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建構服務創新的制度工作
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contextualized interactions between institutional work and the external environment.
This study addresses these gaps by exploring how micro-actors change established
macro-institutional logics. To do so, we adopt an in-depth case study to investigate ITRI, a
Taiwan-based statutory agency, which has engaged in institutional work to promote service
innovation not recognized and embedded in Taiwan. Our research design is a type of
naturalistic inquiry in which insights are induced through qualitative procedures and
interpretative methods. The use of qualitative methods is appropriate because the
transformation of institutional logics is a poorly understood phenomenon in which the causal
dynamics are not immediately apparent. Specifically, after collecting archival materials and
interview data, we also inductively analyze the materials and data, following the guidelines
specified for methods of naturalistic inquiry and the grounded theory approach.
We begin the analysis by using an open-code approach and asking the 6 W’s of the data:
who, when, where, what, how, and why. We focus on the activities through which ITRI
mobilized its resources, relationships, and interpretations to impose change on the
institutions that constrain it. Following an iterative process of cycling among data, literature,
and emerging theory, we begin to identify initial concepts in the data and note recurring
categories. We search for relationships between and among those categories, which
facilitates assembling them into a small number of higher-order themes. Figure 1 represents
our emergent data structure of actors’ efforts to change institutional logics, which yields
twenty-five first-order concepts, nine second-order themes, and three aggregate dimensions
that serve as the foundation for our theory. In this way, Figure 1 provides a structured
illustration of the links between our raw data and the emergent theory that forms the
cornerstone of our theoretical contribution.
Our analysis shows how three types of institutional work – identity, professional, and
discourse – support the movement processes whereby a strategic actor infuses and accredits
its agency. First, identity work refers to actors’ ability to construct the image of “who we are”
as an organization at the intersubjective level. Over time, the intersubjective meaning,
co-evolving with daily operational practices, becomes reified in widely shared rules, norms,
and beliefs. However, as opposed to seeing identity as stable and enduring, organizations
also recognize the generally dynamic and adaptive nature of identity while facing
environmental changes. Actors are anxious to reduce the identity gap between who we are
and what we will become and adopt change-oriented agency. Therefore, organizational
identity transformation was an important part of the process of field-level logic
transformation.