The
Management Department & The Research Center
-
MOS WORKSHOP -
Arijit Chatterjee, Anjan Ghosh, & BERNARD LECA
will present their
paper
Tuesday, January 29th
2019
Room N231 – 9:15 a.m.
in Cergy
4:15
p.m. in Singapore
Scaling
up Good Ideas: Institutional Work from the Margins
Grand challenges – lack of drinking
water, marine pollution, food scarcity, gender disparities, or resource
depletion – have been around for a long time. We know from available evidence
that rules and laws, routines, scripts and schema, norms and habits make this
stability possible (Banerjee & Iyer,
2005; Milanović,
2010; Nunn, 2008). In other words, institutional arrangements lead to the
reproduction and survival of these enduring social ills (Deaton & Dreze,
2009; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Governments and
multilateral agencies have taken initiatives, NGOs have proliferated (Boli
& Thomas, 1999) but these acute and widespread problems persist.
Upward scale shifts (McAdam,
Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001) – contentious actions that diffuse vertically – can
surface issues from small to large arenas. However, unlike social movements,
some problems do not necessarily need confrontation but quiet constructive
problem-solving that requires tenacity and the ability to work within the
system. Many grand challenges do not require us to contest the already
enshrined rights but to engage with the existing system and ensure their
effective implementation on the ground. Structure, therefore, is not simply an
exogenous restraining force. It is also a resource to be deployed to enlarge
the catchment area and address grand challenges – enabling one’s own path
without confronting existing institutions (Djelic
& Quack, 2007; Garud
& Karnøe,
2001).
What practices enable organizations
to achieve large scale change? We explore this question in an inductive study
of the Child In Need Institute (CINI),
a non-profit organization working to eradicate child malnutrition in India.
Relying on forty years of archival data, semi-structured interviews and field
notes, we derive a theory of scaling up ideas from the margins. We make three
contributions: we develop a set of transferable practices (creative disruption ®
linking
®
imbrication) for addressing grand challenges; we find how marginal actors can
engage in long-term and large-scale institutional work; and we show how impact
and reach was achieved by constructing a dense network.
