Institutional Logics Within Faith Based Aid

This book investigates what faith means in the actual day-to-day practice of faith-based NGOs working in the development, humanitarian, and advocacy sectors. Faith-based organisations play an extremely prominent role in international aid and development, operating within the same sphere as organisations without an explicit religious affiliation. This book uses the case study of a UK-based Christian faith-based organisation to develop an analytic tool using institutional logics. Through exploration of how various institutional logics are manifested and negotiated across organisational practice, the book describes how the ‘telos,’ or objective, of the corporate logic (to sustain the organisation) interacts with the telos of the religious logic (namely, to worship God). The book demonstrates that since organisational practices must ultimately work to sustain the organisation, at the organisational level faith is restricted to certain spaces and forms, while at the individual level faith is dominant and active. Bringing a fresh perspective to discussions of religion and development by highlighting how faith influences development at the organisational level, this book will be an important read for researchers working on global development.

The Institutional Logics Perspective is one of the fastest growing new theoretical areas in organization studies (Thornton, Ocasio & Lounsbury, 2012). Building on early efforts by Friedland & Alford (1991) to "bring society back in" to the study of organizational dynamics, this new scholarly domain has revived institutional analysis by embracing a

How do institutions influence and shape cognition and action in individuals and organizations, and how are they in turn shaped by them? Various social science disciplines have offered a range of theories and perspectives to provide answers to this question. Within organization studies in recent years, several scholars have developed the institutional logics perspective. An institutional logic is the set of material practices and symbolic systems including assumptions, values, and beliefs by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences. This approach affords significant insights, methodologies, and research tools, to analyze the multiple combinations of factors that may determine cognition, behaviour, and rationalities. In tracing the development of the institutional logics perspective from earlier institutional theory, the book analyzes seminal research, illustrating how and why influential works on institutional theory motivated a distinct new approach to scholarship on institutional logics. The book shows how the institutional logics perspective transforms institutional theory. It presents novel theory, further elaborates the institutional logics perspective, and forges new linkages to key literatures on practice, identity, and social and cognitive psychology. It develops the microfoundations of institutional logics and institutional entrepreneurship, proposing a set of mechanisms that go beyond meta-theory, integrating this work with macro theory on institutional logics into a cross-levels model of cultural heterogeneity. By incorporating current psychological understanding of human behaviour and linking it to sociological perspectives, it aims to provide an encompassing framework for institutional analysis, and to be an essential and accessible reference for scholars and advanced students of organizational behaviour, organization and management theory, business strategy, and cultural sociology.

The second edition of the bestselling The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism has been thoroughly revised with new chapters added, bringing together extensive coverage of aspects of Institutional Theory.

This book articulates the complexities inherent in higher education’s multi-faceted response to the forces of mediatization—or how institutions change when their social communication gets mediated by technology—and introduces a novel perspective to comprehend them in a systematic way. By drawing on archival analysis and six organizational case studies, the author empirically traces the emergence of a cyber-cultural institution within higher education. As these case studies demonstrate, this new institutional logic requires creativity, individual recognition, and an underlying platform powered by cyber technologies and digitization of content. Using an analytical lens, this cyber-cultural perspective answers many questions about why faculty refuse to adopt online education, why students struggle with mediated teaching, and what possibly could be done to take online education to its next level.

As humanitarian needs continue to grow rapidly, humanitarian action has become more contested, with new actors entering the field to address unmet needs, but also challenging long-held principles and precepts. This volume provides detailed empirical comparisons between emerging and traditional humanitarian actors. It sheds light on why and how the emerging actors engage in humanitarian crises and how their activities are carried out and perceived in their transnational organizational environment. It develops and applies a conceptual framework that fosters research on humanitarian actors and the humanitarian principles. In particular, it simultaneously refers to theories of organizational sociology and international relations to identify both the structural and the situational factors that influence the motivations, aims and activities of these actors, and their different levels of commitment to the traditional humanitarian principles. It thus elucidates the role of the humanitarian principles in promoting coherence and coordination in the crowded and diverse world of humanitarian action, and discusses whether alternative principles and parallel humanitarian systems are in the making. This volume will be of great interest to postgraduate students and scholars in humanitarian studies, globalization and transnationalism research, organizational sociology, international relations, development studies, and migration and diaspora studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners engaged in humanitarian action, development cooperation and migration issues.

How are we to characterise the context in which organisations operate? The notion that organisational activity is shaped by institutional logics has been influential but it presents a number of problems. The criteria by which institutions are identified, the conflation of institutions with organisations, the enduring nature of those institutions and an exaggerated focus on change are all concerns that existing perspectives do not tackle adequately. This book uses the resources of historical work to suggest new ways of looking at institutional logics. It builds on the work of Roger Friedland who has conceived of institutional logics being animated by adherence to a core substance that is immanent in practices. Development of this idea in the context of organisation theory is supported by ideas drawn from the work of the social theorist Margaret Archer and the broader resources of the philosophical tradition of critical realism. Institutions are seen to emerge over time from the embodied relations of humans to each other and to the natural world on which they depend for material existence. Once emergent, institutions develop their own logics and endure to form the context in which agents are involuntarily placed and that conditions their activity. The approach adopted offers resources to ‘bring society back in’ to the study of organisations. The book will appeal to graduate students who are engaging with institutional theory in their research. It will also be of interest to scholars of institutional theory, of the history of organisations and those seeking to apply ideas from critical realism to their research.

This book offers a timely and detailed examination of the reality of criminal legal practice today. Drawing upon extensive anonymous interviews with criminal lawyers in England and Wales, it illuminates how financial pressures arise within the criminal justice system and how lawyers seek to navigate them. The work of criminal lawyers is frequently depicted in the news and media as exciting, well-paid and worthwhile, with prosecutors aiming to convict the guilty and defence lawyers fighting against miscarriages of justice. In contrast, the picture reported by many is of an already creaking and under-resourced system, now exacerbated by fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Against this backdrop, the book considers whether the criminal legal aid system really can continue to provide those unable to afford a lawyer with access to justice and whether the Crown Prosecution Service can provide justice to victims of crime. The book presents detailed findings about the work and experiences of both prosecutors and defence lawyers, how financial pressures influence this and to what extent this has changed with the new ways of working brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.