The institutional logic of great global firms

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Theories of the firm have been dominated by a legacy of ideas from early industrialization that pose zero-sum opposition between capital and labor (or capital and nearly everything else), differentiating the economy from society and often posing irreconcilable conflicts.This paper offers another logic, a social or institutional logic, to let practice provoke the creation of new theory. It provides examples that show how social logic guides the practices of widely-admired, high-performing companies, and why people and society are not an after-thought to be used or discarded, but core to the purpose and definition of the firm. It builds on in-depth, ongoing global field research on admired companies from four continents, followed in over 20 countries, from my book SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good, to derive propositions about the role...