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Summary Readings Organisation and Society
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Boxenbaum & Jonsson (2017)Isomorphism, Diffusion and Decoupling: Concept Evolution and Theoretical
Challenges.
Decoupling = when adaptions to institutional pressures contradict internal efficiency needs,
organizations sometimes claim to adapt when in reality they do not.
Institutional decoupling carries with it a risk of detection where it would no longer confer
legitimacy, but shame on the organization.
Organizations decouple if they experience strong coercive pressure to implement a
new practice, and more so if they distrust the actor that asserts pressure on them.
It is also more frequent among organizations that do not fully believe in the efficacy of
the practice in question.
Employees can refuse to engage in decoupling when it requires them to deviate too far
from their professional role.
Hansen (2012) show substantial variation in the likelihood of decoupling depending on the
local environment as well as the internal environment of the multinational corporation,
Internal power dynamics has been identified as an important variable that mediates the
desire to decouple and the action of decoupling. Decoupling occurred more when top
executives had power over boards to resist external pressure for change.
Firms are less likely to decouple standards for good corporate governance if they
depend on constituents that value highly these governance practices.
Networks and coalitions also mediate the decoupling response. Top executives who had
prior experience with decoupling or who had social ties to organizations that did, were more
likely to engage in decoupling themselves. Decoupling is least likely in companies where
powerful and committed actors cared strongly about implementation and could influence the
organizational response.
Relating to the original prediction that organizations require external trust to decouple, later
work suggests that such faith can be actively sought by the decoupling organization. When
an organization decouples action from structure, it can obfuscate this decoupling by talk
(saying one thing doing another) this is called organizational hypocrisy.
Decoupling is a response to two organization-level problems:
Contradictions between institutionalized pressures with internal organizational
efficiency.
Contradictions among multiple institutionalized pressures.
Early studies focused primarily on decoupling as a deliberate effort to safeguard
organizational efficiency, whereas recent studies suggest that decoupling is a result of
heterogeneous organizational fields that exert multiple and often contradictory pressures on
the organization. Decoupling structure from practice can take multiple forms simultaneously.
Decoupling turned out to be a safeguarding mechanism in a heterogeneous field, an attempt
to deal with conflicting demands in a way that minimizes risk.
In many cases the idea to decouple structure from action can be a useful strategy for
organizations. There are some possible outcomes from decoupling that are less positive:
Decoupling is often understood as pretence (pretending/ symbolic). It is not always
possible to sustain such a purely ceremonial adoption. It can turn into coupling
between structure and action. It may thus lead to full implementation because most
individuals refuse to see themselves as only ceremonial props.
, Institutional pressures can also manifest as demands for symbolic schemes that are
supposed to shape organizational practice. These structures can be difficult to
decouple over time (ratings, rankings, certifications).
Organizations that decouple also set an internal precedence that may be harmful to
its other operations (legitimacy façade). Decoupling is enabling corporate
wrongdoings and internal tolerance for breaking norms and rules.
Turco (2012)
Difficult Decoupling: Employee Resistance to the Commercialization of Personal
Settings.
Introduction
The market’s tendency to organize personal spheres of life is not always unfettered. The
study’s key insight is that the organizational decoupling required for successful
commercialization may complicate companies’ ability to gain employee acceptance.
To say that the market has moved into numerous personal spheres is not to say that it
always does or that its colonization of any given setting is all-encompassing.
We should not view the market as some amorphous force that inevitably colonizes all
corners of social life uniformly and completely, but rather as a collection of entrepreneurial
organizations that take on various forms, deploy a variety of strategies, and meet with more
or less success.
Market expansion into personal life, then, is far from inevitable and uniform.
Public acceptance is necessary but not sufficient for successful commercialization.
Commercializers must also convert their public demand into profitable demand. To effect that
conversion, organizations must gain acceptance from not only a potentially hostile public but
also their own employers.
Gaining such employee acceptance can be quite challenging because the very thing past
work identifies as driving successful commercialization (a euphemistic discourse) can
actually undermine a project’s commercial viability when employees refuse to perform
commercial practices decoupled.
Two general conditions under which employees may resist decoupling:
1) When commercializers recruit employees whose professional projects align with the
euphemistic discourse (undermines personal interest/ identity)
2) When the organization’s external, euphemistic discourse becomes a tool for
coordination among employees, it can expand into a key feature of the organization’s
internal, employee culture (illegitimate and serve as a vocabulary of motive for
justifying resistance).
The commercialization of personal settings
Market advancement into intimate spheres often provokes profound cultural discomfort. To
neutralize cultural discomfort, rent-seeking actors often obscure their commercial objectives,
framing their activities in a euphemistic discourse.
Example: By calling it "life insurance" instead of "death insurance", they try to
neutralize cultural discomfort.
Although gaining public acceptance is necessary for successful commercialization, it is not
sufficient. Even in recent work they defined success in terms of public acceptance only.
Commercializers must gain acceptance from not only a potentially hostile public, but also
their very own employees.
, The challenge of decoupling
How an organization presents itself publicly to gain external legitimacy and acceptance often
runs at odds with what it must do practically to be efficient and profitable decoupling
With decoupling, organizational elites make visible, public commitments to satisfy the
demands of their external environment, but these commitments are often just myth en
ceremony. The real day-to-day work of employees is unaffected by them and is organized for
technical efficiency and profit instead.
Once we recognize the need for commercializers to not only gain public acceptance but also
convert such acceptance into a profitable enterprise, it becomes clear that the work needed
to successfully commercialize personal settings directly implies decoupling.
An organization may use a euphemistic discourse and present itself in nonmarket
terms externally, but at some point, some people inside it will have to behave like it is
a business for it to become a sustainable commercial entity.
Employees might resist performing decoupled practices so as not to appear disingenuous.
They might resist decoupling if they are more committed to a legitimating euphemistic
discourse that the commercial project it was designed to promote.
The empirical puzzle of Motherhood, inc.
Commercialization is an onging and evolving process. Motherhood Inc. represents a case of
commercializing personal life with employing the key mechanism of successful
commercialization euphemistic discourse.
The more discomfort society has with its commercialization, the more important it is for the
market actors to initially legitimate their commercial project in the traditional terms of that
sphere.
Euphemistic discourse must be concretized in organizational practices and structures to be
effective.
It was used in MI classes.
The discourse was used directly with customers in the company’s retail operations.
Even physical features seemed designed to be consistent with the company’s
euphemistic discourse.
Public acceptance was not always immediate. In the case of MI, customers were ultimately
won over. Customers regularly noted that MI was filling a role their families and friends
otherwise would, indicating the market had indeed advanced into the noncommercial space
and was replacing (or at least reshaping) certain traditional relations.
But, despite its success in attracting public demand, they were unable to convert that
demand into profit. Certain organizational instantiations will also be more or less successful
in converting that public demand into profitable demand. So, although garnering public
acceptance is certainly necessary for successful commercialization, it is not sufficient.
The company’s failure to convert public legitimacy into profit stemmed directly from
employees’ refusal to perform certain commercial practices that were crucial to the
organization’s long-term financial viability.
Successful commercialization requires gaining the buy-in of a group equally important
to the organization’s target public (own employers).
Why would employers undercut the financial health of their own employer? Likely to say poor
management or unusually disgruntled employers. Two observations prevent us from doing
so:
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