At the nexus of institutional logics and political networks: The case of academic hiring in newly founded management departments in Turkey

Research on institutional complexity pointed to how individual and organizational identities that are constructed within a network of field-level actors associated with institutional logics drive individual and organizational responses to institutional complexity. This body of research, however, neglected that social networks to which individuals and organizations are linked can be independent from institutional logics, and can influence their behaviors through identities formed within the networks. This study is an attempt to extend research on institutional complexity by examining how individual and organizational identities emanated from political networks in which they are embedded may also shape organizational actors' interpretations of and responses to complexities in environment, depending on their alignment with those identities. The purpose of this study is to explore how individual embeddedness in multiple institutional logics at the field level and in political networks at the societal level shape managerial decisions within organizations. Focusing on the institutional and political environments surrounding academic hiring decisions of management departments of the universities founded between 2007 and 2014 in Turkey, this research proposes that the degrees of individual decision-makers' embeddedness in alternative institutional logics (single versus multiple) and in different political networks (open versus closed) interactively influence their decisions on hiring new academicians with varying identification with institutional logics and embeddedness in political networks. The findings reveal that resulting recruited academic staff have shown variations with regard to their embeddedness in prevailing institutional logics and political networks depending on several contingency factors pertaining to ownership structures, geographic location and political context.