Online Seminar – Scaling impact: Developing capabilities for institutional work

Charlene Zietsma, Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University

Co-authored with Luciano Barin Cruz, Bernard Leca and Jean-Pascal Gond

Organisations such as social movements, development organisations, and cross-national institutional bodies like the World Bank have missions to engage in institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006) to change societal-level institutions in multiple locations in order to address important social or sustainable innovation initiatives at scale. Yet we know little about how such organisations can develop capabilities for performing institutional work at scale (over time and across contexts). Similarly, there has been very limited work on scaling social innovation (Westley & Antadze, 2010), which is likely to be much more complicated than scaling product innovations (Riddell & Moore, 2015), because the wicked problems social innovation addresses are complex, uncertain, and implicate multiple and diverse stakeholders. In this study, we address the question of how organisations can develop capabilities for performing institutional work at scale. We conducted a longitudinal case study spanning 50 years of a development organisation that fights poverty by fostering the development of cooperative banks and supporting the entrepreneurs who rely on them. We found that the organisation broadened and deepened its capability set over time through a learning process involving contextualising and decontextualising its interventions. In addition, it embedded its capabilities in transnational structures that circulated knowledge both within the organisation and outside of it with local political and beneficiary actors at intervention sites. Our findings contribute to the literature on institutional work and on scaling social innovation.

Speaker bio

Charlene Zietsma is Associate Professor, Management and Organisation at the Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University and International Research Fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation. She completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia. Charlene’s research focuses on processes of institutional change, involving entrepreneurship, distributed innovation and collective action usually in the context of sustainability and social justice. Her work has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Journal of Business Venturing and others. In 2016, her paper with Tom Lawrence was awarded the ASQ Scholarly Contribution Award for the paper published in 2010 that has had the most significant impact on the field of organisation studies. Charlene is a Senior Editor for Organization Studies and Field Editor for Journal of Business Venturing, has guest edited several special issues for various journals, and serves on the editorial board for AMJ and AMR. Charlene has been a Chair of Excellence at the Universidad Carlos III, as well as a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, Queensland University of Technology, University of Queensland, and the University of Liverpool.

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