16693: Stakeholders’ Role in Changing Organizational Fields: The Case of Rapidly Evolving Universities

How organizational fields change is an important question in organizational theory. Scholars have already investigated how organizational fields change through examining the evolution of network relationships and the construction of meaning. However, less attention has been paid to how larger societal changes in the relationship among stakeholders drive change in organizational fields. Because stakeholders participate in multiple fields, changes in adjacent fields can send ripple effects through a focal field and reconfigure resource allocations, alter temporal orientations, and thus redefine the roles and influence of stakeholders. It is among others the reorganization of these stakeholder relationships, sparked by adjacent field events, that shapes the trajectory of field evolution. In this PDW, we explore the role of stakeholders in field-level change by examining the extreme case of universities—a mature field undergoing rapid change due to funding shifts, policy reforms, and changing stakeholder demands. Stakeholders have for example pressured universities to redefine impact—from once understood as the diffuse, long-term outcome of excellent research to recently understood in terms of quantifiable, causal mechanisms shaping societal outcomes within a shorter time horizon. Collectively we are going to identify the most pressing theoretical problems and methodological challenges and reflect on our own strategies for adapting to the current changes in the field around universities. By focusing on the role of stakeholder dynamics in shaping field evolution, this PDW aims to spur novel conversations about the interrelationship between fields and thus identify new mechanisms of field evolution.