The Social Construction of Market Value: Institutionalization and Learning Perspectives on Stock Market Reactions

have devoted increased scholarly attention to processes of institutionalization, or mechanisms by which organizational structures, policies, and practices acquire social legitimacy and ultimately become taken-for-granted as normatively appropriate in a population. From a neoinstitutional perspective, organizational structures and practices acquire legitimacy with an organization’s stakeholders to the extent that they are consistent with prevailing “institutional logics,” or “historically-variant sets of assumptions, beliefs, values, and rules by which individuals . . . interpret organizational reality and what constitutes appropriate behavior” (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999:804; see also Friedland and Alford 1991; Scott 2001). Empirical studies in this growing literature have examined how historical change in prevailing institutional logics can lead to change in organizational policies and practices or to different interpretations of a given policy. Thornton and colleagues, for instance, showed that change in institutional logics in the publishing industry from an editorial logic (which conceived publishing as a profession) to a market logic (which conceived publishing as a business) led to The Social Construction of Market Value: Institutionalization and Learning Perspectives on Stock Market Reactions