Responsabilité sociétale et développement durable

An understanding of decoupling in complex institutional fields remains elusive. In such fields, a multiplicity of logics engenders many possible institutional intentions as well as the likelihood of the co-occurrence of decoupled and coupled practices. In this study, I adopt Weick’s dialectical view of loose coupling and integrate it with theory on institutional logics and vocabularies of motive to posit that the meaning of the decoupling (and coupling) of practices when a formal program is adopted in a complex institutional field can be found in the connection(s) that the (de)couplings have with the various available institutional intentions for such adoptions. I used the fuzzy-set approach to comparative case analysis to explore this issue among 28 business facilities that adopted an environmental management system. I found very different systematic connections between the coupling and decoupling of expected environmental management system program practices and the multiple institutional intentions given for the environmental management system adoptions. Moreover, these connections showed that the decoupling of certain practices were pivotal to understanding the meaning of the program adoptions.

Our research contributes to knowledge on strategic organizational responses by addressing a specific type of institutional complexity that has, to date, been rather neglected in scholarly inquiry: conflicting institutional demands that arise within the same institutional order. We suggest referring to such type of complexity as "intra-institutional"—as opposed to "inter-institutional." Empirically, we examine the consecutive spread of two management concepts—shareholder value and corporate social responsibility—among Austrian listed corporations around the turn of the millennium. Our work presents evidence that in institutionally complex situations, the concepts used by organizations to respond to competing demands and belief systems are interlinked and coupled through multiwave diffusion. We point to the open, chameleon-like character of some concepts that makes them particularly attractive for discursive adoption in such situations and conclude that organizations regularly respond to institutional complexity by resorting to discursive neutralization techniques and strategically producing ambiguity.