Institutional work and the paradox of embedded agency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Institutions are social structures that are characterized by a high degree of resilience (Scott, 2001). They have a self-activating nature (Lawrence, Hardy & Phillips, 2002; Jepperson, 1991). Actors tend to reproduce institutions in a given field of activity without requiring either repeated authoritative intervention or collective mobilization (Clemens & Cook, 1999: 445). Early neo-institutional studies emphasized ways that institutions constrained organizational structures and activities, and thereby explained the convergence of organizational practices within institutional environments. They proposed that actors' need to be regarded as legitimate in their institutional environment determined their behavior. This work implicitly assumed that individuals and organizations tend to comply, at least in appearance, with institutional pressures. In fact, actors were often implicitly assumed to have a limited degree of agency. Such a conception of agency was problematic when institutional theorists started tackling the issue of institutional change. While early neo-institutional studies accounted for organizational isomorphism and for the reproduction of institutionalized practices, they did not account well for the possibility of change. Even though institutions are characterized by their self-activating nature, we know that they do change (e.g. Fligstein, 1991). Since the late 1980s, institutional theorists have started addressing the issue of institutional change. They have highlighted the role that organizations and/or individuals play in institutional change. Studies that account for the role of organizations and/or individuals in institutional change, however, face a paradox.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".