Klaus Weber | Northwestern University (original) (raw)

Papers by Klaus Weber

Journal of Management Studies, 2022

Although researchers have acknowledged that not all institutional change results from the intenti... more Although researchers have acknowledged that not all institutional change results from the intentional efforts of relatively reflexive actors, we lack an explanation of how mundane interactions between actors can result in non-strategic institutional change. To address this, we advance the theory of institutional drift that reveals how the practice deviation(s) that occur between interaction partners in an institutional order, transformed into tolerable deviations by the self and others, can lead to the non-strategic transformation of that institutional order. Our framework extends the interactionist perspective in organizational institutionalism by showing how interpersonal interactions are animated and constrained by people's passionate attachment to the fundamental sacred ideals, or ethos, underlying institutional orders. It is this connection with ethos that animates the interactional processes tied to both maintaining and disrupting institutions.

Organization Science, 2021

Business elites influence the allocation of resources to a range of causes related to the social ... more Business elites influence the allocation of resources to a range of causes related to the social good, such as to corporate community or environmental programs. We extend research on executive influence on corporate attention to alternative causes by showing how chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) engagement in two distinct institutional domains, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and independent foundation philanthropy, are interrelated. We draw on the psychology of moral accounting to refine the assumption of personal consistency prevalent in studies of executives’ corporate influence. Specifically, we show that executives use flexible means to realize an overall aspiration of doing good, resulting in divergent emphases in their CSR and philanthropic causes. Evidence comes from a panel of 677 corporations linked to 309 foundations through 1,109 CEOs during the period 2003–2011. CEOs compensated for deficits in their firms’ CSR record by joining the board of trustees of specific nonprofit foundations, but subsequently advanced divergent cause priorities in the corporation and the foundation. Our work suggests that studies of CSR and of executive influence on organizations benefit from taking into account executives’ cross-domain engagement.

Journal of Management Studies, 2020

In much contemporary institutional scholarship, the term ‘actor’ is used as a shorthand for any e... more In much contemporary institutional scholarship, the term ‘actor’ is used as a shorthand for any entity imbued with agency. Talking about actors in institutions thus serves the necessity of allocating agency before returning to the analysis of institutional structures and processes. We find this approach to actorhood limiting, conceptually and normatively. Grounded in the perspective of pragmatist phenomenology, we assert the need for distinguishing between persons and actors, and the value of integrating the person into institutional analysis. We conceive of persons as humans with a reflective capacity and sense of self, who engage with multiple institutions through the performance of institutional roles. People may acquire actorhood by temporarily aligning their self with what is expected from a particular actor-role in an institutional order. Conversely, institutions enter people’s lifeworld as they are personified in people’s social performances. We outline this perspective and examine conceptual and normative implications that arise from the integration of human experience in institutional analysis.

Academy of Management Journal, 2019

We develop the concept of the distant future as a new way of seeing the future in collective effo... more We develop the concept of the distant future as a new way of seeing the future in collective efforts. While a near future is represented in practical terms and concerned with forming expectations and goals under conditions of uncertainty, a distant future is represented in stylized terms and concerned with imagining possibilities under conditions of ambiguity. Management research on future-oriented action has developed around problems of the near future. To explore distant futures, we analyze the case of geoengineering, a set of planetary-scale technologies that have been proposed as solutions to the threat of climate change. Geoengineering has increasingly been treated as if it were a reality, despite continued controversy and in the absence of any implementation. We find that societal-level imaginaries that were built on deeply-held moral bases and cosmologies underpinned the conception of geoengineering, and that a dialectic process of discursive attempts to reconcile oppositional imaginaries increased the concreteness and credibility of geoengineering so that it increasingly has been treated as an 'as-if' reality. We suggest that distant futures orient collective efforts in distinctive ways, not as concrete guides for action but by expressing critiques and alternatives, that can become treated as 'as-if' realities.

Academy of Management Journal, 2020

Many new ventures have to pivot-radically transform what they are about-because their original ap... more Many new ventures have to pivot-radically transform what they are about-because their original approach has failed. However, pivoting risks disrupting relationships with key stakeholders, such as user communities, who identify with ventures. Stakeholders may respond by withdrawing support and starving ventures of the resources needed to thrive. This can pose an existential threat to ventures, yet it is unclear how they can manage this problem. To explore this important phenomenon, we conduct a qualitative process study of The Impossible Project, a photography venture which encountered significant resistance from its user community as it pivoted from an analog focus to an analog-digital positioning. We develop a process model of stakeholder identification management that reveals how ventures can use identification reset work to defuse tensions with stakeholders whose identification with the venture is threatened. A core finding is that ventures can remove the affective hostility of stakeholders and rebuild connections with many of them by exposing their struggles, thus creating a bond focused around these shared experiences. We offer contributions to scholarship on identification management, user community identification, and pivoting.

Administrative Science Quarterly, 2020

We advance interactionist perspectives on how organizational structures emerge in new issue domai... more We advance interactionist perspectives on how organizational structures emerge in new issue domains. Our study is grounded in field data collected over 18 months at a large biomedical company that sought to become more sustainable. Over that period, some sustainability-related issues became firmly embedded in formal structures and procedures, while others faltered. We identify the quality of situational interactions among organizational members as the engine behind the structuring of organizational sustainability efforts. Successful interactions generated traces of attention, motivation, knowledge, relationships , and resources that linked fleeting interactions to emergent organizational structures. Our findings point to the importance of internal advocates and distributed processes at middle and lower levels for developing organizational structures, and we show that advocates' interests, commitments, and identities are altered in the course of repeated interactions, as are the political resources available to them. Paying attention to situation-level interactions thus results in a more dynamic view of the emergence of formal structures through political processes. We develop a process model that informs structuration perspectives on organizational change by showing how social interaction dynamics can account for divergent levels of structuring within the same domain. The model also advances political perspectives on organizational change by unpacking the situational underpinnings of advocacy efforts and collective mobilization around issues.

Academy of Management Review, 2019

Changing environments often expose organizations to institutional logics that are at odds with ot... more Changing environments often expose organizations to institutional logics that are at odds with other logics that were imprinted into the organizations in the past, giving rise to conflict. We specifically propose that prior institutional environments imprint organizational coalitions and governance systems-the organization's polity-and that these polity imprints explain variance in organizational change processes in response to new logics. We argue that such polity imprints shape how different organizational groups construe their conflicting interests in relation to new logics, how they mobilize for and against changes emanating from these logics, and how the outcomes of group conflict become stabilized. To develop this argument, we identify four ideal types of organizational polities, based on differences in the centralization of authority and the unity of organizational elites. Each ideal type gives rise to a characteristic pattern of how organizations process the advent of new logics. Our analysis demonstrates the utility of conceptualizing organizations as open polities-political entities that interact with their external environment-and the importance of taking historically imprinted political features of organizations into account in studies of organizational responses to institutional complexity.

We develop the concept of emotional competence, which refers to the ability to experience and dis... more We develop the concept of emotional competence, which refers to the ability to experience and display emotions that are deemed appropriate for an actor role in an institutional order. Emotional competence reveals a more expansive view of emotions in institutional theory, where emotions are central to the constitution of people as competent actors and lend reality and passionate identification to institutions. We distinguish two facets of emotional competence—private, which is needed to engage in self-regulation, and public, which is needed to elicit other-authorization—and two criteria for assessing emotional competence—the deemed naturalness and authenticity of emotions within an institutional order. These distinctions delineate four processes through which emotional competence ties personal experience and social performance to fundamental institutional ideals, the institution's ethos. We discuss theoretical and methodological implications of this model for researching institutional processes.

Academy of Management Annals, 2017

We review recent research that employs an open polities perspective on organizations. Open politi... more We review recent research that employs an open polities perspective on organizations. Open polities research combines an open systems conception of organizations as intimately linked to their external environment with scholarship that treats organizations as polities-associations of groups with evolving interests and resources that operate within the constraints and opportunities afforded by a formal organizational system. In this perspective, external political environments seep into the internal political dynamics of organizations in various ways, and those internal politics in turn mediate organization-level outcomes in relation to external pressures. We use the framework of the open polity perspective to 1) connect largely parallel literatures at a meta-theoretical level and thus point to ways in which they can inform each other, 2) identify key processes through which internal and external polities are linked and single out organizational dimensions for the comparative analysis of organizations as polities, and 3) identify open questions and opportunities for future research in this perspective.

A critical stage in change toward institutional pluralism occurs when incumbent organizations mus... more A critical stage in change toward institutional pluralism occurs when incumbent organizations must begin to integrate
diverse logics in their operations. The required institutional work inside organizations at that stage—institutional
intrapreneurship—involves distinctive challenges. Incumbent logics are entrenched in organizational routines, status orders,
policies, and structures that hamper change and trigger resistance. We used qualitative data from two integrative medicine (IM)
programs inside large healthcare organizations to understand how institutional intrapreneurs work to integrate the IM logic in
these highly institutionalized organizations. We found that intrapreneurs use opportunistic tactics to create and strengthen
organizational free spaces aligned with the new logic, and then leverage the capacity that is developed to extend elements of
the new logic into the broader organization. This study suggests that a better understanding of the organizational context helps
explain the fate of early-stage efforts toward institutional change

In examining how framing influences an audience's appreciation of products, practices, and people... more In examining how framing influences an audience's appreciation of products, practices, and people, including the framer, we take the perspective of the audience that evaluates the framing. We examine the effects of framing on evaluations when audiences are exposed to a multiplicity of frames, both by the same actor as the result of recurrent communications over time and by multiple actors who vie for attention. Using 36,012 research reports by securities analysts, covering the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry between 1989 and 2012, we tested the relationships between analysts' framing repertoires and professional investors' evaluations of analysts as measured in the publication of Institutional Investor's short list of the best analysts of the year. We found that investors appreciate analysts with framing repertoires that resonate with their needs, that are internally coherent over time, and that offer a moderate amount of novelty in comparison to others' framings. We also found that framing is particularly important for analysts without existing high status, that is, who have never before been recognized as stars or who cannot benefit from association with a prestigious employer.

How do social movements affect decisions within corporations, such as the commercialization of ne... more How do social movements affect decisions within corporations, such as the
commercialization of new technologies? We suggest that the effect of movement activism
is conditioned by the internal polity and therefore varies across organizations. This
article examines how the anti-genetic movement in Germany during the 1980s affected
six domestic pharmaceutical firms’ commercialization of biotechnology. We develop a
process model of how movements penetrate the relatively closed polity of private
organizations. External contestation weakened the position of internal champions of
biotechnology, precipitated divisions among organizational elites, and undermined
collective commitment to the technology. The movement also increased perceptions of
investment uncertainty, but the consequences of this uncertainty depended on
organizational logics of decision making. As a result, investments in some firms were
tilted away from domestic biotechnology projects. The model also explains this variation
in organization-level outcomes of movement contestation.

This study illuminates how new markets emerge and how social movements can effect cultural change... more This study illuminates how new markets emerge and how social movements can effect cultural change through market creation. We suggest that social movements can fuel solutions to three challenges in creating new market segments: entrepreneurial production, the creation of collective producer identities, and the establishment of regular exchange between producers and consumers. We use qualitative data on the grassroots coalition movement that has spurred a market for grass-fed meat and dairy products in the United States since the early 1990s. Our analysis shows that the movement's participants mobilized broad cultural codes and that these codes motivated producers to enter and persist in a nascent market, shaped their choices about production and exchange technologies, enabled a collective identity, and formed the basis of the products' exchange value. •

We examine the antecedents and consequences in developing countries of creating a national stock ... more We examine the antecedents and consequences in developing countries of creating a national stock exchange, a core technology of financial globalization. We study local conditions and global institutional pressures in the rapid spread of exchanges since the 1980s and examine how conditions at the point of adoption affected exchanges' subsequent vibrancy. Little prior research connects the process of diffusion with the operational performance of adopted policies. We find that international coercion was associated with more ceremonial adoption but that, contrary to expectations common in institutional research, contagion processes via peer groups and normative emula-tion of prestigious actors enhanced vibrancy.

Karl Weick's sensemaking perspective has proven to be a central influence on process theories of ... more Karl Weick's sensemaking perspective has proven to be a central influence on process theories of organizing. Yet, one persistent criticism levelled at his work has been a neglect of the role of larger social and historical contexts in sensemaking. We address this critique by showing how institutional context is a necessary part of sensemaking. We propose that there are salient but unexplored connections between the institutional and sensemaking perspectives. We explain how three specific mechanisms — priming, editing and triggering — bring institutional context into processes of sensemaking, beyond a more conventional notion of internalized cognitive constraint. Our contribution seeks to be forward-looking as much as reflective, addressing a critique of one of Karl Weick's key theoretical contributions and offering amendments that extend its reach.

W e examine how executives' ambivalent evaluation of a strategic issue relates to organizational ... more W e examine how executives' ambivalent evaluation of a strategic issue relates to organizational actions taken in response. Ambivalence occurs when a decision maker evaluates an issue as simultaneously positive and negative, a state that has received scant attention in organizational research. We integrate findings in social psychology with the behavioral theory of the firm to suggest how executives' ambivalence prompts wider and more vigorous search for action responses and enables broader participation. Data from a two-wave survey of 104 German CEOs who evaluated the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and reported their organizations' responses show that organizations whose CEOs evaluated the event as both positive and negative were more likely to take action when both evaluations were also strongly held. The reported actions were also of greater scope, novelty, and riskiness. The study contributes to research on organizational decision making by theorizing the role of top executives' ambivalence and by providing a first systematic test of how ambivalence affects responses to strategic issues.

Organizational scholars have highlighted the importance of interpretive ambivalence for mindful-n... more Organizational scholars have highlighted the importance of interpretive ambivalence for mindful-ness, creativity, and strategic change. Ambivalence occurs when an issue is seen simultaneously as positive and negative. We examine organizational factors that influence the propensity of organizational leaders to evaluate a new strategic issue ambivalently. Data come from a survey of 220 German CEOs confronted with the enlargement of the European Union. We find that CEOs of firms with a more ambidextrous strategic orientation and a moderate sense of organizational control over their environment are most likely to be ambivalent about this issue. Our findings affirm the prevalence of interpretive ambivalence at the executive level and suggest ways for organizations to promote or prevent ambivalence in strategic sensemaking.

The cultural and discursive underpinning of industries and markets has received growing attention... more The cultural and discursive underpinning of industries and markets has received growing attention in recent years. I use Ann Swidler's conceptualization of culture as toolkit, and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus as the starting point to further this enterprise. The article illustrates a strategy for measuring and comparing the cultural toolkits in use by different actors in a larger field. The strategy allows quantitative comparisons of similarity at the level of large comprehensive toolkits instead of selective elements or inferred deeper dimensions. It also takes into account the embeddedness of actors' cultural toolkits in the structures of larger social fields and the specificity of toolkits to communication contexts. While this analytic strategy is potentially applicable to any actor's toolkit in a recurring communication context, I use as an illustration the repertoires that different corporations in the pharmaceutical industry employ to account for their activities in their annual reports.