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Institutions
Institutions are the memory bank of society. They embody the norms and values that focus attention and shape the conduct of individuals, organizations, and communities. Institutions cohere within societal sectors, such as the family, the market, the professions, the corporation, the state, and the religions. Of interest is how institutions change, how new institutions emerge, and how institutions influence what people focus on and ultimately decide is the best course of action. (more)
Governance
Economic exchanges are governed by markets, hierarchies, and networks. Of interest is how these governance mechanisms are affected by larger institutional influences, for example different “varieties of capitalism,” such as personal, managerial, and market capitalism—and in turn how these institutional arrangements affect the decision making of entrepreneurs and corporate executives. By examining the top up, rather than bottom down relationships between societal level institutions and markets, hierarchies, and networks, we can understand entrepreneurship and strategic management in the cross national and cross cultural context.
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
While the economic and political context of entrepreneurship is of vital interest, the social and comparative context in which entrepreneurship occurs is relatively understudied. In addition to my work on networks and geographies, I am comparing the consequences of entrepreneurship in the “market and the hierarchy,” examining the long-term survival rates of new ventures founded as internal corporate ventures compared with those ventures founded using resources external to the corporation. (more)
Cultural Industries
The cultural industries consist of those organizations that design, produce, and distribute products that appeal to aesthetic or expressive tastes more than to the utilitarian aspects of customer needs such as films, books, building designs, fashion, and music. Less widely acknowledged, but as critical, cultural industries also create products that serve important symbolic functions such as capturing, refracting, and legitimating societal knowledge and values. For example, educational publishers influence what concepts and theories are promoted to students by the books they publish. Architects shape the sensibilities of interactions at work, home, and play by their choice of technologies, space design, and material resources. Music producers discover and promote vocal artists whose lyrics shape our understandings of age, gender, and ethnicity. C ultural industries are now one of the fastest growing and most vital sectors in the U.S. and global economies (U.S. Census Reports, 2000). This growth is fueled in large part by the nature of the knowledge, creative, and symbolic assets of cultural industries. These assets are increasingly the key underlying drivers of innovation and competitiveness in both national and global economies, making cultural industries of interest to scholars of organizations and strategic management. (more)
Institutions | Governance | Innovation and Entrepreneurship | Cultural Industries
Patricia H. Thornton is an Associate Professor teaching entrepreneurship at Stanford and Duke Universities. She holds a Ph.D. (1993) from Stanford University. She has been a visiting scholar at Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University and Organizational Behavior at INSEAD. Her research and teaching interests are in organization theory, economic sociology, and entrepreneurship and new venture management. The focus of her research is on developing and testing theories that provide a better understanding of the impact of culture and institutional change on the discovery and creation of innovation and on entrepreneurial decision making. She has expertise in the publishing industry and has served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice on acquisitions in the higher education market. She has experience in founding nonprofit organizations, most notably Interim Inc.
Her research is published in for example, the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Sociology, the Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Science. Her article on how institutional logics (culture) affect managerial power in organizations won the prestigious W. Richard Scott award for the best scholarly article from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section of the American Sociological Association. This article pioneers quantitative methodologies for cultural analysis of organizational decisions. Her book “Markets from Culture: Institutional Logics and Organizational Decisions,” (2004), Stanford University Press, shows how culture influences the ability of executives to discover and develop market opportunities. Her edited book with Candace Jones (2005) examines the strategic transformation of cultural industries. She has authored literature reviews on entrepreneurship in the Annual Review of Sociology and the Handbook of Entrepreneurship Research , in particular on how networks and geographies affect the founding of new businesses. Her teaching in entrepreneurship has been recognized by publication of her syllabi in the ASA teaching materials.
Thornton has authored a series of articles on how institutional logics affect organizational decisions. Currently, she is extending this line work by examining how institutional logics affect the decision to use network strategies in product distribution and product choice. She is extending her work on the social context of entrepreneurships by comparing the consequences of entrepreneurship in the “market and the hierarchy,” examining the long-term survival rates of new ventures founded as internal corporate ventures compared with those ventures founded using resources external to the corporation.
Patricia H. Thornton, Duke University
“Patricia Thornton offers a powerful, insightful work that opens up further research and theory for the rest of us. This book will have a substantial impact on organizational studies.”
—Harrison White, Columbia University
Institutional logics, the underlying, governing principles of a corporation, strongly influence organizational decision making. Any shift in institutional logics results in a similar shift in attention to alternative problems and solutions, and results in new determinants for executive decisions. Examining changes in institutional logics in higher-education publishing, this book links cultural analysis with organizational decision making to develop a theory of attention, explaining how executives concentrate on certain market characteristics to the exclusion of others.
Analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data from the 1950s to the 1990s, the author shows how higher- education publishing moved from a culture of independent domestic publishers focused on creating markets for books based on personal, relational networks to a culture of international conglomerates focused on creating markets from corporate hierarchies. This book offers broader lessons beyond publishing—its theory is applicable to explaining institutional changes in organizational leadership, strategy, and structure occurring in all professional services industries.
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Patricia H. Thornton, Duke University
Institutional logics, the underlying, governing principles of societal sectors, strongly influence organizational decision making. Any shift in institutional logics results in a similar shift in attention to alternative problems and solutions, and results in in new determinants for organizational decisions. Examining changes in institutional logics in the higher-education publishing industry, this book links cultural analysis with organizational decision making and develops a theory of attention and institutional change to explain how publish e rs concentrated on certain organizational and market characteristics to the exclusion of others.
Analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data from the 1950s to the 1990s, the author shows that higher-education publishing changed from a culture of independent domestic publishers focused on creating markets for books based on personal, relational networks to a culture of international conglomerates that create markets from corporate hierarchies. This book offers broader lessons beyond publishing—its theory and methods are applicable to understanding institutional changes and organizational decisions on leadership, strategy, and structure occurring in many industries and markets.
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