Culture in action: Cultural competence and agency in institutional environments.

摘要

Research at the intersection of neo-institutional theory, cultural sociology, and social movement theory has shown the substantial consequences of culture in institutional settings. However, the process through which culture can impact an organizational actor's influence in its institutional environment is less clearly understood. In many ways, culture remains a "black box" to scholars of agency within institutional fields. This dissertation encompasses one review chapter and two empirical studies investigating how culture can favor or hinder an actor's ability to achieve a desired outcome. In the first review chapter I focus on a particular outcome, collective action, which has been shown to play a critical role in the introduction of significant change in institutional settings. In this section I develop a process model of cultural influence and argue that actors associate through three main mechanisms: similarity, complementarity, and cultural competence. The second chapter shows how firms were able to influence a new adverse regulatory environment through cultural strategies. The third and final chapter examines the attempts of an organization to stimulate the active involvement of a potential ally in support of its project of change and argues that the failure to act collectively can be attributed to cultural differences that prevented joint mobilization in the pursuit of a common agenda.