How confidence in compliance with the status quo creates opportunities for change

This study explores how the logic of confidence can help non-compliant organizations thrive.
It argues that when a local community presents public signs of conformity to broader social
norms, audience members tend to overlook anomalies within that community. Organizations
whose identities diverge from the dominant type can survive off the radar and may even be
rewarded by the audiences based on their community membership. Drawing from a unique
dataset of Korean neo-Confucian academies from 1623 to 1800 and using a competing risk
analysis of grants of royal charters, this study reveals that non-compliant academies – those
teaching principles divergent from the hegemonic doctrine – were most likely to be chartered,
when they operated in a community whose collegial activities conformed to Confucian
scholarly norms. This finding has implications for understanding the antecedents of
institutional change as well as the role of audience in category violations, and it constructs a
novel framework to better understand organizational diversity in a field