Two Steps and Constituencies of Field Creation and Organizational Change: Rise of Securitization Financial Markets

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Organization Learning and Change

Abstract

Sociologists have long considered organizational change within the context of internal or external forces. Drawing on archival research, transaction data, and ethnographic fieldwork among elite securitization market pioneers, practitioners, and regulators, this article presents a new explanation for organizational change and field creation, one that conceptualizes organizational change as a two-step process. In order to develop an innovative financial practice, budding professionals who sought to build a securitization practice within their organizations formed inter-organizational and inter-industrial networks in order to establish a new field and markets. Four significant developments demonstrate the formation of new cognitive frames. In advancing these, professionals created the markets about which their firms would be incentivized to orient, and thus catalyzed organizational change within their firms and across industries related to the new field. This strategy not only elevated the statuses of these professionals within their host organizations and led to the conditions that created organizational changes across effected industries, but also created a strong, highly adaptable field of securitization.

Author

• David C. Lubin, University of Chicago