Fools Breaking Out: The Role of Symbolic and Material Immunity in Explaining Institutional Nonconformity

In this article, we examine how organizations become less sensitive to the symbolic and material carriers of a prevailing logic and correspondingly enact a deviating logic. Using the highly institutionalized Belgian horticulture industry, we employ a multicase, inductive study of firms that vary in their responses to an emerging logic that diverges from institutionalized norms and practices of their organizational field. We introduce symbolic and material immunity as two essential and interacting attributes predicting firm-level deviation from a dominant logic and discuss factors that enable firms to possess these characteristics.