Ideas as institutions: Explaining the Air Force's struggle with its aerospace concept

Ideas matter, but before they do, they must first establish themselves. This dissertation explores how organizations come to embrace the ideas that they do. Its findings suggest that ideas stick within organizations not simply when they make sense, or when they further an organization's goals and objectives. On the contrary, in order to persist, ideas also need committed proponents, structures to adhere to, and resources for nourishment. Moreover, ideas stand a better chance of taking root and strengthening when they are congruent with the organization's external context. In short, this dissertation suggests that ideas emerge, permeate, and persist within organizations in the same way that institutions do within cultures.; These broader findings spring from a case study that details the history of the aerospace concept---a simple idea born and perpetuated within the United States Air Force in which "air" and "space" are seen as a single indivisible medium rather than as two different places. The concept has long been an official position of the Air Force, but it has never fully taken hold. This describes a paradox of sorts: on one hand, the aerospace concept is strong enough to persist as long as it has, but on the other, it is not strong enough to stick.; To understand this apparent inconsistency, the dissertation evaluates the aerospace concept as if the idea was an emerging institution within the Air Force. First, it derives a hybrid institutionalization process model by bridging two disparate sources within institutionalism's literature. Next, the study refracts the concept's developmental history, reassembled chronologically from an admixture of archival and secondary source data, through this model. Doing so illuminates the variety of variables influencing the concept's development, some of which are within the Air Force's span of control, others beyond it. The method also highlights the important insight that ideas penetrate organizations over time and by degree. Finally, it demonstrates that evaluating ideas as if they were institutions allows us to locate and track their developmental "footprints," to chronicle and examine more clearly their temporally progressive histories, and from there to predict with better confidence their future paths.