ACADEMIC PAPER Gradual institutional change and media influence: The case of Petrobras in Brazil Mayla C. Costa 1 | Gabriela A. de Passos 1 | Arnaldo L. Ryngelblum 2 1 Accounting Department, Federal University of Parana, Curitiba, Brazil 2 Business Department, Universidade Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil Correspondence Mayla Costa, Accounting Department, Federal University of Parana, Lothario Meissner, 632, Jardim Botânico, Curitiba 80210‐170, Brazil. Email: mayla@ufpr.br Funding information Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cien- tífico e Tecnológico, Grant/Award Number: 421753/2016‐1 The media as a social actor emits discourses that reflect in the institutional context, influencing the process of institutionalization of existing practices. One view about the media in organizational studies is that it is a mechanism of organizational complexity reduction, and in this way, it is the focus of the managers' attention to certain aspects of the environment, which has implications for the way that everyday tasks are accomplished in organizations. In this sense, an interest has emerged to understand how the dissemination of information about the acquisition of a refinery in Pasadena, Texas, by Petrobras was the embryo of an international corruption scandal that compromised the organization's image but was also responsible for the emergence of new organizational practices. The data and information used are from secondary sources: the newspapers and magazines with the largest national circulations. The findings reveal that the media sought to influence individuals by elaborating its understanding of the context without being consistently coherent over time. We propose an analytical model of how the media can act in the gradual change of organizational and actors' practices. 1 | INTRODUCTION Organizational institutionalism was historically considered as a limited theory of action, usually an effort to understand how meanings are taken for granted in organizational arenas (Fligstein, 1997; Leca, Battilana, & Boxenbaum, 2008). Most of the studies presupposed that the negotiating and sharing of meanings were responsible for limiting or determining which behaviour made sense to the social actors. In order to bring action back to theory, however, researchers had proposed the institutional entrepreneurship model (Fligstein, 1997), institutional work (Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2011), or institutional logic, which influence the organizational identities and social practices (Costa & Mello, 2017; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). The model proposed by Fligstein (1997), for example, is based on the rationality of the individual actors and on economic game theory, but action results from the type of social skill that enterprising actors have, “in the process of building and reproducing an organizational field, better understood through institutional theory” (p. 397). In this way, the author emphasizes the importance of the social skills of these strategic actors, whom he considers institutional entrepreneurs; through the actions they take and the power they exert, they lead to the production or reproduction of the current arrangements. In this paper, it is proposed that strategically rationalized action can be examined at a mesosocial level as we consider individuals as microlevel and institutions as macrolevel, and then we conceive the media as social actor in the mesolevel. Members of the media are con- sidered both organizations and strategic actors that participate in the process of construction and reproduction of current practices, as well as in the maintenance and gradual change of those practices. The media exerts influence not only on the reputation of organizations but also on the very notion that instrumental rationality permeating capitalist societies and the business world must undergo relevant changes (Pirson, Gangahar, & Wilson, 2016). This position is in agree- ment with Habermas (2012a), albeit with a distinct epistemological basis: “It is considered that there is still a conceptual universe refined enough to deal with the integrity of what is destroyed by instrumental reason” (p. 671), and it is considered in our work that the media is a central actor in the process of change. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that the media has been playing a fundamental role in the institutional environment and on the Received: 8 April 2019 Accepted: 24 April 2019 DOI: 10.1002/pa.1969 J Public Affairs. 2019;e1969. https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1969 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1 of 10