"How identity and power shape an organization's responses to isomorphic pressures : The battle over the soul of economics at the University of Notre Dame".
ESSEC Management Department Seminar, Tuesday 11th of January
Professor Hamid Bouchikhi, ESSEC Business School
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Video transcript
The standard prediction in institutional theory is that one strong norm developed in organizations environment Organizations are compelled to adjust to adapt, to adopt those norms or fail, or die So the the standard institutional theory predictions is quite compelling for organizations. Now what i'm trying to do in this line of work together with some other colleagues in other institutions elsewhere is to sort of unravel the process whereby organizations cope with institutional pressures and show that organizations have some leeway, what we call in organization theory that there is a room for agency for proactive strategies vis-a-vis those institutional pressures and the case of Notre Dame is interesting because the case shows that Notre Dame and the department of economics at Notre Dame has been able to resists alignment with mainstream economics over a period of three decades and that it took ultimately the University along with mainstream economics but they did not do it in a sort of single shot or as I would say as a single man The process was much more subtle and complex and that's what we try to show in that case In the discipline of economics you have this trend toward mainstream and dominance by neoclassical economics That kind of economics really went against some deeply established beliefs about what the University of Notre Dame stands for so that's why it took so much time for the University of Notre Dame to knowledge to go along with mainstream economics that's because mainstream economics went against some perception of the identity, let's call it the identity or the soul or the essence of Notre Dame how power and leadership played in the picture? They played a crucial role and it took some forceful decisive moves by a new Dean to shift the balance of economics toward the mainstream but the interesting thing is that this was not about merely about a sort of crude exercise of power by a Dean who comes in and says guys now, this is the way with to go and i'm cutting jobs here but it was not an exercise of crude power The new Dean hat to challenge the beliefs held by heterodox economics about the identy of Notre Dame so the battle so to speak it was an ideological battle in the first place to refrain the identity of Notre Dame and to emphasize that Notre Dame could be involved with catholic social teaching and could study poverty and labor and so forth using the mainstream paradigm so the Dean was very careful, first to reframe the identy of Notre Dame to make it compatible with mainstream economics before he eventually used traditional levers of power at the disposal of the Dean Is a strong identity an asset or is it a liability? you can think of identity as a strong anchor as a sort of theory of the organization that anchors it in its environment, it gives it character personality. It enables the organization to stand as different, distinctive, unique among other organizations so that's sort of the upside, the beauty of identity. But you can also think that when the environment changes there are new technologies, a new competitive landscape new products new regulations so when there are major disruptions in the organizations environment then a strongly deeply rooted organizational identity may become a trap for the organization. The challenge for leaders is to figure out when and how far a strong identity can be a major competitive asset and when it begins to become a sort of hindrance a weight, all the way to adaptation. That was a paper that I wrote with John kimberly, my co-author, few years ago in the Sloan Management Review. We called it 'Escaping the Identity Trap' The argument we made in that paper is many very high profile, very successful businesses eventually disappeared from earth or died as organizations because the leadership of organizations were not able to takes stock of major disruptions in their environment. The example we use in that the paper Polaroid which is dead as an organization It was rebought as a brand but Polaroid the organization is dead. And we also used the example of moulinex which also is a powerful illustration of how an organization can become trapped in the perception of itself and how that perception can harm or destroy brand equity Interestingly in both cases of Polaroid and Moulinex, for the brands to have in your life the organizations Polaroid the organization, Moulinex the organizations had to be disbanded had to disappear. So these two interesting cases where the organization identity in a way becomes a straitjacket for a brand and without liberating the brand from the straitjacket, the brand can also disappear.
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