Rethinking Implementation and its Relationship to Organizational Status: The Case of U.S. Higher Education Organizations

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. The Organization of Education

Abstract

The view that adoption and implementation are distinct, successive and clearly distinguishable processes underlies a large body of work in organizational studies. Despite considerable research on both, in diffusion studies and neo-institutional theories of organizations, the distinction between adoption and implementation remains conceptually unclear. This paper questions the usefulness of such distinction noting that both concepts reflect researchers’ shared interest in behavioral change. Instead, it offers a re-conceptualization of implementation: as patterns of adoption, and recognizes the need to analytically distinguish two interrelated processes of implementation: individual-level implementation, concerning the behavior of individuals as actors within the organization, and organizational-level implementation, concerning the change in the behavior of the organization as actor in its organizational field. To demonstrate the usefulness of this new framework, the paper focuses on a case of organizational-level innovation implementation in the US higher education field setting: US four-year colleges and universities’ use of a new academic governance model. It draws attention to the neglected relationship between organizational status and implementation, emphasizing the importance of not conflating implementation and conformity. My analysis shows that organizational status has a negative and significant effect on the extensiveness of organizational implementation of innovations. Empirically, it concludes that the change in academic governance within US higher education organizations has not been substantively significant.

Author

• Joris Gjata, University of Virginia