Organizational Field

An organizational field can be defined as a social area where organizations interact and take one another into account in their actions. Organizational fields contain organizations that have enduring relationships to each other. While these relationships can be cooperative or hierarchical, most fields have a power structure such that those organizations with the most resources dictate the rules of the game. Organizational fields are governed by shared rules and meanings. Rules define conventions that can be normative or consensual. Actors in organizations have cognitive frameworks that incorporate these shared cultural understandings of the rules and allow them to make sense of the behavior of other organizations in the field.

A stable organizational field can be thought of as a game where players have fixed positions and interact to contest or reproduce a given social order. They signal their intentions to one another and respond in turn. Organizational fields take the substantive forms of industries, markets, regimes, or policy domains. The idea of organizational field has proved useful in political science, sociology, and economics. There are a number of ambiguities in the use of the idea of organizational field. It is often difficult to determine exactly who is and who is not a member of the field. Broad definitions of organizational fields can include organizations that are not directly involved with the activities in the field. Therefore, suppliers, customers, and states may or may not constitute members of a field, depending on the case being studied.

The idea of organizational field originated in organization studies. Scholars were interested in trying to capture the socially constructed nature of organizational environments. This led them to postulate that organizations had “enacted” environments and that groups of organizations came together to form sectors. The idea of organizations forming a field with a certain set of social relationships that created a system of governance based on shared rules and meanings began to emerge in the 1980s.

The dynamics of organizational fields are a matter of great interest. Organizations try to create a field where they can promote the survival of their organization. The formation of organizational fields presupposes that there is an opportunity for such a field to come into existence. Most scholars agree that fields are more likely to emerge when there are organizations with lots of resources, where governments ratify or help organize fields, where there are entrepreneurs who propagate a conception of what the field should be, and where it is possible to build a coalition of organizations to produce a social order.

By definition, radical change in a field would imply that organizations disappear and the social order is transformed. Change usually occurs when there is a crisis in existing field relations where the positions of dominant organizations are no longer easily reproducible. Because there is always a certain amount of uncertainty in fields, it is often hard to see when a field is about to undergo radical transformation. Organizations will continue to defend the old order as long as they can. Changes to fields will often come from challengers or invaders into the field. These organizations propose a new conception of the field, and if they can find sufficient allies, they will transform the rules and relationships in the field.

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