What happens when many visions of a organizational practice arrive at one organization?

What is it about?

Organizations often imitate other, more successful organizations. However, most of the research assumes that the imitator usually has a rather clear understanding what the imitated practice entails. In this longitudinal case study, I tell a more complex story. The proto-institution (so-called Producer Choice system) invented by the BBC travels to Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark and finally arrives in Poland. However, when the actors at the focal Polish organization want to implement the Producer Choice system, their actions are complicated by the availability of many varying accounts of what the Producer Choice is, what are its goals, and why it is being implemented. The contribution of this study are as follows: 1) The semi-edited account about a proto-institution is endangered by incompatible accounts arriving directly from the adopters. This suggests that the progress of institutionalization may be stopped or hindered not only because of external factors such as the work of adversarial interests groups (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996) but also due to clashes between the semi-edited and unedited accounts of the structure. Such phenomenon is unlikely to occur when a structure is already institutionalized because then the incentives associated with the increased legitimization prevent the adopters from sharing stories about their failures. To put it differently, less stringent filtering of experiences associated with proto-institutions may contribute to undermining their institutionalization and influence further adoptions. 2) The passage of time allows for the accumulation of experiences not only at the field level but also at the organizational level, thus leading some adopters to reevaluate, modify, or abandon their original designs. As adopters reconsider their experiences, the accounts they produce become divergent and less clear, thereby affecting how other organizations perceive the proto-institution. 3) Encounters with multiple semi-edited and unedited accounts that may occur while dealing with proto-institutions are associated with increased levels of cognitive ambiguity and may affect the way meanings are negotiated by adopters. By emphasizing how agency is affected by ambiguity resulting from encounters with multiple accounts, this study helps to explain why attempts at organizational change based on proto-institutions may fail. 4) The study allows to infer that decoupling may be motivated by the lock-in effect: The promises made when the prescription was still weakly understood must be kept, but the decision makers grew skeptical about the value of the adopted practice. Keeping the appearance of rationality and consequentiality requires that the organization continue the process of adoption but the increased understanding of the structure requires its rejection. In the end, the actors deal with that conundrum by engaging in decoupling by imitating a failed source variant that bears the name of “Producer Choice” but amounts to little more than window-dressing.

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Why is it important?

This study, being based on participant observation, allows taking a look at the imitation process from the inside. This unique vantage point permitted collection of empirical material that otherwise would be hard to acquire. Thus, the study provides an in-depth fine-grained account of the translation process and contributes to research on proto-institutions.