Location within the field and the institutional construction of manager's cognition

We demonstrate that differential location in an institutional field leads to a differential impact of institutional pressures on the cognition of actors. We measure the adoption of a set of management techniques called "Manufacturing Best Practices". Our indicators of differential location in the field are whether respondents are public or private, large or small, subsidiaries or independent firms, and technologically sophisticated or unsophisticated. We argue that the first of each pair is more embedded in institutional discourse, as a consequence of differential location in the field, and therefore more likely to acquire institutionalized cognitions. Our indicator of cognition is the extent to which the configuration of practices adopted corresponds to the normatively preferred configuration. We find that firms which are more tightly linked to the field are more likely adopt the practices which are central to the category (in the sense of Rosch or Barsalou's work on category structure) and less likely to adopt the practices which are peripheral.