General Management Essays on the Discursive
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Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN General Management Ciclo XXX Settore Concorsuale: 13/B2 Settore Scientifico Disciplinare: SECS-P/08 Essays on the discursive formation of emerging organizational fields: The role of technology, institutional logics, and identity Presentata da: Andrea Carlo Lo Verso Coordinatore Dottorato Supervisore Chiara Orsingher Prof. Cristina Boari Co-supervisori Prof. Simone Ferriani Prof. Raffaele Corrado Esame finale anno 2019 1 General abstract The thesis aims at shedding light on the process of organizational field emergence as resulting from a collectively enacted discursive endeavor. The investigation hinges upon the perspective that the generation of institutional and organizational domains of activity is primarily driven by the encounter of multiple and potentially misaligned social constituencies who attempt to sort out their mutual incongruences by engaging in communicative-dialectical activities. The three essays composing the thesis are to be understood as autonomous, though complementary, pieces of research, all linked by the emphasis on discursive processes. Essay 1 provides a theoretical investigation addressing one of the most critical factor spurring field emergence, i.e. technological progress. The introduction of new technologies is framed as the occasion for multiple and formerly disconnected actors to join a shared space of negotiation about the meanings carried on by those technologies. These dialectical interplays are motivated both by coordination and legitimation needs and typically regard (1) the defining features of technological artifacts, (2) the identities of actors joining the nascent field, and (3) the constitution of infrastructures that shape the actors‘ interactions. The paper advances our understanding on the discursive process of field emergence by providing insights on how these different issues, debated among actors with competing interests and worldviews, are indeed interrelated with one another. These interconnections represent the engine of technological field emergence. This first theoretical essay, though providing a distinct contribution, serves also as a guideline to generalize the insights advanced in the next two papers, whose empirical setting is the emerging field of civil drones. Essay 2 explores the role of multiple institutional logics as driver of field emergence. Institutional logics have a fundamental role in shaping cognitions and understandings that is reflected in actors‘ discursive actions and interactions. The field coalescing around civil drones is permeated by discursive activity on a number of issues that are framed according to regulatory, entrepreneurial, professional, and technological institutional logics. By studying how field actors debate these issues in field conferences, the paper tracks a number of discursive interaction patterns that are generative of new meanings and that draw their generative power from actors‘ combination of potentially conflicting logics. Essay 3 addresses the identity formation process in nascent fields. The theoretical angle adopted here is that of interstitial emergence, denoting that new fields may spawn from the overlap of other existing fields. The civil drone field is an interstitial field because it involves organizations and cultural resources coming from aviation, photography, and topography. By performing content analysis of a sample of field‘s organizational mission statements and of a publication dedicated to drones, the paper highlights that: (1) the emergence of a field-specific identity is driven by symbolic-isomorphic thrust toward the most professionalized community populating the field; (2) the identity of field-specific organizations tends to be increasingly shaped by ideational issues and specialized cultural resources that indicate a tendency toward identity conceptualization. These two apparently contradictory mechanisms of identity formation, serve to provide legitimacy to the emerging field by connecting it to professional activities, while creating a distinctive field identity forged by drone-specific issues. Overall, the thesis contributes to an ongoing conversation on meaning making as the fundamental process driving the formation of organizational fields. The emergence phase of field is, by definition, characterized by the absence of shared, taken for granted understandings and beliefs. For this reason it represent a theoretically and methodologically challenging item of research. The key insight advanced here is that the new meanings which demarcate nascent domains of socio-economic activity are generated through the intersection 2 between multiple constituencies that thanks to language can combine heterogeneous cultural resources and cognitive schemes. Table of Content ESSAY 1: A FRAMEWORK OF DIALECTICAL MEANING MAKING IN EMERGING TECHNOLOGICAL FIELDS 5 INTRODUCTION 5 DEFINITION OF CORE CONCEPTS AND CONSTRUCTS 8 What‘s a field? 9 What‘s emergence? 11 What‘s technology? 13 MEANING MAKING IN EMERGING FIELDS 15 New meanings creation in fields 16 Meaning making drivers: legitimation, coordination, and competition 18 CORE ISSUES IN TECHNOLOGICAL FIELDS: ARTIFACTS, IDENTITIES AND INFRASTRUCTURES 22 The ―what?‖ issue. Definition of technological artifacts 23 The ―who?‖ issue. Definition of identities 28 The ―how?‖ issue. Definition of infrastructures 32 Interconnections between artifacts, identities, and infrastructures 38 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 41 Contributions to research on fields and technology 42 REFERENCES 45 TABLES AND FIGURES 50 ESSAY 2: THE GENERATIVE MULTIPLICITY OF INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS. HOW DISCURSIVE INTERACTIONS CONSTRUCT AN EMERGING FIELD 53 INTRODUCTION 53 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 56 Field emergence 56 Institutional logics multiplicity 58 Discursive interactions 59 EMPIRICAL SETTING 61 METHODS 64 Discourse and institutional logics 64 Data collection 66 Data analysis 69 THE GENERATIVE INTERACTIONS AMONG MULTIPLE LOGICS 72 Theme 1. What are drones? 73 Theme 2. What is the impact of drones? 75 Theme 3. Is the drone industry part of the aviation sector? 77 Theme 4. What are rules for? 80 Theme 5. Why to form relationships among field members? 83 Theme 6. How to make the field more mature? 86 3 Summary 91 PLACING TEXT IN CONTEXT: GENERATIVE INTERACTIONS IN TIME 93 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS 100 REFERENCES 104 TABLES AND FIGURES 109 ESSAY 3: MAPPING IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN INTERSTITIAL FIELDS. THE CASE OF THE NASCENT ITALIAN CIVIL DRONE INDUSTRY 116 INTRODUCTION 116 INTERSTITIAL EMERGENCE, IDENTITY AND DISCOURSE 118 DATA & METHODS 121 Empirical Setting 121 Data collection 122 Data analysis 123 FINDINGS 128 Mapping organizational identities against each other 129 Mapping field identities against discourse issues 132 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS 137 REFERENCES 139 TABLES AND FIGURES 142 APPENDIX 1 148 4 ESSAY 1: A framework of dialectical meaning making in emerging technological fields Abstract The paper advances a theoretical framework expounding the process of dialectical meaning creation in technology-driven emerging field. New technologies give rise to economic opportunities, social challenges, and futuristic imageries that spur debate among the actors primarily affected by them. The paper investigates how these discursive processes give rise to emerging organizational fields. The framework proposed here is articulated by first disentangling coordination and legitimation as core drivers of meaning making activity, and then by identifying technological artifacts, actors‘ identities, and field‘s infrastructures as the main discursive issues subject to that meaning making activity. The theorization advanced in the paper serves to shed light on the different aspect that are subject to dialectical meaning creation in emerging fields, and it further contributes to a comprehensive understanding of how technological innovation get ingrained in the institutional landscape though the emergence of fields where designs, identities, and arrangements are negotiated among actors motivated by diverging interests and worldviews. INTRODUCTION Institutional research is grounded on the concept of field, that is the level of analysis where social forces exert influences on organizations, shaping actions and cognitions. Initially conceptualized as the set of actors that in the aggregate constitutes a recognized area of institutional life (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), fields are increasingly framed as ―centers of debate‖ (Hoffman, 1999; Wooten & Hoffman, 2008). This view implies that field emergence takes place through the coalescence of different actors around a certain issue that may generate both opportunities and problems, whose significance and implications are thus discussed and negotiated. The process of field formation is often defined as ―interstitial emergence‖ (Morrill, 2001; Zietsma, Groenewegen, Logue, & Hinings, 2017), given that new fields spawn from the overlap and encounter of different, already existing, institutional 5 domains; this implies that a distinctive feature of fields is their intrinsic heterogeneity which is particularly evident in the earliest stage, when field actors are still anchored to their diverse previous affiliations and institutional milieus. Although the literature has variously addressed the mechanisms and social dynamics that underlie the emergence of fields (David, Sine, & Haveman, 2013; Lawrence & Phillips, 2004; Maguire, Hardy, & Lawrence, 2004; Powell & Padgett, 2012), there is a lack of systematic accounts exploring