Three Studies of Institutional Transformation: Theorizing an Institutional Logic’s Basis of Worth, The Role of Values in the Coherence of Institutional Logics, and Remaking Worth in Alberta’s Oil and Gas Industry
Creators: Deka Kalita, Bandita
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2024

<p>Values are core to institutions. The overarching aim of this dissertation is to examine institutional values and their role in enabling or constraining a widely examined phenomenon within organizational studies: transformations. Theoretically, my research contributes towards a growing body of work on understanding the processes by which institutions transform, and their implications on organizations. Empirically, my work focuses on long-term, longitudinal changes occurring in the oil and gas industry of Alberta, Canada. Overall, three studies presented in this thesis foreground evaluative processes constituting concerns about institutions in general, and the grand challenge of energy transitions in particular. The three studies tackle the theme of institutional transformations in unique ways. The first two studies adopt an institutional logics perspective, and the third uses an inductive approach to institutional analysis.<br>
In the first study, I ask, how do values bound institutional logics’ susceptibilities to change and their effects on organizations? I provide a values-based explanation for change and stability by theorizing a process of values commensuration anchoring institutional logics. Foregrounding the centrality of values, I conceptualize a logic’s basis of worth as the superset of commensuration principles governing a logic’s values which rule in the performance of certain values and rule out the performance of others. This study contributes by offering a theoretical grammar (Pentland, 1995) for analyzing how a logic’s values endogenously explain change and stabilization, and extends organizational and management scholarship by offering a toolkit for investigating how new values manifest in logics (Lounsbury et al., 2021).<br>
In the second study, I investigate the effect of values on the coherence of institutions within the interinstitutional system. I ask, how do logics’ constitutive values affect their coherence, and with what interinstitutional implications? I present a theoretical model explaining how values undergird the logics comprising the interinstitutional system. They constitute mechanisms that entail the reconfiguration or reinforcement of institutional logics, and the coherence of institutions within the interinstitutional system—i.e. the extent to which an institution continues to be a resilient pattern of social structure and activity. My model also offers insights on institutional incoherence or erosion—i.e. the extent to which the institution is susceptible to being weakened, and thus, undermined. This study explores the idea that the intensity of interinstitutional contradictions can change even as values-based dynamics effect the coherence or incoherence of institutions, and contributes by bringing in a values-based perspective that focuses on the role of reflexive and pre-reflexive agency in social action (Emirbayer &amp; Mische, 1998). It also offers insights into the construction of grand challenges, and contributes towards theorizing variations in institutional complexity and hybridity.<br>
In the third and final study, a historical, inductive case study of Alberta’s oil and gas industry between 1938 and 2019, I ask, how are institutional values transformed? I find that a recalibration of values was constitutive of the incumbent extractive institution’s transformation. I theorize how this recalibration transpired via an axiological motor consisting of two sets of opposing processes that remake “worth”—what I conceptualize as the registers or building blocks of values—across two dimensions. Overall, the transformation I studied constituted the construction of energy transitions as a grand challenge of the twenty-first century. I show how changing institutional values, driven by a process of remaking worth, underpin this construction. In doing so, this study contributes towards a constitutive approach to institutional analysis, and to the literature on grand challenges.<br>
Overall, the three studies presented in this thesis foreground a constitutive approach to institutional analysis even as they tackle questions pertaining to stability and transformation within institutions, and within the interinstitutional system. An analytical focus on values is the single thread running through all three studies. Taken together, the three studies advance research on institutional transformation processes, institutional complexity and hybrid organizations, and posit practical implications for policy around grand challenges. They contribute to our understanding of how values anchor institutions, and thus, their effects on organizations, and more broadly on the interinstitutional system.</p>