An Institutional Theory of Organizational Retrenchment: Adoption of Early Faculty Retirement Programs among Ontario Universities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Although the influential institutional theory specifies that coercive, mimetic, and normative processes drive organizational change, mimicry has been emphasized at the expense of the other processes. This situation not only misrepresents the theory but also produces fragmented empirical accounts of change. An important type of change, faculty retrenchment, has adverse consequences, yet our understanding of it suffers due to the literature's growing emphasis on political economy expianations and its established emphasis on case studies of U.S. universities, qualitative methods, and short time frames. Advancing institutional and retrenchment theory, I use an expanded institutional framework and event history methods to explain the adoption of retrenchment (early faculty retirement) plans among all Ontario universities from 1989–90 to 1997–98. The results support the theoretical framework: Two conventional institutional (coercive and mimetic) processes and two overlooked institutional (social status and social efficiency) processes spur these adoptions. University (repetitive and dynamic) momentum and university age also contribute to them. I conclude that, with its focus on coercive and noncoercive processes, on rationalized institutional myths, and on the social consequences of change, institutionalism is well‐equipped to explain why universities undergo retrenchment and other types of change. Résumé Bien que la théorie institutionnelle dominante précise que les processus coercitifs, mimétiques et normatifs alimentent le changement organisationnel, le mimétisme est mis de l'avant au détriment d'autres processus. Cette situation mène non seulement à une représentation trompeuse de la théorie, mais également à des comptes rendus fragmentés et empiriques du changement. Un changement important, la réduction des dépenses des facultés universitaires, a des conséquences défavorables, tandis que notre compréhension du phénomène est soumise à l'importance croissante accordée à des explications politico‐économiques dans la littérature, de même qu'à importance particulière accordée aux études de cas d'universités américaines, aux méthodes qualitatives et aux échéances à court terme. Mettant de l'avant les principes institutionnels et de la réduction des dépenses, je fais ici appel à un cadre institutionnel élargi et à des méthodes relevant de l'histoire événementielle afin d'expliquer l'adoption, par toutes les universités ontariennes, de plans de réduction des dépenses (retraite anticipée dans les facultés) de 1989–1990 à 1997–1998. Les résultats viennent appuyer le cadre théorique: Deux processus institutionnels conventionnels (coercitif et mimétique) et deux processus institutionnels négligés (statut social et efficience sociale) encouragent l'adoption de ces plans. L'activité (répétitive et dynamique) et l'âge de l'université y contribuent également. Je conclus que l'institutionnalisme, axé sur des processus coercitifs et non coercitifs, sur des mythes institutionnels rationalisés et sur les conséquences sociales du changement, explique clairement pourquoi les universités subissent une réduction des dépenses et autres types de changements.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".