Accounting for Organizational Innovations: Mobilizing Institutional Logics in Translation

This study examines the translation of an abstract organizational concept into local organizational innovations. The empirical case is the concept of a health care center, promoted as part of a Danish government reform. The study shows that municipalities mobilized and interpreted multiple institutional logics to account for their creation of three different organizational innovations. While the concept of ‘institutional logic’ helped exploring the legitimizing social meanings embedded in the national reform and locally, the concept of ‘translation’ from actor-network theory shed light on the process by which actors mobilized and infused the health care center concept with meanings.