledge is produced. Two linked dynamics are identified as important components of this process. The first is the commodification of management knowledge, or the tendency to reduce knowledge to a routinized and codified product. We argue that the commodification of management knowledge is a cyclical process that has been institutionalized by the interests of distinct …
Theorizing Change: The Role of Professional Associations in the Transformation of Institutionalized Fields.
This study examines the role of professional associations in a changing, highly institutionalized organizational field and suggests that they play a significant role in legitimating change. A model...
Institutions and Institutional Work
Ins titutional approaches to organizat ion studies focus attention on the relat ionships among organi zat ions and the fields in which they oper ate, high lighting in particular the role of rational formal structures in enabling and cons training organiza tional behaviour. A key contr ibution of institutional studies has been the develo pmen t of strong accounts of the processes through which institu tions govern act ion. This has been accomp…
Institutional Entrepreneurship In Mature Fields: The Big Five Accounting Firms
This study examines change initiated from the center of mature organizational fields. As such, it addresses the paradox of embedded agency—that is, the paradox of how actors enact changes to the context by which they, as actors, are shaped. The change examined is the introduction of a new organizational form. Combining network location theory and dialectical theory, we identify four dynamics that form a process model of elite institutional entrep…
The case of disappearing firms: Death or deliverance
To consider the argument presented in Stubbart and Knight's paper (see, Stubbart C. I. and Knight M. B. (2006), The Case of the Disappearing Firms: Empirical Evidence and Implications, Journal of Organizational Behaviour, Vol. 27, pp. 79-100) that, since the majority of organizations have relatively short life spans, the meta theory (which assumes that organizations could live forever if managed well) is wrong in believing that managers make a di…
The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism
Introduction to the Journal of Organizational Behavior's special issue on professional service firms: Where organization theory and organizational behavior might meet
The uniqueness of professional service firms (PSFs) has been well established. Accounting, law, engineering, and management consulting firms are known to differ significantly from both traditional manufacturing and service organizations in their organizational and managerial arrangements. Their performance depends heavily on the reputation and status of their workforce. They utilize unique employment practices and leadership behaviors, and typica…
Institutional Work: Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies of Organizations
The 'institutional' approach to organizational research has shown how enduring features of social life - such as marriage and bureaucracy - act as mechanisms of social control. Such approaches have traditionally focused attention on the relationships between organizations and the fields in which they operate, providing strong accounts of the processes through which institutions govern action. In contrast, the study of institutional work reorients…
Introduction: Theorizing and studying institutional work
T he concept of institutional work describes “the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions” (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006: 215). Institutional work represents an exciting direction for institutional studies of organization, not because it represents a “new” idea, but because it connects a set of previously disparate ideas, and in doing so points to new questions and opens up space fo…
Rhetorical history as a source of competitive advantage
This paper develops a framework for understanding history as a source of competitive advantage. Prior research suggests that some firms enjoy preferential access to resources as a result of their past. Historians, by contrast, understand past events as more than an objective account of reality. History also has an interpretive function. History is a social and rhetorical construction that can be shaped and manipulated to motivate, persuade, and f…
Challenges for Institutional Theory
This essay offers a critical summation of the use of neo-institutionalism to study organizations. While institutionalism has succeeded in becoming the dominant theory to study macro-organizational phenomena, there is a danger that the theory has been stretched far beyond its core purpose—to understand how organizational structures and processes acquire meaning and continuity beyond their technical goals. I discuss some possible reasons for this d…
Institutional Work: Refocusing Institutional Studies of Organization
In this paper, we discuss an alternative focus for institutional studies of organization - the study of institutional work. Research on institutional work examines the practices of individual and collective actors aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions. Our focus in this paper is on the distinctiveness of institutional work as a field of study and the potential it provides for the examination of new questions. We argue that r…
History as social memory assets: The example of Tim Hortons
Strategic management research has demonstrated that firm-specific resources can confer a distinct competitive advantage. This research, however, tends to assume that the resources are fixed and immutable and that they operate inside the organization. We offer a competing view in which resources are socially constructed and operate primarily on external stakeholders. Drawing from emerging research in social memory studies, we argue that historical…
Professionals and field-level change: Institutional work and the professional project
This article explicates the causal connections between changes in professional jurisdictions and changes in organizational fields. The authors argue that professional projects carry within them projects of institutionalization. They focus attention on the critical but often invisible role that professionals play in institutional work, or the creation, maintenance and transformation of institutions. The key contribution of this article is to expli…
Historical Institutionalism
An unfortunate outcome of the shift from 'old' to 'new' institutionalism is that neo-institutional theory has become ahistorical. In their search for scientific legitimacy, contemporary organizational institutional theory has become overly scientifistic in an effort to make universal knowledge claims that are independent of spatial and temporal context. This has left the field with a flat and mechanistic understanding of institutions that has, la…
Scripting professional identities: How individuals make sense of contradictory institutional logics
This article examines how individual accountants subjectively interpret competing logics of professionalism as they transform from practicing accountants to managerial roles and as their organizations transform from traditional professional partnerships to more corporate organizational forms. Based on a longitudinal ethnography of professionals in a Big Four accounting firm we analyse the process by which individual professionals make sense of th…
Re-visiting the historic turn 10 years later: Current debates in management and organizational history – an introduction
The establishment of Management & Organizational History (MOH) emerged out of earlier calls for a ‘historic turn’ in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) and a (somewhat mooted) critique of existing approaches to the study of history in the field. While MOS was seen as universalist, presentist, and scientistic, attempts at historical analysis were seen by some, in the words of Alfred Kieser, as generally “myopic fact collecting without a met…
Theorization as institutional work: The dynamics of roles and practices
This study unpacks the construct of theorization – the process by which organizational ideas become delocalized and abstracted into theoretical models to support their diffusion across time and space. We adopt an institutional work lens to analyse the key components of theorization in contexts where institutional work is in transition from changing institutions to maintaining them. We build on a longitudinal inductive study of theorization by the…
Legitimacy
Legitimacy has emerged as a pivotal but often confusing construct in management research. The popularity of the concept and its widespread application to so many theoretical and empirical contexts has layered the construct of legitimacy with considerable surplus meaning. The object of this paper is to bring clarity and theoretical discipline to an important but misunderstood construct. We demonstrate through a description of the historical evolut…
The strategic use of historical narratives: A theoretical framework
History has long been recognised as a strategic and organisational resource. However, until recently, the advantage conferred by history was attributed to a firm’s ability to accumulate heterogeneous resources or develop opaque practices. In contrast, we argue that the advantage history confers on organisations is based on understanding when the knowledge of the past is referenced and the reasons why it is strategically communicated. We argue tha…
On the Spatiality of Institutions and Knowledge
The relationship between geography and the creation, use, and reproduction of knowledge has been at the core of this book series. The previous twelve volumes have focused, among other topics, on the role that creativity, culture, power, networks, science and universities have in cultivating an understanding of how the social process of knowing unfolds in space. They all draw attention to ways in which this process is situated in places and how le…
Knowledge and Institutions
This open access book bridges the disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences to explore the role of social institutions in shaping geographical contexts, and in creating new knowledge. It includes theorizations as well as original empirical case studies on the emergence, maintenance and change of institutions as well as on their constraining and enabling effects on innovation, entrepreneurship, art and cultural heritage, often at regional…
Political ideology and the discursive construction of the multinational hotel industry
How might political ideology help to shape an organizational field? We explore the discursive construction of the multinational hotel industry through analysis of one of its leading actors, Hilton International (HI), conceived by Conrad Hilton as a means of combatting communism by facilitating world peace through international trade and travel. While the politicized rhetoric employed at hotel openings reflected institutional diversity, it resonat…
Political science (24 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (21 works) · Economics (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Social science (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Management (10 works) · Public relations (10 works)