A dynamic theory of organizational responses to contested technologies: The Monsanto case.

The presentation will show the preliminary results of the PhD thesis “A dynamic theory of organizational responses to contested technologies: The Monsanto case”. Through a grounded theory approach, it aims to understand how corporations respond to increasing multi-source external pressures while succeeding in maintaining their toxic products on the market. Integrating new institutional theory, sensemaking/sensegiving scholarships and the normalization of deviance literature, it argues that depending on the characteristics of the external pressures, different internal corporate interpretive processes are activated that ultimately shape and constrain the organizational responses over time.

Empirically, the thesis draws on an extensive qualitative analysis of 687 internal corporate documents (memos, emails, presentations and text messages between employees) disclosed through litigation and known as the Monsanto Papers. Using temporal bracketing, the thesis distinguishes four periods characterized by distinct combinations of external pressures, sensemaking/sensegiving work and organizational responses. The results show that when contestation escalates, organizations progressively shift from managing risk in regulatory and scientific arenas to governing politics. Over time, deviant practices become institutionalized, embedded in routines and communication infrastructures, thus enabling them to persist even as external legitimacy deteriorates.

The thesis contributes theoretically by conceptualizing legitimacy as graded and temporally unfolding, analyzing strategic responses depending on internal evolving sensemaking work, and offering a dynamic account of how normalization of deviance in corporations is actually reconfigured (rather than reversed) despite intensifying stigmatization. More broadly, it seeks to illuminate how internal cognitive interpretations allow firms to defend and ultimately succeed in maintaining their harmful products commercially viable, with the aim of informing institutional design and policy regulations for harmful innovations.