title: How Multiple Institutional Logics Promote Organizational Settlement and Innovation Over Time: Case Studies from a Higher Education Institution
Creators: name: Jiang, Ye
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2029

description: How can organizations navigate and engage with logic multiplicity and tensions to attain organizational settlement and increased innovation over time despite the ongoing contestations and challenges engendered by incompatible institutional logics? This overarching question is the starting point of this doctoral research. 
Contemporary organizations commonly face the challenge of managing multiple conflicting logics due to their complex and turbulent environment (Pache and Santos, 2021). Whether by choice, coercion, or innovation, organizations are often exposed to incompatible logics, and must address these tensions for sustainable development and innovation (Schildt and Perkmann, 2017). In such cases, conflicts between logics need to be managed, and potential complementarities can be explored to reach a new organizational settlement for innovation. Therefore, when organizations face tensions and challenges generated by incompatible logics, they need to adjust their current settlement to accommodate the demands of multiple logics and reach a new one by integrating or hybridizing elements from different logics over time (Reay et al., 2021; Perkmann et al., 2022). 
Nevertheless, scholar have pointed out most existing literature has focused on how organizations manage, eliminate, or leverage the multiple contested logics that have already existed within the organization, and they have assumed that organizations are born as hybrids. However, many organizations only introduced new logics later in their life cycles for different purposes. So exiting literature have overlooked how foreign or new institutional logics are introduced into the organization and combined with the prevalent logic and contribute to organizational innovation. Furthermore, empirical studies have suggested that organizations often respond to multiple incompatible logics with single, static, sustainable, or irreversible strategies (Gümüsay et al., 2020a; Holm et al., 2017; Uchida, 2023) and they have overlooked the importance of “temporality” in how organizations adopt variegated combinations of strategies to navigate conflicting logics and facilitate cooperation to drive innovation over time. (Gümüsay et al., 2020b, p.7; Ramus et al., 2021a). Thus, the current literature needs a more thorough understanding of how organizations develop new stable settlements by introducing new logics and engaging with multiple conflicting logics over time, as well as how they can leverage these logics to create novel ways for organizational development. This aligns with Uchida’s (2023) call for further examination into “the temporary responses coincide with the growing appreciation of how institutional pressures influence firms in different ways at different times” (p. 797). 
In this dissertation, I designed and conducted multi-dimensional empirical examinations of organizational and individual dynamics of the responses to account for variations in how organizational settlement is reconfigured, temporally situated, and individually embedded. The first and second studies examine the organizational structural dimension – structural blending and structural differentiation, and the third study focuses on organizational cognition – organizational members’ cognitive changes. The empirical context of this research is a higher education institution in China. Based on the constructivist grounded theory method, findings are drawn from analysing multiple qualitative data, primarily combining semi-structured interviews and a wealth of archival data. 
The first study shows that varied strategies with differentiating and integrating features (i.e., separated differentiating, formalized integrating, selectively integrating and differentiating, and hybridized integrating) led to the transformation of the inter-logic relationships from contested to complementary, resulting in the emergence of a new hybridized logic. The second study elucidates that competitive logics can attain truces and co-exist peacefully in an organization through structural arrangement that comprises a temporally sequenced three-stage response model (i.e., securing structural places, breaking logic boundaries, and construing an innovative image) over time, such that the new salient logics were placed and mutually reinforced with the prevalent logic in the organization. The third and final study elaborates that organizational actors interpret and enact the new and unacquainted logic(s) in their careers by reconstructing their temporal role identity over time, which helps reproduce relative stability in the organization. 
Collectively, the three studies reveal novel knowledge about the temporal dynamics of responses to institutional complexity over time. Organizations and individuals are able to alter their understandings and strategies flexibly and gradually to fruitfully accommodate and engage with the ever-evolving logic contestations and pressures. Within this perspective, this dissertation provides a more nuanced, realistic account of the deliberate and temporal pathways through which contemporary organizations manage and leverage institutional complexity on an ongoing basis.