Acciones representativas en el ámbito global

Organizational fields are a central concept to research conducted from an institutional theory perspective, as it provides a middle level of analysis of how social actors engage with their institutional setting. The field literature focuses on a few dimensions in discussing fields: the difference between emerging and mature fields, the degree of fragmentation of fields and their formal structuring and centralization (Greenwood et al., 2011).

The variety of definitions of the field concept highlights the difficulty of reaching just one common understanding of the concept (Wooten & Hoffmann, 2008: 130-138).

36

Fields can be defined as a “community of disparate organizations, including producers, consumers, overseers, and advisors, that engage in common activities, subject to similar reputational and regulatory practices” (Powell, 2007: 3). Similarly, Scott (1991) defines fields as “a community of organizations that partakes of a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside the field”. DiMaggio and Powell (1983) see them as “organizations that in the aggregate represent a recognized area of institutional life”. Placing emphasis on a new angle, Hoffman (1999) claims that “the field began to be seen as forming around the issues that became important to the interests and objectives of a specific collective of organizations”, rather than on geographical proximity for instance.

If DiMaggio and Powell (1983) focus on the frequent interactions between organizations in a field and Hoffmann (1999) primarily looks at their formation around particular issues, social movement theory has a more nuanced view on the concept and connects it to collective action. Thus, Fligstein and McAdam (2012: 9) develop a theory of fields in which they define strategic action fields as “a constructed mesolevel social order in which actors (who can be individual or collective) are attuned to and interact with one another on the basis of shared (which is not to say consensual) understandings about the purpose of the field, relationships to others in the field (including who has power and why), and the rules governing legitimate action in the field. A stable field is one in which the main actors are able to reproduce themselves and the field over a fairly long period of time.” They distinguish between incumbents, challengers and supervisory governance units within the strategic action fields and discuss their roles in the way in which the field as such develops.

Scholars have also been interested in field formation processes that social actors are a part of. Wooten and Hoffmann (2008) pinpoint an initial phase of research in relation to fields in which the main idea was that fields are static and that organizations forming them are all similar to each other. The mechanism behind this claim was that organizations adopt institutional elements that make them similar to other organizations in order to gain legitimacy, which is more important overall for their survival than efficiency. This argument stems from the discussions around institutional isomorphism in the literature (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). A second later phase of research

37

emphasized though that fields are dynamic and include heterogeneous organizations (Wooten and Hoffmann, 2008; Zietsma et al., 2017). The field became contested, incorporating struggles between organizations which in the end also exert influence on the field itself (Bourdieu, 1985). The relationship between organizations and the field at a more macro-level became therefore bi-directional and influenced theorizing about how fields form and develop (Mair and Hehenberger, 2014).

Hoffman (1999) elaborated on how fields revolve around issues and not around technologies or markets and defines them therefore as “centers of debates in which competing interests negotiate over issue interpretation” (Hoffman, 1999: 351).

According to him, “field formation is not a static process” (Hoffman, 1999: 351), so basically different actors represent different institutions at field level and influence its development. He claims that in field formation we need to look at the institutions that are already at the core of the field and also at the institutions that compete with those and that reside within different populations in the field. The field changes as organizations enter and exit and this is also reflected in the changing institutions that emerge through the negotiations between different configurations of actors at different moments: “Issues define what the field is, making links that may not have previously been present. Organizations can make claims about being or not being part of the field, but their membership is defined through social interaction patterns. Field membership may also be for a finite time period, coinciding with an issue’s emergence, growth and decline.” (Hoffman, 1999: 352). Hoffmann (1999) looked at how events can create opportunities for institutional change but the question of agency remains present. The way actors respond to these events (strategically or opportunistically) in order to engage in the negotiations in the field has an effect on the resulting new institutions.

What is of utmost importance is that social actors can be part of several fields simultaneously. This translates into them having to conform to various institutional arrangements and challenges in these fields, especially since organizational fields are dynamic arenas of contestation, subject to diverse formation and change processes. This struggle has not been left unnoticed: Greenwood et al. (2011) addressed this aspect through their discussion of institutional complexity, as did Kraatz and Block (2008) through the concept of institutional pluralism.

38

Greenwood et al. (2011) understand through institutional complexity the competing institutional logics that organizations have to face in their contexts. Institutional logics are defined as principles guiding “how to interpret organizational reality, what constitutes appropriate behaviour and how to succeed” (Thornton, 2004: 70). Their main argument is that institutional complexity gets filtered through fields and organizations elaborate particular responses to cope with the complexity as a result of being part of these various, multiple fields.

Institutional complexity has been addressed in previous studies as depending on the number of institutional logics in the environment and the extent to which they are incompatible. One such example is the work of Raynard (2016) who elaborates on different types of complexity that can characterize institutional settings. The criteria at the basis of these types are the compatibility of logics, their prioritization in the field and the overlap of jurisdiction of the logics. The precision of institutional prescriptions, as well as the thoroughness through which they are enforced play a decisive role in the way in which they exert pressures on the organization. Different configurations of these dimensions can lead to segregated complexity (where organizations adopt a unitary structure or structural compartmentalization to deal with logics that have no overlap in jurisdiction), restrained complexity (where there is a clear prioritization of logics in the field and organizations use symbolic decoupling or mirror the field in terms of prioritization), aligned complexity (where logics are compatible and mutually reinforcing and organizations adopt blended hybrid structures and develop integrative devices) and volatile complexity (where there is no consensus on prioritization or jurisdiction and organizations adapt selective coupling or idiosyncratic structures).

Raynard’s (2016) underlying argument is that logics do not always have to clash; they can actually prove to be compatible and coexist in a field. This is a significant change in understanding of how institutional logics affect organizations, emphasizing not only their constraining effect but also their potential enabling effect.

Kraatz and Block (2008) also introduce their view on institutional pluralism in which organizations are part of several institutional systems simultaneously. Unlike Greenwood et al. (2011) and in accordance to Raynard (2016), the authors focus on the pressures and expectations that different institutional settings can pose but also on the

39

opportunities that they can generate: “we try to show how the same institutional pressures that threaten to divide the organization may, at least in some circumstances, hold it together instead” (Kraatz and Block, 2008: 5).

Organizations are therefore part of a variety of institutional arrangements as a result of their embeddedness in various fields. This institutional pluralism can be both constraining and enabling for organizations and this brings forward once more the issue of actors’ capacity to actively engage with their institutional setting and not only cope with its pressures (Mair et al., 2015). Disentangling the enabling and the constraining elements of the institutional settings for organizations is the first step towards understanding their approaches in dealing with their environments.

As we have seen, the way fields form, their composition, the logics that are represented in the field have all been addressed by previous research. These dimensions however and their relevance for organizational action are all strongly reliant on the type of field under discussion. Different types of fields have been discussed depending on field conditions such as degree of institutionalization, degree of complexity and evolutionary stage (Zietsma et al., 2017). Studies have been conducted thus in nascent fields, emerging fields, mature fields, structured fields, contested fields, fragmented fields, etc.

(Zietsma et al., 2017). Out of these, highly institutionalized or structured fields are of particular importance for the current study and we will thus turn briefly to previous understandings of these fields in the literature.

Various depictions of these fields have been given: “a field is highly institutionalized if it has a stable set of rules, norms and cognitive schemas that define accepted ways of operating. Such mature fields are often characterized by the presence of field-dominating organizations and a dominant organizational form.” (Perkmann and Spicer, 2007: 1104; Greenwood et al., 2002). Other authors emphasize the patterns of interaction between established and legitimate actors that are also clearly stipulated in these fields (Maguire et al., 2004), as well as the stability and coherence of logics (Zietsma, 2017). Highly institutionalized fields are also characterized by high levels of institutional infrastructure, overlapping of institutions and hierarchical differentiation between actors in the field (Hinings et al., 2017; Zietsma, 2017). Some authors emphasize that the predictability of these fields is more conducive to institutional

40

entrepreneurship (Dorado, 2005; Greenwood et al., 2002), although there is no real consensus around this aspect.

In order to understand organizational approaches to institutional pluralism and complexity therefore, there is the strong need to take into account the particular types of fields being investigated. As the conditions determining the type of fields present different opportunities and challenges for organizations, an understanding of the connections between these conditions and organizational behavior is necessary. This particular study aims to better empirically anchor the concepts of institutional complexity and institutional pluralism by focusing on the specificities of a highly institutionalized type of field and how they are being perceived and addressed by organizations.