Look What's Back! Institutional Complexity, Reversibility and the Knotting of Logics
| Author | Kajsa Lindberg,Trish Reay,Giuseppe Delmestri,Petra Adolfsson,Davide Nicolini,Elizabeth Goodrick |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12156 |
| Date | 01 April 2016 |
| Published date | 01 April 2016 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 27, 228–248 (2016)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12156
Look What’s Back! Institutional
Complexity, Reversibility and the Knotting
of Logics
Davide Nicolini, Giuseppe Delmestri,1Elizabeth Goodrick,2Trish Reay,3
Kajsa Lindberg4and Petra Adolfsson4
IKON, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick,Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK, 1WU – Vienna University
of Economics and BusinessInstitute for Change Management & Management Development, Welthandelsplatz
1, 1020, Vienna, Austria, 2College of Business, Florida Atlantic University, Davie, FL, 33325, USA, 3Alberta
School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, T6G 2R6, Canada, and 4Gothenburg ResearchInstitute,
G¨
oteborg University, B 600, SE 405 30, Gothenburg, Sweden
Corresponding author email: davide.nicolini@wbs.ac.uk
Through a comparativehistorical study of community pharmacy in the UK, Italy, Sweden
and the USA, the authors examine what happens to institutional arrangements designed
to resolve ongoing conflicts between institutional logics overextended periods of time. It
is found that institutional arrangements can reflect the heterogeneity of multiple logics
without resulting in hybridization or dominance. Because logics remain active, similar
conflicts can reappear multiple times. It is found that the durability of the configurations
of competing logics reflects the characteristics of the polities in which fields are embed-
ded. The dominance of any societal institutional order leads to more stable field-level
arrangements. The authors suggest that the metaphor of institutional knots and the re-
lated image of institutional knotting are useful to capture aspects of this dynamic and to
foreground the discursiveand material work that allows multiple logics to coexist in local
arrangements with variable durability.
Introduction
Professionalism is destroyed when unqualified lay-
men, driven solely by the profit motive, acquire the
ownership and the control of professionalenterprise.
The demands of the owner may be expected to clash
with the conscience of the professional. (Petition by
Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, 1878)
Pharmacists are free professionals and such they
must remain. It is our duty to defend this occupation
in order to avoid the pharmacy transforming into a
drugstore! [Any new regulation should avoid phar-
macy] becoming a dishonorable trade. (Member of
Italian Parliament, 1965)
These two quotes are excerpted from legislative
discussions in Britain and Italy regarding the on-
going societal concern about whether or not phar-
macists should hold the exclusive right to own a
pharmacy. Both quotes showsimilar arguments in
defence of the right of exclusivity and self-control
of the pharmacist profession. Yet the claims were
raised in two dierent countries, in dierent situa-
tions (court debate vs parliament debate), almost
90 years apart, and with completely dierent
outcomes. The British court ruling allowed for the
separation of ownership and profession, paving
the way for pharmacy multiples (known as chain
stores in North America). Conversely, the Italian
law prevented ownership by anyone except a
pharmacist and strictly disallowed the existence of
chains, presenting them as dishonourable(see Law
475/1968 and related parliamentary debates). Dif-
ferent institutional logics, i.e. sets of assumptions,
© 2015 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
Look What’s Back! 229
values and beliefs connected to meaningful prac-
tices and material processes (Thornton, Ocasio
and Lounsbury, 2012) were clearly at play in these
two events: they clashed, and their conflict came
to be pacified in distinct ways.
Even though legislation was implemented in
both Britain and Italy to resolve disagreements
about pharmacy control and ownership, the same
issues resurfaced and were repeatedly addressed.
In Britain, the same argument for professionalism
re-emerged in a 1968 court case, with the Pharma-
ceutical Society trying unsuccessfully to curb the
diversification of chains’ retail operations. In Italy,
the same argument for professionalism was de-
feated in 1888 in parliament by advocates of a free
market economy, to be resurrected twenty years
later in regulations that re-transformed the phar-
macy into a public–professional compromise. Sim-
ilarly in Sweden, clashes overpharmacy ownership
and control were addressed and resolved multiple
times. In contrast in the USA, the issue was settled
at the beginning of the 20th century, rarely to sur-
face again.
How can we explain these events from an in-
stitutional logics perspective? Established theory
suggests that institutional logics coexist and com-
pete within a field (e.g. Greenwood et al., 2011),
but there has been little attention to how conflicts
among the competing logics are resolved.We know
that ‘uneasy truces’ among logics can exist (Reay
and Hinings, 2009) and that oscillations in the rel-
ative importance of logics can occur (Dunn and
Jones, 2010). However, little or no research ex-
ists that investigates why or how the same con-
flicts between logics erupt over and over again in
a field, as was evident in our study. We address
this theoretical gap concerning the durability of
institutional arrangements by employing a com-
parative case study of community pharmacy in
the UK, Italy, Sweden and the USA. We expli-
cate how pharmacy was structured according to
conflicting logics, and how the same conflicts con-
tinued to emerge, despite arrangements in place
to resolve them. We find that, although the ten-
sions among conflicting logics can be temporar-
ily resolved within specific arrangementsthat allow
for institutional compromise, this does not lead to
hybridization, dilution or takeover as Glynn and
Lounsbury (2005) and Thornton (2004) found.
In mature fields such as community pharmacy,
institutional logics can remain distinct for ex-
tended periods of time. We introduce the metaphor
of institutional knots to identify temporary forms
of institutional compromise in whichlogics are wo-
ven together while remaining clearly identifiable.
Exploiting the heuristic power of the metaphor of
the knot, we also investigate why certain arrange-
ments are more durable than others. In contrast to
previous studies, we conclude that such durability
is the result of both local dynamics and the char-
acteristics of national level arrangements and their
anchoring to global institutional streams.
Institutional logics
The concept of institutional logics has been used
to account for how the conduct of social ac-
tors reflects broader belief systems. Institutional
logics are described as ‘ways of ordering reality’
(Friedland and Alford, 1991, p. 243) and ‘the
socially constructed, historical patterns of ma-
terial practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and
rules by which individuals produce and repro-
duce their material subsistence, organize time and
space, and provide meaning to their social reality’
(Thornton and Ocasio, 2008, p. 804). Institutional
logics shape and constrain conduct by specifying
which goals or values should be pursued within
a given domain, and what actions, interactions
or interpretations are appropriate for the pursuit
(Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury, 2012).
Early work tended to frame the relationship
between conflicting logics in terms of domina-
tion and succession where conflicting logics coex-
ist only until the winning dominant logic becomes
prevalent in the field (Scott et al., 2000; Thornton
and Ocasio, 1999). Scholars later introduced the
idea that conflicting logics can coexist in the same
field for longer periods of time, and focused on the
conditions supporting this long-term persistence.
Forexample, Marquis and Lounsbury (2007) show
how competing logics result in industry segmen-
tation and a corresponding variation in practices;
Bjerregaard and Jonasson(2013) describe a similar
form of selective segregation of competing logics
at the firm level. Other literature suggests that the
conflict between alternative logics can remain un-
resolved. Greenwood et al. (2011, p. 323) labelled
a situation where incompatible logics coexist for a
lengthy period of time in a truce as ‘enduring insti-
tutional complexity’. Truces allow for a settlement
between conflicting logics (Meyer and Hammer-
schmid, 2006) and the establishment of new forms
© 2015 British Academy of Management.
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