| The term operating on the institutional cusp refers to organizations confronted with an environment of multiple and conflicting institutional logics. This dissertation addresses the question of how the presence of such plural, contradictory institutional logics affects organizational forms and strategies. The dissertation proposes that organizations that operate on the institutional cusp may provide important insights about the early dynamics of institutional forms in more stable and structured organizational fields and policy sectors. The empirical work in this dissertation reports on the community development venture capital (CDVC) field, a new segment of the U.S. finance industry.; The dissertation argues that organizations that operate on the institutional cusp are created by institutional entrepreneurs who draw upon their substantive knowledge of multiple logics to identify core elements that they recombine into new organizational forms. Because the entrepreneurs draw upon a multiplicity of logics, the resulting organizations display a significant level of diversity in their structures and behaviors.; As the field matures and field members become increasingly aware of each other, and of their participation in a common enterprise, new generations of entrepreneurs perform their own type of bricolage. They combine legitimated elements from the early forms, and from forms legitimated by the conflicting logics, to create new organizations that reflect the particular resources and limitations of their individual situations. In contrast to some of the existing organizational literature, which assumes that activities in maturing organizational fields must inevitably move those fields towards isomorphism, this dissertation proposes that an environment of multiple, conflicting logics, in combination with direct political action by institutional entrepreneurs and field-level organizations, can maintain high levels of diversity in such fields. The dissertation also proposes an alternative argument to those that associate the presence of conflicting institutional logics with instability, change, or buffering. |
