The organizational fields’ literature has predominantly focused on cases of successful change, but paid much less attention to how change failure unfolds. Extrapolating from the failure of introducing public-private partnerships in Kuwait, we suggest the concept of institutional power work that explains how actors mobilize power to affect change within fields. We present three power strategies of manipulating, stalling and attacking that circumvent change to protect interests, and further delineate how these strategies produce two enduring mechanisms of institutional control: systemic paralysis and systemic deterrence that can lead to change failure. We contribute to organization theory by identifying the power strategies and mechanisms underpinning the interplay between interests and change failure.
