Work in Progress – please do not cite without permission of the author 1 st . oikos Young Scholars Organizations Academy 2011 Organizations and Cultural Sustainability The Institutionalization of Quebec Community Daycare Centers: Sustaining Values through Innovative Resistance This is a work in progress. Please do not cite without permission of the author. Marcos Barros HEC Montreal (Quebec, Canada) marcos.barros@hec.ca Abstract All around the world many traditional community organizations have faced institutional demands for increasing professionalization and efficiency in order to face market competition or receive government funds. While many advocate that these changes enable their survival, others claim that community organizations loose their fundamental values during this process. Our article presents the findings of a study conducted in one of these organizations, Quebec Community Daycare Centers (QCDC), that underwent a slow but enduring process of institutionalization led mainly by its provincial government. Our goal was to understand how organizational members reacted to the arrival of new institutional logics fostered by these new social demands and if and how they maintained their original ideals. We will present the findings of a qualitative case study in a QCDC working in an underprivileged neighbourhood in Montreal (Canada). Our research revealed resistant actions that either protected or adapted old values to new practices. On the one hand, actors applied an isolation strategy that, through many legitimacy tatics or newly created rules, tools, or practices, allow them to prevent the entrance of different logics inside their workplace. On the other hand, QCDC members also were capable of actively fuse old and new logics in order to maintain former values and adapt to new social demands. We propose that this “innovative resistance”, through isolation or hybridization, is a important dynamic that could explain and, eventually, help community organizations to survive while keeping their core beliefs.