In this review, we examine the idea of organizational restructuring as a conceptual tool and how it has been used to alter societal definitions and interpretations of employment. Although use of the term restructuring is relatively recent, the broad issue of changing emloyment conditions with which it is concerned has a long history, going back to the industrial revolution. Our main focus is a consideration of the causes and consequences of restructuring, in its more recent rhetorical and structural versions.

While the literature on framing has importantly expanded our understanding of frame creation and contests from an interpretive point of view, previous studies have largely neglected the structural contexts in which framing activities occur. In this study, we propose extending the framing approach by incorporating insights from the literature on sensemaking to examine how and when opportunities for meaning creation open up and how this affects subsequent discursive processes. Connecting framing and sensemaking better enables us to examine how structural factors prompt and bound discursive processes, affecting when and where frame contests emerge. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by examining changes in the discourse of globalization. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses of newspaper articles and corporate press releases, we trace the emergence of globalization discourse, its diffusion, and the increasing contention that surrounds it. Our findings show how and where globalization discourse emerged in response to greater U.S. involvement with the international economy, and how later frame contests over the meaning of globalization have depended on the interests of the actors involved.

Changing organizational critical success factors, new expectations for human resources, and the changing roles and capabilities of HR professionals are discussed here. The authors envision today’s top HR job to encompass: Enabling capable and courageous leadership; building a very strong and adaptive organizational culture; strengthening organizational productivity and performance; fostering creative innovations, products, and solutions; and building exceptionally high customer loyalty. They explain why and show how this is done.

If we fail to examine the likelihood of illegal and unethical behavior, strategy studies risk being seen as cheerleaders for the official and formal sides of organization, while missing the informal realities that also explain our findings. More research into how rules are broken will help our field to better connect the proverbial corporate trees we examine with the larger forests they inhabit.

Although revolutions spawn new organizational forms, sociologists have paid little attention how economic elites affiliated with the old regime, and challengers unaffiliated with the old order struggle to populate new organizational forms. We suggest the conflict between elites and challengers unfolds through organizations sponsored by each group. We argue that elites affiliated with the old order can reproduce their power through a new organizational form if they collectively succeed in influencing the institutional environment. In turn, the success of collective action by elite-sponsored organizations hinges on the political opportunity structure consisting of the policy goals of the government, divided reformers, electoral instability, and influential allies. We intensively study the creation of investment privatization funds (IPFs) in the Czech republic during the Velvet Revolution when state-owned banks sought to use IPFs to insulate themselves against take-over attempts, and private entreprenuers deployed IPFs to gain control of state enterprises including banks that were being privatized. Our data suggest that a favorable political opportunity structure enabled state-owned banks to build alliances, lobby the government, and constrain challengers to take over banks. Private entrepreneurs were able to acquire wealth and power subject to some limits imposed by state-owned commercial banks.

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 the recycling social movement enabled the rise of a for-profit recycling industry, we show that movements can help to transform extant socio-economic practices and enable new kinds of industry development by engaging in efforts that lead to the de-institutionalization of field frames.

The rise and fall of organizational effectiveness, an "umbrella construct" once at the forefront of organizational theory, is traced through four life-cycle stages: emerging excitement, the validity challenge, "tidying up with typologies," and construct collapse. Although the study of effectiveness has declined, research on its component elements continues to thrive. Using the effectiveness story as an exemplar. we develop a more general model of this process for all umbrella constructs, defined here as broad concepts used to encompass and account for a diverse set of phenomena. This life-cycle model--driven largely by a dialectic between researchers with a broad perspective ("umbrella advocates") and those with a narrower one ("validity police")--leaves open the possibility that some umbrella constructs may ultimately be made coherent or remain permanently controversial rather than collapse, as effectiveness has done. We propose that umbrella constructs will arise most frequently in academic fields without a theoretical consensus, will inevitably have their validity seriously challenged, will have a shorter life than their constituent elements, and will be more vulnerable to validity challenges when they lack support from practitioners. This model's implications for the future direction of such current umbrella constructs as organizational learning, culture, strategy, and performance are also explored and elaborated. Ironically, some evidence suggests that studies around the construct of organizational "performance" have arisen to replace the nearly identical, but fallen umbrella construct of organizational effectiveness.

Hirsch and Lounsbury present a critical review of the generational paradigm debate among institutional theorists. DiMaggio and Powell's assertion that the new should replace the old is challenged.

The article reviews several books by Douglass C. North, including "The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790 to 1860," "Structure and Change in Economic History," and "Institutional Change and Economic Growth."

During the last decade, the United States lost its dominance as the owner and producer of mass communication, both domestically and around the world. The globalization of ownership of mass media content, production, and technology has major implications for audience definitions and theories about who controls these media, for what purposes, and with what effects. The articles in this special issue are the first collection to address the issues raised by these recent developments, not only in film but also for book/magazine publishing, record/television production, advertising, HDTV technology, and public broadcasting. The increasing importance of economic analysis is also explored, for the insights it provides in explaining the decline of American dominance and for the implications of redefining 'news' when it is viewed as an economic product. This article sets out an overview of major research and conceptual issues that these developments raise for the field of mass communication.

While the "formulation" or "strategy" side of business policy has always drawn appropriately from economic theory, we caution that, taken to its logical extreme, economic theory ignores the importance of implementation, implies lack of choice in organization decision-making, and makes the organization a nonentity, in tins paper, we outline the fundamental differences between behavioral and economic approaches to business policy These differences are highlighted by an illustration of their divergent perspectives on corporate "agency".

This paper examines the role of accounting in facilitating and legitimating the conglomerate movement in American business during the 1960s. We argue that the profileration of conglomerate mergers contributed to a reconceptualization of the corporation that emphasized its financial rather than its productive capacities. This conception of the firm has now been institutionalized; its logic motivates the takeovers and restructuring that characterize contemporary business. Our case illustrates the rhetorical power of accounting as a symbolic system for legitimating new corporate forms and practices.

Ownership contests for control of large American corporations have become increasingly problematic and public with the advent of the "hostile takeover." This article examines the diffusion of this once "deviant" innovation. Its focus is on the relationship between changing business practices and American business culture; more specifically, on how the processes of the normative framing of hostile takeovers facilitated their diffusion and legitimation, helping to recreate or sustain order despite the disruptions engendered by takeovers. Three eras in the diffusion of this deviant innovation are delineated. Each is characterized by a language and argot that serve to cushion the hard fact of status loss by acquired executives. Neither culture nor social structure is seen here to dominate this interactive process. The provision of incentives to remain within the institution while career goals and pathways are redefined constitutes a case study of institutional reintegration, within a subsystem of society seldom examined from this perspective of changing values and ideologies.

Despite similarities in technology and other aspects of their operation, the typical pharmaceutical manufacturing firm is far more profitable than the typical phonograph record company. These industries are compared in terms of their institutional environments, primarily from 1950 to 1965. Strong differences in organizational effectiveness, regarding their ability to control three aspects of the environment--pricing and distribution, patent and copyright law, and external opinion-leaders--are suggested to help account for the differential performance of these industries. The utility of comparing whole industries as units of analysis in organizational research is also discussed.

Organizations engaged in the production and mass distribution of "cultural" items are often confronted by highly uncertain environments at their input and output boundaries. This paper outlines the structure and operation of entrepreneurial organizations in the most speculative segments of three cultural industries: book publishing, phonograph records, and motion pictures. Commercial cultural products are conceived as nonmaterial goods, directed at a mass public of consumers, for whom they serve an esthetic, rather than a clearly utilitarian purpose. Three adaptive "coping" strategies are set forth and examined: the deployment of "contact" men to organizational boundaries; overproduction and differential promotion of new items; and the cooptation of mass-media gatekeepers. The concept of an "industry system" is proposed as a useful frame of reference in which to trace the filtering of new products and ideas as they flow from producer to consumer and in which to examine relations among organizations. This substantive area, seldom viewed from an organizational perspective, is then related to a growing body of literature in the subfield of interorganizational relations.

The study of organization began with Selznick's classic study of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Many of the issues he raised are replicated in the case of China's creation of the Three Gorges dam. We show how the approval and administration of these public works smartly illustrate the distinctions overly drawn in organization studies between "old" and "new" institutional theory.

In the field of organizational behavior, the term ‘diffusion?has come to be implicitly paired with the concept of innovation. The now taken-for-granted joining of these once-separate terms influences the placement of diffusion in our cognitive maps. Our exploration of how this came about provides a useful illustration of evolution in managerial cognition. We examine the evolution of the term ‘diffusion?from its inception in the English language to the present day. The trend of term results in an ironic plot for diffusion studies in the managerial literature ?for the spread of innovations now carries with it a normative, implicitly positive subtext. While other fields narrate diffusion in a largely neutral manner, the field of organizational behavior narrates diffusion as a phenomenon that should be supported, looked forward to, and encouraged. Ironically, we continue, in our discourse, to treat diffusion studies as if they remained neutral. But to call diffusion studies neutral is to ignore the plot (Czarniawska 1997) associated with the term, and how the latent meaning of diffusion studies influences both the way the studies are used and the way we think of them. The implications of this become even more important with the increasing size of the “innovation?focused on by diffusion studies. and into the area of worldwide systems ?diffusion between countries and continents. Those who study diffusion of pills and those who study diffusion of markets essentially examining radically different things, but these are all legitimated by using the terms "innovation" and "diffusion".

Institutions do not come into being de novo, but instead are often based on and built out of much that preceded them. In this chapter, the rhetorical strategy of retaining aspects of the "discarded" institution by reframing them as "new" is traced and outlined. Examples are provided from the claims of post-socialist east European states to have privatized and created new capitalist markets.

As a long-time contributor to Institutional Theory, Hirsch assesses its development, debates, and future prospects

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 the recycling social movement enabled the rise of a for-profit recycling industry, we show that movements can help to transform extant socio-economic practices and enable new kinds of industry development by engaging in efforts that lead to the de-institutionalization of field frames.