Putting the Cart before the Horse: Developing Institutional Logics as Meanings, Practices, and Theorizations

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 16: Theorizing Organizations

Abstract

Much of the existing literature has treated institutional logics as an analytical tool, with limited empirical evidence about how they come to be (Lounsbury et al., 2021). Yet in the context of interstitial issue fields—a type of organizational field that develops around a centering societal issue—how symbolic constructions and materials practice become interlinked into a lasting institutional logic has great import for how the centering issue is addressed. In this study, we mobilize institutional work to examine how cross-sector actors purposively developed the elemental components of an institutional logic and how they worked to glue those components together through theorization. Using ethnographic methods, we observed working meetings over two years and collected meeting artifacts. We found that meaning and practice work happened through mostly independent and qualitatively different processes and did not follow expected orders of operation. Moreover, theorization work was varied and partial. This study provides novel evidence on institutional logics and IIF development in real time.

Authors

• Lara Altman, Northwestern University

• Jeannette Anastasia Colyvas, Northwestern University