Our research addresses one of the most conspicuous and enduring issues facing IT practitioners: how to align a firm’s IT resources with its business needs. Past work in this area has been largely atheoretical and sometimes inconsistent. We seek to provide an internally consistent explanation of how organizations achieve alignment and thereby improve business performance. Our work differs from p...

Using comparative data from six European countries and Japan, our paper analyses to what extent differences in graduate employment can be explained by differences between higher education institutions, i.e. “institutional effects”. In order to estimate the size of these institutional effects we carry out multilevel analysis. This analysis shows that there appears to be large inter-country and f...

The concept of institutional complementarity – i.e. the idea that the coexistence of two or more institutions enhances the functioning of each – is increasingly used to explain why institutions are resistant to change and why introducing new institutions into a system often leads to unintended consequences or failure to achieve the intended objective. While the concept is appealing and intuitiv...

This paper extends the application of institutional theory to electronic human resource management (e-HRM), and strategic information systems (IS) more generally, in a multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiary setting. By adopting Scott’s (2001) institutional theory perspective, this paper explores the effects of host-country institutional factors on strategic e-HRM practices in foreign subsid...

Drawing on arguments from institutional theory, we examine the implementation and use of a supplier development program by a major North American automotive manufacturer. While all suppliers adopted the program as an apparent response to coercive institutional pressures from their customer, the study focuses on the effects of such pressures on internal information processing and the behavior of...

Manuscript Type: Empirical Research Question/Issue: We utilize institutional theory to examine corporate governance in microfinance institutions (MFIs). Many MFIs operate at the bottom of the economic pyramid (BOP), which is usually agrarian, impoverished, and plagued with institutional voids. We investigate the link between the composition of the boards of MFIs and the ability of the MFIs to f...

Protecting the safety and welfare of clinical trial subjects is the primary responsibility of the multidisciplinary ethics committee. In India, ethics committees have come under increasing criticism for functioning as "secret societies unaccountable to the public" (1). Yet, little effort has been made to undertake qualitative research on the ethics review bodies. This article describes the esse...

OBJECTIVE To compare the attitudes toward and perceptions of institutional practices that can influence patient safety between all professional groups at a university medical center. DESIGN A questionnaire measuring nine dimensions of organizational and safety culture was distributed to all hospital workers. Each item was rated on a 1 ('strongly disagree') to 5 ('strongly agree') scale. PAR...

In this paper we discuss how literacy has been positioned within the senior secondary curriculum and how different views of literacy are situated in the curriculum through disciplinary and institutional practices. We discuss a research project where we have drawn on three definitions of literacy – a print-oriented, language oriented or semiotic view – to conduct an linguistic analysis of syllab...