Brewing an assortment of responses to institutional logics

Organizations are often confronted with multiple demands imposed by their environment. While the organization, as a whole, may face the same pressures, responses may differ within and across the organization. This case study explores how organizational actors within five separate units of a global brewery group experience and respond to the same institutional complexity; that is, attendance to both social and commercial aspects in relation to the issue of ‘alcohol-related harm.’ The study shows that the organization, as a whole, pursued four different models of response simultaneously: separation, co-existence, industry bricolage, and organizational bricolage, while the individual units enacted different combinations of these four. This paper contributes to the literature on institutional logics by moving deeper inside the organization and studying the underlying meaning systems guiding these different responses.