This chapter provides a summary of the closing plenary at the 2018 Alberta Institutions Conference in which four scholars – Markus Höllerer, Marc Schneiberg, Patricia Thornton, and Charlene Zietsma – shared their views on how we could once again put the macrofoundations of institutional...

Recent institutional scholarship has discovered new possibilities for change in both the accumulation of incremental transformations and in the skillful action, institutional work, and creative activities of political and institutional entrepreneurs. Lurking behind stability and change lie...

What are the social, political and institutional conditions for organizational heterogeneity and the production of new organizational forms? I address this question using historical methods and time series analyses of 3145 mutual fire insurers — important cooperative alternatives to markets...

Despite recent advances, neither organizational studies nor the scholarship on economic resilience has systematically addressed how the ecologies of organizations that populate local economies can serve as infrastructures for responding proactively to economic shocks. Using county-level data,...

Organizational scholars increasingly appreciate the role of categories as bases of order or “cognitive infrastructures” in markets. Yet they construe categories as disciplinary devices. They understand category formation, implementation, and revision as the purview of professionals. And they...

Existing financial market architectures combine astonishing complexity with tight coupling, making them prone to systemic crises or “normal accidents” and placing extraordinary demands on regulation. In light of this, we consider two routes for regulatory reform. A “high modernist”...