Institutional Logics, Contradiction, and Symbolic Power: Theorizing Ambivalence and Confidence in the Organic Foods Sector

• In Event: 1184 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 10. Institutions and Institutional Change

Abstract

This draft paper moves towards the development of a novel sociological framework for understanding ambivalence, which I define as an inability to adjudicate or select between competing and incompatible goals or perspectives. I conceptualize ambivalence as a multilevel phenomenon that may be distributed within organizational fields in ways that are both uneven and patterned. After reviewing classical, structural-functionalist accounts of ambivalence, I turn to theoretical and empirical work within the institutional logics approach. I argue that, when tempered with Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic power, the institutional logics approach illuminates how ambivalence is produced in cognitive- emotional sensemaking, in interactions, and in organizational structure and design, as well as why ambivalence may be concentrated within certain settings in organizational fields and absent from other settings. I use interview data from a study of the U.S. organic foods sector, which is organized according to contradictory institutional logics of expansion and transformation, to flesh out the argument. Finally, I consider how sociological attention to ambivalence may contribute to understandings of institutional effects and political processes in organizational fields.

Author

• Michael Haedicke, Drake University