第54回 2017年11月29日(水) 開催
「The Cultural Foundations of Organizational Divergence: A Study of Nintendo and SEGA's 'Console Wars」
- 報告者
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U. C. Davis Ph. D student
Evan Lauteria氏
- 日時
- 2017年11月29日(水) 19:00〜21:00
[講演要旨]
The “institutional logics” perspective within sociology responds to neoinstitutional theory’s inability to address organizational and institutional divergence and heterogeneity by drawing attention to the cultural dimensions of organizational life. Scholars within this school of thought position organizations as actors in “interinstitutional fields” with competing and complementing “logics,” or symbolic and material avenues for pursuing rational organizational behavior. Thus far, however, cultural sociologists of organizations have struggled to identify generalizable historical factors that produce new institutional logics in a given field. This paper responds to this gap in the literature by exploring the divergent organizational behaviors of Japanese video game companies Nintendo and SEGA following the unsettling of the American video game market in 1983. Faced with uncertainty in the industrial field of video game and console production, Nintendo and SEGA were incapable of resorting to isomorphic responses given the absence of necessary mechanisms, such as successful peer organizations or well-established regulatory groups. Extending institutional logics’ application of Ann Swidler’s model of culture, I argue that uncertainty in unsettled organizational fields require organizations to develop new cultural frames, symbolic schemas of interpretation and avenues for material behaviors. An organization’s pre-existing symbols and material behaviors, its “cultural tool-kit,” form the foundation for the emergence and dissemination of these new cultural frames that, over time, develop into institutional logics as taken-for-granted truths or traditional practices.