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In this article, we take stock of the institutional logics perspective and highlight opportunities for new scholarship. While we celebrate the growth and generativity of the literature on institutional logics, we also note that there has been a troubling tendency in recent work to use logics as analytical tools, feeding disquiet about reification and reductionism. Seeding a broader scholarly agenda that addresses such weaknesses in the literature, we highlight nascent efforts that aim to more systematically understand institutional logics as complex, dynamic phenomena in their own right. In doing so, we argue for more research that probes how logics cohere and endure by unpacking the role of values, the centrality of practice, and the governance dynamics of institutional logics and their orders. Furthermore, we encourage bridging the study of institutional logics with various literatures, including ethnomethodology, phenomenology, professions, elites, world society, and the old institutionalism, to enhance progress in these directions.

Institutions are often taken for granted, serving as backgrounded typifications that guide our interactions. Instead of considering this taken-for-grantedness as a natural, self-sustaining feature ...

In his recent paper, Professor Mutch (2018) sets out a new, thought-provoking framework for theorizing societal logics, building upon the insights of cultural historians. He proposes that“they are each derived from some aspect of the relations between people and their social and natural worlds, as demonstrated through the work of historians to be enduring features of human existence” (247). Mutch argues that the specificities of practices may vary across time and place,but that the same nine societal logics remain; defined by “perennial features of our embodied relationship with the world” (247). We disagree. Although we are aligned with Mutch in our enthusiasm about the historical turn in institutionalism (Kipping & Üsdiken, 2014; Suddaby,Foster, & Mills, 2014), we take a very different set of lessons from history, and from historians.

This paper is based on a presentation at a conference in 2019, which called on participants to explore the merits of more practice-theoretical conceptualizations of institutions and institutional logics. The main body of the paper is a lightly edited version of the presentation, which explores three interwoven topics: First, why an avowedly practice-theoretic institutionalism might be analytically fertile; second, what horizons might be generated for institutional logicians by an intensified embrace of practice theory; and third, what these analytic potentialities might entail for the “peopling” of institutional theory. The tone and purpose of the paper are exploratory; though provisional conclusions are elaborated in an analytic epilogue. Purposefully provocative claims include that institutional logics may possess some form of intentionality, or a distinctive orientation toward the world, and that such orientations may differentially encourage jurisdictional expansion.

Talk of “macrofoundations” helps foreground the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions – dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of microfoundations. Highlighting these aspects of institutions in turn opens intriguing lines of inquiry into institutional reproduction and change, lived experience of institutions, and tectonic shifts in institutional configurations. However, there is a twist: taking these themes seriously ultimately challenges any naive division of micro and macro, and undermines the claim of either to a genuinely foundational role in social analysis. The authors propose an alternative “optometric” imagery – positioning the micro and the macro as arrays of associated lenses, which bring certain things into focus at the cost of others. The authors argue that this imagery should not only encourage analytic reflexivity (“a more optometric institutionalism”) but also draw attention to the use of such lenses in everyday life, as an underexplored but critical phenomenon for institutional theory and research (“an institutionalist optometry”).

This papers develops four amendments to current COVID-19 public health policy using a cultural network approaches to community dynamics. As social scientists, we do not claim to be health experts or epidemiologists, but, based on our knowledge and the materials examined in this paper, we maintain that policymakers would benefit from: 1) interventions aimed at flattening the curve that take into account differences in social dynamics across communities by incorporating local social unit network interactions; 2) turning their attention to specific city and community dynamics to help them customize public health interventions; 3) looking downstream from the “hammer” phase to the “dance” phase of contagion to consider how interactions in and across communities may play into, or help undercut, the second wave; and 4) crafting directives and information provisions that take into account (and build off) both shared rumors and rational information search by social groups. We bolster these claims with a mix of historical examples from the Spanish Flu Epidemic, current case examples in the media on health portals concerning the COVID-19 Crisis, and a crude simulation of cultural network contagion, on which our group has begun work. We wish to share our evolving paper as early as possible in the hopes that some readers will find it useful and customize their own work – and policies – around COVID-19 accordingly.

The core goal of the “micro-foundational” agenda appears to be less an institutionalism founded in the micro, or reduced to the micro, and more some form of integrative institutionalism: that is, an institutionalism that does justice to the perpetual, co-constitutive interplay of local activities (the micro) and trans-local patterns (the macro). In this chapter, thus, the authors argue for a conscious, explicit embrace of integrative institutionalism; and of the broader agenda that this terminology opens up. Based on this overdue rewording the authors highlight additional problems and possibilities – providing a constructive reformulation and elaboration of the “micro-foundational” agenda as it currently stands.

Institutions and identity are two of the most popular domains of scholarship within the academy, perhaps because they have such varied and important consequences for societies, organizations, and i...

Faced with massive increases in the volume and velocity of data, and aided by vast increases in computing power, businesses are investing ever more extensively in analytic tools and techniques: fro...

We examine the role of history in organization studies by theorizing how collective memory shapes societal institutions and the logics that govern them. Rather than a historical ideal types, we propose that societal logics are historically constituted cultural structures, generated through the collective memory of historical events. We then develop a theoretical model to explain how the representation, storage, and retrieval of collective memory lead to the emergence of societal logics. In turn, societal logics shape memory-making, and the reproduction and reconstruction of history itself. To illustrate our theory we discuss the rise of the corporate logic in the United States. In addition, we identify two sources of discontinuity that can disrupt this memory-making process and create notable disjunctures in the evolution of societal logics. We conclude by discussing how changes in collective memory and the historical trajectory of societal logics shape organizational forms and practices.

History plays an indispensable but often underestimated role in the lives of institutions, organizations, and individuals. While many organizational theorists seem to be essentially ahistorical, or...

Data analytics is upon us, and appears to be spreading. Analytic technologies and techniques are increasingly seen as a source of competitive advantage, across both industries and countries. In the...

Sociologists often treat groups and organizations as if they had collective intentionality – that is, a collective impetus for action that exists semi-independently of the members of the group. At present, however, we lack a sound understanding of how collective intentionality is achieved or maintained. Furthermore, although organizations provide a well-defined and distinctive setting for an empirical and theoretical investigation of collective intentionality, organizational intentionality in its own right has received little attention. In this chapter, we seek to address the relationship between collective intentionality, organizational identity, and organizational decision-making, using the potentially powerful method of meta-ethnography: the comparison, contrast, and synthesis of multiple ethnographies.

Institutional research often seems to contain an implicit assumption that actors are capable of understanding institutional prescriptions and logics without difficulty; and that institutional presc...

Institutional logics have sometimes been characterised as relatively static formations; even though they are subject to both exogenous and endogenous sources of change. In this paper, we seek to co...