How foundations think

The question of institutional change has become central to organizational research. Recent scholarship has demonstrated, often through carefully researched cases, that institutions can and sometimes do change. According to this research, there are two primary factors that can cause institutions to change. First, institutional entrepreneurs, including individual actors or small group of actors, are able to mobilize change in directions that favor new sets of interests. A second factor which contributes to institutional change are the processes endogenous to the everyday functioning of institutions, such as the loose coupling between formal and informal practices or the contested meanings in the adoption of new practices. Some scholars have raised concerns about this turn in institutional research, pointing out that there is a theoretical inconsistency between the strong reliance on individuals as the primary unit of analysis and the examination of endogenously generated processes to explain institutional change. The goal of this paper is to describe the structural characteristics and associated behaviors of dominating institutions as they incite change within other institutions. We carry out this research through historical analysis, in which we document the Ford Foundation's organizational characteristics, its modes operandi, and substantive decisions for reshaping America's graduate schools of management between 1952 to 1965 from a vocationally disparate, but 'successful' field to a more academically and discipline based orientation. We frame two questions in order to anchor the scope of our investigation: What are the structural characteristics of a dominant institution? What key behaviors do dominant institutions use to allow them to significantly reshape an existing institution?