The Economic-Social Duality for Executive Rationale: The Interplay between Resource Pool and Game Rule for Sense-Giving and Sense-Making

I truly enjoyed reading the perspective article entitled ‘Advancing indigenous management theory: Executive rationale as an institutional logic’ by Gordon Redding and Michael Witt (2015), especially its implications for a ‘promising avenue for indigenous management research’ (179). I agree with the authors in general terms that the research on the impact of culture as an informal institution, and also the effect of formal institutions, on business practices must come down from a highly abstract level to a more pragmatic ground, especially their interaction and integration as embodied by various specific mechanisms to guide practices. For that purpose, Redding and Witt introduce an interesting notion of ‘executive rationale’ to guide action. Applying the abstract notion of institutional logic to specific business practices, executive rationale refers to the ‘socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality’ (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008: 101) in the specific context of business practices. In other words, executive rationale provides a mental blueprint for practical actions in a business context. In addition, the authors have empirically generated a tentative model with multiple dimensions to compare the dominant executive rationales as institutionally-embedded across five key economies.