The institutional change literature has predominantly focused on successful changes and sparsely on failed changes, but the idea of institutional fields reverting to their pre-change or near pre-change state, after change attempts, remains underexplored. Although recent studies have explored similar phenomenon from the perspective of actors resisting change and trying to restore status quo, a field-level understanding of the processes and the dynamics associated with it remains underexamined. The present study, using the case of reforms in the field of petroleum (...) exploration and production in India, examines an institutional change where the institution, once modified, gradually reverted near to its prechange state. We suggest the concept of institutional elasticity to explain such reverting of institutions, and elaborate on three boundary conditions—scope of change, pace of change, and field-level actor constellations—which have implications for the relationship between institutional elasticity and reverting of institutions. (shrink)

Managerial values are abstract ideals that act as guiding principles for managing enterprises. Organizational identities connote the central, enduring, and distinctive features of an organization’s self-definition. There is a need to examine how and which managerial values are acted upon within developing country enterprises and how these values are reflected, projected, or disguised in the organizational identities of these enterprises. This special issue pays particular attention to how organizational identities respond to conflicting managerial values in the developing world, how values (...) work enables enterprises to adapt to environmental change, and the relationship between organizational aspiration and positive identities in developing world enterprises. (shrink)

Organizational identity has emerged as a significant construct to understand the behaviour of organizations. However, researchers have noted several inconsistencies in the way organizational identity has been conceptualized so far. The concept of organizational self holds promise in reconciling these tensions. In this article, we contribute towards this reconciliation by identifying processes that may facilitate the creation of a shared understanding of organizational self. Borrowing from, and building on, theorization from Indian psychology that specializes in the knowledge of individual self, (...) we propose three processes, namely meta-cognizing, guarding and organizing, that assist organizational members arrive at a shared understanding of organizational self. Evidence from one organization’s efforts to evolve a unique identity is used to demonstrate the existence of these processes. This conceptualization is capable of addressing the inconsistencies in the organizational identity literature, and also has significant implications for practice as it may be able to suggest how organizational members can develop and preserve a unique organizational identity in the context of dynamic internal pressures and external influences. (shrink)