What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Microfoundations?

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 26. Organizational Theory

Abstract

The growing interest in microfoundations of institutions has been one of the significant developments in institutional theory. The broad microfoundational turn in institutional theory can be gleaned from a casual perusal of major publications in the 2010s and in many of the review chapters in the 2nd edition of The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. The microfoundational turn in institutional theory, evidently part of a larger movement in organization and management theory, is a surprise given the theoretical tradition’s original insight was to account for the macro, institutional influences on lower-level units. Even more surprising is the extent to which the call for microfoundations has gone on without really clarifying what we as institutionalists mean by microfoundations. As a result, 10 years after Powell and Colyvas’s first Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism chapter on the microfoundations of institutional theory, we are still “opening the black box.” Perhaps some reflections on the usefulness or purpose of establishing the “microfoundations” of institutional theory may be in order. In this paper, we first discuss the general issues in microfoundations and then what we as institutionalists in particular talk about when we talk about microfoundations. We show the emergence of two different approaches to microfoundations in institutional theory. We speculate on the necessity of elaborating on microfoundations of institutional processes and suggest how these approaches could be deployed to deepen multi-level thinking in institutional theory.

Authors

• Hokyu Hwang, UNSW Sydney

• Jeannette Anastasia Colyvas, Northwestern University