| Institutional theories argue that organizations adopt processes and structures to meet societal expectations rather than for their productive value (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Suddaby, 2010). Organizations behave in such a way to ensure legitimacy what is a precondition for the access to important resources and long-term survival (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Meyer & Scott, 1983). Institutional logics play an important role within this context because they “provide guidelines on how to interpret and function in social situations” (Greenwood, Raynard, Kodeih, Micelotta, & Lounsbury, 2011, p. 318). As such, institutional logics shape organizational structures and behavior within an organizational field—defined as a group of organizations that constitutes part of institutional life (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983)—by, for example, influencing the likelihood of implementing associated practices. Within institutional theories, organizations have long been treated as unitary research entities and as autonomous actors (Pache & Santos, 2010) and most studies in the context of institutional logics have focused on organizational-level responses (Blomgren & Waks, 2015; Greenwood et al., 2011; McPherson & Sauder, 2013; Reay & Hinings, 2009). This view, however, oversimplifies what organizations are (i.e., departmentalized systems and coalitions of participants who, at times, have incongruent interests and who are confronted with different stakeholder groups, Cyert & March, 1963; Heimer, 1999). Consequently, an organization can be characterized as a “marketplace of ideas” (Dutton, Ashford, O’Neill, & Lawrence, 2001) in which multiple institutional logics of varying levels of relevance exist. Intraorganizational interest groups try to convince others of the importance and relevance of particular logics and the practices associated with those logics (Wickert & de Bakker, 2018). Thus, contemporary research have called for a stronger focus on these underlying intra-organizational processes (i.e., the micro-level of analysis) to better understand how organizations’ responses to institutional complexity are conceptualized and implemented (McPherson & Sauder, 2013; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). With our study, we address this call by investigating the strategies that corporate social responsibility (CSR) managers1 apply to cope with tensions that arise from institutional complexity within their organizations during the CSR implementation process. The implementation of CSR is particularly suitable for addressing the aforementioned research gap because of two aspects: (a) inherent institutional complexity and (b) conceptual ambiguity. First, CSR can be characterized as a bundle of practices and actions that take into account the expectations of diverse stakeholder groups and the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental performance (Aguinis, 2011; Aguinis & Glavas, 2012). Because social and environmental issues are likely to comprise normative elements, they may sometimes be perceived as incongruent with economic and technical concerns (Friedman, 1970; Jensen, 2002; Sundaram & Inkpen, 2004; Thauer, 2014; H. Wang, Tong, Takeuchi, & George, 2016; Wickert & de Bakker, 2018). Consequently, CSR managers often “face opposition from their colleagues, who may consider [social and environmental objectives] a threat to profitability and to the business’s core interests” (Wickert & Schaefer, 2015, p. 118). Based on this potential incongruity, CSR implementation is characterized by institutional complexity caused by tensions between the simultaneous pursuit of economic, social, and environmental performance—which in turn is associated with a social-welfare logic—and the exclusive focus on economic goals—that is characteristic of a commercial logic (De Clercq & Voronov, 2011; Kok, de Bakker, & Groenewegen, 2017). |
