Law and Organisations
Why do organisations standardise innovation, and how do decision-makers interact with those systems? This question anchors my research. I explore the collaborative dynamics and innovation networks across private and public sectors, with a focus on addressing complex social and ecological challenges. To achieve this, I employ an interdisciplinary “Law and Organisations” approach. This framework integrates socio-legal studies—the empirical exploration of law in society—with organisational and management theory, drawing upon economic sociology and institutional economics to understand strategic behaviour and institutional design.
| Research Theme | Academic Field | Key Concepts |
|---|---|---|
| Innovation and strategic action in the emergence of accounting standards | Organisation and Management Studies | Institutional Isomorphism: How organisations facing uncertainty adopt similar structures and standards to gain legitimacy, irrespective of immediate efficiency (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; See: Hoffman & Ventresca, 2002; Miller & Power, 2013; Nicholls, 2009). |
| User experience of standards in corporate governance and law | Socio-Legal Studies | Symbolic Structures: How broad legal mandates are translated into organisational symbols of compliance, mediating the law’s actual impact on behaviour (Edelman, 1992; See: Gray & Silbey, 2014; Lange, 2015). |
| Leverage points in complex social-ecological systems | Systems Theory and Sustainability Science | Social-Ecological Systems: Multi-level frameworks and indicators for analysing how resource users self-organise to achieve ecological sustainability (Meadows, 1999; See: Ostrom, 2009; Wackernagel et al., 2021). |
References
DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48, 147. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095101
Edelman, L. B. (1992). Legal ambiguity and symbolic structures: Organizational mediation of civil rights law. American Journal of Sociology, 97(6), 1531–1576. https://doi.org/10.1086/229939
Gray, G. C., & Silbey, S. S. (2014). Governing inside the organization: Interpreting regulation and compliance. American Journal of Sociology, 120(1), 96–145. https://doi.org/10.1086/677742
Hoffman, A. J., & Ventresca, M. J. (Eds.). (2002). Organizations, policy, and the natural environment: Institutional and strategic perspectives. Stanford University Press.
Lange, Bettina, and Fiona Haines. “Regulatory transformations: An introduction.” Regulatory Transformations: Rethinking Economy Society Interactions (2015): 1-30.
Meadows, D. H. (1999). Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system. Sustainability Institute.
Miller, P., & Power, M. (2013). Accounting, organizing, and economizing: Connecting accounting research and organization theory. The Academy of Management Annals, 7(1), 557–605. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2013.783668
Nicholls, A. (2009). ‘We do good things, don’t we?’: ‘Blended Value Accounting’ in social entrepreneurship. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34(6-7), 755–769. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2009.04.008
Ostrom, E. (2009). A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems. Science, 325(5939), 419–422. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1172133
Wackernagel, M., Hanscom, L., Jayasinghe, P., Lin, D., Murthy, A., Neill, E., & Raven, P. (2021). The importance of resource security for poverty eradication. Nature Sustainability, 4(8), 731–738. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00708-4