Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, Pakistan
I draw on a detailed case study of a popular political party in Pakistan, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), to first highlight how its amateur politician founders skillfully employed distributed institutional entrepreneurship and emotive and performative work; and drew upon norms, values and affiliations both internal and external to the contested field of Pakistani politics to legitimize a new form of party organization in Pakistan. Second, I highlight how the field incumbents, the political notables, in the second half of the PTI’s history, deployed their own suite of institutional persuasion work to infiltrate the PTI organization, and undermined the legitimacy of the new organizational form by acting from both inside and outside the party. In doing so this paper highlights how the creation of new organizational forms in a contested field differs from the creation of new organizational forms in both established and emerging fields; the factors which determine which of the two parties – the challengers or the incumbents – are successful in such new organizational form creation battles; and the usefulness of undertaking ‘unconventional’ organizational research for not only pushing the frontiers of organization theory, but also for making it more relevant to theorists, policymakers, and the general public alike.