Symbolic Management: Governance, Strategy, and Institutions

The theory of symbolic management reveals a pervasive pattern of ’symbolic decoupling’ - a separation between appearances and reality - at every level of the governance system. At each level the processes of governance are less efficient or effective than they appear; from interpersonal relations within organizations such as those between CEOs and directors, top managers and lower-level employees, to relations between firm leaders and external stakeholders such as journalists and security analysts. There is even a separation between appearances and reality at the level of the governance system itself.

In this book, James Westphal and Sun Hyun Park develop symbolic management into a major theoretical perspective on governance. Not only does symbolic management provide a compelling behavioral alternative to economic perspectives such as agency theory, but it subsumes economic theory. Agency theory is reconceived as a historically contingent institutional logic that became taken for granted among corporate stakeholders for a period of time and eventually replaced by a new logic of governance. Through a body of extensive empirical research Westphal and Park demonstrate how the symbolic management activities of firm leaders have contributed to this historical shift in prevailing logics of governance, and present a warning to regulators, investors, and the general public.

James Westphal, Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration, University of Michigan, Sun Hyun Park, Associate Professor of Strategy and International Management, Seoul National University

James Westphal is the Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He conducts research in the areas of strategic management and organizational theory, with a focus on social and psychological processes in corporate governance and strategic decision making. He was elected to the Macro-Organizational Behavior Society in 2004, the Fellows of the Academy of Management in 2011, and the Fellows of the Strategic Management Society in 2019. He previously served as Division Chair of the Strategic Management Division of the Academy of Management. He was listed as the 3rd most productive management scholar in the world over the period 2005-2015, and his research has been referenced in Business Week, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Sun Hyun Park is Associate Professor of Strategy and International Management at College of Business, Seoul National University. Prior to joining SNU, he served as Assistant Professor of Management and Organization at Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. His research focuses on how corporate managers cope with a firm’s external environment, which includes technological, institutional, and competitive dynamics. He served as a global representative for the Organization and Management Theory division of the Academy of Management (2017-2019), and he currently serves on the editorial review board for Strategic Management Journal and Strategic Organization (2019-2021).