| Institutional theory has matured to the point where we know a great deal about how institutions, once formed, are reproduced. We know less about how they are constructed. For this reason, some organizational theorists have turned to social movement concepts to better explain dynamics of change between economic actors. This study examines how social movements might inspire the creation of new organizing mechanisms. If new organizational forms result from recombination of existing elements, how might challenging and defending groups affect their construction? This research unpacks the processes by which challengers and defenders adapted their practices to accommodate each other and shows how challengers and defenders, in negotiating their interests and rights, shape the design of a new organizational form.; An inductive, ethnographic approach was used to examine interactions between community managed software projects from the free software and open source social movements (challengers) and established firms in the software industry (defenders). With interviews of 70 contributors and close examination of the practices used by 4 projects to manage their interactions with firms, I find that both community projects and firms made changes in their practices and form to better collaborate. Firms changed commonly accepted industry practices to conform to the community's practices. Community projects changed attributes of their ideologically inspired form to incorporate as non-profit foundations and defined a role for fines. Firms used tactics to preserve their power by influencing project priorities. Community managed projects resisted such efforts with tactics to preserve pluralism and their communal norms and values. Competing processes of mutual accommodation and preservation helped define the attributes of non-profit software foundations and the parameters of a new negotiated order that helps reconcile the competing logics of community managed projects and firms. If new organizational forms result from the recombination of old institutional elements, than processes of conflict and compromise are necessary to explain their synthesis. This research provides further evidence that a social movement can be a source of institutional innovation. The real innovation, however, emerges from the interactions between the movement and incumbents, not just the movement itself. |
