Multilayered Political Dynamics in Institutional Changes

This study explores the diffusion of social welfare departments by focusing on agency-based institutional pluralism with respect to political dynamics among institutional agents within an organization. By taking a pluralistic view of institutional agents with agency-specific traits, we emphasize the role of multilayered political dynamics in institutional change and processes. This study's framework of multilayered political dynamics allows for the identification of different groups of institutional agents occupying various structural positions within an organization whose agency-specific traits are decoupled from structural positions for the promotion or rejection of particular institutional models and logics. The results of a longitudinal analysis of the diffusion of social welfare departments in Korean universities suggest that multilayered political dynamics among boards of trustees, university presidents, and inter-departmental units in a university can have considerable influence on the likelihood of adopting a social welfare department. The results have important implications for macroinstitutional processes, political dynamics within organizations, and roles of various institutional agents.