Page 197 - The Resilient Organization

184 Part Four: Step 3. Rehearsing a Culture of Resilience

often celebrate. Robert Wood of San Jose State University and I argue that
activists who understand the political nature of institutional change can
play key roles in enabling firms to meet environmental challenges. This will
require, however, knowledge and skills that few activists have adequately
demonstrated.
Activists need to draw on recent theory of institutions—the basic, taken-
for-granted rules of the game in human systems. First, activists need to
understand better the nature of institutions inside their organizations—that
the institutions are automatically accepted as part of reality yet ultimately
alterable and that they make it possible for activists to perform some vital
tasks of renewal while making others enormously difficult. Second, activists
need to understand the nature of institutional entrepreneurship.
Institutional entrepreneurship theory shows how activists can carry out the
difficult political tasks of bringing together constituents to support new
ways of doing things and then getting people accustomed to ways just
different enough to work.
AT&T’s Opportunity Discovery Department (ODD) (the story that is
told in full in Chapter 10) presents a good case in point. It became a hub
for a sort of social movement (McAdam & Snow, 1997) in the organization
aimed at rejuvenating it. Officially established to examine technology
futures and develop tools for scientific strategy making, its people constantly
promoted change they believed the firm needed to survive. They achieved
remarkable, though partial, success. However, the firm’s ultimate sale to
SBC (which adopted the AT&T name) represented defeat of the venerable,
pioneering company ODD sought to save.
Table 13.1 lists lessons from institutional theory and compares them
to ODD’s behavior and its results. We briefly consider the definitions of
institution and their usefulness for practitioner challenges such as those
faced by the ODDsters, suggesting an approach that we believe makes
clear the institutional issues that activists confront. We then outline what
institutional theory could have taught ODD and can teach activists
elsewhere—practitioner-oriented understandings of institutions and delib-
erate institutional change. We compare what institutional theory teaches
to ODD’s behavior and draw new insights into institutions from ODD’s
experience.