Values and targets in an institutional entrepreneur in an extreme situation: Assisting in survival as a going concern status and as worthiness

Values can powerfully direct actors through the provision of underlying unquestioned assumptions and taken-for-granted ways of thinking and acting (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2004; Gerdin, 2020), also assisting in institutional entrepreneurship (Chakhovich and Virtanen, 2023; Egan, 2014; Sutheewasinnon et al., 2016). Targets are usually presented as directing actors very concretely on the basis of more general organizational goals (Gerdin, 2020; Mo, 2022). While values constitute an example of a social form of control, targets, as part of performance measurement, function as more technical controls (Gerdin, 2020), but they both may also aid in institutional entrepreneurship (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Chakhovich and Virtanen, 2023; Egan, 2014; Gooneratne and Hoque, 2016; Hyvönen et al., 2012; Kilfoyle and Richardson, 2015; Sutheewasinnon et al., 2016). Both values and targets thereby direct action, but in different and complex ways (Gerdin et al., 2019). Such a function may become valuable in the face of extreme performance pressures. Similarly, it may be useful when trying to enact institutional entrepreneurship (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Chakhovich and Virtanen, 2023; Egan, 2014; Sutheewasinnon et al., 2016).

Performance targets have become increasingly pressing in organizational life (Covaleski et al., 1998; Kallio et al., 2020; Kornberger et al., 2011; Mo, 2022; Roberts, 2009, 2018; Seneviratne and Hoque, 2023). For example, performance pressures have been shown to profoundly affect personnel in accounting firms (Covaleski et al., 1998; Kornberger et al., 2011). The associated transparency may cause excessive attention to be paid to accountability (Messner, 2009; Roberts, 2018), resulting, for example, in blame avoidance and in managing appearances (Roberts, 2009). Organizational targets can thus become performative of organizational values (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Ferdous et al., 2019; Kornberger et al., 2011; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016; Mo, 2022; O’Dwyer and Unerman, 2008; Roberts, 2009, 2018): this occurs when actors under pressures related to targets and performance measures reject appreciated and original values, altering the socio-technical control dyad (Gerdin, 2020) of values and targets.

The literature on values and targets has scrutinized organizations and individuals facing heightened performance pressure (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Kallio et al., 2020; Kornberger et al., 2011; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016; Mo, 2022; Seneviratne and Hoque, 2023) and crisis situations (Becker et al., 2016; Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Christensen et al., 2018; Kenno and Free, 2018; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016). However, studies focusing on values and targets have typically been conducted in relatively well-established organizations in which organizational survival has not been immediately on the line (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Chenhall et al., 2017; Covaleski et al., 1998; Kallio et al., 2020; Kornberger et al., 2011; Kraus et al., 2017; Mo, 2022; Seneviratne and Hoque, 2023). Values and targets in organizations on the edge of survival, with an emphasis on this aspect, have not been scrutinized, while this paper acknowledges the work by Carlsson-Wall et al. (2021) on management control in a state organization facing an extreme situation. However, organizations in crisis do not necessarily seem to only stress immediate organizational targets but may instead exhibit fragmentation and even confusion (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017) with a varied use of values and targets (Becker et al., 2016; Christensen et al., 2018; Kenno and Free, 2018; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016). Any institutional entrepreneurship that uses values or targets or both (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Chakhovich and Virtanen, 2023; Egan, 2014; Sutheewasinnon et al., 2016) on the edge of survival may therefore not be straightforwardly executed. However, the ways in which the differing nature of pressures threatening different aspects of survival could cause institutional entrepreneurs (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Löhlein and Müssig, 2020) to use values and targets have not been examined. The research question is: How can institutional entrepreneurs make values and targets to assist in different aspects of organizational survival in an extreme situation?

The paper presents a case within which the survival of the focal company, a potential institutional entrepreneur, is seriously threatened. The essence of organizational survival is acknowledged to be composed of two parts: formal going concern status and experienced worthiness. The paper relies on a teleological explanation model used in the case organization in which (1) values are assumed to lead to targets that are assumed to assist in survival and (2) values and targets are assumed to assist in survival separately by themselves. Values and targets form here a part of a specific socio-technical control dyad (Gerdin, 2020) meant to affect organizational survival. The case company is attempting to remain a going concern in the face of an extremely demanding market situation in the Finnish media industry, with profitability concerns and pressures from one major competitor in particular. This competitor is considered by case company representatives to be unethical, causing reputation problems for the entire industry or field and thereby alienating customers. Values are here taken to be the disembodiments of the opposite or negation of the focal company, the major competitor. The focal company acts as an institutional entrepreneur in opposing this competitor.

The study shows how, when serious difficulties emerge, the target of gaining five articles in a given magazine becomes performative of values. Here the other values are affected, but not quality consciousness. A pressing target appears to undermine values but only those values that are not judged to be representative of the unique worthiness of the organization based on customer views. Survival as formal going concern status is felt to be achieved when the target of the five articles is reached. However, survival makes sense in the first place only if quality consciousness, a value, is retained. If survival were only about doing the same as the competitor, survival would not be felt to make sense, because it would not encompass the organizational purpose felt to be uniquely worthy. If one survives by doing the same as the competitor, i.e. in this case gives up quality consciousness, one has lost one’s unique character and thus has not in fact survived after all. The value of quality consciousness is thereby strengthened in the case company. The study also shows that in this case the focus on worthiness can mean a focus on what outsiders, namely customers in the field, are felt to consider worthy and ethical, in comparison to the offering of a major competitor. Moreover, while institutional entrepreneurship may rely on certain values, targets may be needed to still connect the potential institutional entrepreneur to the existing field which this entrepreneur is attempting to alter. Such a connection may be important for providing more resources for the institutional entrepreneur.

The present study contributes to the discussion about the relations between values and targets (Chenhall et al., 2017; Kallio et al., 2020; Kraus et al., 2017; Leotta and Ruggeri, 2022; Mo, 2022; O’Leary, 2017; Seneviratne and Hoque, 2023) and about the nature of values and pressing targets in crisis situations (Becker et al., 2016; Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Christensen et al., 2018; Kenno and Free, 2018; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016) by showing how, in response to threats, values and targets can form a socio-technical dyad that opposes various aspects of such threats and how institutional entrepreneurship (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Alonso-Almeida et al., 2021; Chatzichristos and Nagopoulos, 2021; Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Löhlein and Müssig, 2020) can assist in forming such a dyad. The study also contributes to the literature that has expressed concern about how targets can become performative of values (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Ferdous et al., 2019; Kornberger et al., 2011; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016; Mo, 2022; O’Dwyer and Unerman, 2008; Roberts, 2009, 2018). Research has concerned itself with how values and targets can function in balance and particularly with how to prevent targets from undermining values. By contrast, this study shows how values and targets can function in conjunction even when they may simultaneously possess contradictory elements and even partly undermine each other. Relatedly, research has suggested targets to be optimally in line with values (Chenhall et al., 2017; Kraus et al., 2017; Leotta and Ruggeri, 2022; O’Leary, 2017). Interestingly, the present study finds that if values and targets each help in achieving survival, but different facets of it, they need not be completely in line with each other, at least temporarily. This research thus acknowledges the complexity inherent in extreme situations (Becker et al., 2016; Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Christensen et al., 2018; Kenno and Free, 2018; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016) in the sphere of socio-technical control dyads (Gerdin, 2020) in organizations. Finally, the study also contributes to the literature on institutional entrepreneurship and management control (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Chakhovich and Virtanen, 2023; Egan, 2014; Gooneratne and Hoque, 2016; Hyvönen et al., 2012; Kilfoyle and Richardson, 2015; Sutheewasinnon et al., 2016) by showing how values and targets may have different purposes in institutional entrepreneurship; values may assist more directly in institutional entrepreneurship while targets may simultaneously help in reaching compatibility with existing institutions to secure support for the institutional entrepreneur.

The study is structured as follows. The theoretical section focuses on values, targets, their interaction under pressure and associated institutional entrepreneurship. This is followed by the methodology, containing information on the data and analysis. Then, the empirical data are presented as general information on the company and its field, company targets and company values – different forms of survival are addressed in the subsections on targets and values in the section on empirical data. The study ends with discussion and conclusions.

Here values and targets are contemplated, also with reference to pressures. Moreover, it is shown how institutional entrepreneurship may be implemented by the use of values and targets.

Values have been presented being tied in with culture (Gerdin, 2020; Henri, 2006) and tacit; not always easily observable (Ouchi, 1979). Values typically represent generally valued ways of acting within a given organization (Ahrens and Ferry, 2022). Organizational values are an addendum to the mission, vision and strategy of a given organization (Carlsson-Wall et al., 2021; Contrafatto et al., 2019; Johnson et al., 2008; Kallio et al., 2020; Mo, 2022; Seneviratne and Hoque, 2023). Values could also be seen as a part of an organization’s cultural controls (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2004; Carlsson-Wall et al., 2016; Gerdin et al., 2019), social controls (Carlsson-Wall et al., 2021; Gerdin, 2020; Mo, 2022) and belief systems (Gerdin et al., 2019). They are a part of socio-technical control dyads in organizations (Gerdin, 2020). Values could be perceived as “needs, personality types, motivations, goals, utilities, attitudes, interests, and nonexistential mental entities” (Meglino and Ravlin, 1998, p. 351). Values are defined here as non-measurable and indirect providers of direction for action, following Carlsson-Wall et al. (2021), Gerdin (2020) and Mo (2022) who imply the non-measurability of such social controls.

Values may be perceived in satisfying customer needs (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Ferdous et al., 2019; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016; Sharma et al., 2014). Longer-term customer values may oppose demanding short-term budget targets (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017). Attempts may also be made to alter customer values and to bring them into line with other values such as environmental values within the adoption of environmental management accounting (Ferdous et al., 2019).

Values have been perceived to have considerable potential for directing actors (Carlsson-Wall et al., 2021; Gerdin, 2020; Gerdin et al., 2019; Mo, 2022). Values could be perceived as priorities assigned to certain states or outcomes (Henri, 2006, p. 79) or tendencies to prefer certain statuses over others (Pratt and Beaulieu, 1992, p. 668). Values could therefore be seen as forms of representing the “good” as in ethics, theology or philosophy, as something normative (Meglino and Ravlin, 1998, p. 354) related to priorities (Gerdin, 2020; Henri, 2006, p. 79), empathy (Carlsson-Wall et al., 2021) and preferences (Pratt and Beaulieu, 1992). Values are not exactly forms of prioritization; a given entity may hold multiple conflicting values. Yet they assist in the prioritization of actions, in choosing between “right” and “wrong”. The focus on ethics partly explains why values are considered so powerful; doing something perceived as “good” seems to be a human need. Such “good” has been related to a concern for outsiders instead of only the focal company itself (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Ferdous et al., 2019; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016).

As stated, values can also be related to the organizational mission (Contrafatto et al., 2019; Johnson et al., 2008; Kallio et al., 2020). This mission has been seen as the wider purpose or raison d’être of the organization (Johnson et al., 2008, p. 164): the potential opposite to a purely financial or business orientation (Contrafatto et al., 2019; Sanders and McClellan, 2014). This mission is meant to explicitly explain why the organization exists in the first place and what needs it serves (Johnson et al., 2008, p. 10). However, critique has also been leveled at how such a mission or purpose might only be about empty words in so-called “mission statements” (Chenhall et al., 2017). Contrary to this, these statements may also matter: companies with mission statements emphasizing employees have been shown to perform better in areas such as advanced work-life practices and worker satisfaction (Blair-Loy et al., 2011). Mission is the stated purpose of the organization primarily from the organizational perspective while still considering stakeholders (Contrafatto et al., 2019; Johnson et al., 2008; Kallio et al., 2020). Organizational identity is also a more internally oriented view of the organizational mission or purpose; a view held primarily by organizational members (El Masri et al., 2017; Pianezzi, 2021) but a view that is also necessarily in interaction with external stakeholders (Pianezzi, 2021).

In partial contrast to these constructs, worthiness is defined here as a construct considered to be experienced by the stakeholder representatives as the extent of the success or worth of the organization in serving the needs of those representatives, i.e. its perceived success in implementing its purpose. Worthiness is tied to the terms “worth” and “value” (Jeacle, 2022; Millo et al., 2021) which here refer to the value of the focal organization as considered to be attributed by stakeholders. Worth may be monetary (Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2021; Jeacle, 2022; Plante et al., 2021), but it may also mean recognition or appreciation in a qualitative sense (Morales and Lambert, 2013; Pitts, 2022), as in this study. This worthiness relies on the unique and distinguishing features and purposes of the organization in question, and it considers the stakeholder views on organizational value more explicitly than the organizational mission or identity. In the literatures of organizational identities (El Masri et al., 2017) and missions (Johnson et al., 2008, p. 164), the concept of “purpose” may also have a more internal focus, looking more at how employees may achieve this purpose, while in the case of worthiness, “purpose” is meant to have a more external focus, referring to how stakeholders are considered to value it.

Targets have been seen as specific and quantified manifestations of the issues to be accomplished as identified by management (Mo, 2022). Targets refer to the desired level of performance standards (Otley, 1987) and are part of performance measurement (Gerdin, 2020). Unlike values, targets could effectively be seen as explicitly clarified, measurable and quantifiable (Mo, 2022; Ouchi, 1979) as targets are related to “explicit, verifiable measures” (Norris and O’Dwyer, 2004, p. 177). Targets are defined here as measurable and direct providers of directions for action, following Mo (2022), who emphasizes the measurability of such more technical controls (Gerdin, 2020). Targets represent the “technical” in organizational socio-technical control dyads (Gerdin, 2020).

Targets could be perceived as providing practical direction for the entity in question; advice on the direction in which this entity is supposed to be advancing (Mo, 2022) within a certain ethical stance adopted outside targets. Unlike values, targets do not typically have an ethical undertone. Targets usually support practical prioritization between different targets (Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016) – not choosing between “right” and “wrong” – as values do. The reason for using individual targets is often goal congruence aimed at organizational level (Kennedy and Widener, 2019). Targets and standards are set by the focal organization for itself or for its employees (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016; Mo, 2022). They thus typically have a more internally oriented and functional perspective than values. Chenhall et al. (2017) examined the potential for performance measurement systems to be used within organizations to express the values and beliefs of organizational members. There values and measured targets appeared to function in tandem with each other.

Company survival can be conceptualized as a continued formal going concern status (Chen et al., 2016). Alternatives to this could be insolvency, bankruptcy and company termination or liquidation. A target associated with going concern status could be solvency and a certain level of company earnings (Subramanyam and Wild, 1996) that would not result in the loss of the legal limit to equity. Productive customer relationships are integral to the maintenance of this going concern status (Dhaliwal et al., 2020).

Targets may become performative of values. Environmental targets can be used to modify customer values (Ferdous et al., 2019). Mo (2022) shows how a pressing performance target of 7 TWh could cause less attention to be paid to organizational values in a state-owned organization in the energy field. Roberts (2009, 2018) expressed concern about the transparency at which performance measurement aims. This can cause excessive pressure for and attention to accountability (Messner, 2009; Roberts, 2018), resulting in blame avoidance, managing appearances (Roberts, 2009) and a narcissistic preoccupation with promoting or defending oneself (Roberts, 2018). For example, employees in large accounting firms have been objectified as manageable and self-managing subjects (Covaleski et al., 1998) as considerable performance pressure is exerted on them (Kornberger et al., 2011). It appears that the efforts to initiate such changes are often based on external financial pressures (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016).

However, organizational crises seem to have mixed and complex consequences for the values and targets of organizations. Organizational threats may increase the importance of short-term organizational financial targets in the view of top management. However, these threats may cause line managers to focus more on longer-term initiatives and customer-related values. All this may lead to organizational fragmentation and confusion in viewpoints. (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017) During the financial crisis of 2008, affected companies emphasized the use of budgeting for planning and resource allocation and less for performance evaluation (Becker et al., 2016), perhaps resulting in fewer performance pressures. In response to this financial crisis, and to avoid future bankruptcies, Icelandic banks introduced more administrative controls and thus pressures regarding their use. However, they also altered organizational values. (Christensen et al., 2018) Makrygiannakis and Jack (2016) show how, at a time of crisis in the Greek hospitality industry, budgeted targets and their achievement gained in importance. However, other monitoring, such as that of inventory or quality targets, became less important as it consumed organizational resources (Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016). Finally, Kenno and Free (2018) note the significant politization and complexities involved in the use of management accounting, including targets, in a Canadian automotive crisis.

Barley and Tolbert (1997, p. 96) have defined institutions as “shared rules and typifications that identify categories of social actors and their appropriate activities or relationships”. Existing values could function as or represent institutions; these institutions are often described in terms of values held (Ferdous et al., 2019; Laguecir et al., 2020; Löhlein and Müssig, 2020). An institution as a taken-for-granted structure (Barley and Tolbert, 1997) ties in with the idea of a value. Institutions could be seen to encourage organizational isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). However, structure and agency have been acknowledged to mutually constitute each other (Garud et al., 2007, p. 961; Sewell, 1992). Structure, i.e. institutions, may therefore be altered through agency (Seo and Creed, 2002).

An institutional entrepreneur is defined here as an entity able to try to induce institutional change (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Alonso-Almeida et al., 2021; Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Löhlein and Müssig, 2020). Such an entrepreneur is assumed to take distance from the pre-existing institutionalized rules, practices or logics and, at least in principle, to provide alternatives to these (DiMaggio, 1988; Löhlein and Müssig, 2020, p. 2). Institutional entrepreneurs may possess knowledge, education, values and experience that allow them to note existing contradictions between, for example, political and economic institutions and organization-level institutions. This may assist them in altering these organization-level institutions. (Hiebl, 2018) The sustainability literature talks about so-called norm entrepreneurs (Andrades et al., 2024; Bebbington et al., 2012; Larrinaga et al., 2020) as institutional entrepreneurs aiming to affect the established norms and thus the values in a certain field. While this literature has typically investigated the field of sustainability reporting, institutional entrepreneurs in other fields, such as circular economy, could also aim to impact values and norms (Alonso-Almeida et al., 2021).

Institutional entrepreneurship does not always need to be successful in altering institutions (Chatzichristos and Nagopoulos, 2021). In fact, it may sometimes be unsuccessful. Major et al. (2018) show failed institutional entrepreneurship in the context of accounting change involving responsibilization and incentivization. Moreover, Chatzichristos and Nagopoulos (2021) compare successful and unsuccessful institutional entrepreneurs in the field of social entrepreneurship. Furthermore, a lone institutional entrepreneur may not always stand a chance of bringing about wider change (Nugraheni et al., 2022). For example, in the case of the initiation of the Global Reporting Initiative, multiple actors and their interrelations were important (Larrinaga and Bebbington, 2021).

Organizational customers could provide help in institutionalization processes (Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Sharma et al., 2014). Accounting firms that functioned as institutional entrepreneurs in expanding their offerings and altering their organizations did so due to demands from their customers (Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006). Changes in customer values could serve other institutional changes, for example, in environmental values (Ferdous et al., 2019). However, customers’ role here could also be complex. When nonprofit organizations transformed themselves into social enterprises as institutional entrepreneurs, they noticed the importance of novel business-related customers and potential contradictions between the demands of those new customers and existing beneficiaries (Ko and Liu, 2021).

Institutional entrepreneurship has been shown to rely heavily on the existence of institutional contradictions (Contrafatto et al., 2019; Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Seo and Creed, 2002; Sewell, 1992). There could be a contradiction between conforming to existing practices, namely, merely providing accounting services or alternatively more multidisciplinary services such as consulting (Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006). Financial and social values can be involved in institutional contradictions. Financially oriented values may end up overpowering other values through pre-existing financially oriented thought structures and the associated emotions. (Laguecir et al., 2020).

Institutional entrepreneurs could alter socio-technical dyads to achieve change, as follows. Aleksandrov (2020) shows how values can alter and adjust along with institutional changes, for example, in the university sector. Kallio et al. (2020) also demonstrate how values and targets may be essential in altering institutions in the university sector, having renounced the use of academic logic and autonomy for that of managerial logic and for an emphasis on detailed performance targets. Institutional entrepreneurs have also been shown to use cost savings targets rhetorically to achieve change in municipalities (Hyvönen et al., 2012) and other management accounting targets to induce change in their networks in the context of postal services (Kilfoyle and Richardson, 2015). Targets, e.g. in the form of budgetary cuts, may help in inducing subsequent institutional change, but targets may also need to be altered to induce this change, for example by a switch from one-year to three-year targets (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018). Egan (2014) shows how water efficiency targets and the associated acknowledgement of water as a value may have been brought about by institutional entrepreneurs in an Australian context. An institutional entrepreneur has also been indicated to advocate certain values and targets when fighting the gray economy in the construction industry (Chakhovich and Virtanen, 2023). Sutheewasinnon et al. (2016) demonstrate how institutional entrepreneurs in the Thai public sector promoted selected performance-oriented values and targets in the public administration. Moreover, Gooneratne and Hoque (2016) show how institutional entrepreneurs in a Sri Lankan bank established a budgetary system with targets in that bank. While this research has looked at how values and targets both may help in institutional entrepreneurship (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Egan, 2014; Sutheewasinnon et al., 2016) and may need to be altered with this entrepreneurship (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Chakhovich and Virtanen, 2023; Gooneratne and Hoque, 2016; Sutheewasinnon et al., 2016), the present study looks at how values and targets may also have different ends within this entrepreneurship. Targets may assist in reaching compatibility between different institutional logics (Leotta and Ruggeri, 2022). The present research then investigates how values may assist in institutional entrepreneurship and targets may simultaneously help in reaching compatibility with existing institutions and how all this may still contribute to institutional entrepreneurship.

The literature on institutional entrepreneurship, targets or values has typically looked at both the institutional entrepreneur level and the field level, with a focus varying slightly between more focus on the institutional entrepreneur (Chakhovich and Virtanen, 2023; Egan, 2014; Hyvönen et al., 2012; Kilfoyle and Richardson, 2015) and on the field (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Gooneratne and Hoque, 2016; Sutheewasinnon et al., 2016). This study is positioned to look slightly more at the institutional entrepreneur while also firmly acknowledging data and phenomena at the field level. The present study scrutinizes a potential contradiction between (1) institutionalized industry or field-level practices along with associated targets and (2) perceived customer needs as values. The case below describes such a socio-technical control dyad of values and targets and how an institutional entrepreneur could tap into these to try to change the field.

The study uses case methodology to achieve an in-depth and rich understanding (Ahrens and Dent, 1998) of the reality in one case company, termed AdvertCo, and the associated field. The data used are interviews and archival data. The case company and the field serve the theoretical purpose well as they allow looking at institutional entrepreneurship in a situation in which the survival of the company is in jeopardy and this company is therefore doing everything possible to survive in the field.

Altogether 23 interviews were carried out within the company, among its board members, with its former employees, and with outsiders: customers, representatives of an investor, a representative of a major magazine that provided advertising space for the case company, as well as journalists and a photographer who worked in cooperation with the case company representatives. Current employee interviews were complemented by a number of interviews with former employees that proved effective as these former employees had vivid and recent recollections of their work in the company and openly shared their views. The company’s (former) employees were able to express views on the company and its values, targets and field. Outsider interviews afforded access to a wider understanding – especially of the company values and the field context. Not all potential stakeholders were reached, as is usual in case studies. For example, the representatives of the printing house responsible for printing the case company’s magazines declined to be interviewed because they felt that they had such limited exposure to the focal company that they would be able to add nothing to the research. Moreover, not all former employees could be reached in practice. Furthermore, the focal company had many customers and it was only practical to interview a limited number of them. These field-level data were primarily and quite naturally identified in cooperation with company representatives while outsider interviewees also assisted in this identification.

In the interviews, employees past and present were asked about their own and the company’s values and targets, as well as about certain other issues connected to these, such as performance measurement and remuneration, targets for the long and the short term and company culture. These interviewees also described the field as a context for the company. The outsider interviews looked at the values and targets of AdvertCo as seen by those outsiders, and outsiders’ other experiences when dealing with AdvertCo and the field more generally.

The interviews were semi-structured in allowing free expression on the issues considered important by the interviewees. Two customer representative interviews were made by phone due to the long distance to that specific customer, and one face-to-face interview with an investor was interrupted and completed later by phone. All the other interviews were conducted face to face. All interviews were audiotaped and transcribed; all interviewees consented to this recording. Notes were made separately on the issues addressed outside the recording, and these notes were written up immediately after each interview. As a part of each interview, suggestions for additional interviewees were elicited and this procedure resulted in finding relevant individuals who had had any extended contact with the company in question.  Appendix details the data sources.

Archival data were also used to gain access to the company context and the field. The magazines produced by the company were analyzed, as were magazines produced by competitors and other magazines that were distributed similarly to those of the case company and competitors’ magazines – as attachments to major magazines. The case company and competitors’ Web sites were examined. Financial information about the company was retrieved from a national registry. Contrary to the identification of potential interviewees, the researcher primarily identified these field-level data independently of the company representatives’ views.

The analysis followed some of the relatively reflexive and creative process elements used by Aleksandrov (2020), Carlsson-Wall et al. (2021) and Kallio et al. (2020), following a type of process used previously in this journal. The phases of:

• data reduction;

• evoking “a big picture”; and

• coding and associated interpretation could be distinguished here.

Such processes were applied continuously as novel data accumulated. This was also supported by the discussion of the data and findings in research workshops and such events and a research diary updated after each interview. Data reduction involved the reading of the interview transcripts and notes in the research diary to promote a profound understanding of the data. The initial idea was to dig deep into values, targets and their interrelations. Manual coding resulted in an analysis sheet on the different values and targets that the interviewees described. This was manually grouped according to the different elements of values and targets. To remain reflexive to the sensitive context of extreme pressures, creativity in connecting empirical data with theories was emphasized. A historical timeline was prepared to understand the company developments and its different actors and actions each year. An attempt was made here to form a “big picture” in the company story regarding its values and targets and patterns in them. Finally, additional coding included identifying previously unnoted links between values and targets, their combination into categories about these relations and the links with institutional entrepreneurship that particularly emphasized the role of activeness and initiative in the use of values and targets by institutional entrepreneurs.

The level of analysis of institutional entrepreneurship was both company level and field level and the analysis looked at the interconnections between these levels and some of the potential effects of the institutional entrepreneur on the field level. This necessitated an initial focus on the institutional entrepreneur to determine the actions taken. However, the field level was also paid more attention rather later to understand the context and to shed light on the consequences at the field level. The interview data were helpful in understanding the field level as many company as well as outsider interviewees described the field. This was because the destiny of the company seemed to them to be heavily intertwined with the developments at the field level. Moreover, several of the decisions made at the company level appeared to have been made with the field level in mind. Interviews were thus implemented with not only the company but also the field in mind. The interviewer was cognizant of the potential emphasis on the field during the interviews and also kept this focus in mind whenever it did not emerge completely naturally. However, in the interpretation of the data, the specific viewpoint of each interviewee was always critically considered and it was thus acknowledged that every interviewee had their own personal interpretation of both the company and the field. This meant that the company representatives presented a view of the field that was colored with their own company-related interpretations while all the other interviewees likewise had their own perspectives. Furthermore, the archival data provided more direct access to the outputs of the organizations in the field than interview data and thus enhanced the understanding of this field. At the field level, the narrative and interpretive, not strictly causal nature of the study (Aleksandrov, 2020; Lukka and Modell, 2010) was particularly relevant, also because the necessarily temporally and spatially limited data would not allow for the analysis of widely generalizable field changes. The field level analysis then finally fed into the analysis of the institutional entrepreneur to reflect on any effects on this entrepreneur. The analysis was thus iterative between these levels. This was also the result of the analysis of the associated institutional entrepreneurship literature, in which similar kinds of analyses seemed to have been conducted.

The analysis was also abductive, having both inductive and deductive components; trying to learn from the case data while simultaneously relying on existing theory (Lukka and Modell, 2010) about values, targets and institutional entrepreneurship. The relations between these entities were examined in the literature and this motivated the search for such relations in the empirics as well as noticing relations not yet shown in the literature. Throughout the analysis, no formal coding scheme was used to remain contextually sensitive to the precarious field of the actors. Particular attention was devoted to looking at the links between values, targets, institutional entrepreneurship and survival and a teleological explanation model was seen as the most appropriate for connecting these. This was because survival emerged as the priority aimed at in the values and the targets, both of which were seen to contribute in complex ways to this survival for institutional entrepreneurs in their field.

The first contribution was formed as follows. The literature on values and targets were first focused on and this, together with the abductive analysis of the data, created an understanding of how values and targets could counter threatening situations. A subsequent focus on the institutional entrepreneurship literature then rendered comprehensible how institutional entrepreneurs could use values and targets for their own purposes in high-pressure situations. The second contribution was the result of looking at the literature on values and targets and simultaneously acknowledging how they could sometimes function in tandem in the empirical data despite their inherent contradictions. The third contribution emerged with a particular focus on the institutional entrepreneurship literature and the focus on the empirical data that showed how institutional entrepreneurs could more specifically use the socio-technical dyad of values and targets in combination to achieve their goals by using values directly and targets indirectly in institutional entrepreneurship. Next, the empirical findings are presented.

Next general information on the company and the industry is provided. Then the targets at AdvertCo are described. Here the sales target set in terms of the number of advertorial articles per edition of a magazine is paid particular attention. After this, the values at AdvertCo are analyzed, paying particular attention to quality consciousness as a value emerging as particularly relevant. Information about the main competitor is also given. The two forms of survival are addressed in the empirics on values and targets.

AdvertCo was started up in 2008. The research period covers the time from 2008 until the beginning of 2015, when the interviews ended. During this time, the company was new to the field, a start-up. The annual sales of AdvertCo during the research period were about 400,000 euro. There is evidence of it experiencing significant financial problems at least around 2011 and 2013. Initially, it employed two founders and one outsider. There is evidence of it employing more outsiders as producers starting in 2011, possibly also earlier. Table 1 illustrates some of the company’s historical information. A board member explained how the more positive profit figures toward the end of the period indicate an extensive restructuring, not a fundamental improvement in the underlying business.

AdvertCo was making so-called advertorials, journalistic commercials that were typically published in the form of a printed magazine between better-known, major magazines. An advertorial is an “advertisement that is prepared in the form of a magazine article” (Journalist). In a given magazine, there were also pure advertisement spaces.

The entire media industry was in a very difficult situation. This was especially true during the financial crisis of 2008-09. The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) commented about that time: “All magazines were full of blackness[…] A major business magazine[…] was pretty much completely black, it was [written] that this is how bad everything is[…]”. Here, “blackness” refers to the dark, pessimistic and negative views on the future of the business environment presented in the press.

AdvertCo was established by four former EarlyCo employees. EarlyCo was a competitor of AdvertCo. Two left early on, and another left after several years due to difficulties, leaving the current CEO as the sole remaining founder. Despite tough competition, especially from larger, often national competitors such as MajorCo, AdvertCo focused on a specific region. The business relied both on telemarketing, done by producers and the CEO and on quality journalism, which was mostly done by professional freelance journalists (and photographers). The company aim was also that to the extent possible, the magazines would feature certain themes – coherent ensembles. One company employee was working as the editor and graphic designer of the magazines and did not do any selling. Another company invested equity funds in AdvertCo in 2013. As a result, AdvertCo had moved next to the premises of this investing company.

Financial difficulties caused some tough decisions to be made; the move illustrates this. The company had previously occupied certain quite comfortable offices, and the latest office was rather desolate compared to these. There was an excessively small room for this company, and the producers were too close to each other. The move was necessitated by the financial difficulties; it was not a completely free choice. The following quote describes this situation:

The specific targets in the company were project-based. Projects were acknowledged to possess both a qualitative component (success in terms of the contents of the magazine) and a profitability component. The CEO explained: “[The culture] includes a focus on making a profit, but still without forgetting quality and the customer.” Profitability was, of course, important and necessary in this institutional field for companies to retain their monetary resources, to gain investors and to stay in this field as actors. A board member also noted how the company was running out of cash and how this made continuing its business impossible. Another board member commented:

Sales were considered the most vital basis for success – “without sales, there is no business”, as the CEO aptly stated. The target of sales was perceived to be very important for maintaining the company as a going concern. Without sales, there would be neither profits nor investors, that were important to amass monetary resources in the current institutional field. In practice, a lot of the everyday concerns seemed to be directed toward selling. There was a flip chart on the office wall on which producers and the CEO marked their sales.

The sales target per month (or by project, there was some variation here) per producer or CEO was about 15,000–20,000 euro, usually considered to be about five articles. The basic salary of producers was about 1,500 euro, and commission was typically 10% on a given sale, which resulted in commissions forming about 50% of the total salary if the target was reached. The target of five articles was derived from how many articles were planned to be produced per magazine and this target was typically more formally monitored after each project, thus every four to eight weeks (this varied depending on the season). However, quite a lot of monitoring took place continuously or, for example, weekly. A former producer described the five-article target:

There were differences in terms of how much producers focused on sales and quality, but no producer ever admitted to sacrificing quality to get sales. However, it was sales that were measured, as explained above, not quality. Sales were the primary measure of how the business was doing and how many monetary resources it was able to amass in the current institutional field. The number of contacts and phone calls, sometimes minutes over the phone, as well as the number of customers in different stages in the sales funnel^[1] were also monitored, although less than sales.

Many producers explained how this was hard work: only calling, calling and calling. One former producer explained that the work was not “rocket science”, another said that he used 97% of his time for selling. There were personal differences, however; some producers preferred to do more background work than others before calling, some producers explained specific marketing strategies they would use to get customers’ attention while others focused more on the number of phone calls, and some producers were more focused on the current projects, timetables and quantitative targets to make the deadline while others expressed more entrepreneurial interest in developing the company more generally. The CEO was also working a lot in selling.

The company target was profitability but the individuals’ targets were to sell five articles within a given time period. However, in such a small company, company targets and individual targets potentially had a more immediate relation than in a larger company: if everyone reached the single target of selling the required number of articles, this almost directly meant that the company target was also very close to being reached. The costs of the company consisted of salaries, rent and facilities, printing, as well as payments to journalists and photographers for preparing the advertorials and to major magazines for the provision of advertising space. All these costs were relatively controllable as the relations with the printing house, journalists, photographers and major magazines were fairly well established. The key uncontrollable factor in the operations was the sales.

The four original entrepreneurs wanted to be honest both toward the customers and toward the readers. They felt that their previous employer, EarlyCo, had experienced difficulties in its dual purpose of (1) producing journalistic articles of good quality and (2) openly conveying the paid advertising messages of company representatives. It was felt that this resulted in articles that were meant to look like quality journalism but with company messages hidden within them. Company representatives were then not satisfied as they felt they could not speak freely about the issues they were willing to pay to speak about. When the case company’s financial problems escalated, it was, however, difficult to retain honesty as a general value:

Here, the publishing house representative is considering how the company target related to going concern status appeared to override the value of honesty. The company needed the money from the publication to remain a going concern; however, it was so close to the edge that it was unable to pay for the publication.

One value that was repeatedly stated as much appreciated was good atmosphere. A former employee explained how employees in the case company were working together as a team: if anybody succeeded, everybody would celebrate together. However, at least a few times the relaxed atmosphere seemed to be lost; this could be traced to the financial difficulties and also to the time when the equity investor came along – the need to produce results perhaps grew in the company. Being on the edge of survival was not conducive to a relaxed atmosphere. During this time, a former employee claimed that there was heightened monitoring of the achievement of the sales targets and major pressure to reach those targets. This was most likely due to the need to monitor the financial performance to survive and to avoid going over the edge. Moreover, even before this time, one former employee explained how the company in at least one month did not pay the employees their salaries at the agreed time due to a failed product concept, a failure which was not seen by him to be attributable to the employees. This potentially affected the atmosphere in the company negatively. A quote follows:

Stated values, such as formal value or mission statements (Carlsson-Wall et al., 2021; Mo, 2022) can be distinguished from so-called experienced but not-always-stated values that actually guide organizational actions (Aleksandrov, 2020). The four stated values of AdvertCo were the following: respect, joyfulness, realism and quality consciousness. Respect would be directed toward customers and employees. Joyfulness encompassed feelings such as excitement, motivation and relaxation. Realism would imply a down-to-earth mentality, realistic planning and tackling difficult issues. Finally, quality formally meant doing everything slightly better than expected.

Several board members and employees admitted that there had been difficulties in actually putting these values into practice; the company situation had been so tough that it had been difficult to be joyful. One former employee almost mocked the stated values: he had not experienced respect, joyfulness, nor quality at a time when the company working atmosphere had not been particularly positive. Two former employees complained about the lack of realism in the company in setting targets. It was therefore unclear to what extent some of the stated values were actually present in the everyday work of the company.

One experienced value could be termed customer focus; attention to customer needs specifically in company processes. However, customer satisfaction was not really monitored due to the lack of resources for this. Relatedly, it was not known how many people read the articles, as this is very difficult to follow in printed media in general. Customers also talked about how they would have liked to know more about who read the articles. These customers sometimes reported that the article had been favorably received by their own customers or other outsiders. No customer ever claimed to have received negative feedback from outsiders on any article. However, such comments about article visibility were at the level of anecdotal evidence, relying on no formal monitoring. A customer commented:

One former employee called customer relations “one-night-stands” as strategic partnerships with customers were not really feasible. A customer also mentioned the desire to have a closer partnership with AdvertCo, so that the company would contact the customer afterwards to elicit feedback and also so that the customer would receive more advance information on the contents of a specific magazine and the customer’s position therein. Two customers complained about an unnecessary rush to produce an article, preventing proper information exchange, while one customer had not experienced this although it had had several projects with AdvertCo. One of the customers claimed never to have received the magazine afterwards. Company survival sometimes had to be prioritized over the use of resources for customer communication. A customer commented:

A former employee noted that the following problem sometimes occurred. First a customer was promised that no spaces would be sold to competitors in a given magazine, so exclusive coverage was guaranteed. However, on the last day, when the company desperately needed to fill the space, it would still sell a competitor a small advertisement space. A producer might experience difficulties explaining this to the first mentioned customer. This event again was due to the financial difficulties.

A certain short-term orientation was seen in the company in that the themes could have been decided on much earlier, so that customers could take these themes into account in their own marketing budgets. However, this did not take place. The main theme of a magazine might sometimes change in one day; planning was difficult. Customers could sometimes say that they were not interested now, but asked what plans the company had for later. It was impossible to reply to this, because plans might change quite a lot, depending on the situation. Many of these issues originated from the fact that the company was in financial straits. It had to adjust its short-term decisions to customers’ current suggestions, being ready to flexibly switch themes if the situation so required and the original themes did not attract the attention of customers according to plan. A former producer explained about the financial dependence on customers and the financial situation of the company:

On a more positive note, flexibility was indeed a company value that particularly the journalists and one customer talked about. Employees also said that the company provided opportunities to take a lot of responsibility; not everyone liked this but those who did really appreciated it. There was thus an entrepreneurial culture. Persistence was also seen as important, particularly in telemarketing; producers continuously stressed the importance of forceful selling and not giving up. Two customers and one journalist mentioned expertise and professionalism; the company was seen to especially appreciate Finnish professional work by publishing on it.

The value of quality consciousness was central in the company: it was a stated value as well as an experienced one. The CEO felt that the business should prosper through providing better quality than its competitors. Several other employees had also taken up the quest for quality in their work. Quality was specifically approached here by the presentation of customers in the advertorials and the value added thereby provided to the customers. The value of quality consciousness focused on the image of the customer in the final product, while customer focus shown earlier as a value was concerned with how the company processes more mechanically and practically satisfied customer needs. The company representatives seemed to feel that the company functioned as an institutional entrepreneur in changing how quality was offered in this field. During the research period, the company was new to the field and wanted to achieve changes in this field.

The CEO emphasized how it was important to have satisfied customers after each project. The customers were meant to be gained with the hope that they would return with sales in the future. The aim was not only to get sales regarding one project at a time. The CEO explained in relation to his earlier employment at EarlyCo:

Quality and through it fulfilling the needs of the customers was seen as the raison d’être for the company. Giving customers true opportunities for their voices to be heard through quality was seen as the unique purpose of this company. At AdvertCo, it was felt that no other company in the field was doing exactly this. If AdvertCo did not survive as a going concern, such opportunities for customers would also disappear from this field along with the company. Quality thereby represented the worth of the company to customers and to the entire field. The company was felt to be an institutional entrepreneur in providing quality differently from everyone else in this field and thus fundamentally transforming the field. The producers acknowledged the importance of quality consciousness in presenting customers in the advertorials. A former producer noted:

Several customers were happy with the quality of the output produced by the company. A customer noted how having a specific theme in the magazine had served it and its field well. Another customer, a marketing specialist, commended the company on its marketing approach and long-term orientation to serving customers. This customer commented:

The major competitor, MajorCo, was seen as the mirror image of AdvertCo. This competitor was framed as unethical by several case company employees. In addition, a journalist explained how MajorCo made a large profit but paid its journalists less than AdvertCo; this was considered unethical. Here the journalist is referring to the need to have companies such as AdvertCo in the field as alternatives to MajorCo:

The view at AdvertCo was that the competitor had spoiled the market and partly AdvertCo’s opportunities in the market by producing too undifferentiated magazines and by trying just to make money from customers, not aiming at win–win situations with customers. For example, there were situations in which producers would call potential customers and these customers would say that they would never agree to participate in such a business again after their experiences with the competitor. The fate of the industry or field could thereby be seen to rest on AdvertCo and the fulfillment of its major purpose. The company representatives often presented the company as an institutional entrepreneur in upholding the reputation of the entire field. Below is a quote from a former producer regarding quality at AdvertCo and at MajorCo:

The employees and journalists considered the magazines by the case company to clearly represent better quality than those produced by MajorCo. The photographs were seen to be of good quality compared to those of MajorCo – whose pictorial language usually consisted of having one person pictured for each company, resulting in a collection of 30–40 faces in a given magazine, resembling a classmate picture collection. AdvertCo clearly attempted to do quality journalism, with a wider variety in visuality, and its copy was sometimes also quoted in other, occasionally very reputable and well-known media.

The quality was also seen in how a journalist explained how the company always provided her with a clear briefing on the topic and on the perspective envisaged for a given advertorial, helping her succeed in her work. This was not the case with all her other contacts. Such an approach was meant to assist in producing quality advertorials where customers would truly be listened to. This appeared to be a part of the practice of the company of trying to function as an institutional entrepreneur.

Quality also seemed to have been successfully realized according to a comparison between the magazines of AdvertCo and those of its main competitor. MajorCo did indeed have magazines in which typically very many companies from different industries were presented one after another, and there was no clear leading idea behind the selection of the companies. The theme would be something like “Management” and the companies’ promotional material was then presented under this theme – however, it was difficult to learn anything specific from management based on this listing of the companies’ material. A MajorCo representative justified its approach in one magazine as follows:

The justification in this text focused mostly on how digital media resulted in more surface browsing while printed media provided potential for a more profound focus and more time devoted by the readers. However, it remained unclear which need of which audience such a long listing of company articles would particularly address. It appeared that there were a lot of telemarketers behind MajorCo magazines, people who were not apparently mentioned in the credits of the magazines. The competitor was much more efficient than AdvertCo, making a large profit; telemarketers may not have been paid by salary but only by commission at MajorCo.

The case company employees tended to compare the values at the case company to those (apparently seen) at MajorCo, emphasizing the worth of AdvertCo. Producers tried to be what they considered “ethical” (compared to MajorCo), meaning they would deliver customers what had been promised. Some producers felt that in MajorCo this issue was neglected as no customer would get any real visibility in the competing magazines. The company representatives thereby wanted to distinguish the focal company as an institutional entrepreneur from the prevailing practices in the field.

To sum up, AdvertCo was trapped in a vicious circle of the increasing difficulties of printed media, a competitor that was felt to have spoiled the market, customers not deciding on deals fast enough, inability to do effective planning, and constant pressures to pay employees and service providers. The following quote demonstrates some of these pressures.

AdvertCo had not been financially successful and was under formal reorganizing proceedings at the end of the study in 2015. This is a formal arrangement in Finland based on a court order. It meant that the company was close to bankruptcy and had to be helped, for example, by having some of its loans written off. However, it was not bankrupt. The purpose of these proceedings was to avoid bankruptcy. A board member explained:

Another board member explained in 2015 that the company’s business was in principle constantly unprofitable and the cash flow disastrously negative. After the research period, there was a major cash flow crisis and all personnel, except the CEO, had to be laid off and the office space vacated. The board member described the dire situation:

Interestingly, reorganizing proceedings helped AdvertCo; it survived this threat and recovered after the research period. Close to the end of the research, it stopped making advertorials and began implementing corporate communication and advertising. It also employed about six to eight people until 2024, when it finally went bankrupt. These developments after the study period have not been followed-up in this research. However, the quality of advertorials by MajorCo and more generally in the field was monitored until 2024. Here the quality clearly improved soon after the research period and has remained at that higher level ever since. Therefore, this institutional entrepreneur may actually have been successful in altering the quality in the field, but in a different way from what it expected: not by taking control of the field but only after leaving the field.

In the following, balancing values and targets on the edge of survival is first discussed, and then implications for customer relations are considered.

Targets have the capacity to become clear and even quantified (Mo, 2022; Ouchi, 1979) means of survival when the situation is so dire that the survival of the company depends on those targets being reached. The situations when the values of AdvertCo were sacrificed seemed to be tied to the difficult financial situation looming over the company (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016). Targets became very powerful as sales were deemed vital to the survival of the entire company as a going concern in the current institutional environment. It is also worth noting that in this field, survival traditionally appeared not to be about doing things very differently from others, but this differentiation was what this company was trying to do, thus aiming at institutional entrepreneurship. Therefore, it was first necessary for this company to distinguish oneself and to be different before it might then offer something novel to the field.

It is noteworthy that the main target was not articulated as selling as many articles as possible but as selling specifically five articles. This could be interpreted in such a way that the target itself was mixed with the imperative of preserving quality as a value: Producers were expected to sell a number of articles perhaps perceived as reasonable, not an excessively large number that would motivate them to sacrifice quality. However, such an interpretation would be incorrect, as the target of five articles seemed most of the time to be tantamount to selling as many articles as possible – a hopelessly unattainable target.

Research has shown how targets can alter or undermine values (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Ferdous et al., 2019; Kornberger et al., 2011; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016; Mo, 2022; O’Dwyer and Unerman, 2008; Roberts, 2009, 2018). Here the five-article target appeared to become performative of values. This target motivated toward company values of what could be termed achievement: responsibility, entrepreneurship and particularly persistence and potentially de-motivated with regard to other values, such as honesty. The values strongly related to this target were reinforced, while some of the values that were more peripheral to it became less appreciated. However, the value of quality consciousness was still to a considerable extent retained in the company. Sacrificing this value would have meant sacrificing the unique worth of the company and the potential to try to function as an institutional entrepreneur (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Alonso-Almeida et al., 2021; Chatzichristos and Nagopoulos, 2021; Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Löhlein and Müssig, 2020). The study acknowledges that if worth is not retained, survival is not meaningful, and one might just as well go and work for the competitor instead. In the case of AdvertCo, a threatening situation regarding performance pressures was observed to be extreme. However, even here it appeared that the target of five articles was not pervasive enough to undermine all values. The functioning here of the socio-technical control dyad (Gerdin, 2020) was therefore complex.

Quality consciousness may be perceived as not conflicting with the sales target, because quality appeared to be needed in the longer term to get customer organizations interested in making articles about themselves in the first place. However, it also appeared entirely possible for the competitor to achieve sales without attention to quality. AdvertCo could perhaps not afford to take the risk of ignoring sales targets in the short term and just wait for the long term to materialize. Failure to reach sales targets may have meant that the company would not even be around in the long term, given the current institutional environment in which reaching of sales targets was vital. Such failure seemed to materialize; this institutional entrepreneur (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Löhlein and Müssig, 2020) eventually appeared to have failed at least partly due to it being unable to reach its targets and thus to gather sufficient financial resources. This failure may also have been due to this institutional entrepreneur being unable to convince customers of the worthiness of its values. Such complexities regarding values and targets are common in the literature that has studied them in crisis situations (Becker et al., 2016; Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Christensen et al., 2018; Kenno and Free, 2018; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016).

The prior literature has looked at how institutional entrepreneurs might use management control rather directly in aiding in this entrepreneurship (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Chakhovich and Virtanen, 2023; Egan, 2014; Gooneratne and Hoque, 2016; Hyvönen et al., 2012; Kilfoyle and Richardson, 2015; Sutheewasinnon et al., 2016), similarly as the institutional entrepreneur here used values. However, these entrepreneurs may also use management control, such as targets, more indirectly to maintain themselves compatible with existing institutions that they actually attempt to alter in the longer term. This compatibility may be important in the short term to secure the necessary resources. Different elements of management control may thus exhibit different purposes for institutional entrepreneurs, and not all these elements need to be directly and continuously contributing to institutional entrepreneurship in altering institutions. Temporality may play a role here: certain elements may be perceived as more important in the longer term and others in the shorter term. This may be particularly relevant in settings of extreme pressure and limited agency in which one has to first survive the short-term pressure that limits one’s agency to then reach the longer term.

Survival appears to have two facets: that of remaining a formal going concern (Chen et al., 2016; Subramanyam and Wild, 1996) and experienced worthiness (Contrafatto et al., 2019; Johnson et al., 2008; Kallio et al., 2020). How to balance between these? Considering causation, perhaps one could decide first the core of the entity to survive (value) and only then try to do all possible to ensure such survival (to reach relevant targets). This means that one would first decide the core that it makes sense to safeguard and then try to safeguard it. This socio-technical control dyad (Gerdin, 2020) thus included a teleological explanation between values and targets. First, values were perceived by this institutional entrepreneur to lead to targets that were assumed to help in survival. The primary aim of the institutional entrepreneur was to promote the value of quality consciousness. However, this led to the requirement to promote the target of five articles so that this company could stay alive in the short term to eventually reach that value in the longer term. Second, values and targets were assumed to help separately in survival. The value of quality consciousness helped in achieving worthiness, while the target of five articles assisted in achieving going concern status. This institutional entrepreneur used values and targets for different purposes; values assisted relatively directly in institutional entrepreneurship by opposing the existing institutional field while targets supported this by maintaining the company compatible with existing institutions to amass resources. Figure 1 shows the teleological explanation model of the study.

The study has shown how even under intense performance pressure, targets may not always alter all values. Instead of targets, the context of being on the edge of survival may become performative of values. This can even result in values and targets that appear in some situations to contradict each other, such as the quantified target of a number of articles and the value of the quality of the articles. It was shown here how what appeared as such a contradiction was due to the dual nature of survival. Although there appeared to be a contradiction between a value and a target, focusing on these simultaneously actually contributed to fuller chances and perspectives for survival. Interestingly, such an apparent contradiction was not an unexplained glitch but had a clear purpose.

Research has suggested that targets could optimally be in line with values (Chenhall et al., 2017; Kraus et al., 2017; Leotta and Ruggeri, 2022; O’Leary, 2017). This could mean here that the most important target should have been about the quality of the articles, not about their quantity. Alternatively, if the most important target was performative of the most important value, this value should have encouraged to aim at a maximum number of articles regardless of quality. However, the present study claims that if values and targets are believed to help to achieve two partly unconnected facets of survival, they need not be in line with each other – as long as they are in line with successful efforts to survive. This may be a temporary situation in an extreme case. However, such a situation may be necessary for organizational survival and therefore vital in a crisis context.

Chenhall et al. (2017) study how performance measurement could be used to express the values of organizational members. It is worth noting that the targets do not always have to express the values – and here this is relevant. Values show what is uniquely worthy to be retained and targets indicate what to do to retain these values. Worthiness and the way to retain it need not resemble each other in an extremely pressurized situation. One may sometimes have to pay attention to a given simplified target to retain an entity that is valuable in ways other than specified by that target alone. Under extreme performance pressure, the target of five articles does not have to measure the value of quality consciousness as long as the value is otherwise kept in mind when aiming at the target.

Customers were seen as important in distinguishing between the two facets of survival. The status of being a going concern had an internal perspective – how the company itself could survive – while worthiness had an external one – how stakeholders, particularly customers, could benefit from this survival (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Ferdous et al., 2019; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016; Sharma et al., 2014). Worth was something that customers were felt to consider valuable and worthwhile. Here this worth appeared to be the potential to function as an institutional entrepreneur (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Löhlein and Müssig, 2020) in modifying the field. Extreme pressure to survive can lead to a more profound consideration of customer needs, not only that of the survival of the entity itself.

In the present case setting, customers were at the core of the value of quality consciousness: the mission and purpose of the focus on quality was to serve the customers. However, this was not always successful. The customer needs were sometimes considered in the company in terms of what was felt to be missing in the competitor’s offering, not necessarily always from the customers’ point of view. The customers were assumed to care more about the quality of the output and less about the processes by which these customers were dealt with. This did not always hold true. Values do not automatically represent outsider views. The institutional entrepreneur (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Löhlein and Müssig, 2020) may have failed because it did not pay attention to important aspects of customer needs.

The competitor was considered as the benchmark against which the quality of the case company’s offering was being evaluated, and as the motivator for the maintenance of high quality. The competitor’s characteristics were seen as opposing, and thereby underlining the importance of the ethically perceived features of the case company. The essence of the competitor potentially crystallized the focal company purpose. The company was perceived as worthy because it was perceived as ethical. Outstripping the competition formed a clear goal for the institutional entrepreneur. Here the company aimed to function as an institutional entrepreneur in trying to induce institutional change (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Löhlein and Müssig, 2020) and to provide alternative values for the field (DiMaggio, 1988; Löhlein & Müssig, 2020, p. 2). It was also functioning as a norm entrepreneur (Alonso-Almeida et al., 2021; Andrades et al., 2024; Bebbington et al., 2012; Larrinaga et al., 2020) by noting existing contradictions between field institutions and customer values (Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Hiebl, 2018; Ko and Liu, 2021). However, it did not appear to immediately succeed in this (Chatzichristos & Nagopoulos, 2021; Alonso-Almeida et al., 2021; Nugraheni et al., 2022). Interestingly, it appeared that the quality of advertorials was improving in the field and therefore this institutional entrepreneur may have been successful after all. Failure to reach targets and to convince customers of the worthiness of the values appeared to have taken place at the level of the institutional entrepreneur itself. However, there seemed to have been success in the overall field level based on the efforts by this institutional entrepreneur. Interestingly, the fruits of this success were gathered by other actors, i.e. those who reached their targets more and thus continued to maintain their presence in the field long enough to be able to perhaps convince the customers of the associated worthiness. The consequences of the actions of institutional entrepreneurs when using a socio-technical control dyad of values and targets (Gerdin, 2020) can be quite subtle and complex.

This study contributes to the literature on the links between values and targets (Chenhall et al., 2017; Kallio et al., 2020; Kraus et al., 2017; Leotta and Ruggeri, 2022; Mo, 2022; O’Leary, 2017; Seneviratne and Hoque, 2023) and on the pressing nature of targets in crisis situations (Becker et al., 2016; Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Christensen et al., 2018; Kenno and Free, 2018; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016) by demonstrating how values and targets can together form a socio-technical control dyad (Gerdin, 2020) that addresses different aspects of organizational survival. The paper also contributes to the literature expressing concern that targets may become performative of values (Bourmistrov and Kaarbøe, 2017; Covaleski et al., 1998; Ferdous et al., 2019; Kornberger et al., 2011; Makrygiannakis and Jack, 2016; Mo, 2022; O’Dwyer and Unerman, 2008; Roberts, 2009, 2018) by showing how values and targets can function together in complex ways in times of crisis to try to ensure survival. Finally, the study contributes to the literature on institutional entrepreneurship and management control (Ahrens and Ferry, 2018; Chakhovich and Virtanen, 2023; Egan, 2014; Gooneratne and Hoque, 2016; Hyvönen et al., 2012; Kilfoyle and Richardson, 2015; Sutheewasinnon et al., 2016) by showing how institutional entrepreneurs may use values and targets for different purposes; values may be felt to assist in institutional entrepreneurship while targets may support this by maintaining the focal entity more formally compatible with existing institutions to amass resources.

This study has practical implications for management control. There is literature on the individualizing performance measurement aiming at transparency (O’Dwyer and Unerman, 2008; Roberts, 2009, 2018) for example inside accounting firms (Covaleski et al., 1998; Kornberger et al., 2011). However, it appears that on the edge of survival, selected values may also become acutely visible, representing the experienced worthiness of the entity in question. Does this imply that we should not, in practice, be worried about performance pressures, as they have the potentially positive consequences of sharpening the organizational purpose and focusing organizational members on important outsiders’ needs? The answer is no; such performance pressures can strengthen foci on both values and targets and there is no guarantee that these foci will be balanced and that immediate targets will not undermine appreciated values in specific situations. However, the study does underline the importance of paying attention to and communicating about both vital values and targets in times of distress. This is valid not only in such private and small enterprises as the case organization, but also in larger entities and even in public organizations that are also increasingly under financial duress. Notably, in public organizations, values may be a very important basis of the operations.

The study provides advice to those who want to survive in an extreme situation. Here both facets of survival could be considered. A key value could be chosen to represent worthiness. However, a key target could also be monitored to remain as a going concern. Balancing between these is likely to be demanding. Institutional entrepreneurs could also pay attention to using values in transforming institutions while retaining targets to tap into the resources provided by existing institutions. In certain other situations than in the case studied here, the use of values and targets may also be reversed: targets may help to attain change while values may assist in providing existing resources. Moreover, here targets have been acknowledged to affect values. However, values becoming performative of targets could also result in the following potentially unwanted consequences. Those targets that can technically be easily derived from values could be preferred to targets that would otherwise be needed, for example, for survival. In addition, targets that may be vital for ensuring the survival of an entity in the short term may be ignored if they are not superficially in line with this entity’s values and purposes. The study also underlines the wider societal significance of values and targets in survival. Economic targets and survival in economic terms are not the only forms of survival that may matter. There may be strong societal significance in retaining certain non-economic values. Such values may be impactful for the development of society in providing unique worth to certain stakeholders. This may also impact how society more generally considers bankruptcy; it may be perceived as a temporary stage in the journey of entrepreneurs rather than as an end point.

The study is acknowledged to have the following limitation in particular. It looks at a given company and addresses the field-level actors particularly tied to this company, not all possible field actors. This makes it demanding to profoundly theorize the connections between values, targets and institutionalization at field level and to minutely generalize such theorizations to this level. Instead, in line with the ideals of qualitative research, the study aims at generalizing into theories about values, targets and institutional entrepreneurship, in other words, at using analytic(al) generalizability (Eisenhardt, 1989; Meyer, 2001; Yin, 1984). Moreover, the creation of the teleological explanation model, or of other such abstract models, assists in potentially transferring the findings to other theoretically related contexts and thus reaching a form of generalizing in those contexts (Miles and Huberman, 1994, p. 279).

In future research values and targets could be considered from an ethical standpoint as they are both so powerful in directing actors. The ethical implications of the actions and behavior to which values and targets incite could be paid more attention. The specific preconditions and implications of sharpening the organizational purpose with performance pressures are also important fields of study. Future research may also investigate the interaction of values and targets in field contexts that are different from the potentially declining media industry, for example, the technology sector or the services sector, which may be increasing in size and importance. Given the great and potentially increasing importance of small companies, their attempts at institutional entrepreneurship under pressure are also relevant subjects for study. Such issues could be researched with added field-level data to emphasize wider perspectives and implications. All this would enhance our understanding of the future developments of institutional entrepreneurship in important fields.

The author is grateful to the Editor and the anonymous Reviewers for their valuable comments that have clearly helped to improve the quality of the manuscript. The author thanks the Research Council of Finland, the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Research Fund of Savings Banks for their funding of the research upon which this paper is based. The author would also like to thank Chris Chapman, Wai Fong Chua, Jeff Everett, Lukas Goretzki, Teemu Malmi, Virginia Mattila, Sven Modell, Jan Mouritsen, Norio Sawabe, Hiroyuki Suzuki, Eija Vinnari and the participants of the research seminars at the Turku School of Economics and the Conference on New Directions in Management Accounting, Brussels, Belgium, in 2016, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. A special thank you is due to all those who kindly agreed to contribute their valuable time to this research project as interviewees.

None of the funding sources had any role in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Interviews

Investing company, manager 9.10.20131h

AdvertCo, chairman of the board 20.2.20142h

AdvertCo, CEO 2.4.20141 h 30 min

AdvertCo, editor and graphic designer 30.4.20141 h 10 min

AdvertCo, producer 30.4.201430 min

AdvertCo, former producer 28.5.20141 h 25 min

AdvertCo, former board member, owner and employee 30.5.20142 h 15 min

Freelance journalist 11.6.201455 min

Freelance journalist 11.6.20141 h 20 min

AdvertCo, former producer 16.9.20142 h 15 min

Freelance photographer 23.9.201455 min

Freelance journalist 30.9.20141 h

Customer representative 2.10.201430 min

AdvertCo, former producer 8.10.20141 h 15 min

Publishing house, marketing director 14.10.201450 min

Customer representative 16.10.201440 min

Investing company, junior consultant 21.10.20141 h 15 min

Customer representative 3.11.201425 min

Investing company, manager 5.11.201440 min and 13.11.201435 min

Customer representative 17.11.201440 min

AdvertCo, former producer 3.12.201455 min

AdvertCo, board member 22.1.20151 h 15 min

Archival data

Magazines prepared by AdvertCo

Magazines prepared by two other competitors

Other magazines distributed in connection with the major magazines

AdvertCo web site, competitors’ web sites

Financial and employment data about AdvertCo