Roy Suddaby

The article discusses common misconceptions of what grounded theory is not, by Roy Suddaby of Alberta, Canada. Grounded theory is not: presentation of raw data, or perfect or routine application of formulaic techniques to data. Grounded theory is not easy nor an excuse for the absence of methodology. It is not theory testing, content or word counts. Grounded theory is new modes of interaction and organization using methodology that is attentive to issues of interpretation and a process not binding itself too closely to longstanding assumptions.

This study examines the role of professional associations in a changing, highly institutionalized organizational field and suggests that they play a significant role in legitimating change. A model...

This paper describes the role of rhetoric in legitimating profound institutional change. In 1997, a Big Five accounting firm purchased a law firm, triggering a jurisdictional struggle within accounting and law over a new organizational form, multidisciplinary partnerships. We analyze the discursive struggle that ensued between proponents and opponents of the new organizational form. We observe that such rhetorical strategies contain two elements. First are institutional vocabularies, or the use of identifying words and referential texts to expose contradictory institutional logics embedded in historical understandings of professionalism, one based on a trustee model and the other based on a model of expertise. A second element of rhetorical strategies is theorizations of change by which actors contest a proposed innovation against broad templates or scenarios of change. We identify five such theorizations of change (teleological, historical, cosmological, ontological, and value-based) and describe their characteristics.

This study examines change initiated from the center of mature organizational fields. As such, it addresses the paradox of embedded agency—that is, the paradox of how actors enact changes to the context by which they, as actors, are shaped. The change examined is the introduction of a new organizational form. Combining network location theory and dialectical theory, we identify four dynamics that form a process model of elite institutional entrepreneurship.

In this paper, we discuss an alternative focus for institutional studies of organization - the study of institutional work. Research on institutional work examines the practices of individual and collective actors aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions. Our focus in this paper is on the distinctiveness of institutional work as a field of study and the potential it provides for the examination of new questions. We argue that research on institutional work can contribute to bringing the individual back into institutional theory, help to re-examine the relationship between agency and institutions, and provide a bridge between critical and institutional views of organization.