Institutional maintenance work and power preservation in business exchanges: Insights from industrial supplier workshops

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper aims to offer new theoretical and empirical insights into power dynamics in an industrial supplier workshop setting. Theoretically, it advances an institutional perspective on supplier workshops as an important venue in managing, preserving and instituting industrial market power. Based on a detailed ethnographic analysis of an industrial workshop setting, this article investigates the institutional maintenance work of Retail Co. in preserving the power dynamics of market dominance in business exchanges and market structures. Our findings revealed three previously unreported insights into the subtle, but nonetheless pervasive power from institutional maintenance work in an industrial workshop setting. First, the institutional workshop work comprised a cultural performance; constituting socialization practice through a performance game, the power of numbers in field comprehension and an award ceremony. Second, the institutional workshop work mobilized projective agency, stipulating, directing and appealing for the instituting of distinct market rules and collective identities. Finally, the institutional workshop work increases supplier docility and utility via the regulative technologies-of-the-self to enhance business planning, operations and market decision-making practice, without necessarily being seen to be disciplinarian. Studies suggest that maintaining market leadership is dependent on power (Clegg, 1987, 1989). While there exists a range of insights on power in business-to-business exchanges including, how power is exercised in purchasing (Cho & Chu, 1994); the locus of power (Meehan & Wright, 2012), its drivers (Caniëls & Gelderman, 2007), we know much less about how such power is maintained in the social structures of an industrial market. In recent reviews on industrial market power dynamics, Meehan and Wright (2012) and Blois and Hopkinson (2013) emphasized that there is a need to reexamine the units of analysis research bias at an organizational or individual level of business exchanges. As a consequence, research has typically remained on the macro-level of firms, regulators and markets while several complex ways in which the social workings of power 'bear down' (Hardy, 2004; Kumar, 2005) on industrial market settings has been neglected. Hingley (2005a) suggests that it is necessary to re-focus research on power, paying more attention to new relational theoretical approaches and methodological units of analysis including micro-institutional arrangements, logics and venues. In the present study we concentrate on the unit of analysis of the industrial workshop; a line of enquiry that conceptualizes the industrial workshop as an institutional arrangement and venue for developing and maintaining …