Institutionalizing Organizational Change

Date of Award

6-2025

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Sociology

First Advisor

Paul Ciccantell, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Chien-Juh Gu, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Vincent Lyon-Callo, Ph.D.

Fourth Advisor

Emily Drew, Ph.D.

Abstract

This study captures ten years of ongoing efforts to institutionalize organizational change in a state organization. Organizational change is often difficult to sustain, becoming eroded over time and leading to pessimism about change efforts. However, despite historical patterns of change efforts within this organization to become deinstitutionalized, these efforts have persisted and continued to expand through organization and organizational field.

Using qualitative organizational case study methods, including participant interviews, document reviews, and participatory action research, I traced historical events to identify changes in institutionalized scripts, practices, and organizational structures. The study seeks to understand how actors have worked to institutionalize organizational change.

Findings identify a multi-level institutional intervention in which a small group of actors were able to expand their own, and others’, agency within the organization and organizational field toward enacting change by shifting mechanisms of institutionalization from episodic, individual-driven efforts to systemic, organizationally driven efforts. The study identifies a number of practices and organizational structures upon which actors have intervened to contribute to the durability of efforts. Using imported templates, accompanied by a consultant, actors have been able to embed and routinize socialization practices, office groups, enabling roles and structures, and desired frameworks, building a normative network that facilitates further action and diffusion.

This study captures a story that demonstrates how small acts, seemingly insignificant on their own, can accumulate to create and sustain substantive organizational change in support of organizational improvement. Through capacity-building, development praxis, developing small groups with shared understanding, relational approaches, and persistence, actors have been able to navigate, change, or use organizational constraints, at multiple levels of the organization, to facilitate the durability of efforts. This study extends the literature on organizational change and institutionalization by demonstrating how actors use their agency to institutionalize change frameworks in organizations. Findings will also be useful for practitioners for creating practice and framework documents, refining practice to increase the durability of efforts, and to transmit narratives to past, current, and future generations of consultants and organizational actors through historical storytelling.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Abstract Only

Restricted to Campus until

6-1-2035

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