Institutional Logics and Interorganizational Learning in Technological Arenas: Evidence from Standard-Setting Organizations in the Mobile Handset Industry

Gurneeta Vasudeva (), Elizabeth A. Alexander () and Stephen L. Jones ()
Additional contact information
Gurneeta Vasudeva: Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
Elizabeth A. Alexander: Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol BS16 1QY, United Kingdom
Stephen L. Jones: Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455

Organization Science, 2015, vol. 26, issue 3, 830-846

Abstract: Conceptualizing standard-setting organizations (SSOs) as technological arenas within which firms from different countries interact and learn, we offer insights into the interplay between firms’ institutional logics and their interorganizational learning outcomes. We suggest that firms’ interorganizational learning is embedded in their macrolevel country contexts, characterized by more corporatist versus less corporatist (pluralist) institutional logics. Whereas corporatism spurs coordinated approaches, pluralism engenders competitive interactions that affect the extent to which firms span organizational and technological boundaries and learn from each other. We test our theory using longitudinal analysis of 181 dyads involving 26 firms participating in 17 SSOs in the global mobile handset industry. We find that interorganizational learning, as measured by patent citations, involving corporatist firm dyads significantly increases when the dominant logic within the arena is also corporatist. By making cooperative schemas more accessible, a dominant corporatist logic also enhances interorganizational learning across technologically distant dyads. When a pluralist logic dominates the arena, corporatist dyads learn less because firms in the dyad activate a contradictory logic that decouples them from their natural processes for interorganizational learning. These findings highlight the implications of institutional logics for interorganizational learning outcomes and provide insights into how firms attend to institutional contradictions in arenas that provide opportunities for interorganizational learning.

Keywords: organizational learning; institutional logics; institutional contradictions; corporatism; technological arenas; mobile phones; standard setting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2014.0940 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:26:y:2015:i:3:p:830-846

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().