Institutions And Organizations: A Process View 019884381X, 9780198843818

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Institutions and Organizations: A Process View......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
List of Figures......Page 8
List of Tables and Boxes......Page 10
List of Contributors......Page 12
Series Editorial Structure......Page 18
Endorsements......Page 20
1.1 Introduction......Page 24
1.2 A Strong Process View of Institutions......Page 25
1.3 The Value Added of a Strong View on Institutions......Page 26
1.3.1 Using a Strong Process View to Rekindle Institutional Theory......Page 27
1.3.2 Rethinking Institutional Theory through a Process Lens......Page 29
1.4.2 The Dynamics of Institutional Logics......Page 30
1.5 Concluding Remarks......Page 31
References......Page 32
2: Working Institutions......Page 35
2.1 Chicago School Institutionalism......Page 37
2.2 Institutional Entrepreneurship......Page 42
2.3 Institutional Work......Page 44
2.4 Inhabited Institutions......Page 46
2.5 Working Institutions......Page 48
References......Page 51
3.1 Introduction......Page 56
3.2 A Phenomenological Perspective on Institutions......Page 57
3.2.1 What is an Institution? A Process- and Action-Based Definition......Page 58
3.2.2 Institutions as Collective Accomplishments......Page 60
3.2.3 Processes Everywhere......Page 62
3.4 Instead of a Conclusion: The Ontological Status of Institutions......Page 63
References......Page 64
4.1 Introduction......Page 65
4.2 A Brief and Partial History of Doing Institutional Analysis without Institutional Theory......Page 67
4.3 Four Keys for Doing Institutional Analysis without Institutional Theory......Page 75
4.4 Conclusion......Page 78
References......Page 79
5: Stories of (and Instead of) Process......Page 84
5.1 Stories......Page 86
5.2.1 Health Disparities and Biological Difference......Page 87
5.2.2 Stories of the Categories......Page 90
5.2.3 Stories Outlast the Categories......Page 91
5.3 Employment Reform......Page 94
5.4 Stories and Process......Page 96
References......Page 99
6.1 Philosophical Sorting......Page 102
6.2 Human Activities in Heidegger and Mead......Page 106
6.3 Activities and Lives......Page 108
6.4 Practices and Organizations......Page 113
6.5 The Practice Plenum......Page 117
References......Page 121
7.1 Introduction......Page 123
7.2 Organizational Fields, Processes, and Networks......Page 124
7.3 Process Research Focus......Page 128
7.4.1 Network Features......Page 129
7.5 Network Dynamics: Process of Changing Structure......Page 130
7.6 Field-Level Networks and Processes......Page 131
7.7 A Field-Level Process Approach Related to Network Research......Page 135
7.8 Discussion: Bringing Process into Structure......Page 136
References......Page 138
8.1 Introduction......Page 141
8.2 Individual and Intersubjective Interpretation of Design-Based Cues......Page 142
8.3 The Multiplicity of Design-Based Cues......Page 145
8.4 Time and the Inherent Dynamism of Design-Based Cues......Page 147
8.5.1 The Dynamic Interpretation of Design-Based Cues and Processes of Institutionalization......Page 150
8.5.2 Theoretical Contributions......Page 151
8.5.3 Future Research Avenues......Page 153
References......Page 154
9: The Long Walk to Aleppo: Institutional Myths, Inhabited Institutions, and Ideals in the Real World......Page 157
9.1 The Civil March for Aleppo......Page 159
9.2 Institutional Myths, Inhabited Institutions, and Ideals in the Real World......Page 168
9.3 Implications for Institutional Theorizing......Page 173
References......Page 175
10.1 Introduction......Page 177
10.2 Discourse, Risk, and Translation......Page 178
10.3 Discourse and Institutional Change......Page 180
10.4 Changes in the Field of Chemistry......Page 182
10.5 Green Chemistry and the Discourse of Risk......Page 184
10.5.2 Creating New Conditions of Possibility......Page 185
10.6 Organizational Risks......Page 187
10.7 Creating New Conditions of Possibility......Page 189
10.8 Conclusion......Page 190
References......Page 192
11.1 Introduction......Page 197
11.2 Corporate Law and Litigation against Company Directors......Page 199
11.3.1 A Practice Perspective......Page 200
11.3.2 An Institutional Logics Perspective......Page 201
11.4 Business Judgment and Judicial Practice......Page 202
11.5 Data Collection and Analysis......Page 203
11.6.1 Facts......Page 204
CREDITOR-REGARDING LOGIC......Page 205
DIRECTOR’S BUSINESS JUDGMENT LOGIC......Page 206
11.6.3 Judicial Practice......Page 209
11.6.4 Logics, Practices, and Links to Institutional Societal Orders......Page 211
11.7 Discussion......Page 213
References......Page 215
12.1 Introduction......Page 217
12.2.1 From Diffusion to “Diffusion cum Adaptation”......Page 219
12.2.2 The “Diffusion” of Management Innovations......Page 220
12.3.1 Best Practice: A Management Practice in Motion......Page 222
THE SEGMENTED AND DECENTRALIZED NATURE OF THE ITALIAN PUBLIC SECTOR......Page 223
12.3.3 Data Collection......Page 224
12.3.4 Data Analysis......Page 226
12.4.2 Best Practice in Italy: An Unsystematic Arrival from Many Sources......Page 227
12.4.3 Best Practice in Italy: From “Best” to “Good” Practice......Page 229
12.4.4 Adaptation Patterns: Inventories and Networking Spaces......Page 230
12.4.5 Adaptation Process and Positions in the Public-Sector Field......Page 233
ADAPTATION PROCESSES IN THE CENTER......Page 234
TWO CO-EXISTING PROCESSES OF ADAPTATION......Page 235
12.5.1 Qualifying Adaptation: When and How Does It Happen?......Page 236
12.5.2 Adaptation Patterns and Field Configurations......Page 238
12.5.3 Towards a Framework of Adaptation Dynamics......Page 239
12.6 Conclusions......Page 242
References......Page 244
13.1 Introduction......Page 250
13.2 Data as a Fundamental, Objective Resource......Page 251
13.3 Conceptions of Data in the Organizational Literature......Page 252
13.4 Unpacking Data in Practice......Page 253
13.4.1 Methods......Page 254
13.4.2 Data in Intensive Care......Page 255
13.5 The Nature of Data in the CIS......Page 259
13.6 Constituting Data......Page 263
13.7.1 Data as Process......Page 266
13.7.2 “Data in Principle” and “Data in Practice”......Page 268
13.7.3 Implications of a Processual Conception of Data......Page 269
13.8 Conclusion......Page 270
References......Page 271
Index......Page 274

Citation preview

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Institutions and Organizations

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Perspectives on Process Organization Studies Series Editors: Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas

Perspectives on Process Organization Studies is an annual series, linked to the International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, and is dedicated to the development of an understanding of organizations and organizing at large as processes in the making. This series brings together contributions from leading scholars, which focus on seeing dynamically evolving activities, interactions, and events as important aspects of organized action, rather than static structures and fixed templates. Volume 1: Process, Sensemaking, and Organizing Editors: Tor Hernes and Sally Maitlis Volume 2: Constructing Identity in and around Organizations Editors: Majken Schultz, Steve Maguire, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 3: How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies Editors: Paul R. Carlile, Davide Nicolini, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 4: Language and Communication at Work: Discourse, Narrativity, and Organizing Editors: François Cooren, Eero Vaara, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 5: The Emergence of Novelty in Organizations Editors: Raghu Garud, Barbara Simpson, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 6: Organizational Routines: How They Are Created, Maintained, and Changed Editors: Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Claus Rerup, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 7: Skillful Performance: Enacting Capabilities, Knowledge, Competence, and Expertise in Organizations Editors: Jörgen Sandberg, Linda Rouleau, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 8: Dualities, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizational Life Editors: Moshe Farjoun, Wendy Smith, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 9: Institutions and Organizations: A Process View Editors: Trish Reay, Tammar B. Zilber, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas

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Institutions and Organizations A Process View Edited by Trish Reay, Tammar B. Zilber, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930210 ISBN 978–0–19–884381–8 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Contents

List of Figures List of Tables and Boxes List of Contributors Series Editorial Structure Endorsements

1. Introduction: Institutions and Organizations: A Process View Trish Reay, Tammar B. Zilber, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas 2. Working Institutions Stephen R. Barley 3. A Processual View on Institutions: A Note from a Phenomenological Institutional Perspective Renate E. Meyer

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4. On Doing Institutional Analysis without Institutional Theory Tim Hallett

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5. Stories of (and Instead of) Process Francesca Polletta

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6. Processes, Life, and the Practice Plenum Theodore R. Schatzki

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7. Bringing Process into Structure: Combining Network Analyses with Process Lenses to Explore Field-Level Evolution and Changes Amalya L. Oliver 8. The Interpretation of Design-Based Cues: A Processual Approach Micki Eisenman, Michal Frenkel, and Varda Wasserman 9. The Long Walk to Aleppo: Institutional Myths, Inhabited Institutions, and Ideals in the Real World Mark de Rond and Tim Hallett

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Contents

10. The Discourse of Risk and Processes of Institutional Change: The Case of Green Chemistry Steve Maguire and Cynthia Hardy

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11. Making and Regulating Business Judgment: Judicial Practice, Logics, and Orders Terry McNulty and Abigail Stewart

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12. Systematic Heterogeneity in the Adaptation Process of Management Innovations: Insights from the Italian Public Sector Davide Nicolini, Andrea Lippi, and Pedro Monteiro 13. Data as Process: From Objective Resource to Contingent Performance Matthew Jones, Alan F. Blackwell, Karl Prince, Sallyanne Meakins, Alexander Simpson, and Alain Vuylsteke Index

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List of Figures

2.1. 1986 diagram, from Barley, 1986: 108

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2.2. Nested institutions and the matrix of social worlds

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2.3. Diagram from Barley and Tolbert, 1997

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2.4. Strategies for institutional work

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2.5. Work process of public affairs professionals after Kaynak and Barley, forthcoming

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7.1. Field-level changes in networks over time—an illustration

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9.1.

Carrying CMFA flags while walking through Serbia. April 2017, © Mark de Rond

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9.2.

Cooking eggs for breakfast. Serbia, April 2017, © Mark de Rond

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9.3.

Making breakfast after a night on the beach. Thessaloniki, Greece, April 2017, © Mark de Rond

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9.4. Still asleep early one morning in a hay barn. Serbia, March 2017, © Mark de Rond

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9.5. Deciding on the CMFA’s goals during the “summit.” Thessaloniki, April 2017, © Mark de Rond

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12.1. Number of entries for term “best practice” in Factiva

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12.2. Number of best practice projects in Italy according to our survey

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12.3. A model of adaptation dynamics

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13.1. The becoming of data

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13.2. The making of data

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List of Tables and Boxes

Tables 12.1. Data sources

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12.2.

Characteristics of adaptation patterns

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12.3.

Distribution of adaptation patterns across cases

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Boxes 10.1. Changing practices: the example of plastics

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Changing practices: the example of Bisphenol A

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Example of best practice inventory

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12.2.

Example of best practice networking space

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List of Contributors

Stephen R. Barley is the Christian A. Felipe Professor of Technology Management at the College of Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. He holds an AB. in English from the College of William and Mary, an M.Ed. from Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. in Organization Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the Richard Weiland Emeritus Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Barley co-founded and co-directed the Center for Work, Technology and Organization at Stanford’s School of Engineering from 1994 to 2015. He was editor of Administrative Science Quarterly from 1993 to 1997 and the founding editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review from 2002 to 2004. Alan F. Blackwell is Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge. After an early career as an artificial intelligence engineer working mainly in factory automation and transport, further academic study in comparative religion, performing arts and psychology led to his current research interests in the broadest questions of technology in society. His group is dedicated to action research, designing new technologies as experimental social interventions, working in the field to understand contexts in which the Sustainable Development Goals present challenges to prevailing technocratic imaginations. He is Research Director of the Cambridge Global Challenges initiative, Co-director of the Crucible Network for Research in Interdisciplinary Design, a board member of Cambridge Enterprise, and a trustee of the Centre for Global Equality. Mark de Rond is Professor of Organizational Ethnography at Judge Business School, Cambridge University. He studies people by living with them under similar conditions so as to understand how they experience, and develop meaningful relations to, the world around them. Aside from the peace activists that feature in his chapter, his fieldwork has included stints with war surgeons in Helmand (2009–11), a Cambridge Boat Race crew (2006–8) and an “enactive ethnography” of rowing the length of the Amazon River (2013). His current fieldwork revolves around online child sexual exploitation and, specifically, the phenomenon of pedophile hunting. Micki Eisenman is Senior Lecturer in the Organizational Behavior and Strategy groups at the Hebrew University’s Jerusalem School of Business and Director of the Asper Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Her work has appeared in the Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Studies, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Human Relations, and the Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship. She was awarded first place in the 2004 INFORMS Organization Science Dissertation Proposal competition and her work was nominated for the

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List of Contributors Academy of Management Review’s Best Paper of 2013, Academy of Management’s William H. Newman Award for Outstanding Dissertation-Based Research, and the Managerial and Organization Cognition Division’s Best Student Paper award. Additionally, Dr. Eisenman is a regular reviewer for leading management journals and serves on the board of the Academy of Management Review. Michal Frenkel is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published extensively on organizational aesthetics, center-periphery relations in organization studies, international management, gender, ethnicity, race, and religiosity in and around organizations. Her papers have appeared in the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Organization, and many others. She has been a visiting fellow at the Harvard Center for European Studies, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and at Smith College. She serves on the editorial boards of Organization Studies and Sociological Theory. Tim Hallett is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. He is most known for his efforts to develop “inhabited institutionalism” (American Sociological Review, 2010, Theory and Society, 2006, with Marc Ventresca), and his research on symbolic power, organizational culture, and the micro-politics of schools (Social Psychology Quarterly, 2007, Sociological Theory, 2003). His current research develops an inhabited institutional approach to understanding professional education, based on a two-year ethnographic study of a Masters of Public Affairs program. Cynthia Hardy is a Laureate Professor in Management at the University of Melbourne and Professor at Cardiff Business School. Her research interests revolve around discourse, power, and risk. She has published over sixty journal articles and ten books, including the Handbook of Organization Studies, which won the George R. Terry Book Award, and the Handbook of Organizational Discourse, which won Outstanding Book at the National Communication Association. She is co-founder of the International Centre for Research in Organizational Discourse, Strategy and Change, and was recently awarded the Trailblazer of the Year award by the Organization and Management Theory division of the Academy of Management. Matthew Jones is Reader in Information Systems at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. His work focuses on the relationship between information technology and organizational and social change. The main focus of his research in recent years has been in the healthcare sector, particularly acute hospitals, but he has previously undertaken studies in the press and broadcasting media, management consultancy, and the photographic industry. His research tends to involve engaged fieldwork in organizations and he has published on methodological and theoretical issues in such research. Ann Langley is Professor of Management at HEC Montréal, Canada and holder of the chair in strategic management in pluralistic settings. Her research focuses on strategic change, interprofessional collaboration, and the practice of strategy in complex organizations. In 2013, she was co-guest editor with Clive Smallman, Haridimos Tsoukas, and Andrew Van de Ven of a special research forum of the Academy of Management Journal on Process Studies of Change in Organizations and Management. She is also co-editor

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List of Contributors of the journal Strategic Organization, and co-editor with Haridimos Tsoukas of the book series Perspectives on Process Organization Studies published with Oxford University Press. She is Adjunct Professor at the Université de Montréal and University of Gothenburg. Andrea Lippi is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Florence and Scientific Coordinator of Public Policy at the National School of Administration (SNA - Italian Central Government) in Rome. His interests include public policy and policy evaluation, public administration reforms, and local governance. Recent publications include “How Policy Instruments Are Chosen: Patterns of Decision Makers’ Choices” (Policy Sciences, 2017, with G. Capano) and Local Public Services in Times of Austerity across Mediterranean Europe (2018, edited with T. Tsekos). Steve Maguire is Professor of Strategy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship and Fellow of Multidisciplinary Innovation at the University of Sydney Business School. His research focuses on technological and institutional change driven by the emergence of novel risks to human health and the environment. He has published over forty peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and conference proceedings, as well as four edited volumes. His scholarship has earned numerous awards and distinctions, including the 2014 Page Prize for Integration of Sustainability Issues into Business Curricula and the 2010 Greif Research Impact Award. Terry McNulty is Professor of Management and Corporate Governance at the University of Liverpool Management School. His research interests cover processes of power, influence, and accountability in corporate governance. His work about boards, directors, and other actors involved in governance has been published by scholarly journals, policy makers, and practitioner organizations. Sallyanne Meakins is Senior Clinical Data Manager at Royal Papworth Hospital, Papworth Everard, Cambridge. Renate E. Meyer is Professor of Organization Studies at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business. She is also Professor at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School and Co-Director of the Research Institute for Urban Management and Governance at WU Vienna. Her research focuses on meaning structures and she has recently studied structural forms of institutional pluralism, institutions as multimodal accomplishments, novel organizational forms, and patterns of management ideas mostly in areas of urban governance challenges such as open government, sharing economy, or collaborative governance. Renate is a senior editor of Organization Studies. Pedro Monteiro is currently a post-doctoral fellow at EMLYON Business School in France. He is an organizational ethnographer interested in bureaucracy and formal organizational structures and their implications for cross-expertise collaboration, learning, innovation, and knowledge work. He is the co-founder of the Talking about Organizations podcast which broadcasts ideas from mostly classic organizational scholarship to a wide audience. He has published in international journals and handbooks. He recently received the Grigor McClelland Award and the Academy of Management’s Louis Pondy Award for his doctoral work.

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List of Contributors Davide Nicolini is Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School where he co-directs the IKON Research Centre and co-ordinates the Practice, Process and Institution Research Programme. In the past he has held positions and visiting appointments at the University of Oslo, the Tavistock Institute in London, ESADE in Barcelona, and the Universities of Trento and Bergamo in Italy. His current research focuses on the development of the practice-based approach and its application to phenomena such as expertise, managerial knowing and attention, collaboration, safety, and technological innovation in organizations. He is also interested in the refinement and promotion of processual, relational, and materialist research methods. He has used these approaches to study healthcare organizations, managerial work, construction sites, factories, public organizations, cybersecurity, pharmacies, and scientific labs. Amalya L. Oliver is Full Professor in the sociology of innovation, networks, and entrepreneurship at the Department of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her current studies focus on knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial organizations and their networks, innovation in general, and in the specific context of social entrepreneurship, city innovation, ethnic entrepreneurship, and the factors that are associated with innovation in peripheral regions. She has published in Organization Science, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Inquiry, Journal of Management Studies, Social Studies of Science, Minerva, and Research Policy among others. She also published three books: Networks for Learning and Knowledge Creation in Biotechnology (2009); Fraud and Misconduct in Research: Detection, Investigation, and Organizational Response (2017, with Beh-Yehuda); and Social Leaders in Israel (2011, with Zilber and De-shalit). Francesca Polletta is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (2002), It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (2006), and editor, with Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, of Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (2001). She studies social movements, culture in politics, and institutional experiments in radical democracy, and is completing a manuscript on how imagined relationships shape moral action. Karl Prince is Director of Knowledge Innovation at Cambridge Digital Innovation, Cambridge Judge Business School and Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge where his focus is on developing research on digital innovation and advancing the translational impact of such research. His research interests include the dynamics of innovation, digital innovation, and information systems more broadly. He also teaches on these topics on various programs. He has previously held research positions at Leeds University Business School, Warwick Business School, and Cambridge Judge Business School, and has extensive industry experience, including in the engineering, finance, and technology consultancy sectors. Trish Reay is Professor in Strategic Management and Organization at the University of Alberta School of Business in Edmonton, Canada. She also holds a Visiting Distinguished Professor appointment at Warwick Business School. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief at Organization Studies. Her research interests include qualitative research methods, organizational and institutional change, professions, and

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List of Contributors professional identity. She studies these topics in the context of healthcare and family firms. Published articles from these research streams appear in the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Work and Occupations, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Family Business Review. Theodore R. Schatzki is a social theorist who works as Professor of Geography and of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Social Practices (1996), The Site of the Social (2002), Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space (2007), The Timespace of Human Activity (2010), and Social Change in a Material World (forthcoming), as well as the co-editor of, among other works, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (2001) and The Nexus of Practices (2017). He recently concluded a long stint as a dean. Alexander Simpson is Research Assistant at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Abigail Stewart is Lecturer at the University of Liverpool Management School. Her research interests cover boards of directors, corporate governance, and the role of the law in relation to these. She has previously worked as a barrister, solicitor, and as an in-house counsel in a number of organizations in both Australia and the UK. Haridimos Tsoukas holds the Columbia Ship Management Chair in Strategic Management at the Department of Business and Public Administration, University of Cyprus and is Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the International Symposium on Process Organization Studies with Ann Langley. His research is informed by process philosophy, phenomenology, and neo-Aristotelian perspectives on reason and the social. His interests include knowledge-based perspectives on organizations and management; organizational becoming; practical reason in management and policy studies; and metatheoretical issues in organizational and management research. Alain Vuylsteke is Consultant Intensivist and Clinical Director of Clinical and Diagnostic Services at Royal Papworth Hospital and Associate Lecturer, University of Cambridge. Varda Wasserman is Associate Professor at the Open University of Israel in the Department of Management and Economics. She is an organizational sociologist specializing in organizational aesthetics, organizational control and resistance, embodiment, and gender identities. Her recent publications are in Organization Science, Organization Studies, Gender and Society, and Organization. Tammar B. Zilber is Associate Professor of Organization Theory at the Jerusalem School of Business, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on the dynamics of meaning and action in institutional processes. Focusing on the microfoundations of institutions, and using qualitative methods, she examines the role of discursive acts (like narrating) in constructing institutional realities; the institutional work involved in creating and maintaining fields, given field multiplicity; spatial and emotional mediations of institutional dynamics; the interrelations between institutional logics and institutional work; and the translation of institutions over time and across social spheres.

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Series Editorial Structure

Editors-in-Chief Ann Langley, HEC Montréal, Canada, [email protected] Haridimos Tsoukas, University of Cyprus, Cyprus and University of Warwick, UK, [email protected]

Advisory Board Hamid Bouchikhi, ESSEC Business School, France Michel Callon, CSI-Ecole des Mines de Paris, France Robert Chia, University of Strathclyde, UK Todd Chiles, University of Missouri, USA François Cooren, Université de Montréal, Canada Barbara Czarniawska, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Martha Feldman, University of California, Irvine, USA Raghu Garud, Pennsylvania State University, USA Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento, Italy Cynthia Hardy, University of Melbourne, Australia Robin Holt, University of Liverpool, UK Paula Jarzabkowski, Aston Business School, UK Sally Maitlis, University of British Columbia, Canada Wanda Orlikowski, MIT, USA Brian T. Pentland, Michigan State University, USA Marshall Scott Poole, University of Illinois, USA Georg Schreyögg, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Barbara Simpson, University of Strathclyde, UK Kathleen Sutcliffe, University of Michigan, USA Andew Van de Ven, University of Minnesota, USA Karl E. Weick, University of Michigan, USA

Editorial Officer and Process Organization Studies Symposium Administrator Sophia Tzagaraki, [email protected]

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Endorsements

“As we become more willing to convert reified entities into differentiated streams, the resulting images of process have become more viable and more elusive. Organization becomes organizing, being becomes becoming, construction becomes constructing. But as we see ourselves saying more words that end in ‘ing,’ what must we be thinking? That is not always clear. But now, under the experienced guidance of editors Langley and Tsoukas, there is an annual forum that moves us toward continuity and consolidation in process studies. This book series promises to be a vigorous, thoughtful forum dedicated to improvements in the substance and craft of process articulation.” Karl E. Weick, Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology, University of Michigan, USA “In recent years process and practice approaches to organizational topics have increased significantly. These approaches have made significant contributions to already existing fields of study, such as strategy, routines, knowledge management, and technology adoption, and these contributions have brought increasing attention to the approaches. Yet because the contributions are embedded in a variety of different fields of study, discussions about the similarities and differences in the application of the approaches, the research challenges they present, and the potential they pose for examining taken for granted ontological assumptions are limited. This series will provide an opportunity for bringing together contributions across different areas so that comparisons can be made and can also provide a space for discussions across fields. Professors Langley and Tsoukas are leaders in the development and use of process approaches. Under their editorship, the series will attract the work and attention of a wide array of distinguished organizational scholars.” Martha S. Feldman, Johnson Chair for Civic Governance and Public Management, Professor of Social Ecology, Political Science, Business and Sociology, University of California, Irvine, USA “Perspectives on Process Organization Studies will be the definitive annual volume of theories and research that advance our understanding of process questions dealing with how things emerge, grow, develop, and terminate over time. I applaud Professors Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas for launching this important book series, and encourage colleagues to submit their process research and subscribe to PROS.” Andrew H. Van de Ven, Vernon H. Heath Professor of Organizational Innovation and Change, University of Minnesota, USA

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Endorsements “The new series—Perspectives on Process Organization Studies—is a timely and valuable addition to the organization studies literature. The ascendancy of process perspectives in recent years has signified an important departure from traditional perspectives on organizations that have tended to privilege either self-standing events or discrete entities. In contrast, by emphasizing emergent activities and recursive relations, process perspectives take seriously the ongoing production of organizational realities. Such a performative view of organizations is particularly salient today, given the increasingly complex, dispersed, dynamic, entangled, and mobile nature of current organizational phenomena. Such phenomena are not easily accounted for in traditional approaches that are premised on stability, separation, and substances. Process perspectives on organizations thus promise to offer powerful and critical analytical insights into the unprecedented and novel experiences of contemporary organizing.” Wanda J. Orlikowski, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA “The recent decades witnessed conspicuous changes in organization theory: a slow but inexorable shift from the focus on structures to the focus on processes. The whirlwinds of the global economy made it clear that everything flows, even if change itself can become stable. While the interest in processes of organizing is not new, it is now acquiring a distinct presence, as more and more voices join in. A forum is therefore needed where such voices can speak to one another, and to the interested readers. The series Perspectives on Process Organization Studies will provide an excellent forum of that kind, both for those for whom a processual perspective is a matter of ontology, and those who see it as an epistemological choice.” Barbara Czarniawska, Professor of Management Studies, School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden “We are living in an era of unprecedented change; one that is characterized by instability, volatility, and dramatic transformations. It is a world in which the seemingly improbable, the unanticipated, and the downright catastrophic appear to occur with alarming regularity. Such a world calls for a new kind of thinking: thinking that issues from the chaotic, fluxing immediacy of lived experiences; thinking that resists or overflows our familiar categories of thought; and thinking that accepts and embraces messiness, contradictions, and change as the sine qua non of the human condition. Thinking in these genuinely processual terms means that the starting point of our inquiry is not so much about the being of entities such as ‘organization,’ but their constant and perpetual becoming. I very much welcome this long overdue scholarly effort at exploring and examining the fundamental issue of process and its implications for organization studies. Hari Tsoukas and Ann Langley are to be congratulated on taking this very important initiative in bringing the process agenda into the systematic study of the phenomenon of organization. It promises to be a path-breaking contribution to our analysis of organization.” Robert Chia, Professor of Management, University of Strathclyde, UK

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Endorsements “This new series fits the need for a good annual text devoted to process studies. Organization theory has long required a volume specifically devoted to process research that can address process ontology, methodology, research design, and analysis. While many authors collect longitudinal data, there are still insufficient methodological tools and techniques to deal with the nature of that data. Essentially, there is still a lack of frameworks and methods to deal with good processual data or to develop process-based insights. This series will provide an important resource for all branches of organization, management, and strategy theory. The editors of the series, Professors Ann Langley and Hari Tsoukas are excellent and very credible scholars within the process field. They will attract top authors to the series and ensure that each paper presents a high quality and insightful resource for process scholars. I expect that this series will become a staple in libraries, PhD studies, and journal editors’ and process scholars’ bookshelves.” Paula Jarzabkowski, Professor of Strategic Management, Aston Business School, UK

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1 Introduction: Institutions and Organizations A Process View Trish Reay, Tammar B. Zilber, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas

1.1 Introduction Institutions—the taken-for-granted structures, practices, and meanings that define what people and organizations within their jurisdiction think, do, and aspire to—are all about process, even though this may not always have been evident in some of the institutional theory literature (Surachaikulwattana and Phillips, 2017). Institutions come to be through a process of institutionalization (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). They are “work in progress” (DiMaggio, 1988), the unfolding outcome of people’s and collective actors’ continual efforts to maintain, modify, or disturb them (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). Institutional logics (Thornton et al., 2012) are also in motion—holding varying degrees of dominance in “constellations” that change over time (Goodrick and Reay, 2011). And the conversations that constitute institutional fields—where much of the institutional drama unfolds—are ever unfolding (Hoffman, 1999). Still, “process” as an analytic concept is quite rarely discussed within institutional theory. There is no entry for “process” in the 2008 Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (Greenwood et al., 2008), jumping from “principles of scientific management” to “professional services and practices.” While a whole section of the revised and updated 2017 second edition (Greenwood et al., 2017) is entitled “Institutional Processes,” there are only two entries about process—“process models” discussed in a chapter on institutional theory and the natural environment; and “process studies” discussed in the introduction. Clearly, institutional processes are discussed in many of the chapters in both editions of the “Green book.” What we find interesting is the missing

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discussion of process as an analytic concept within institutional theory. Indeed, most studies within neo-institutionalism take what Langley (2009: 410) termed “a weak process view, where emphasis is placed on the change and development of existing entities.” In this introduction, our focus will be on exploring the fruitfulness of a “ ‘strong’ process ontology” of institutions, “where things are considered to be subordinated to and constituted by process” (see also Langley and Tsoukas, 2017: 3–4). In this introduction, we call for a strong process approach to institutional dynamics, one that highlights institutions as emergent, generative, political, and social. We first relate “weak” and “strong” process views with the two metaphors commonly used to explain institutionalization—diffusion and translation. After reviewing some of the recent developments within institutional theory that set the ground for a strong process view, we move to exemplify the potential of a strong process view for institutional theory, using the chapters in this book, based on the Ninth International Symposium on Process Organization Studies. We end this introduction with some suggestions that we believe will contribute positively to the ongoing development of institutional theory through a strong process view.

1.2 A Strong Process View of Institutions In the lingo of institutional theory, the difference between “weak” and “strong” process orientation can be likened to the difference between the two main metaphors that have dominated institutional thinking—“diffusion” versus “translation” (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996). While both diffusion and translation capture the essence of institutions as ongoing processes, they conceive this process in very different ways, given their different paradigmatic stands. Drawing on a “diffusion” metaphor, earlier studies conceptualized institutionalization as the transmission of a given entity from one arena to another. Most studies in this tradition use quantitative, longitudinal, and macro-level methodologies. While they tell us much about patterns of spread, like speed and rates of diffusion and timing of adoption, and the antecedents and consequences of institutionalization (see reviews by Strang and Soule, 1998; Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2008), they were criticized for conceptualizing diffusion as a binary event (e.g. adoption versus non-adoption, Fiss et al., 2012: 1094), and for assuming that structures and practices are adopted by players within a field without modifications, “uncritically and in toto” (Fiss et al., 2012: 1077). Thus, while accounts of diffusion take a process view, they are also overly simplifying (Ansari et al., 2010: 67) and offer a “context and scale free” depiction of process (Whitson et al., 2013: 141). 2

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In contrast to this mainstream institutional analysis, “Scandinavian institutionalism” (Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2008; Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008) departed from the diffusion model altogether, advancing “translation” as a more appropriate metaphor for the process of institutionalization (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996). Adapted from Latour (1986), this perspective conceptualizes institutionalization as a form of social action. Rather than assuming that material and ideational objects travel across boundaries intact, the argument is that they are creatively transformed on their way from source to target (SahlinAndersson, 1996). Accordingly, scholars have examined the active efforts of various persons and collective actors to make sense of structures, practices, and ideas as they are adopted and adapted in local contexts (for reviews, see Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008; Zilber, 2008). Over the past years, attention in institutional theory to the complexity and heterogeneity of the institutional order (Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2008; Greenwood et al., 2011; Zilber, 2011) and to agency (Battilana and D’Aunno, 2009; Lawrence, 2008; Reay et al., 2013) has resulted in a growing interest in the micro-foundations of institutions and institutionalization (Powell and Colyvas, 2008). Such context-sensitive, particularistic approaches enable a deeper understanding of institutional dynamics as political and ever changing, and facilitate much closer attention to the ways organizations and institutions construct each other simultaneously (Zilber, 2008).

1.3 The Value Added of a Strong View on Institutions Several chapters in this book highlight the potential of such a strong process view of institutions, particularly in two domains. Intellectually, such a process view helps us reconnect with original formulations of institutional theory that may have been “lost in translation” with their use (and misuse) within the big tent of institutional theory (Barley, this volume; Hallett, this volume; Meyer, this volume). A strong process view can also help to rekindle institutional theory by borrowing from other theories (Eisenman et al., this volume; Oliver, this volume; Polletta, this volume; Schatzki, this volume). And, it allows us to challenge and rethink our understanding of central concepts within institutional theory, such as “loose coupling” (de Rond and Hallett, this volume), “institutional work” (Maguire and Hardy, this volume), the work of institutional logics on the ground (McNulty and Stewart, this volume), and institutionalization between diffusion and translation (Nicolini et al., this volume). Finally, it stimulates us to question some of the foundations of our own academic institutions by drawing attention to the processual nature of many of our taken-forgranted categories such as “data” ( Jones et al., this volume). 3

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1.3.1 Using a Strong Process View to Rekindle Institutional Theory Seven of the chapters in this book contemplate the status of process in institutional theory by exploring the connections between current-day institutional theory, its intellectual origins, and other theoretical domains. Both Barley and Meyer go back to the classical foundations of institutional theory to highlight how “processes are built irremovably into its framework” (Meyer, this volume). Hallett uses a process lens to (re)read the very development of institutional theory within organization theory, and to highlight what has been lost with the lack of cross-fertilization between institutional theory and other theories and disciplines. Polletta, Schatzki, Oliver, and Eisenman et al. engage in such cross-fertilization, by combining insights from the studies of stories in policy making (Polletta), the practice plenum (Schatzki), network analysis (Oliver), and aesthetic design (Eisenman et al.) to rethink, respectively, the ability to change institutions, fields, and the role of materiality in institutional dynamics. Specifically, in his chapter “Working Institutions,” Stephen Barley reviews current attempts to explore action and structures in institutional theory using the terms “institutional entrepreneurship,” “institutional work,” and “inhabited institutions.” He suggests an important fourth approach, which he names “working institutions,” that he explains by building on Chicago School sociology and by exploring “occupations whose work focuses on creating, changing, and maintaining institutions.” In “A Processual View on Institutions: A Note from a Phenomenological Institutional Perspective,” Renate Meyer explores the deep process roots of phenomenological institutional theory. “Process,” she claims, is “everywhere,” and disregarding it—in empirical studies of institutions—carries a grave price to our ability to understand institutions. Likewise, process studies without institutions are also lacking. Only the integration of institutions and process theories allows us to fully appreciate the ontological status of institutions. In his chapter “On Doing Institutional Analysis without Institutional Theory,” Tim Hallett discusses the possibility of “doing institutional analysis without institutional theory.” Reviewing the development of institutional theory, Hallett notes how it has evolved by building on concepts and insights from a diverse set of theories and disciplines, including those of sociology and psychology. Hallett suggests that the very “success” of institutional theory— the rich literature and conversations that span levels of analysis and all kinds of empirical phenomena—limits current-day institutional thinking. He argues that today’s scholars can potentially remain completely embedded within institutional theory, with no basic or background training in the intellectual traditions from which or against which it developed. By offering a strong 4

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process understanding of how institutional theory developed, Hallett offers a critique of current institutional theory and suggests four “keys” that should be used to open it up to outside enrichments. Indeed, organization theory more broadly has developed through borrowing (Agarwal and Hoetker, 2007; Hatch, 1997) and adapting ideas from other traditions (Bartunek and Spreitzer, 2006; Oswick et al., 2011; Whetten et al., 2009). The next four chapters exemplify how such borrowing can enrich our understanding of institutional theory from a process lens. In “Stories of (and Instead of) Process,” Francesca Polletta highlights the limiting effects of stories in policy making that aim to change institutions. Building on two powerful examples of policy making to combat the institution of inequality, Polletta shows how stories echo institutions and thus hide their constructed, processual nature. She “demonstrates the difficulty of telling stories in which processes rather than people are the drivers of action . . . stories . . . are better at explaining how people’s aspirations are fulfilled or foiled than they are at describing how those aspirations are constructed.” Polletta’s chapter highlights the political impacts of process or categorical thinking, and warns us that stories cover process, hence they cover institutions. In “Process, Life, and the Practice Plenum,” Theodore Schatzki delves into the very conceptualization of “process,” and builds on ideas from practice theory, including Heidegger and Mead, to offer an integrated theory of the interrelations between practice and process. Although his chapter does not directly address institutions, his exploration of the relation between process and practice has implications for understanding institutions. Insofar as the latter structure social life, multiple ontological categories are needed (event, process, structure, substance). An overemphasis on process, Schatzki notes, risks shifting attention from interconnected sociomaterial activities making up a practice, which for him is the key analytical category in social theory. Change does occur, albeit in an uneven manner. “The art of understanding change,” notes Schatzki, “is the art of grasping the hows and whys of irregularity.” In her chapter, “Bringing Process into Structure: Combining Network Analyses with Process Lenses to Explore Field-Level Evolution and Changes,” Amalya Oliver shows the potential benefits of borrowing particular concepts and insights from network analysis—centrality, connectivity, clustering, and assortativity—to highlight processes of field evolution and change. Indeed, she calls for increasing scholarly efforts to cross the boundaries between network analyses and institutional approaches, and provides convincing explanations of the positive outcomes that could be realized. Micki Eisenman, Michal Frenkel, and Varda Wasserman’s chapter “The Interpretation of Design-Based Cues: A Processual Approach” explores the interpretation of elements in the organizational environment that affect institutional dynamics. By arguing that such interpretation is complex and ever ongoing, 5

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they highlight the limits of design-based cues to carry institutional meanings and stabilize the institutional order. Thus, their chapter advances our understanding of the underlying dynamics that account for institutions as ongoing processes.

1.3.2 Rethinking Institutional Theory through a Process Lens Five of the chapters in this book use a strong process view to rethink central concepts within institutional theory. De Rond and Hallett challenge our understanding of “loose coupling,” Maguire and Hardy rethink “institutional work,” and McNulty and Stewart revisit the work of institutional logics on the ground. Nicolini et al.’s study of a process of institutionalization integrates insights from both diffusion and translation studies, blurring the lines between these seemingly different phenomena. Jones et al. question the very understanding of key institutions. In “The Long Walk to Aleppo: Institutional Myths, Inhabited Institutions, and Ideals in the Real World,” Mark de Rond and Tim Hallett use the ethnography of the civil march to Aleppo to contemplate loose and tight coupling in institutional dynamics. Closely following the march as a process of organizing, embedded within a multitude of institutions, they question the premise that loose coupling helps organizations deal with institutional contradictions. In “The Discourse of Risk and Processes of Institutional Change: The Case of Green Chemistry,” Steve Maguire and Cynthia Hardy exemplify how a strong process view highlights the interdependencies and co-construction of actors, actions, and objects in a process of institutional change. In their rich depiction of the institutionalization of green chemistry, they explore how different actors translated “risk,” and in the process constructed not only their knowledge, but their own status as knowing subjects and the knowable objects. Terry McNulty and Abigail Stewart’s chapter, “Making and Regulating Business Judgment: Judicial Practice, Logics, and Orders,” draws on a process analysis to connect institutional logics and the institutional order with the micro-practice a judge (as shown in the narrative of his written judgment) was using in order to make sense of and legitimate his ruling. By focusing on one actor (a judge) and one text (the judgment), the authors offer a detailed analysis of the interplay between logics, practice, and process. In “Systematic Heterogeneity in the Adaptation Process of Management Innovations: Insights from the Italian Public Sector,” Davide Nicolini, Andrea Lippi and Pedro Monteiro explore a process of translating managerial practices within the field of the Italian public sector. They show that the variety of local adaptations of managerial practice was patterned by the characteristics of the field, and power relations within it. Taking a process view on diffusion, they 6

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rethink what “local” adaptation means, and enrich our understanding of institutionalization as both “translation” and “diffusion.” Finally, writing from outside institutional theory, Matthew Jones and his co-authors show how a taken-for-granted central tenet of the institution of science and current-day organizations—data—is not an objective and tangible resource, but is rather constructed and becoming. In their chapter, “Data as Process: From Objective Resource to Contingent Performance,” they deconstruct the meaning of data within information sciences, and empirically follow the construction of “data” within intensive care units. By “unpacking data in practice,” they convincingly show that data acquire their objective-like status through performance. A strong process approach, then, allows us to question one of the central institutions of our modern times—science itself.

1.4 Avenues for Further Research While the chapters in this book attest to the fertility of a strong process view on institution, they also raise the possibility of promising avenues that can even further enrich institutional theory. Specifically, we believe a strong process view may help us rethink institutional work, institutional logics, and cross-level institutionalism. We will briefly highlight recent work that goes in these directions.

1.4.1 The Dynamics of Institutional Work A strong process orientation may help us move beyond the classificatory tendencies characterizing many studies of institutional work (Lawrence et al., 2013) and focus, instead, on temporal dynamics of institutional work. For example, are there temporal patterns in the employment of different kinds of institutional work over time? Are different actors engaged in different kinds of institutional work during different stages of institutionalization? A strong process approach may help us move beyond the post-hoc dichotomy between creation, maintenance, and disruption of institutions; that is, are there ways to avoid retrospectively categorizing institutional work based on outcomes? How do actors define their efforts in vivo? How is “institutional change” or “maintenance” constructed as the process unfolds? And how are unintended consequences interpreted?

1.4.2 The Dynamics of Institutional Logics A strong process orientation may help us move beyond a conceptualization of institutional logics as static and given. Rather than looking at how they can be 7

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used as tool kits (McPherson and Sauder, 2013), we may also ask how they can be interpreted—and hidden or changed—on the ground (Reay et al., 2017; Zilber, 2013; 2017). Further, we may use a strong process approach to appreciate the micro-level work involved in managing, changing, and reproducing institutional logics (Lok, 2010; Reay and Hinings, 2009; Smets et al., 2012). More generally then, a strong process view may allow us to bridge the distinction between institutional logics and institutional work.

1.4.3 The Dynamics of Cross-Level Institutionalism A strong process orientation may also help us improve our understanding of how actions at one level (e.g. institutional work within an organization) interact with actions at other levels (e.g. institutional logics at the field level). Although scholars continually call for more cross-level studies, they remain few and far between. The concept of inhabited institutions suggests that workplace dynamics can stimulate organizational or societal-level changes (Fine and Hallett, 2014; Gray et al., 2015) and changing trends in society can promote unexpected workplace activities. Alternatively, a holistic approach (Schatzki, this volume) could provide a way to understand the tightly connected and entwined relationships that are inherently cross-level and best understood when considered collectively, rather than viewed from multiple levels. We suggest that a strong process approach can help to provide new answers about the purposeful (or not) interactions among key actors at multiple levels.

1.5 Concluding Remarks The chapters in this volume attest to the value added of a strong process view to our understanding of institutions and institutional dynamics. There are recent voices that critique institutional theory, its big tent approach, and the potential for colonial tendencies that could lead to an inner language that does not communicate with or is not relevant to day-to-day organizational experiences (Reed and Burrell, 2019). In response, other voices point to ongoing strengths (Cornelissen, 2019; Svejenova, 2019). We suggest that the growing number of institutional studies taking a process view help to counter at least some of the critique by focusing on the here and now of people’s lives within organizations and the broader institutional order. We hope this volume will inspire more explorations of institutional dynamics on the ground and cross-fertilization with other intellectual traditions. 8

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Introduction Sahlin, K., and Wedlin, L. (2008). Circulating Ideas: Imitation, Translation and Editing. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin-Andersson, and R. Suddaby (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 218–42). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sahlin-Andersson, K. (1996). Imitating by Editing Success: The Construction of Organizational Fields. In B. Czarniawska and G. Sevon (Eds), Translating Organizational Change (pp. 69–92). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Smets, M., Morris, T., and Greenwood, R. (2012). From Practice to Field: A Multilevel Model of Practice-Driven Institutional Change. Academy of Management Journal, 55(4), 877–904. doi:10.5465/amj.2010.0013. Strang, D., and Soule, S. A. (1998). Diffusion in Organizations and Social Movements: From Hybrid Corn to Poison Pills. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 265–90. Surachaikulwattana, P., and Phillips, N. (2017). Institutions as Process. In A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies (pp. 372–86). London: Sage. Svejenova, S. (2018). Constructive Pluralism for a Theory of Organization: Rediscovering Our Community, Identity, and Vocation. Organization Studies, 40(1), 59–64. Thornton, P. H., Ocasio, W., and Lounsbury, M. (2012). The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure, and Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whetten, D. A., Felin, T., and King, B. G. (2009). The Practice of Theory Borrowing in Organizational Studies: Current Issues and Future Directions. Journal of Management, 35(3), 537–63. doi:10.1177/0149206308330556. Whitson, J., Weber, K., Hirsch, P., and Bermiss, Y. S. (2013). Chemicals, Companies, and Countries: The Concept of Diffusion in Management Research. In B. M. Staw and A. P. Brief (Eds), Research in Organizational Behavior, 33, 135–50. Zilber, T. B. (2008). The Work of Meanings in Institutional Processes and Thinking. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin-Andersson, and R. Suddaby (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 151–69). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Zilber, T. B. (2011). Institutional Multiplicity in Practice: A Tale of Two High-Tech Conferences in Israel. Organization Science, 22(6), 1539–59. doi:10.1287/orsc.1100.0611. Zilber, T. B. (2013). Institutional Logics and Institutional Work: Should They Be Agreed? In M. Lounsbury and E. Boxenbaum (Eds), Research in the Sociology of Organizations: Institutional Logics in Action, 39A, 77–96. Zilber, T. B. (2017). How Institutional Logics Matter: A Bottom-Up Exploration. In J. Gehman, M. Lounsbury, and R. Greenwood (Eds), Research in the Sociology of Organizations: How Institutions Matter, 48A, 137–55.

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2 Working Institutions Stephen R. Barley

It was not until 2005 that I discovered that I was an institutionalist. You might ask, “How could you have been so blind, so unreflective, so totally out of touch with reality? Do you realize that in your 1986 paper on CT scanners you included a diagram which clearly sports the label ‘institutional realm’ (see Figure 2.1) and, you used the words ‘institution,’ ‘institutional,’ or ‘institutionalized’ nearly fifty times in the opening of the paper alone? Long before 2005 you published three papers with “institutions” in their titles (Barley, 1989; Barley and Tolbert, 1997; Orlikowski and Barley, 2001). How come it took you nearly twenty years to figure this out?” Normally, I would say, “I’ve been out to lunch.” But now that I’ve been asked to talk on my notion of institutions, it’s time I constructed a good “retrospective account.” Constructing such an account is part of my agenda for today. Suggesting where we could go from here is the other part. You can blame Royston Greenwood for puncturing the bliss of my ignorance. I remember the day vividly. I had been invited to the University of Alberta to give a talk. Royston had picked me up at the airport and was driving me to the hotel. Now, when Royston calls, the odds are he has a plan. This occasion was no different. Royston wanted me to write a chapter for the Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, that he, Christine Oliver, Roy Suddaby, and Kirstin Shalin-Anderson were trying to organize. Sensing work, I immediately tried to back out by saying, “Royston, I can’t write a chapter for the handbook. I’m not an institutionalist. I don’t do institutionalism.” Sly dog that he is, Royston launched into a long rap about how I had been writing about institutions from the start. Then he said the magic words, “You’re just an institutionalist who works at the coalface.” At that moment sunlight broke through the grey Canadian skies. I was converted by the word of Greenwood: “I am an institutionalist, just not the kind that

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Working Institutions Effects of action on structure

REALM OF ACTION

Institutional constraints on action

SCRIPTS T1

SCRIPTS T2

T1

T2

Exogenous or Strategic Change

Exogenous or Strategic Change

SCRIPTS T3

T3 Exogenous or Strategic Change

INSTITUTIONAL REALM

Figure 2.1. 1986 diagram, from Barley, 1986: 108 Note: The progressively denser backgrounds signify structuring’s cumulative effects

most of my friends and colleagues are!” But I still had a problem: If I am an institutionalist, to what sect did I belong? I hadn’t entered the sanctum of institutionalism through the front door like students of Powell, Meyer, Zucker, or Scott. I hadn’t entered through the back door, like admirers of Selznick and Stinchcombe. I hadn’t even come through the pantry like the institutionalists at Alberta who have been cooking up new ideas for at least two decades. I came through a little used trapdoor in the floor to find myself surrounded by macro-organizational theorists. It took me a while to figure out what kind of institutionalist I am and how I became one without knowing it. To do this I had to write the paper for Royston which I called “Coalface Institutionalism” (Barley, 2008). Only then did I discover where the tunnel beneath the trapdoor went, who dug it, and how I crawled through it from the coalface to the sanctum. Nevertheless, I still want to mention a few disclaimers, all of which are true. Although I now accept that I am an institutionalist, I only once wrote a paper that would qualify as institutional theory (Barley and Tolbert, 1997). I have never directly set out to study an institution, an institutional logic, an institutional entrepreneur, or any of the social processes associated with neoinstitutional theory: mimesis, coercion, myths, logics, decoupling, or the formation of norms. The closest I have come to directly studying a key concept in institutional theory was my attempt to map the organizational field that the business community in the U.S. built during the 1970s and 1980s to exert influence on Congress and the Administration (Barley, 2010). Even 13

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then, I was more interested in sounding a political call to arms than making a contribution to institutional analysis. Instead, my research has largely focused on the study of work, occupations, technology, ideologies, and employment relations with a few early forays into organizational and occupational cultures. I don’t think of myself as a macro-organizational theorist. The strongest influences on my thinking have been studies of work and occupations, ethnomethodology, industrial sociology, and industrial relations. Notice that organizational theory is missing. When forced to put a label on my orientation, I retreat to symbolic interactionism. Most of the time I just study a phenomenon that interests me and go after it like a “realist” ethnographer, as Van Maanen (1988) would put it. So where in all this is my brand of institutionalism rooted?

2.1 Chicago School Institutionalism The clearest answer is in Chicago School sociology of work. I have written several papers that lay out my understanding of the kind of sociology associated with the Chicago School, so I will not repeat most of those arguments here (Barley, 1989, 2008). Everett C. Hughes (1958), his colleagues, and students like Herbert Blumer (1969), Anselm Strauss (1978a, 1978b), Howard Becker (1963, 1982), Erving Goffman (1961, 1974), Julius Roth (1963), Ralph Turner (2006), Tomatsu Shibutani (1962), Melville Dalton (1950), and Donald Roy (1959) saw institutions as crucial to understanding “society in action” (Hughes, 1942: 307). Yet, they never produced a systematic conceptualization of institutions. To absorb their perspective you have to read their work, which mostly consisted of empirical studies of occupations, careers, roles, routines, rituals, socialization, and occasionally an organization. Yet, as I pointed out in “Coalface Institutionalism,” you can find scattered throughout their papers and the papers of scholars they influenced, such as Gary Alan Fine (1991) and David Maines (1982), short passages that provide clues to how the interactionists conceptualized institutions. What then, from the perspective of an interactionist, is an institution? There are several key ideas. First, institutions are “social forms” (a term drawn from Simmel, 1922) within which human action takes place and which, in turn, are instantiated by human action. In other words, the interactionists viewed institutions as products of and templates for action in specific situations. In contemporary parlance, they were interested in the reciprocal relationship between structure and action: how structures guide action and how action at the same time creates, alters, or maintains the structure. Therefore, it is fair to say that the interactionists’ vision was compatible with Anthony Giddens’ 14

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(1984) notion of structuration, for they too saw institutions as constantly in process (Strauss, 1982). This is why I made a great deal of Giddens’ notion of structuration in my early work (Barley, 1986, 1989; Barley and Tolbert, 1997). Structuration allowed me to speak more explicitly about the link between action and structure than did interactionism, because Giddens posited mid-range processes that linked action to structure, which for better or worse, I glossed with the general concept of scripts. I understand scripts to be both behavioral and cognitive. The interactionists differed from both Giddens and from most neoinstitutional theorists by studying action to uncover patterned “clusters of conventions,” another term that Hughes (1962–71: 52) employed to describe institutions. Historically, the neo-institutionalists have started with macrolevel institutions and have asked how those institutions diffuse or how they constrain action. Interactionists go at it from the other direction. Second, the interactionists held that institutions are socially constructed or, in Strauss’ (1978b) terms, “negotiated.” To say that an institution is a negotiated order is to say that it is the sediment of a history of voting, decree, conflict, agreement, compromise, bargaining, persuasion, coercion, and other forms of interaction by which humans seek to achieve their interests and legitimate their perspectives. As such, institutions and negotiated orders are historically bound. Institutions change as negotiations continue. The only question is how long of a span of time is required before we see a change. Power is equally important to understanding the stability and change of a negotiated order: Some actors have more power and influence over the fate of an institution than do others. Thus, with respect to institutions there are always struggles, whether the struggles are obvious or not. Third, for the interactionists, institutions were nested like concentric circles defining different levels of analysis or, more accurately, social worlds of increasing range and scope. An academic department is embedded in a university. If the university is a public university in the U.S., it is embedded in a state’s system of higher education. The state’s universities and colleges are, in turn, embedded in the U.S. system of higher education. Furthermore, institutions are linked together in a matrix of relations quite similar to what neoinstitutionalists call an organizational field. For instance, the institutions of higher education intersect with and are influenced by local, state, and federal governments, various funding agencies, foundations, businesses, and donors. For Strauss the image was one of intersecting, overlapping, and interacting “social worlds,” as I have tried to depict in Figure 2.2. To get a sense for what Strauss meant by social worlds it is worth quoting him at length: Social worlds refer to a set of common or joint activities or concerns, bound together by a network of communication . . . One can point to such social worlds

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Institutions and Organizations as those of opera, ballet, baseball, surfing, art, stamp collecting, mountain climbing, homosexuality, and medicine, although the concept also is probably useful in conceptualizing and studying industries and the sciences. These social worlds vary considerably in size, types, number and varieties of central activities, organizational complexity, technological sophistication, ideological elaboration, geographical dispersion, and so on . . . One of the most important features of social worlds is their inevitable differentiation into subworlds . . . The conceptual imagery here is of groups emerging within social worlds, evolving, developing, splintering, disintegrating or pulling themselves together, or parts falling away and perhaps coalescing with segments of other groups to form new groups, often in opposition to older ones—in short, of subworlds intersecting, in powerful contact with other subworlds both within the parent social world and with those “inside” other social worlds. (Strauss, 1982: 172)

Although Strauss developed the notion of social worlds to introduce more structural thinking into interactionist research, he was very careful to emphasize that matters of interpretation and signification are important. In other words, social worlds are likely to be delineated both structurally and culturally. Fourth and finally, interactionists were specifically interested in what Goffman (1983) called an “interaction order” in his 1983 presidential address to the American Sociological Association. Interaction orders are the patterned

Donors Foundations U.S State Corporations Funding Agencies

Dept. State Govt

University System System

Federal Govt.

Figure 2.2. Nested institutions and the matrix of social worlds

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system of roles, rituals, identities, vocabularies, careers, rules, and ways of behaving, thinking, or perceiving that provide the structure and understandings necessary for maintaining a coherent definition of the situations in which we find ourselves. You can think of interaction orders as the “micro-institutions” and “vocabularies of motive” (Mills, 1940) that enable us to take part in the round of life in a specific social scene. Interaction orders encompass the takenfor-granteds of our everyday lives as members of an occupation, as church goers, as football fans, as concert goers, and as attendees at lectures, among many other things. Interaction orders are created, maintained, and changed by the actions and interactions of the people who are embedded within them. When I was in graduate school I read the writings of the Chicago School extensively as well as the ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel, 1967; Sudnow, 1965; Emerson, 1970; Bittner, 1965) and Berger and Luckmann (1967). From the interactionists I developed a kind of sociological imagination that focused primarily on mapping the interaction orders of occupations and workplaces. The Chicagoans’ perspective significantly influenced my own take on institutions. Hence, they were the ones who dug the tunnel I crawled through to the sanctum of institutionalism, passing by occasional struts put in place by ethnomethodologists and by Berger and Luckmann to keep the tunnel from caving in. You can glean my influences from the few attempts I have made to state how I conceive of institutions: We define institutions as shared rules and typifications that identify categories of social actors and their appropriate activities or relationships . . . Our definition . . . applies to various levels of analysis because it makes no assumption about the identity of relevant social actors. They may be individuals, groups, organizations or even larger collectives. (Barley and Tolbert, 1997: 96–7) Careers [were] those institutional forms of participation characteristic of some social world: A stream of more or less identifiable positions, offices, statuses, and situations that served as landmarks for gauging a person’s movement through the social milieu. These constituted the “objective” face of the career, its structural or public aspect, which could be studied in terms of career lines whose branchings hinged on the turning points and contingencies that members of the social world routinely confronted. On the other hand, the notion pointed away from the career’s structure toward the individual’s experience of the career’s unfolding. This, the so-called subjective face of the career, consisted of the meanings individuals attributed to their careers, the sense they made of their becoming (Stebbins, 1970). Subjective careers involved accounts (Scott and Lyman, 1968) or definitions of the situation (McHugh, 1968) that enabled individuals to align themselves with the events of their biographies. (Barley, 1989: 49) The tendency for theorists to privilege institutional over interactional stories of how practitioners construct, maintain, and challenge occupational jurisdictions is also to blame [for why we don’t know much about the early days of an

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Institutions and Organizations occupation]. Studies of encounters between professionals and clients and between professionals and paraprofessionals indicate that rhetorics, interactions, and other everyday behaviors are crucial for sustaining the jurisdictional boundaries of even well-established professions (Emerson, 1970; Hosticka, 1979; Anderson and Helm, 1979; Barley, 1986). Yet, aside from occasional references to the acts of highly visible historical figures or groups, most tales of how occupations acquire jurisdictions revolve around institutional supports (such as the founding of training programs or the enactment of legislation) rather than patterns of situated action, interaction, and interpretation, what Goffman (1983) called an interaction order. (Nelson and Barley, 1997: 620)

Given all of this, what I have been wrestling with over my career is the link between the micro and the macro. I usually start to tackle this issue by mapping the interaction order in a work setting among the members of one or more occupations: radiologists, technologists, computer technicians, emergency medical technicians, doctors, car salesmen, architects, and most recently lobbyists and public affairs professionals. My implicit assumption has always been that by studying interaction orders, sooner or later I’d bump into something that resembled an institution at some level of analysis. For some time now, institutionalists have recognized that they need a theory of action or agency. Calls from neo-institutionalists to focus on how people create, maintain, and alter institutions began as early as the late 1980s. Paul DiMaggio took institutionalism to task for its lack of human agency in 1988: If the focus of institutional theory on norms, taken-for-granted assumptions, and cognitive and coordinative limitations represent substantive reasons for the neglect . . . of interests, part of this neglect is implicit not in the logic of institutional arguments but in the rhetoric that institutional theorists have used to advance them. The “iron cage” is one such phrase, with its implicit portrayal of humans as powerless . . . Similar are assertions that institutionalized organizations “take on a life of their own” . . . Presumably if an organization “takes on a life of its own” one need not attend to individual or group motives to understand behavior . . . The most widespread rhetorical, as opposed to analytic, dismissals of agency . . . occur in the chronic use of passive constructions and, where nouns are used as the subjects of active verbs, in the selection of subjects so broad of reference as to be substantively empty . . . [T]he locutions . . . [that institutionalists use] systematically de-emphasize human agency. Institutional myths are highly institutionalized: and some structural elements are . . . “societally legitimated.” Another approach . . . would be to ask, “Who has institutionalized the myths (and why)?” and “Who has the power to ‘legitimate’ a structural element?” (DiMaggio, 1988: 10)

Nevertheless, it took another decade or two before institutional scholars began to take agency, interests, and power seriously as important components of the study of institutions. Three somewhat overlapping literatures have emerged to tackle the problem: (1) studies of “institutional entrepreneurship,” (2) studies 18

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of “institutional work,” and (3) studies of “inhabited institutions.” Let’s consider each briefly with an eye to how close they bring us to the coalface.

2.2 Institutional Entrepreneurship Research on “institutional entrepreneurship” draws its inspiration from DiMaggio’s 1988 essay where he wrote: “New institutions arise when organized actors with sufficient resources (institutional entrepreneurs) see in them an opportunity to realize interests that they value highly” (DiMaggio, 1988: 14; emphasis in original). In short, the literature on institutional entrepreneurs traces its roots to a parenthetical expression. A few years later, in what some institutionalists refer to simply as the “orange book” because of the color of its cover, DiMaggio (1991) published an essay on the emergence and structuration (his term) of an institutional field: U.S. art museums. Although DiMaggio does refer to individuals who advocated for a more educational and democratic role for museums in society, the key actors in his story are philanthropic organizations, the progressive movement, city governments, existing museums, and the emerging professions of art historians, art educators, museum directors, curators, and other staff. The people that DiMaggio highlights served to link these various organizations into a network that ultimately structured the emergence of public museums. Interestingly, DiMaggio explicitly downplayed the idea that his “entrepreneurs” (a word he does not use in this particular essay) acted intentionally: I have not meant to imply that Keppel and his colleagues set out to achieve these ends in a coherent manner or that the Carnegie program was single-handedly responsible for them. Such a view would be misleading for three reasons. First, although Carnegie played the major role as a center around which structuration could occur, it was joined by the Rockefeller philanthropies and, in the 1930s, by the federal government’s arts projects . . . Second, Carnegie’s museum grant-making was far-ranging, even scattered; the pattern, taken as a whole was not the product of conscious design. Third, and most important, the Carnegie museum programs were as much a resource for professional reformers as they were an expression of the corporation’s own intentions. (DiMaggio, 1991: 278–9)

One of the most common criticisms of the literature on institutional entrepreneurs is that it portrays individuals as heroes who use their wits, vision, and resources to intentionally create or alter institutions (for this critique see Powell and Colyvas, 2008; Lawrence et al., 2009). My reading of the literature on institutional entrepreneurship suggests that this criticism is overblown. While it is certainly true that papers in this body of research sometimes mention specific individuals who build bridges to existing organizations and occupations, 19

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who take advantage of shifting cultural discourses, and who articulate perspectives that challenge the status quo (Maguire et al., 2004; Lawrence and Phillips, 2004), it strikes me that such analyses differ substantially from hero worship and the prescience that the management literature and the public often attribute to the founders of new organizations and industries. Instead, as in DiMaggio’s paper, the “entrepreneurs” in this body of research are typically people tied to organizations and social movements of various kinds or are organizations themselves (for examples see Garud et al., 2002; Maguire et al., 2004; Munir and Philips, 2005; Munir, 2005; Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006). I submit that it is quite reasonable to posit that when institutions are created, changed, defended, or dismantled that somewhere people, perhaps many people, are doing something. Moreover, some of these people are likely to be more influential than others, perhaps because they have what Fligstein (1997, 2001) calls “social skill” or because they have access to situationally important forms of social, cultural, and financial capital. I suggest, however, that calling these people entrepreneurs is an unfortunate choice of term because it unnecessarily calls to mind the broader social discourse on entrepreneurs which in its most popular form promotes hero worship. More importantly, the stream of research and theory on social entrepreneurship is not really about entrepreneurs at all. Instead, it focuses our attention on a variety of social phenomena, especially the formulation of discourses, theories, and ideologies that enable agents—whether they are individuals, social movements, organizations, or occupations—to challenge or protect some status quo. What distinguishes this body of research is that it asks us to consider how people interpret opportunities, constraints, events, or technological developments and subsequently devise narratives that increase the odds of either change or stability in a social system (Philips et al., 2004). In this sense, the literature has much in common with studies of social movements where interpretations, narratives, and ideologies play an important role (Snow et al., 1986; Benford and Snow, 2000). For instance, Greenwood, Suddaby, and Hinings (2002) emphasized the construction of theories as critical to institutional change. Lawrence and Phillips (2004) saw the changing cultural understanding of whales as the grounds that allowed whale watching to emerge as an industry. Munir’s (2005) analysis of the change from analogical to digital photography was rooted in changing narratives about the role of photography in everyday life. Research on social entrepreneurship also highlights power and power’s implications for how social worlds change and evolve (Philips et al., 2004; Garud et al., 2007). Zilber (2002: 247) attributed the changing institutional structure of a rape crisis center to a “power struggle” between those who subscribed to the feminist ideology of the founders and the therapeutic ideology of those who later became associated with the center. The rise of popular 20

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photography hinged on Kodak’s ability to define the meaning of taking pictures in everyday life (Munir and Philips, 2005). Finally, most (but not all) studies of institutional entrepreneurship cover a considerable span of history across whose stage walk multiple actors with conflicting interests (DiMaggio, 1991; Battilana, 2006; Garud et al., 2002). Perhaps it would be more accurate to relabel research on institutional entrepreneurship as: “A historically and contextually situated literature on the cultural dynamics of institutional sense making and contestation.” The rebranding (although a mouthful) would at least release this stream of research from a pesky label. But whatever its faults (and there is no study or body of research without faults), the literature on social entrepreneurship takes us a step closer to the coalface where institutions are mined. It explicitly acknowledges that when institutions emerge, change, die, or remain the same somewhere, somehow people are wittingly or unwittingly doing and saying things.

2.3 Institutional Work Writings on “institutional work” comprise the second body of research and theory aimed at bringing agency into institutional theory. This line of work is newer and less extensive than the literature on institutional entrepreneurship. Lawrence and Suddaby’s (2006) paper, “Institutions and Institutional Work,” marks its genesis. The authors defined institutional work as “the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions” (2006: 215). They then reviewed the neo-institutional literature for evidence of practices that might be counted as institutional work. They found nine associated with creating institutions, five associated with maintaining institutions, and three associated with disrupting institutions. Importantly, with two exceptions (advocacy and mimicry), Lawrence and Suddaby labeled the practices with gerunds (e.g. vesting, defining, theorizing, educating, etc.), thereby emphasizing categories of action. Referring to the diagram that appeared in my paper with Pam Tolbert (see Figure 2.3), Lawrence et al. (2009) argue that studies of institutional work focus on the upward arrows, whereas neo-institutionalism has historically focused on the downward arrows. In a second paper Lawrence et al. (2011: 2) draw a parallel between their agenda and more classic sociological studies of work: The study of institutional work takes as its point of departure an interest in work— the efforts of individuals and collective actors to cope with, keep up with, shore up, tear down, tinker with, transform, or create anew the institutional structures within which they live, work, and play, and which give them their roles, relationships, resources, and routines.

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Institutional Realm

a

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Key: a = encode, b = enact, c = replicate or revise, d = externalize and objectify

Figure 2.3. Diagram from Barley and Tolbert, 1997

By grounding their approach in the concepts of practice, purpose (intentionality), and effort, Lawrence and his colleagues aim to get closer to the coalface than have students of institutional entrepreneurship by emphasizing forms of action instead of discourse, rhetoric, and meaning making. However, like studies of institutional entrepreneurship, most empirical studies of institutional work consist of case studies based on archival and interview data. The studies cover long stretches of time, sometimes as much as twenty years (Gawer and Phillips, 2013). Unfortunately, the backward gaze causes a cave-in on the way back through the tunnel to the coalface. Rarely are archives detailed enough to tell you exactly what particular people did at particular points in time when they faced obstacles. This is especially the case when the documents are created by organizations. Archives usually suppress the debates and sense making that went on. This is because organizations tend to tidy up their documents so that they rarely contain any heat, passion, or politics. To illustrate: Consider the relationship between what went down in your last faculty meeting and what appeared in the official minutes. A telling exception to this trend is Rojas’ (2010) study of how S. I. Hayakawa managed to construct what Hughes would have called the “license and the mandate” to undermine and discipline student protestors at San Francisco State University in the late 1960s. This is because Rojas had access to first-person accounts of those events recorded at the time. Furthermore, interviewees tend to forget important details of the past, especially those that seemed trivial to the informant. Interviewees also tend to tell just-so stories of coherent processes and outcomes. Otherwise, as 22

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Working Institutions • Advocacy • Defining • Vesting • Constructing identities • Changing normative associations • Mimicry • Theorizing • Educating • Enabling work • Policing • Deterring • Valourizing • Defining

• Demonizing • Mythologizing • Embedding • Routinizing • Disconnecting sanctions • Dissociating moral foundations • Undermining assumptions and beliefs • Maintaining practices • Disrupting practices • Defending practices • Creating boundaries • Constructing normative networks

Figure 2.4. Strategies for institutional work

Garfinkel (1967) noted, they risk appearing irrational by being unable to give a credible account. Nevertheless, case studies are reasonable and quite useful for studying institutional work because they allow us to examine cases of institutional change that we know happened. By contrast, it is difficult to anticipate institutional dynamics that have not yet occurred. Although studies of institutional work don’t quite get us to the coalface where we see action in process, they have been useful for compiling a growing compendium of what we might call strategies of action for creating, maintaining, and changing institutions. Figure 2.4 provides a selective list of the strategies that students of institutional work have uncovered or theorized. Nevertheless, what is often missing is a sense of what Hughes called “goings on”: The notion that work is situated, evolving, patterned, and composed of practices and moves. Lawrence et al. (2013: 1029) acknowledge this at the end of their introductory chapter to the special issue of Organization Studies on institutional work: And yet, studies of institutional work, including most of the submissions to the Special Issue, tend to concentrate on its connection to intended effects, basing their analyses largely on retrospective accounts embedded in interviews and archival data. Focusing on these questions using these methodological approaches limits our ability to uncover and understand the messy day-to-day practices of institutional work.

2.4 Inhabited Institutions I would argue that if you want to dig through the cave-in to get to the coalface, you need to use ethnographic methods because you need to be present as 23

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people actually struggle to accomplish institutional work. But, when we are not looking to the past, we run up against a critical problem: How can we know when and where institutional work is likely to happen? This is why exogenous events (or jolts and shocks) are so useful, even though the literature on institutional work seeks to highlight endogenous sources of change. When you know that something is happening or is about to happen that puts (or might put) institutions to the test, you can position yourself to be there when institutional work is likely to go down. This is why the adoption of new technologies, legal battles, the passing of new laws, the election of public officials, the emergence of new discourses, and other observable challenges to the way things have been are so useful for studying how people create, change, or maintain institutions. The other alternative is to study settings in which one knows that there are multiple institutional logics in play and to examine how people negotiate this multiplicity. This strategy seems to undergird the final body of research that examines how actions and institutions are linked: the literature on “inhabited institutions.” Because this work is primarily ethnographic, we finally arrive at the coalface. “Inhabited institutions” is a term first coined by Scully and Creed (1997) and further developed by Hallet and Ventresca (2006) in a paper that reinterpreted Gouldner’s groundbreaking Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, from the perspective of symbolic interactionism. Hallett and Ventresca argue convincingly that Gouldner’s work “is exemplary of an ‘inhabited institutions approach’ because by doing field work he could identify three separate ways that the institution of bureaucracy emerged and co-existed simultaneously in the gypsum mine” (p. 214). The three forms of bureaucracy can be seen as different negotiated orders that solidified in different eras and parts of the mine as workers and management grappled with the meaning of bureaucracy through situated action, interaction, and interpretation. In addition to employing ethnographic field methods, research that adopts the perspective of inhabited institutions evinces several distinct characteristics. First, these studies take note of the broader institutional regimes and logics in which their sites are embedded. Often, the sites are schools or nonprofit organizations that are facing new ideologies of accountability. Binder (2007), Hallett (2010), Berman (2012), and Aurini (2012)—key papers in this line of research—emphasize ongoing negotiations and the construction of meaning within and among groups of actors who draw on external institutional logics to create, alter, or preserve their own interaction orders. Second, the researchers assess interaction orders with respect to dynamics of coupling, decoupling, and recoupling. Said differently, they examine the tightness of the relationship between an interaction order and the institutional systems in which they are immersed. Third, the studies frequently find that different arms of an organization negotiate somewhat different interaction orders, 24

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implicitly recalling Strauss’ imagery of social worlds and their subworlds. Fourth, students of inhabited institutions view institutional logics as resources that people can draw on strategically to construct a local reality. Finally, because studies of inhabited institutions rest on field work, these scholars are able to ground their analyses in thick descriptions drawing on informants’ words, actions, and interactions.

2.5 Working Institutions Given what I have said about how I became an unwitting institutionalist, it should come as no surprise that I find myself most aligned with those who advocate studying inhabited institutions. Their work, like mine, is also rooted in the Chicago School which makes us members of the same sect. With that said, I nevertheless think there is an opportunity to push even further toward the coalface where institutions are created, modified, and changed by crossing the study of institutional work with the study of inhabited institutions. In the process, we may also learn more about institutional entrepreneurs, although they may not look quite like entrepreneurs and certainly they won’t look like organizations. Following Bechky (2011), my proposal for doing so involves bringing occupations into the mix. Whereas most of the research I have been discussing focuses on people in organizations who become enrolled, wittingly or unwittingly, in projects of institutional change, there are occupations and organizations whose explicit jobs are to maintain, enforce, change, create, and disseminate institutions or institutional logics. I have in mind occupations such as government affairs agents (Kaynak and Barley, forthcoming), for-hire lobbyists (Morales, 2013), members of standard-setting bodies, regulators, legislators, members of think tanks (Medvitz, 2012), trade association personnel, patent officers, judges, corporate lawyers, and officers of the Federal Reserve, among others. What all of these occupations have in common is that their members’ daily work specifically entails trying to structure an institutional environment in which they and others are embedded. Although occupations such as these are not those typically studied by researchers employed by business schools (or for that matter occupational sociologists) and although they may not fit organization and management journals’ notions of what is fit for publication, all are occupations that focus on changing the environments in which organizations are embedded. In some cases, these occupations may even represent the environment. I propose that the best approach for such research is to become more concrete and situated. The preferred method is, therefore, ethnography, ideally participant observation whether complimented by interviews or not. 25

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Discourse could be important, but texts are largely peripheral and at best tools for triangulation. Let’s call the focus of such research, “working institutions.” I use the term “working” as a verb, not an adjective. In other words, I am not implying anything about whether institutions succeed or fail. Instead, I want to invoke such ideas as working “on,” “with,” “through,” or “against” institutions. Furthermore, I do not mean to encompass avocational activities, however consuming or important. I am interested in work for which people are hired and paid. So we are talking about occupations and explicit jobs and roles. This is where Chicago sociologists of work would have first looked. It seems to be the last place where organizational theorists look largely because work and occupations unfortunately became tangential to organizational theory after the late 1960s (Barley and Tolbert, 1991; Barley and Kunda, 2001). To give you a sense of what it might look like to study people who “work institutions,” let me draw on an ethnography of public (or government) affairs professionals conducted by Ece Kaynak, one of my doctoral students at Stanford (Kaynak and Barley, forthcoming). Public or government affairs professionals are what we might call “inside lobbyists” in contrast to “lobbyists-for-hire.” Public affairs professionals are employees of the organizations on whose behalf they lobby policy makers at the local, state, or federal level. They do not work for lobbying firms. In this case, Ece studied a public affairs team that lobbied at the local level on behalf on an organization, Devo, which was a large non-profit that employed over 10,000 people and was a large landholder in several surrounding towns and cities. Consequently, the public affairs team was deeply involved with local politics of land use and development. At the time of field work, Devo was in the process of trying to get approvals from local legislative bodies to redevelop two pieces of land which it owned in nearby cities. Ece spent five months as a participant observer with the public affairs team. She was privy to their meetings, she engaged with the team in informal conversations and interviews, she accompanied members of the team to city council and city planning meetings, she attended events sponsored by Devo for local officials and members of the communities, and she collected documents produced by the team as well as by the cities of Fairview and Springfield where the developments were sited. Figure 2.5 summarizes the work processes the public affairs team used as they went about trying to convince local legislators and community members to support Devo’s plans. Each of the six processes displayed in the figure are glosses for a multitude specific actions, interactions, and conversations that occurred over time both within the team and between members of the team and local officials and community leaders. The first thing to note is that the work of the public affairs team was composed of six major types of activity: 26

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External to the Organization

Sense-Giving Work

Construct Narratives

Disseminate Narratives

Sense-Making Work

Share and Interpret Information

Monitor

Foundation Work

Plan Relationship Needs

Build and Maintain Relationships

Figure 2.5. Work process of public affairs professionals after Kaynak and Barley, forthcoming

planning relationship needs, establishing and maintaining relationships, monitoring, pooling information, constructing narratives, and disseminating narratives. Second, three of these activities occurred inside the organization, or “backstage,” as Goffman would have put it: planning relationship needs, pooling information, and constructing narratives. All of these activities occurred in Devo’s offices away from the gaze of outsiders. The other three activities occurred outside the organization, or “frontstage” in Goffman’s terms, where various audiences were present. Third, the work that occurred backstage fed frontstage work and vice versa. Fourth, the types of activities define three overarching categories: what we call (1) foundation work (because these activities laid the basis on which all other activities rested), (2) sense making, and (3) sense giving. Detailing the sorts of discussions, actions, and interactions that comprise the six activities is beyond the scope of this chapter.1 Nevertheless, there are several general aspects of the work process that are worth noting. First, public affairs people explicitly discussed which officials and members of the community they needed to establish or strengthen relationships. Second, they established and maintained relationships through a variety of activities including formal events, informal events, private conversations, one-on-one lunches, and so on. During these events and conversations public affairs staff became aware of or monitored information that was crucial to their development activities: who stood where, who had what concerns, what other people were involved, how discussions outside of Devo were proceeding, and so on. In addition, the staff regularly attended city council meetings and other 1

For more detail on these actions and interactions see Kaynak and Barley (forthcoming).

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meetings where important information might surface. They read local newspapers and blogs that printed articles and opinion pieces, not only on Devo’s proposed projects, but more generally on the public’s stance on development. The staff pooled and discussed all of these sources of information backstage in staff meetings where members attempted to make sense of what they had learned. This, in turn, might lead the team to decide they needed to do more relationship work. Their sense making also informed the crafting of narratives that spoke to the needs and concerns of their allies as well as their opponents. Once crafted, the staff disseminated the narratives in formal documents, speeches at city council meetings, private conversations, and occasionally in opinion pieces. During dissemination new intelligence might be acquired that led to recrafting narratives (sometimes significantly) as well as to more relationship work. In short, the public affairs professionals’ work was organized in cycles and feedback loops. Furthermore, working institutions such as a city’s zoning laws or a community’s stance on development covered long periods of time. What can studies such as this one do for institutional theory? First and foremost, they allow us to see how individuals who hold particular jobs and roles attempt to use and change the institutions within which their social world is embedded. Second, they bring to the fore ongoing negotiations (in Strauss’ sense of the term) and show us how institutions and interaction orders mesh in ways that go beyond notions of coupling, uncoupling, and decoupling. Third, they shed light on conflicting interests and the fundamentally political nature of establishing, altering, and defending negotiated orders and institutions. Fourth, they help reduce the gap between action and structure and the distance between micro- and macro-phenomena. Finally, in the process of all of this, researchers get to witness and perhaps even take part in the goings-on that occur at the coalfaces of institutional dynamics. So, I invite you to pick up the interactionist’s headlamp to help you see, grab your pick and shovel, and join me on the way even further back to the coalface.

References Aurini, Janice D. (2012). Patterns of Tight and Loose Coupling in a Competitive Marketplace: The Case of Learning Center Franchises. Sociology of Education, 85(4), 373–87. Barley, Stephen R. (1986). Technology as an Occasion for Structuring: Evidence from Observations of CT Scanners and the Social Order of Radiology Departments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 31, 78–108. Barley, Stephen R. (1989). Careers, Identities, and Institutions: The Legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology. In Michael B. Arthur, Douglas T. Hall, and Barbara

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Working Institutions S. Lawrence (Eds), Handbook of Career Theory (pp. 41–66). New York: Cambridge University Press. Barley, Stephen R. (2008). Coalface Institutionalism. In Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver, Roy Suddaby, and Kirstin Sahlin-Anderson (Eds), Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 490–515). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Barley, Stephen R. (2010). Building an Institutional Field to Corral a Government. Organization Studies, 31(6), 777–805. Barley, Stephen R., and Kunda, Gideon (2001). Bringing Work Back In. Organization Science, 12, 75–94. Barley, Stephen R., and Tolbert, Pamela S. (1991). Introduction: At the Intersection of Organizations and Occupations. In Pamela S. Tolbert and Stephen R. Barley (Eds), Research in the Sociology of Organizations (pp. 1–13). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Barley, Stephen R., and Tolbert, Pamela S. (1997). Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links between Action and Institution. Organization Studies, 18, 93–117. Battilana, Julie (2006). Agency and Institutions: The Enabling Role of Individuals’ Social Position. Organization, 13, 653–76. Bechky, Beth A. (2011). Organizational Theory Work: Institutions, Occupations and Negotiated Orders. Organization Science, 22(5), 1157–67. Becker, Howard S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Becker, Howard S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Benford, Robert D., and Snow, David A. (2000). Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–39. Berger, Peter L., and Luckmann, Thomas (1967). The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday. Berman, Elizabeth P. (2012). Explaining the Move toward the Market in US Academic Science: How Institutional Logics Can Change without Institutional Entrepreneurs. Theory and Society, 41(3), 261–99. Binder, Amy (2007). For Love and Money: Organizations’ Creative Responses to Multiple Environmental Logics. Theory and Society, 36(6), 547–71. Bittner, Egon (1965). The Concept of Organization. Social Research, 32, 239–55. Blumer, Herbert (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Dalton, Melville (1950). Men Who Manage. New York: John Wiley and Sons. DiMaggio, Paul J. (1988). Interest and Agency in Institutional Theory. In Lynne G. Zucker (Eds), Institutional Patterns and Organizations: Culture and Environment (pp. 3–22). Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. DiMaggio, Paul J. (1991). Constructing an Organizational Field as a Professional Project: U.S. Art Museums, 1920–1940. In Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Eds), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (pp. 267–92). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Emerson, Joan (1970). Nothing Unusual Is Happening. In Tomatsu Shibutani (Ed.), Human Nature and Collective Behavior (pp. 208–22). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

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Institutions and Organizations Fine, Gary A. (1991). On the Macrofoundations of Microsociology: Order, Meaning and Comparative Context. Sociological Quarterly, 32(2), 161–77. Fligstein, Neil (1997). Social Skill and Institutional Theory. American Behavioral Scientist, 40(4), 397–405. Fligstein, Neil (2001). Social Skill and the Theory of Fields. Sociological Theory, 19(2), 105–25. Garfinkel, Harold (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Garud, Raghu, Jain, Sanjay, and Kumaraswamy, Arun (2002). Institutional Entrepreneurship in the Sponsorship of Common Technological Standards: The Case of Sun Microsystems and Java. Academy of Management Journal, 45(1), 196–214. Garud, Raghu, Hardy, Cynthia, and Maguire, Steve (2007). Institutional Entrepreneurship as Embedded Agency: An Introduction to the Special Issue. Organization Studies, 28(7), 957–69. Gawer, Annabelle, and Phillips, Nelson (2013). Institutional Work as Logics Shifts: The Case of Intel’s Transformation to Platform Leader. Organization Studies, 34(8), 1035–71. Giddens, Anthony (1984). The Constitution of Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goffman, Erving (1961). Asylums. New York: Anchor. Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row. Goffman, Erving (1983). The Interaction Order. American Sociological Review, 48, 1–17. Greenwood, Royston, and Suddaby, Roy (2006). Institutional Entrepreneurship in Mature Fields: The Big Five Accounting Firms. Academy of Management Journal, 49(1), 27–48. Greenwood, Royston, Suddaby, Roy, and Hinings, C. R. (2002). Theorizing Change: The Role of Professional Associations in the Transformation of Institutionalized Fields. Academy of Management Journal, 45(1), 58–80. Hallett, Tim (2010). The Myth Incarnate: Recoupling Processes, Turmoil, and Inhabited Institutions in an Urban Elementary School. American Sociological Review, 75(1), 52–74. Hallett, Tim, and Ventresca, Marc J. (2006). Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and Organizational Forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theoretical Sociology, 35, 213–36. Hughes, Everett C. (1942). The Study of Institutions. Social Forces, 20(3), 307–10. Hughes, Everett C. (1958). Men and Their Work. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Hughes, Everett C. (1962–71). Going Concerns: The Study of American Institutions. In The Sociological Eye (pp. 52–64). Chicago, IL: Aldine. Kaynak, Ece, and Barley, Stephen R. (Forthcoming). Shaping The Political Environment: An Ethnography of Public Affairs Professionals at Work. Work and Occupations. Lawrence, Thomas B., and Phillips, Nelson (2004). From Moby Dick to Free Willy: MacroCultural Discourse and Institutional Entrepreneurship in Emerging Institutional Fields. Organization, 11(5), 689–711. Lawrence, Thomas B., and Suddaby, Roy (2006). Institutions and Institutional Work. In Thomas B. Lawrence and Walter R. Nord (Ed.), Sage Handbook of Organization Studies, 2nd edn (pp. 215–54). London: Sage.

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Working Institutions Lawrence, Thomas B., Suddaby, Roy, and Leca, Bernard (2009). Introduction: Theorizing and Studying Institutional Work. In Thomas B. Lawrence, Roy Suddaby, and Bernard Leca (Eds), Institutional Work: Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies of Organizations (pp. 1–28). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, Thomas B., Suddaby, Roy, and Leca, Bernard (2011). Institutional Work: Refocusing Institutional Studies of Organization. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(1), 1–7. Lawrence, Thomas B., Leca, Bernard, and Zilber, Tammar B. (2013). Institutional Work: Current Research, New Directions and Overlooked Issues. Organization Studies, 34(8), 1023–33. Maguire, Steve, Hardy, Cynthia, and Lawrence, Thomas B. (2004). Institutional Entrepreneurship in Emerging Fields: HIV/AIDS Treatment Advocacy in Canada. Academy of Management Journal, 47(5), 657–79. Maines, David R. (1982). In Search of Mesostructure: Studies in the Negotiated Order. Urban Life, 11(3), 267–79. Medvitz, Thomas (2012). Think Tanks in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive. American Sociological Review, 5: 904–13. Morales, Daniel M. (2013). Policymaking as Gift Exchange: An Ethnographic Study of Lobbyists. Doctoral dissertation. Stanford University, CA. Munir, Kamal A. (2005). The Social Construction of Events: A Study of Institutional Change in the Photographic Field. Organization Studies, 26(1), 93–112. Munir, Kamal A., and Phillips, Nelson (2005). The Birth of the “Kodak Moment”: Institutional Entrepreneurship and the Adoption of New Technologies. Organization Studies, 26(11), 1665–87. Nelsen, Bonalyn J., and Barley, Stephen R. (1997). For Love or Money: Commodification and the Construction of an Occupational Mandate. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42, 619–53. Orlikowski, Wanda J., and Barley, Stephen R. (2001). Technology and Institutions: What Can Research on Information Technology and Research on Organizations Learn from Each Other? MIS Quarterly, 25(3), 145–65. Phillips, Nelson, Lawrence, Thomas B., and Hardy, Cynthia (2004). Discourse and Institutions. Academy of Management Journal, 29(4), 635–52. Powell, Walter W., and Colyvas, Jeannette A. (2008). Microfoundations of Institutional Theory. In Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver, Roy Suddaby, and Kirstin SahlinAnderson (Eds), Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 490–515). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rojas, Fabio (2010). Power through Institutional Work: Acquiring Academic Authority in the 1968 Third World Strike. Academy of Management Journal, 53(6), 1263–80. Roth, Julius A. (1963). Timetables: Structuring the Passage of Time in Hospital Treatment and Other Careers. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Roy, Donald F. (1959). “Banana Time”: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction. Human Organization, 4, 158–68. Scully, Maureen, and Creed, Douglas (1997). Stealth Legitimacy: Employee Activism and Corporate Response during the Diffusion of Domestic Partner Benefits. Academy of Management Meetings.

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Institutions and Organizations Shibutani, Tomatsu (1962). Reference Groups and Social Control. In Arnold M. Rose (Ed.), Human Behavior and Social Processes: An Interactionist Approach (pp. 128–47). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Simmel, Georg (1922). Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations. New York: Free Press. Snow, David A., Rochford, E. B., Worden, Steven K., and Benford, Robert D. (1986). Alignment Processes, Micromobilization and Movement Participation. American Sociological Review, 51(4), 464–81. Strauss, Anselm L. (1978a). A Social World Perspective. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 1, 119–28. Strauss, Anselm L. (1978b). Negotiations: Varieties, Processes, Context and Social Order. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Strauss, Anselm L. (1982). Social Worlds and Legitimation Processes. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 4, 171–90. Sudnow, David (1965). Normal Crimes: Sociological Features of the Penal Code in a Public Defender Office. Social Problems, 12(2), 55–76. Turner, Ralph H. (2006). Role Theory. In Jonathan H. Turner (Ed.), Handbook of Sociological Theory (pp. 233–54). New York: Springer. Van Maanen, John (1988). Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zilber, Tammar B. (2002). Institutionalization as an Interplay between Actions, Meanings and Actors: The Case of a Rape Crisis Center in Israel. Academy of Management Journal, 45(1), 234–54.

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3 A Processual View on Institutions A Note from a Phenomenological Institutional Perspective Renate E. Meyer

3.1 Introduction At the 2017 International Process Symposium Mark de Rond, Tim Hallett, and I were invited to speak about “Making Institutional Theory Processual.”1 My part on this panel became to speak about phenomenological institutionalism and the processual view of institutions it offers. The questions I was asked to address were: Can institutional theory do without processes? Should institutional theory be more processual than it currently is? Can process theory do without institutions? I mainly draw on the writings of Alfred Schütz, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann and link them to themes that I see relevant for current theorizing on institutions. Given the specific topic of the event and this volume, I will focus on the role of processes.2 In a nutshell, my responses to the questions assigned to me are: No, a phenomenological institutional theory cannot do without processes, never has in the past, and has no intention of doing so in the future. To the contrary: Processes are built irremovably into its framework. Hence, on a conceptual level, phenomenological institutional theory already is 1 During the preparation for the panel, the three of us had intensive email contact and several conversations and discussed a number of questions and angles for this panel. This note will focus on the part I was assigned. However, it should be read as one part of a panel of three. Moreover, with regard to communicative styles, it is a talk put down in writing and, hence, bears the features of a talk. 2 A more detailed presentation of phenomenological institutional theory and its potential contributions to neo-institutional theory can be found in Meyer (2008).

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highly processual. However, I concur that current institutional analyses do not always stress processes prominently enough. Process theory on the other hand could operate without institutions, but the price is high. I do understand that such a wish may be a reaction to the rather inflationary usage of “institution” in current organization research— more as a prefix or self-categorization than as an actual concept in the analyses (Meyer and Höllerer, 2014). However, institutions are core components of the fabric of the social world. Process theory could omit them from its conceptual toolbox only at the risk of losing sight of typified patterns and of reducing its scope to more ephemeral processes a step that is hardly advisable because by taking it, process theory would exclude from its perspective considerable parts of the social world. Institutions and processes are inextricably intertwined phenomena; the alienation of the two is due to our researching them separately. I will argue my points by outlining the phenomenological understanding of institutions and the role processes play therein.

3.2 A Phenomenological Perspective on Institutions Phenomenological institutional theory is based on the foundational work of Alfred Schütz, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann (e.g. Schütz, 1993 [1932] and 1971; Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Schütz and Luckmann, 2003 [1975]). Schütz’s ambition was to give Weber’s concept of “subjective meaning” a social foundation, and to combine Weber’s ideas with Husserl’s and Bergson’s philosophical thoughts. For Weber, subjective meaning was the key to his verstehende sociology and a core component of his concept of agency. Action, for Weber, is subjectively meaningful, and social action takes account of and is oriented towards other actors. Schütz was interested in how human consciousness works, how phenomena are perceived, as well as how they may be valued or appreciated aesthetically and emotionally, but also in how social meaning is constructed. Meaning for Schütz is inherently temporal, tied to lived-through time and an individual’s consciousness and biography. The constitution of meaning in an individual’s consciousness is always accomplished in the present, anticipating future states, and looking back to the past. Subjective meaning therefore changes in the course of an unfolding action and especially in retrospect, when looking back on what has occurred. Given that an individual’s consciousness, the location of meaning constitution, is inaccessible for others, how, then, is social meaning, meaningful interaction, and collective action possible? Schütz emphasized that human consciousness is directed (meaning that it always has an object) and works on the basis of “typifications”—that is: 34

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The application of generic types to our experiences in the life-world. These typifications are central building blocks of the social knowledge shared by a particular social grouping and are core components of institutions. Trying to understand the meaning as assigned by other actors requires empathy, not only for a researcher (what was later called “double hermeneutics”), but also for all social actors. Schütz, and Berger and Luckmann, were influenced by George Herbert Mead and American pragmatism (e.g. Mead, 1965 [1934]). Especially Mead’s emphasis on actors’ ability to take the perspective of significant and generalized others found its way into their theorizing. In the seminal “treatise” (1967), Berger and Luckmann carry forward Schütz’s project. They highlight the essential role institutions play in the social construction of reality. How central processes are becomes evident in the very first sentence of their introduction: “The basic contentions of the argument of this book,” they stress, “are implicit in its title and sub-title, namely, that reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyse the process in which this occurs” (1967: 13; my emphasis). The sociology of knowledge, they continue a little later, is concerned not only with the multiplicity and heterogeneity of knowledge and truths in human societies and knowledge’s asymmetric distribution across society’s members, but especially with “the processes by which any body of knowledge come to be socially established as ‘reality’ ” (1967: 15; my emphasis). Consequently, they are concerned less with institutions than with processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization.

3.2.1 What is an Institution? A Process- and Action-Based Definition Definitions of institutions abound. Already way before institutional theory entered organization theory, Hughes (1936: 180) deplores that “[t]he only idea common to all usages of the term ‘institution’ is that of some sort of establishment of relative permanence of a distinctly social sort.” In order to embrace the role of processes in phenomenological institutional theory it is important to keep in mind its decidedly action-based and type-based understanding of institutions building on Schütz’s concept of typifications of actions, situations, objects, and persons. The most frequently referenced definition of institution highlights the process character: “Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put differently, any such typification is an institution” (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 72). This definition typically warrants some elaboration. The focus on the reciprocity stresses the social character of institutions and the ability to take the role of the other. It requires at least a certain degree of overlap in relevance systems and intersubjectively shared Lebenswelt. It ties institutions to 35

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a specific social grouping (a “thought collective” in Ludwik Fleck’s (1980 [1935]) terminology) which can be, for example, a family, group, organization, or society, and which serves as a reference group when it comes to judging appropriateness and legitimacy. The institution typifies actors and their actions and bundles them; that is, types of actors perform types of scripted activities as a part of social roles. Of course, each and every enactment is unique and the subjective meanings differ. But the meaning an act is assigned incorporates these shared typifications. Institutions seldom stand alone, but come in agglomerations, organized around Leitideen (Lepsius, 1990; Meyer, 2014), forming provinces of meaning (as Schütz calls them) with a particular meaning structure, value spheres (as in Weber’s work), or institutional spheres or orders (as much current institutional theory points out). For example, democracy as Leitidee is enacted through a multitude of institutionalized practices with typified actors and actions such as voting, parliamentary debates, and decision making, separation of powers, and many more. Processes are central for Berger and Luckmann (1967) in several respects. They highlight three “moments” of the social construction of reality—externalization of subjective meanings, objectivation (part of which is institutionalization), and internalization. All three are moments in a dialectical process. Equally, the sequences of habitualization, institutionalization, sedimentation, and transmission which describe how institutions come into existence and are maintained are conceptualized as processes. And finally, legitimation is a process too; one of producing second-order objectifications of meaning, or more simply: a “process of ‘explaining’ and ‘justifying’” (1967: 111). What happens during the process of institutionalization is that typified activities, categories of actors, and meanings continuously become more and more closely connected to one another, forming a “package” of ideational and behavioral, material and symbolic features. As part of the process of objectification, these “packages” become sedimented in all sorts of sign systems— language being the primordial human sign system, but visual and material artefacts, aural sign systems, etc. play an important and currently quite neglected role in these processes as well (see two recent special issues: Boxenbaum et al., 2018 and Höllerer et al., 2018). Established institutions, then, are “crystalized” social meaning (Berger & Kellner, 1984). Institutions are “alive” in their enactment, that is the performance of the scripted activity; they are literally “in action.” Enactment of institutions has a temporal quality and the scripted activity involves, at least in most cases, some sequential steps that are open to a processual analysis. Institutions also persist as internalized structures of expectation that actors have of themselves and of others, and in the way they make sense of present and past events, and their future projects. This has implications for the “radius” of institutions. It includes those who harbor the expectation that a particular type of actor 36

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performs a particular type of scripted activity, those who use these typifications in their interpretations of the world, not only those who actually perform the activity. The methodological problem this entails is quite obvious: Institutions are never directly measurable; their working needs to be inferred by reconstructing the meanings assigned by actors and the meaning structures they are part of; and while activities can be observed, expectations are more difficult to empirically access, especially if they work on low levels of reflexivity. This makes clear that the visibility of the typified activity is a bad proxy for an institution’s range of validity. Institutions, as reciprocal typifications, do not determine action or interpretation, but they provide a shared cognitive infrastructure for meaning making to occur, they train perception and cognition, and form the tracks along which meaning making can run (a “thought style” as Ludwik Fleck, 1980 [1935] calls it). This works at different degrees of latency, ranging from reflexive and strategic availability to complete taken-for-grantedness; a common misunderstanding being that institutions are always highly latent and taken for granted and work quasi automatically, almost in a stimulus-response manner, or that institutional theory is or should be primarily interested in those that are. The constitution of meaning in the individual’s consciousness has a built-in temporality. The construction of social meaning is based on historicity. Institutions are sociohistorical Gebilde (formations). They are “relatively permanent” (Hughes, 1936) with a life cycle of their own. They are historical “plants,” they “grow” in a particular cultural soil, they change their form and/or meaning in the course of history, they eventually die and disappear. Berger and Luckmann (1967: 72; my emphasis) stress this historicity of institutions when they highlight that institutions “cannot be created instantaneously . . . It is impossible to understand an institution adequately without an understanding of the historical process in which it was produced.” This is one of the reasons why the “travel” of institutions, their “translation” into different cultural landscapes and the changes they undergo in such processes, is so interesting.

3.2.2 Institutions as Collective Accomplishments If institutionalization is a process, when is something finally institutionalized and can be called an institution? Phenomenological institutionalism stresses a distinct moment in this process: Institutionalization is completed when a habitualized typification is passed on to a new generation of actors who were not involved in its original formation. In its most basic form, a third person is required. This is an often neglected, but in fact central aspect, and I will expand a little on its implications. 37

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First of all, transmission is “responsible” for the fact-like appearance of institutions; they are presented to the new generation as “the way it is.” Berger and Luckmann explain that the actors who were involved in the beginning can understand the meaning of an institution “by exercising their powers of recollection” (1967: 79). This changes for the new generation who have no personal memory of the original circumstances. Hence, the activities a person has introduced herself or has witnessed in nascendi will never achieve the same degree of objectivity. While human actors are creative and bring into being many novel ideas, they do not start the social world ex nihilo. In most instances of our social world, we are a “new generation,” born into a “sociohistorical a priori” which makes available to us certain parts of the sedimented social knowledge (and excludes us from others) and which, as collective totality, delineates the “horizon” within which people can meaningfully act—and beyond which it is impossible to see or understand. Second, the necessity of transmission helps delineate what is not an institution, and to distinguish institutions from other recurrent forms of activity, such as routines or practices, and related concepts such as categories. Although recurrent, not all routines are institutions: People can have their “private” sequences of activities and follow them their whole life; pairs or social groups can develop patterns of activities and enact them for long periods of time. From a phenomenological institutional perspective, these are habitualizations that become institutionalized only if a new person enters the scene to whom the pattern is presented as “fact.” The relationship between a phenomenological understanding of institutions and practices is a little trickier and essentially depends on the definition of “practice”: If practices are defined as “scripted activities” and “scripts” as being composed of social roles and types, there is considerable overlap with practices being a component of the “package”; if practices are regarded as a sequence of socially meaningful activities, they may or may not be institutionalized. Hence, in both cases, institution is the narrower concept. Similarly, typifications categorize actors, situations, objects, activities, but not all categories are institutionalized. Third, transmission to a new generation helps clarify the relationship between the process of institutionalization and the process of diffusion. From a phenomenological institutional perspective, institutionalization in its basic form requires a third person. Hence, diffusion beyond this third person is not a defining feature of institutionalization per se, but describes the scope of the social grouping within which something is institutionalized and the institution’s radius (both synchronically and diachronically). In addition, what is being transmitted is essentially the expectation (and acceptance as legitimate) that certain types of actors perform certain types of activities. Only for those actors who are assigned a particular typified role, the execution of specific activity is included. Some institutions, even if pertained in a large group 38

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of actors, will be performed by very few and rarely (e.g. the institutions connected to the succession of a Catholic pope). Fourth, and, at least when it comes to what fascinates me, most importantly, the necessity of transmission accounts for the transcendental quality of institutions: Institutions are not merely instrumental in that they guide and coordinate social action, what is more, they outlast the moment of their origin, they transcend time and space. Every enactment of an institution references the typifications it embodies and the Leitidee they signify (Meyer, 2014; Rehberg, 1994). It is these references through which a unique act becomes recognizable and interpretable, and acquires meaning as enactment of an institution. Every enactment of an institution is therefore a symbolic expression of the typifications it incarnates. This expressive character ultimately makes all institutional orders symbolic orders. The presentational (i.e. in the sense of “giving presence to”; Schütz, 1971) aspect is crucial for institutions and is achieved through symbols that range from bodily symbols (e.g. rituals, mise-en-scène of the body), spatial and object symbols (e.g. architecture, material artefacts), time symbols (e.g. the structuring of processes, construction of history), to text symbols (e.g. vocabularies; visual registers).

3.2.3 Processes Everywhere There is, as I hope to have shown, no shortage of processes in phenomenological institutionalism: the temporality of meaning constitution in individual consciousness, the temporality inherent in action, the process character of all stages of the institutionalization of meaning-typification-action “packages,” the transmission and the historicity of institutions, the processes of transmission, sedimentation as permanently unfinished, not even in total institutions, de-institutionalization, the institutional order being permanently in flux. There are all kinds of processes: biological, subjective, intersubjective, social, societal, historical, etc., each with their own dynamics and mechanisms. Processes are woven into the very fabric of a phenomenological understanding of institutions, their emergence, workings, legitimation, and disappearance. For institutional theory and process theory, there is, hence, an ample field of potential collaboration. Just to name a few potential questions, we could disentangle different types of processes; the relationship between institutions and temporality (and spatiality) deserves more attention; and, given that “the processes by which any body of knowledge come to be socially established as ‘reality’ ” (Berger & Luckmann, 1967: 15; my emphasis) is the core objective of phenomenological institutionalism, to investigate how these processes unfold in a mediatized or digitalized social world, how “alternate realities” and fake news are socially constructed and become institutionalized, would be worthy subjects. 39

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3.3 An Institution-Free Process Theory? As a scholar obsessed with institutions, I have taken some lengths to elaborate how institutions from a phenomenological perspective are inherently processual. With regard to process theory, I cannot claim to offer elaborations, only opinions. Can process theory do without institutions? I would say: hardly. Not, if process theory is interested in stabilized patterns, generic processes that are established and “relatively durable”; not if process theory is interested in processes of a “distinct social sort” (Hughes, 1936); not if it is interested in types of processes; not, if social meanings play a role in the analysis, and if only to make the point that particular processes are not institutionalized (and I am not even arguing here that we as researchers can hardly analyze the social world without recurring to typifications and patterns). Hence, I am not saying that process theory cannot do without particular versions of institutional theory; what they cannot (or should not) do without is institutions.

3.4 Instead of a Conclusion: The Ontological Status of Institutions Institutions are crystallized social meanings; they are structures of expectations. For objectifications, the danger lies in their reification, in treating them as if they were “things.” “The basic ‘recipe’ for the reification of institutions,” as Berger and Luckmann (1967: 107) warn, “is to bestow on them an ontological status independent of human activity and signification.” Institutions are instantiated in their enactment, that is in the performance of the scripted activity; they persist beyond their immediate instantiation as internalized structures of expectation. They erode when they are no longer woven into meaningful action and the expectation of seeing them performed wanes. They have no ontological status beyond the activities and processes that enact them either in the social realm or the realm of individuals’ consciousness. Language is tricky in this respect and by invoking certain analogies or metaphors it leads astray: From a phenomenological perspective, institutions are not beds that embed persons, in which they lie however comfortably or uncomfortably. Institutions are not buildings or islands, where people dwell or which they inhabit. To focus more on the processes, to keep in mind the liquidity of institutions (some with high, some with low viscosity), may help preventing reification.

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References Berger, P. L., and Kellner, H. (1984). Für eine neue Soziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Berger, P. L., and Luckmann, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books. Boxenbaum, E., Jones, C., Meyer, R. E., and Svejenova, S. (2018). Introduction to the Special Issue “The Material and Visual Turn in Organization Theory: Objectifying and (Re)acting to Novel Ideas.” Organization Studies, 39, 595–616. Fleck, L. (1980 [1935]). Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Höllerer, M., Daudigeos, T., and Jancsary, D. (2018). Multimodality, Meaning, and Institutions: Editorial. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 54(A), 1–24. Hughes, E. C. (1936). The Ecological Aspect of Institutions. American Sociological Review, 1, 180–9. Lepsius, M. R. (1990). Interessen, Ideen und Institutionen. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Mead, G. H. (1965 [1934]). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, R. E. (2008). New Sociology of Knowledge: Historical Legacy and Contributions to Current Debates in Institutional Research. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin, and R. Suddaby (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 519–38). London: Sage. Meyer, R. E. (2014). Leitideen and Institutions. Notes for the EGOS 2013 PDW on Institutional Logics, Orders of Worth, and Leitideen. WU Vienna. Meyer, R. E., and Höllerer, M. A. (2014). Does Institutional Theory Need Redirecting? Journal of Management Studies, 51, 1221–33. Rehberg, K.-S. (1994). Institutionen als symbolische Ordnungen: Leitfragen und Grundkategorien zur Theorie und Analyse institutioneller Mechanismen. In G. Göhler (Ed.), Die Eigenart der Institutionen: Zum Profil politischer Institutionentheorie (pp. 47–84). Baden-Baden: Nomos Verl.-Ges. Schütz, A. (1971). Das Problem der sozialen Wirklichkeit. Gesammelte Aufsätze Band 1. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Schütz, A. (1993 [1932]). Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schütz, A., and Luckmann, T. (2003 [1975]). Strukturen der Lebenswelt. Konstanz: UVK.

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4 On Doing Institutional Analysis without Institutional Theory Tim Hallett

4.1 Introduction Institutional theory is becoming an increasingly dominant paradigm in organizational studies (Alvesson and Spicer, 2018; Vogel, 2012).1 It is now possible to have a career—from PhD to full professor, working entirely within the field of institutional research. This is not, however, how the field came into bloom. Rather, many of the key founders were not self-consciously “institutional” as they embarked on their careers, developing the ideas that would only later come to be known as “institutional theory.” With this observation in mind, this chapter asks, can we escape the now dominant field and, in essence, do institutional analysis without institutional theory? Should we? The answer, I contend, is a qualified “yes.” I argue that the dominance of institutional theory in organizational studies is problematic in the sense that many of the most important insights and developments in institutional theory emerged through cross-fertilization across multiple fields, rather than the narrow cultivation of one. Institutional theory can benefit, in particular, through engagement with process organizational studies, and this chapter serves as an invitation for 1 Special thanks to the Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study for their support while writing this chapter. This chapter is based on a panel at the 2017 International Process Symposium titled “Making Institutional Theory Processual.” The panel included Renate Meyer, Mark de Rond, and myself, and in developing the panel we corresponded extensively to generate ideas. It was Renate who came up with the provocation, “Can we do institutional analysis without institutional theory?” While all three of us spoke to this during the panel, we agreed that I would take the lead on this question. Thus, while I am “author” of this chapter, it is inspired by Renate and Mark and the many conversations with the participants at the meetings. I also thank Tammar Zilber and Trish Reay for their comments and encouragement.

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process scholars to consider doing “institutional analysis without institutional theory” as a means to develop fresh insights that will enliven organizational studies and institutional research alike. To the skeptical reader this may seem like an unlikely invite, as “process” and “institutions” may sound like contradictory terms. After all, according to the categorizations that one might find in an undergraduate class on organizations, or even in a graduate seminar, “institutional” approaches are typically deemed “macro-structural” (Schneiberg and Clemens, 2006), even if the structures involved are cultural in nature, for example the templates for organizing that a society views as legitimate (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). In contrast, “processual” approaches are by definition dynamic, and are far more open to “micro”-analyses (Langley, 1999). Yet this apparent boundary is a false one, and process is alive and an animating feature in the burgeoning research on institutional entrepreneurship (Beckert, 1999; Hardy and Maguire, 2017), institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006; Hampel et al., 2017), and inhabited institutionalism (Hallett and Ventresca, 2006; Bechky, 2011). To craft this invitation, the body of this chapter provides an accessible, historical review of the development of institutional theory, one that will draw process scholars into the institutional field, lend insight into how to do institutional analysis without institutional theory, and, in doing so, identifies some of the constraints that are limiting institutional scholars today. The historical review is necessarily brief, but nonetheless revealing. As with any history it must start somewhere, and following the lead of DiMaggio and Powell (1991) and Hirsch and Lounsbury (1997a, 1997b), I start with Philip Selznick and his tradition. I then move into the work of John Meyer and his colleagues and research by Paul DiMaggio before segueing into Stephen Barley’s scholarship and the area of research coming to be known as “inhabited institutionalism” (II). Taken together, the historical review suggests four keys for doing institutional analysis without institutional theory. The first key is to study an organization or organizations. Although this may seem obvious, it points to the broad potential to cross fields: Wide swaths of research across many disciplines involve the study of organizations, but many of these scholars do not choose to examine the organizational and institutional aspects of their work. The untapped potential is vast. The second key is to cultivate multiple areas of scholarly interest, and come to focus on their intersections. None of the founders of institutional theory were narrow in their training or interests, which enabled them to create novel dialogues and to span and reconsider conceptual and substantive boundaries. The third key is to allow the analysis to be driven by the data and the research questions, and to let those questions emerge and evolve in the course of the research, freely crossing fields when necessary. As with any good research program, scholars must return to the 43

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literature as the analysis takes shape, and the fourth key is to engage with institutional theory but not to be bound by it.

4.2 A Brief and Partial History of Doing Institutional Analysis without Institutional Theory To start our history, I begin with Philip Selznick and his lineage, a legacy that includes, among others, Meyer Zald, Nancy Denton (Zald and Denton, 1963), Sheldon Messinger (1955), and Burton Clark (1956), and continues today in work by Matt Kraatz (Kraatz and Flores, 2015) and Martin Krygier (Krygier, 2012). Of course, this group did not call themselves “old institutionalists”— that label was applied retrospectively by DiMaggio and Powell in 1991. Throughout his career, Selznick was working at the intersections of organizational sociology, politics, and law. He and his colleagues were less interested in a specific theory (institutional or otherwise) than they were with addressing an important set of questions: How are organizations created to serve our human goals and achieve our social values, only to frustrate them? Why are organizations recalcitrant tools for achieving those values, and what can we do about it (Selznick, 1943, 1957, 1992)? In grappling with these questions, this group was doing something we now think of as “old” institutionalism before that name or theory was applied to them. This reveals both the power and danger of naming. As Hirsch and Lounsbury (1997a) note, the “old” moniker is rather pejorative, when in fact the work of Selznick and his colleagues remains valuable for thinking about the practical challenges of managing and leading organizations, the unintended consequences of purposeful actions, how organizations acquire a distinctive character (even if that character becomes quite different from that imagined by its originators), and the importance of having values, identifying them, and attempting to protect them (Kraatz, 2009, 2010). To think about the relationship between human action, organizations, and the achievement of values, Selznick was drawing on the middle-range sociological theories of his dissertation advisor, Robert Merton, and the Parsonian interpretation of Weber. Selznick begins with the idea that people create organizations to achieve their values (Selznick, 1943, 1948). Values are the ends towards which actions are oriented, actors are interested in achieving those values, and organizations are tools for doing so. There is a functionalist shadow here, but Selznick was also interested in pragmatism and how people deal with the problem situations that arise in organizations (Krygier, 2012). This is an important foil to the excesses of functionalism and Parsonian armchair theorizing, and these scholars used historical case studies of particular organizations to show how, in the course of muddling through everyday 44

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problems, those ultimate values get displaced, and the organization, which was supposed to be a tool to achieve values, gets infused with different values and gets upheld as important in its own right. That process of value infusion is, in fact, what Selznick and company call “institutionalization” (Selznick, 1957). If not properly cared for, this process of institutionalization (value infusion) reflects the unintended consequences of purposive action. The classic case of value displacement and institutionalization is Selznick’s (1949) study of the TVA, but clear and succinct examples are also found in work by Zald and Denton (1963) and Messinger (1955). Zald and Denton did a historical case study of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA; 1963). Today, most Americans think of the YMCA as a place where middle-class families can exercise, but when it was founded it was a tool to achieve the value of salvation for young men. However, the YMCA always depended on an “enrollment economy,” and as social interest in religion declined, the organization had to adapt to survive. Zald and Denton tell the story of this adaptation and value displacement, and how it changed the character of the organization, from a specific focus on saving souls to a far more secular, general focus on community wellbeing. In a similar study, Messinger (1955) examined the Townsend Organization in the aftermath of the Great Depression. This social movement organization was purposively created to achieve the value of social reform, focusing on pensions for the aged. However, when “New Deal” legislation became a reality and America developed a social welfare safety net, the urgency of the problem declined. In essence, the value had been achieved and the organization was no longer needed, but for the members, the “Townsendites,” the social movement organization had been infused with value in its own right. While the social movement was no longer necessary, the members did not want to see their organization go. The organization, which had been a means to the end of social reform, had become institutionalized as an end in itself. It became a recreational club but it still needed resources to survive, and in order to survive it began to sell merchandise to the general public, for example, items ranging from candy to “Townsend Club Toileted Soap.” Through this process of institutionalization the original value of social reform was displaced and the organization became focused on salesmanship. Today the Selznickian tradition remains important and fresh sociological interest in studying and reconsidering “values” has primed the approach for a comeback (Hitlin and Piliavin, 2004; Kraatz and Flores, 2015). Selznick’s emphasis on purposive managerial behavior is a largely unacknowledged precursor to the current body of research on “institutional work,” defined as “the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions” (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006: 215). Research on “institutional work” tends to focus on intended effects 45

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(Lawrence et al., 2013: 1029), and Kraatz (2009, 2010) argues that, in many ways, the research on institutional work is reinventing the Selznickian wheel, but without Selznick’s broader and more holistic concern with the unintended and often negative consequences of purposive action. While current scholars doing research on “institutional work” are self-consciously institutional, Selznick and his colleagues were doing a form of institutional analysis before contemporary institutional theory was a thing. Unencumbered, these “old” scholars tilled the new ground for current institutional theory. The benefits of doing institutional analysis without institutional theory are also evident in the tradition of thought associated with John Meyer. Meyer and his colleagues (Meyer and Rowan, 1977, 1978; Meyer and Scott, 1983) were not bound by the institutional theory of the day. If they were, we would see more direct engagement with the Selznickian oeuvre in Meyer’s early writings, but such engagement is limited. This may seem odd, but Meyer and his crowd were asking and answering a different set of questions with different kinds of data, and just as Selznick’s “old” approach would not be named until later, Meyer’s “new” institutionalism was not labeled until 1991 (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991). Unencumbered by such labels, Meyer worked freely at the intersections of cultural sociology, organizational sociology, and the sociology of education. In the late 1970s, Meyer and his colleagues were trying to make sense of a bevy of data on San Francisco schools. The data presented a puzzle. Schools reported numerous reforms and wrote multiple reports to signal compliance, but teachers remained unsupervised and their practices varied. Organizational charts established the authority of administrators, but principals reported little influence over teaching (Meyer and Rowan, 1978, Cohen et al., 1979).2 This empirical gap between the formal organizational structures of schools— their policies, regulations, curriculum, and hierarchies—and the everyday practices of teachers (what is often called the “core technology” of schooling) was surprising because most organizational theory of the day still held to the belief that formal structures were largely rational and functional from the perspective of technical efficiency (Stinchcombe, 1968). The belief at the time was that people created organizational structures to help accomplish local work needs.3 In other words, those organizational structures existed because they were technically rational. However, in looking at this school data, Meyer and his colleagues saw a loose coupling between the formal structure and the core technology of

2 These empirical observations were published after the seminal 1977 article, but they were analytically prior. See Perrow (1986) and Hallett (2010) for a discussion of this progression. 3 And, as we have seen, even Selznick would expect that organizational structures would be created as a means to achieve some value, at least initially.

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schooling. Formal structure and substantive practices seemed to be largely disconnected, and those formal structures clearly were not facilitating or reflecting the work of teaching. This disconnect posed a number of questions: Why did these formal structures exist if they did not fulfill a technical need? Moreover, why do all schools generally look the same in how they are set up organizationally, despite the very different needs of schools and the populations they serve? Given their diverse needs, schools should exhibit a diversity of organizational forms, but they do not. Why? These questions required a new kind of explanation, and to answer them Meyer and his colleagues went “big” or “up” into the external cultural environment (Meyer and Rowan, 1977, 1978; Meyer and Scott 1983). They argued that schools adopt similar organizational forms because they reflect broad cultural ideals about what schools “ought” to look like. Meyer calls these ideals “institutional myths,” not in the sense of something that is necessarily “false,” but rather in the sense of a cultural account. When schools conform to the mythic cultural account of what schools “ought” to look like by adopting similar organizational forms, they acquire legitimacy with the public, and that public legitimacy is important, because without it schools cannot survive. With this, Meyer provides a novel explanation for why, circa the late 1970s, American schools looked so similar: not technical efficiency, but rather conformity to macro-cultural myths. Eventually this explanation for organizational homogeneity gained influence for thinking about a broad range of organizations, not only for American schools, and not just for public-sector organizations, but also for those in the private and non-profit sectors (Meyer and Scott, 1983; Tolbert and Zucker, 1983; Hwang and Powell, 2009). This proved to be a watershed moment not only for organizational studies, but also for cultural sociology. This work helped to establish culture as an important independent variable instead of a dependent variable. In sociology Meyer is celebrated not only as an “institutionalist,” but also as a key figure in the “cultural turn” in sociology (Friedland and Mohr, 2004; Hallett and Gougherty, 2018), because he helped to shift the focus from culture as an outcome to culture as an explanation for something else, in this case for why organizations look so surprisingly similar. Meyer’s theoretical move makes his approach more structural and less processual relative to Selznick. For Meyer, the institutional environment is a macro-cultural condition that compels organizational conformity, whereas for Selznick institutionalization is a process of value infusion and displacement. These approaches are different because Meyer and his cadre were trying to understand different things, but, as with Selznick, in many ways Meyer was doing a kind of institutional analysis without institutional theory. And, as with Selznick and “old institutionalism,” the “new institutional” label was applied to Meyer by others. Although Meyer embraced it, today he would 47

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probably label himself differently, as a “world polity” or “world society” theorist (Meyer et al., 1997; Meyer, 2010). Regardless, once applied the “new institutional” name stuck, which brings us to the work of one of those namers, Paul DiMaggio. Paul DiMaggio, along with his colleague Woody Powell, is responsible for naming “old” and “new” institutionalism in their 1991 edited volume, so it would be difficult to argue that his role in the development of institutional theory has not been self-conscious. Nevertheless, DiMaggio did not begin his career in the field of institutional theory. Instead, his emerging research interests were intersectional, involving cultural sociology, organizational sociology, and the sociology of professions. DiMaggio got his start as an interpreter of Bourdieu’s ideas for American audiences (DiMaggio, 1979), and, like Meyer, he had a prominent role in the “cultural turn” in sociology (Friedland and Mohr, 2004). Empirically, DiMaggio was interested in art and museums. He was struck by a curious observation: In the post-Civil War era, American museums had a marvelous variety of forms, and even could be quite carnivallike. Similarly, the music halls that were the homes for symphony orchestras would also host much more low-brow, popular acts. However, by the start of the twentieth century museums had become homes to art and other artifacts deemed “high culture,” and the music halls became exclusive to symphonies and other high-cultural forms of music. How and why did this happen? In answering this question, and by extending his analysis up to 1940, DiMaggio identifies two related developments. First, the successful efforts by the Brahmins to define art in a way that fit their exclusive tastes, thereby elevating those tastes to an elite form of cultural capital (DiMaggio, 1982a, 1982b), and second, the creation of a cadre of art professionals (and not professional artists) who acquired this same cultural capital, obtained key positions in the art and museum field, and brought their organizations into conformity (DiMaggio, 1991). Reading DiMaggio’s early work with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see the seeds of what would become his seminal paper on institutional isomorphism with Powell (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). In light of DiMaggio and Powell (1983), the story of the art professionals is what would become “normative isomorphism”—the process through which organizations become similar to each other through the spread of common professional norms and personnel who carry those norms. DiMaggio provides an explanation for organizational conformity that, when joined with “coercive” and “mimetic” isomorphism, would become central to new institutional thought (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). However, he arrived at this “institutional” place while pondering Bourdieu, culture, organizations, professions, and museums at the turn of the twentieth century, and not while thinking narrowly about institutions per se. Although he came to name his work as part of a larger 48

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“new institutional” approach that included the work of Meyer and many others, it was not, in its origins, self-consciously “institutional.” In this volume, Stephen Barley tells the compelling story of how he too became an institutionalist “without knowing it.” There is, perhaps, no better example of institutional analysis without institutional theory. Steve tells the story with more accuracy and panache than I ever could, so instead of repeating the story I will tell a complimentary one, the story of how institutional theory came to him and the scholarly fields that he works in, thereby becoming more processual in orientation while expanding our understanding of institutions. After DiMaggio and Powell’s seminal 1983 article, institutional thought became increasingly macro in its orientation. Multiple studies used sophisticated quantitative techniques to examine how organizations conformed to the institutional pressures characteristic of larger environments by adopting policies that signaled surface conformity (Tolbert and Zucker, 1983; Baron et al., 1986, 1988; Sutton et al., 1994; Chaves, 1996). Meyer took this style of thinking “up” yet another level, to the world polity and nation states, examining how more and more nations are coming into surface conformity with the “Western cultural account” (Meyer et al., 1997; Meyer, 2010). This robust tradition of research became the “signature” of new institutionalism (Powell and Colyvas, 2008: 977), but it is admittedly of less interest to the readers of this volume: With its macro-evolution new institutionalism came to obscure what have been called the “microfoundations of institutions” (Powell and Colyvas, 2008), and also came to gloss over the dynamic, processual aspects of organizations. There was less and less attention to, or understanding of, what people were actually doing inside of and across organizations. Institutionalists have moved towards Barley’s research because he helps to address this lacuna. Barley is an ethnographer whose research uses an interactionist lens to examine the intersections of work, technology, and occupations. Around the time that DiMaggio was developing his ideas about professional isomorphism, Barley was studying the substantive work activities and local organizational cultures of funeral directors, radiologists, and technicians (Barley, 1983a, 1983b, 1986). Barley was interested in questions of what happens to professional hierarchies when new technologies are introduced, implemented, and processed through existing and new workplace orders. He is renowned for “bringing work back in” to organizational studies (Barley and Kunda, 2001). This move has proven vital to institutional theory because studying work is central for examining the couplings that exist between the pressures of the institutional environment and the actual substantive activities of organizations. As new institutionalism became more macro, Meyer and Rowan’s early observation of loose coupling became an uninterrogated 49

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assumption, but slowly scholars began to question this assumption (Meyer and Rowan, 2006; Hallett, 2010; Bromley and Powell, 2012). Studying work is an important means for examining whether organizations and institutions are loosely coupled, tightly coupled, or something else entirely, and why that might be the case. Barley demonstrates that—however fixed and habituated it may seem—work, the couplings that work engenders, and the relationship between work and institutions are ongoing accomplishments (Barley and Tolbert, 1997). Barley’s call for scholars to study work and do research at the “coalface” of institutions (2008) draws extensively from the Chicago School of Sociology and various interactionist traditions more broadly, and this is also true for the emergent approach coming to be known as “inhabited institutionalism” (Scully and Creed, 1997; Hallett and Ventresca, 2006). II takes as its focus the recursive relationships between the institutional “myths” or “logics” that characterize the organizational environment and the social interactions through which people (inside of and across organizations) respond to and interpret those institutional pressures, shaping them in turn. As Amy Binder explains: Organizations are not merely the instantiation of environmental, institutional logics “out there” . . . where workers seamlessly enact preconscious scripts valorized in the institutional environment . . . Instead, they are places where people and groups (agentic actors, not “institutional dopes”) make sense of, and interpret, institutional “vocabularies of motive” . . . and act on those interpretations—the central premise of symbolic interactionism. (2007: 551)

In focusing on interactions and the meanings that arise from them, II aspires to capture work activity and more, including the “shadowland of informal interaction” that Selznick (1949: 260) discussed but did not observe in situ, and the range of interactions that can matter for organizations, whether dramatic or mundane, strategic or unreflective, purposeful or habituated (Garfinkel, 1967; Goffman, 1967; Blumer, 1969; Strauss, 1978). Instead of focusing on individuals and agency—a focus common to the research on institutional entrepreneurs and institutional work—II focuses on interaction and people doing things together (Becker, 1986), at times in concert and at times in conflict. Yet, the focus is not on interactions “sui generis” (Goffman, 1983; Rawls, 1987), but rather the couplings between interactions and institutions. In focusing on interactions rather than individuals and doing so in organizational contexts and in relation to the institutional environment, II is best seen as a mesosociological approach and not a micro one. II has been self-consciously institutional in its development and determined to name itself. Its roster features a number of organizational scholars working in business schools, including Marc Ventresca, Beth Bechky (2011), 50

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Sylvia Dorado (2013), and Maureen Scully and Doug Creed (1997). It would be incorrect to describe it as institutional analysis without institutional theory. However, my own arrival at this scholarly home was driven empirically by an ethnographic case study of an urban elementary school, and not the draw of institutional theory. I had learned ethnography and micro-sociology under the care of Gary Alan Fine (another scholar who could be charged with doing institutional analysis without institutional theory—1984, 1996, 2007). Substantively I was interested in cultural sociology and social psychology. Conceptually, I was trying to create a dialogue between Bourdieu and Goffman, to examine how symbolic power (the power to define the situation) is cultivated and deployed in and through social interactions, but shaped by the habitus and forms of capital valued in the social setting, thereby setting limits on and partially constituting efforts at impression management and the larger negotiated order (Hallett, 2003). The school that was my fieldsite, “Costen Elementary,” was a rich venue for observing these interactions, because it featured a new principal with a rather different style and set of cultural capital than the teachers expected or preferred. Despite these initial interests, I was not naïve to the reality that my fieldsite was an organization, and I began to expand my scope by reading organizational ethnographies. The one that I found most compelling was Gouldner’s (1954) Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. I was struck by the similarities between Gouldner’s gypsum mine and the arrival of new bureaucratic pressures circa the 1950s, and the school that I was studying and the emergence of pressures and policies focusing on accountability in the new millennium. Marc Ventresca and I had been looking for a way to collaborate, and as a starting point we decided to read Patterns together. We soon realized that Marc’s “institutional” reading of the text and my “interactionist” reading were compatible. Scully and Creed had first used the evocative phrase “inhabited institution” in 1997, and we realized that our dual reading of Patterns provided the opportunity to expand this kernel of an idea, from a description of how institutions are to an approach for doing research. Marc continued to push me, gently, towards organizational studies, which became my third area of interest to go with cultural sociology and social psychology. As I continued to grapple with the ethnographic data from “Costen School,” I realized that Meyer and Rowan’s discussion of “myth and ceremony” and the classic imagery of schools as loosely coupled (Meyer and Rowan, 1977, 1978; Weick, 1976) fit how the teachers described the school in the recent past, before the arrival of the new principal who was bent on actually implementing accountability reforms. I began to think of accountability as a larger institutional myth, and started to wonder, what happens when, through a process of “recoupling,” myth and ceremony and loose coupling are replaced with a tight coupling and the “myth incarnate?” 51

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My ethnographic data, which captured the before and after culture of the school and the contentious interactions between the teachers and the new principal, provided one possible answer: epistemic distress and turmoil (Hallett, 2010). The social psychological aspects of turmoil and the local organizational aspects of recoupling became a way to push back against the macro-proclivities of new institutionalism while expanding the foundation for II and emphasizing the importance of grounded observations of substantive organizational activity, echoing Barley’s call. As with the other scholars discussed in this chapter, I did not start out as an institutionalist, but I ended up doing both institutional analysis and institutional theory, and my research has become much better as a result.

4.3 Four Keys for Doing Institutional Analysis without Institutional Theory This brief history serves as an invitation for process scholars and others who study organizations, encouraging them to cross scholarly fields. In crossing such boundaries they may find themselves doing a kind of institutional analysis without institutional theory. There are admitted dangers in doing so—institutional theory is now an established, even dominant field. People are invested in this field, and may not take kindly to outsiders stepping on their turf. However, there can also be great benefits in taking such risks, including the development of new scholarly fields and cross-fertilization between them. Reviewing the legacies of Selznick, Meyer, DiMaggio, Barley, and the development of II reveals these benefits, and it also suggests four keys for doing institutional analysis without institutional theory. The first key might appear to be obvious, but it has important implications: Study an organization or organizations. All of the scholars discussed above were studying organizations, although they had different reasons for doing so. Importantly, because of the ubiquity of organizations in society, there are many more scholars out there whose research touches or is touched by organizations than there are self-identified “organizational scholars.” Wendy Espeland and Carol Heimer, two excellent sociologists at Northwestern University, are fond of telling their students that, in the end, everyone is an organizational scholar because all empirical research implies organizations, somewhere, at some point. The organizational aspects of such research may remain implicit, but the potential is vast and in many ways untapped. Embracing organizations as an object of study is a way to access this potential. At the same time, and in a strange way, organizations are becoming less explicit and more implicit in institutional theory. Selznick’s approach was robustly organizational—organizations were the focus of the research and the 52

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locus of institutionalization. For Meyer, organizations, and organizational conformity in particular, became the outcome to be explained, with institutional myths serving as the explanation. Organizations were still central, but organizations were no longer doing the explanatory work. As institutional theory has continued to evolve, the view and place of organizations has become less robust. It would be wrong to say that the current research on “institutional entrepreneurship” and “institutional work” ignores organizations—much of it does not. However, in some of this work the organizations drop out as scholars focus on the interplay between forms of individual agency and larger institutions. In some cases this focus is entirely appropriate, particularly when organizations do not have a strong role in the empirical story (Delbridge and Edwards, 2008). However, in some ways institutional theory has been slowly losing its “organizationalism” (Kraatz and Block, 2008) as scholars redirect their gaze towards individuals and institutions. In other words, as much as there is a need to “bring individuals back into institutional theory” (Lawrence et al., 2011: 53), there is a growing need to “bring organizations back into institutional theory.”4 This is important for a number of reasons. In contrast to the macro-focus of new institutionalism, current research on institutional entrepreneurs and institutional work is directing needed focus to the “microfoundations of institutions” (Powell and Colyvas, 2008), but conceptually we should avoid reifying this divide. Micro-, meso-, and macro-phenomena are all evident in organizations, and studying organizations provides an “elevator” between micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of analysis (Glaeser, 2000: 22). Moreover, organizations provide a welcoming entryway into institutional theory for all of those scholars who are studying organizations, implicitly or explicitly, and from whatever discipline or framework they may be employing to do so. Finally, and substantively, organizations are microcosms of society. Nearly every aspect of society or area of scholarly interest can be found to exist in organizations, but when organizations fall out of institutional theory some of this richness and the potential for cross-fertilization is lost. This leads us to the next key. The second key for doing institutional analysis without institutional theory is to cultivate multiple areas of personal scholarly interest, and see where they intersect. Selznick was working at the intersections of organizational sociology, politics, and law. Meyer works at the intersections of cultural sociology, organizations, and education. DiMaggio works at the intersections of culture, organizations, and professions. Barley does research at the intersections of work, technology, and occupations. Today, Meyer, DiMaggio, and Barley

4 Although they don’t use the phrasing of “bringing organizations back in,” see Greenwood et al. (2008: 29–30) for a discussion.

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have added still more areas of interest as they have followed their data and their curiosities. Their work developed from multiple scholarly fields, and even as they have been important for the development of institutional theory, they have not remained content to stay within the comfortable field of institutional theory. Cultivating the intersections of multiple areas is not the same thing as coopting adjacent areas and topics into one scholarly field. Adjacent fields need to be appreciated both for what they can offer institutional thought as well as for what they accomplish in their own right. Unfortunately, recent institutional theory has developed a “colonial tendency” (Zilber, 2012: 88). For example, in one recent approach “institutional logics” are defined as “the socially constructed, historical patterns of cultural symbols and material practices, including assumptions, values, and beliefs, by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences” (Thornton et al., 2012: 2). This kind of definition subsumes too much (Purdy et al., 2017)—society, history, the cultural, the material, meaning, activity, time, space . . . As a result, it is unclear where an institutional logic stops, where something else begins, or what really makes something institutional or not (Meyer and Höllerer, 2014). There is another danger: This kind of definition and colonial tendency might do more to alienate scholars in adjacent fields than to cultivate common ground, which narrows the range of people who might consider an engagement with institutional scholarship. Instead of expanding the field, the expansive definition of institutional logics may actually confine it. If so, it becomes all the more important to liberate oneself from such theoretical definitions and to do institutional analysis without institutional theory, much as the founders of institutional theory have done. The third key is to allow the analysis to be driven by the data and the research questions, and to let those questions evolve in the course of the research. Regardless of initial interests or preliminary research questions, continue to ponder, “What is this a case of?” (Ragin and Becker, 1992). How are organizations a tool to achieve human values, but why do they operate in a way that ends up frustrating those values? Why are schools so surprisingly similar in their organizational forms despite their diverse needs? Why did American museums change from being a collective hodge-podge to being the restrictive high-cultural versions we see today? How do workplaces interpret and respond to technology, and what does that imply for professional hierarchies? What happens when myth and ceremony are replaced with the myth incarnate? The research discussed in this chapter developed as scholars grappled with data that begged and answered these research questions, questions and answers that ended up advancing institutional thought even if they did not start out that way. 54

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This leads us to the fourth and final key: As research questions and analysis take shape, return to the literature and in doing so do not ignore institutional theory, but do not be bound by it either. Institutional theory has become so prominent that it is difficult to avoid, and I recognize that it was, perhaps, much easier to “do institutional analysis without institutional theory” in prior decades, before institutional theory acquired the status that it has today. As a result, dissertation advisors, journal editors, and reviewers expect scholars to engage in institutional analysis with institutional theory, and their power is compelling. Nevertheless, we should use institutional theory in the same way that Selznick argues that people should use organizations: As a means towards the end of achieving some goal, in this case the goal of answering research questions, solving empirical problems or puzzles, and expanding knowledge. If the data and the research questions do not tell an institutional story, we should not be compelled to write one. We should feel comfortable ignoring the pressure to do more institutional theory for the sake of institutional theory. While there is some value in pursuing theory as an end in itself, there is a danger, and as Alvesson and Spicer (2018) argue, institutional theory is becoming institutionalized, which has implications both good and bad. Institutional theory is full of useful insights, but it is also full of limitations, and progress comes from problematizing those limitations (Alvesson and Sandberg, 2011). I submit that it is actually easier to identify and interrogate those problems by studying organizations, cultivating multiple areas of interest, by going where the data and evolving research questions lead, and by approaching institutional theory as a curious stranger from an adjacent field.

4.4 Conclusion Luminaries such as Philip Selznick, John Meyer, Paul DiMaggio, and Stephen Barley were not self-consciously institutional as they embarked on the research that would establish their careers and the scholarly field of institutional theory. They came to have an influence that spanned far beyond their initial efforts and it is now possible to have an entire career in the singular area of institutional research. Where institutional theory would, in the past, be a section of a PhD qualifying exam, today it can be the subject of an entire exam. And yet, as institutional theory has become a dominant field, it has lost some of the potential for cross-fertilization with adjacent fields, including process organizational studies. With this there is a danger: This once fertile field of thought could become a conceptual iron cage, one that narrows our thinking and research, thereby limiting our capacity to do the very sort of creative things that the founders of institutional theory did so well. 55

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Given this state of the field, can we move beyond these constraints by doing institutional analysis without institutional theory? Should we? The answer to these questions, I have argued, is a qualified “yes,” and this answer also serves as an invitation for scholars to cross boundaries and cultivate new ground. But how? Reviewing the history of the development of institutional theory suggests four keys: 1) study an organization or organizations, 2) cultivate multiple areas of personal scholarly interest and focus on their intersections, 3) allow the analysis to be driven by the data and the research questions, and let those questions emerge and evolve in the course of the research, and 4) as the analyses take shape return to the literature and engage with institutional theory, but do not be bound by it. These four keys jangle, however silently, in the pockets of scholars such as Selznick, Meyer, DiMaggio, Barley, and the many associates who work alongside them. As they have done their work they have broken new ground and cultivated the scholarly field of institutional theory and, rather than locking us into a now dominant field, these same keys unlock new possibilities.

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Institutions and Organizations Fine, Gary Alan (1996). Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fine, Gary Alan (2007). Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Friedland, Roger, and Mohr, John (2004). The Cultural Turn in American Sociology. In Roger Friedland and John Mohr (Eds), Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice (pp. 1–70). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garfinkel, Howard (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: Prentice-Hall. Glaeser, Andreas (2000). Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Goffman, Erving (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Doubleday. Goffman, Erving (1983). The Interaction Order: American Sociological Association, 1982 Presidential Address. American Sociological Review, 48, 1–17. Gouldner, Alvin W. (1954). Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Greenwood, Royston, Oliver, Christine, Sahlin, Kerstin, and Suddaby, Roy (2008). Introduction. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, R. Suddaby, and K. Sahlin-Andersson (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 1–46). Newbury Park: Sage. Hallett, Tim (2003). Symbolic Power and Organizational Culture. Sociological Theory, 21(2), 128–49. Hallett, Tim (2010). The Myth Incarnate: Recoupling Processes, Turmoil, and Inhabited Institutions in an Urban Elementary School. American Sociological Review, 75, 52–74. Hallett, Tim, and Gougherty, Matthew (2018). Bourdieu and Organizations: Hidden Traces, Macro Influence, and Micro Potential. In Jeff Sallaz and Tom Medvetz (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 273–98). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hallett, Tim, and Ventresca, Marc (2006). Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and Organizational Forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory and Society, 35(2), 213–36. Hampel, Christian E., Lawrence, Thomas B., and Tracey, Paul (2017). Institutional Work: Taking Stock and Making It Matter. In Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver, Thomas Lawrence, and Renate Meyer (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, 2nd edn (pp. 558–91). Los Angeles: Sage. Hardy, Cynthia, and Maguire, Steve (2017). Institutional Entrepreneurship and Change in Fields. In Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver, Thomas Lawrence, and Renate Meyer (Eds) The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, 2nd edn (pp. 261–80). Los Angeles: Sage. Hirsh, Paul M., and Lounsbury, Michael (1997a). Ending the Family Quarrel: Toward a Reconciliation of “Old” and “New” Institutionalisms. American Behavioral Scientist, 40(4), 406–18. Hirsch, Paul M., and Lounsbury, Michael (1997b). Putting the Organization Back into Organization Theory: Action, Change, and the “New” Institutionalism. Journal of Management Inquiry, 6(1), 79–88. Hitlin, Steven, and Piliavin, Jane Allyn (2004). Values: Reviving a Dormant Concept. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 359–93.

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On Doing Institutional Analysis without Institutional Theory Hwang, Hokyu, and Powell, Walter W. (2009). The Rationalization of Charity: Influences of Professionalism in the Non-Profit Sector. Administrative Science Quarterly, 54, 268–98. Kraatz, Matthew S. (2009). Leadership as Institutional Work. In Thomas Lawrence, Roy Suddaby, and Bernard Leca (Eds), Institutional Work: Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies (pp. 59–91). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kraatz, Matthew S. (2010). Two Cheers for Institutional Work. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20, 59–61. Kraatz, Matthew and Block, Emily (2008). Organizational Implications of Institutional Pluralism. In Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver, Roy Suddaby, Kerstin SahlinAndersson (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 243–75). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Kraatz, Matthew S., and Flores, Ricardo (2015). Reinfusing Values. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 44, 353–81. Krygier, Martin (2012). Philip Selznick: Ideals in the World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Langley, Ann (1999). Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data. Academy of Management Review, 24(4), 691–710. Lawrence, Thomas B., and Suddaby, Roy (2006). Institutions and Institutional Work. In Stewart R. Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, Tom Lawrence, and Walter R. Nord (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies (pp. 215–54). New York: Sage. Lawrence, Thomas B., Suddaby, Roy, and Leca, Bernard (2011). Institutional Work: Refocusing Institutional Studies of Organizations. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(1), 52–8. Lawrence, Thomas B., Leca, Bernard, and Zilber, Tammar B. (2013). Institutional Work: Current Research, New Directions and Overlooked Issues. Organization Studies, 34(8), 1023–33. Messinger, Sheldon L. (1955). Organizational Transformation: A Case Study of a Declining Social Movement. American Sociological Review, 30, 3–10. Meyer, Heinz-Dieter, and Rowan, Brian (2006). Institutional Analysis and the Study of Education. In H. D. Meyer and Brian Rowan (Eds), The New Institutionalism in Education (pp. 1–13). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Meyer, John W. (2010). World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor. Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 1–20. Meyer, John W., and Rowan, Brian (1977). Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–63. Meyer, John W., and Rowan, Brian (1978). The Structure of Educational Organizations. In Marshall W. Meyer et al. (Eds), Environments and Organizations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Meyer, John W., and Scott, W. Richard (1983). Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Meyer, John W., Boli, John, Thomas, George M., and Ramirez, Francisco O. (1997). World Society and the Nation State. American Journal of Sociology, 103(1), 144–81. Meyer, Renate, and Höllerer, Markus (2014). Does Institutional Theory Need Redirecting? Journal of Management Studies, 51(7), 1221–33.

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Institutions and Organizations Perrow, Charles (1986). Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay. New York: McGraw-Hill. Powell, Walter W., and Colyvas, Jeannette A. (2008). Microfoundations of Institutional Theory. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, R. Suddaby, and K. Sahlin-Andersson (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 276–98). Newbury Park: Sage. Powell, Walter W., and DiMaggio, Paul (Eds) (1991). The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Purdy, Jill, Ansari, Shaz, and Gray, Barbara (2017). Are Logics Enough? Framing as an Alternative Tool for Understanding Institutional Meaning Making. Journal of Management Inquiry, https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492617724233. Ragin, Charles, and Becker, Howard (1992). What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, Anne Warfield (1987). The Interaction Order Sui Generis: Goffman’s Contribution to Social Theory. Sociological Theory, 5(2), 136–49. Schneiberg, Marc, and Clemens, Elisabeth S. (2006). The Typical Tools for the Job: Research Strategies in Institutional Analysis. Sociological Theory, 24(3), 195–227. Scully, Maureen and Creed, Doug (1997). Stealth Legitimacy: Employee Activism and Corporate Response during the Diffusion of Domestic Partner Benefits. Paper presented at the Academy of Management Meetings, Boston, MA, August. Selznick, Philip (1943). An Approach to a Theory of Bureaucracy. American Sociological Review, 8(1), 47–54. Selznick, Philip (1948). Foundations of the Theory of Organization. American Sociological Review, 13(1), 25–35. Selznick, Philip (1949). TVA and the Grass Roots. New York: Harper and Row. Selznick, Philip (1957). Leadership in Administration. New York: Harper and Row. Selznick, Philip (1992). The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. (1968). Constructing Social Theories. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Strauss, Anselm (1978). Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Sutton, John R., Dobbin, Frank, Meyer, John W., and Scott, W. Richard (1994). The Legalization of the Workplace. American Journal of Sociology, 99(4), 944–71. Thornton, Patricia, Ocasio, William, and Lounsbury, Michael (2012). The Institutional Logics Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tolbert, Pamela S., and Zucker, Lynn G. (1983). Institutional Sources of Change in the Formal Structure of Organizations: The Diffusion of Civil Service Reform, 1880–1935. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28, 22–39. Vogel, Rick (2012). The Visible Colleges of Management and Organization Studies: A Bibliometric Analysis of Academic Journals. Organization Studies, 33(8), 1015–43. Weick, Karl E. (1976). Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21, 1–19. Zald, Mayer N., and Denton, Patricia (1963). From Evangelism to General Service: The Transformation of the YMCA. Administrative Science Quarterly, 8, 214–34. Zilber, Tammar B. (2012). The Relevance of Institutional Theory for the Study of Organizational Culture. Journal of Management Inquiry, 21(1), 88–93.

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5 Stories of (and Instead of) Process Francesca Polletta

A process approach sensitizes us to the fact that what we tend to see as things, conditions, states, substances, and selves are in fact processes of becoming rather than being. Certainly scholars are guilty of ignoring process. We tend to treat society, institutions, organizations, demographic categories, identities, and even social movements as entities that change rather than as processes whose boundaries in time and space are dynamic cultural constructions (Emirbayer, 1997; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Melucci, 1996). But ordinary people do the same. They too act as if they belong to an organization, join or leave a movement, or pursue their self-interest, as if organizations, movements, selves, and interests are fixed things. Yet, the key is “as if.” At some level, people also know that these are more ongoing accomplishments than stable entities. When I remind my introductory sociology students that society is not something that we can see or touch or feel, they are surprised but also not surprised. It makes sense. The question, then, is how people maintain that knowing and not knowing. Why do they accept the idea that interactions that are only sometimes regularized and that occur in a variety of settings can be thought about as an organization? How do they come to believe that people in all their mutability can be thought of as members of stable demographic categories? One way to gain purchase on questions like these is to look at the ways in which people have tried to create the categories, fix the processes, use laws and language to define an entity and to act as if that entity is stable rather than fluid. This probably does not happen in one moment. Certainly it does not do so in the realm of policy making, which is what I focus on here. Instead, a policy is passed, and then is followed by efforts to interpret the categories to which the policy applies and the criteria for applying the policy. Gradually, a common sense about those things takes shape. Categories and criteria are

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institutionalized, acquiring “the moral and ontological status of taken-for-granted facts which, in turn, shape future interactions and negotiations” (Barley and Tolbert, 1997: 99). In this chapter, I describe the institutionalization of categories and criteria for combatting two kinds of inequality. In the first episode, policy makers, scientists, and pharmaceutical company executives acted as if one could treat inequalities in health between whites and African Americans as a function of innate biological traits, rather than as the result of multiple, intersecting, intergenerational social, political, economic, and biological processes. They did this although they knew that the latter was true. In the second episode, lawyers and judges acted as if men and women’s occupational aspirations were set when they were youngsters and remained the same over time, rather than forged in and through their experiences in the job market. Again, they did this although they knew the latter was true. Behind both moves, I argue, were stories. Stories allowed political actors to treat processes as if they were fixed categories, unchanging traits, and stable conditions. It is that “as if” move that I want to emphasize. When we hear a good story, we believe not that it is capturing reality in all its detail, but rather that it is capturing what is most important in reality. The problem is that stories do so in ways that are familiar; that is, in ways that resonate with stories we have heard before. Given those familiar stories, I argue, it is hard to tell new stories in which processes rather than people are what drive action, and it is hard to tell stories in which people’s aspirations and identities are created by the institutions in which they participate rather than created outside them. Yet, those difficulties have consequences. In the cases I describe, one consequence was that the categories and criteria used to identify inequalities ended up reproducing them. I begin by briefly rehearsing scholarship on narrative persuasion and on the difficulties of telling certain kinds of stories. Then I show how stories figured in two efforts to combat inequality. One effort involved legislation requiring the collection and reporting of data on racial, ethnic, and gender differences in biomedical research. The other used litigation to challenge employers’ failure to hire and promote women. In both cases, I show that stories were variously told, alluded to, and required as a way to deal with the inadequacy of the categories that were established by the policy and the criteria that were used to prove the applicability of the policy. The stories made the categories and criteria acceptable, contributing to the fiction that they were working to redress inequalities. More generally, I argue that stories may not be especially well equipped to capture the processual dimensions of inequality, and perhaps, the processual dimensions of other social, economic, and political relations.

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5.1 Stories We can define a story as an account of a sequence of events in the order in which they occurred to make a point (Labov and Waletsky, 1967). While some definitions of stories require that the sequence of events occur in the past and only once, more expansive definitions include both accounts of future events and accounts of sequences of events that have occurred more than once (i.e. “habitual” or “generic” stories). All stories have characters that are either human or have human-like traits or perceptions. And all stories have a point, message or “moral” (Bal, 1985; Brooks, 1984; Polletta, 2006). Beyond this minimal definition, I want to underscore four features of stories. One is that the persuasiveness of stories owes less to the veracity of the events they recount than to the verisimilitude of those events (Bruner, 1990; Czarniawska, 1997). When we hear a story, we enter a story world. We read, “Once upon a time, in a place far, far away . . . ” or hear, “that reminds me of something that happened . . . ” and we know that we are entering a time and space that is different from our current one. We suspend our natural skepticism about the credibility or relevance of the events that are recounted and instead strive to grasp the motivations of the characters and the unfolding logic of events. Studies by communication scholars show that when people are absorbed by a story (their absorption is measured by their disagreement with statements such as, “While I was reading the narrative, activity going on in the room around me was on my mind”), they are likely to be persuaded by the story’s message. This is true even when they know the story was made up (Green and Brock, 2000). Thus the story persuades in spite of its artifice. Or better, readers assume that the story is simplifying the mess of reality in order to make a point. We often say the truth a story arrives at is “deeper.” By that, we mean that the story conveys a powerful moral message. The second feature of stories I want to highlight is their allusiveness. Stories do not announce their moral explicitly. In fact, research shows that we tend not to believe stories when the moral is too obvious (Slater et al., 2006). We do not want to be hit over the head with the moral of the story. Instead, we expect that the events and their denouement will yield their own moral. Of course, events do not yield their own moral. Rather, listeners or readers extract the moral. We fill in the blanks: We draw connections among events as they unfold and we draw out the larger point of the story’s end (Brooks, 1994; Polletta, 2006). But we do not do so idiosyncratically. We do so based on stories we have heard before. This is the third key feature of stories. We hear a sequence of events and we think: This is a David and Goliath story about the little guy beating the big guy. Then we hear a little more of the story and we think: No it’s actually a Pride Before a Fall story about the little guy biting off more than

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he can chew. Narrative theorists disagree on whether there are four basic plots or 400 (Brooks, 1984; Polletta, 2006). My own view is that there are many ways to tell stories: many plots, as well as twists on plots and twists on the twists. And, indeed, what makes a story different from a script (Schank and Abelson, 1977) is that a story recounts a unique set of events. The formula or plotline that connects the events, both to each other and to other stories, is hard to discern, and properly so. Still, I argue that some stories are, in a particular time and place, hard to tell. In the modern West, it is hard to tell a story without a clear human or human-like protagonist who has dreams and goals and who comes up against some obstacle (which may be a person, an institution, or something else) that the protagonist either overcomes or does not overcome. Let me highlight one more feature, less of stories than of storytelling. Few of the stories we hear in everyday life are told in full; that is, with an orientation that sets the time and space of the story, a series of “and then” clauses, and a clause that serves as the events’ denouement. Instead, stories are often told in fragments or simply referred to (e.g. “oh, it’s like that disastrous board meeting last year”). In fact, the most powerful stories are often precisely the ones that do not need to be told in full, because speakers can assume that audiences are familiar with the story (Feldman and Skoldberg, 2002; Polletta, 2006). That poses a methodological problem, of course, since it is difficult to identify the elements of a “capsule story” (Kalcik, 1975) or a story allusion. I do not try to solve that problem here, but only point out that it is an important one. In the rest of this chapter, I want to suggest that policy makers allude to stories, or ask for stories to be told, when they create and use categories, rules, conditions, and standards because the stories make it seem as if these constructs match reality—not exactly but in some deeper, more moral sense. However, when it comes to combatting inequality, the forms that stories conventionally take make it difficult for them to capture inequality as a process. Stories are better at accounting for inequalities by way of originating conditions and subsequent events than by way of processes with no clear beginning or end. And they are better at explaining how people’s aspirations are fulfilled or foiled than they are at describing how those aspirations are constructed.

5.2 Biomedical Reform 5.2.1 Health Disparities and Biological Difference Groups representing women and racial and ethnic minorities saw themselves as striking a blow for equality when, beginning in the early 1990s, they persuaded the U.S. government to adopt policies that required biomedical researchers to include women and racial and ethnic minorities in all clinical 64

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studies, and to analyze differences among subgroups in treatment effects, disease progression, and biological processes. Before that, there was little effort to recruit racial and ethnic minorities to participate in clinical research. And as a result of misplaced protectionism, women were sometimes prohibited from participating in clinical trials for fear of damaging unborn fetuses. Behind both failures was the assumption, as the first female head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) put it, that one could extrapolate general conclusions from “that tidy, neat mean, ‘the average American male’ ” (quoted in Epstein, 2007: 2). Those seeking to reform the practice of research included feminist health activists and advocates for the health of racial and ethnic minorities as well as federal bureaucrats and Congressional representatives (Auerbach and Figert, 1995). For many, the point of paying attention to differences in how people responded to drugs and experienced disease was to make some headway against severe inequalities in health. African Americans at the time had a life expectancy that was fully seven years shorter than that of whites. Women, black and white, had a longer life expectancy than men but suffered from poorer health. The point of reforming biomedical research—at the time a $93 billion industry—was to combat inequalities in health. Reformers were extraordinarily successful. The 1993 NIH Reauthorization Act required the inclusion of women and racial and ethnic minorities in federally funded research and the reporting of racial, ethnic, and gender differences in findings. The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) followed suit, first eliminating barriers against the inclusion of women in testing in 1993, and then issuing guidelines that called for the inclusion of women and minorities in testing, the assessment of drugs’ safety and efficacy across subpopulations, and the reporting of race and ethnicity information in applications for FDA drug approval. From that point on, what Epstein (2007) calls “the inclusion and difference paradigm” diffused through other federal bureaucracies, the pharmaceutical industry, and biomedicine generally. It became a kind of common sense about how one did research. There is a puzzle, though. If one’s concern is with the poorer health of racial minorities than whites and that of women compared to men, does it make sense to focus on the differences between how men and women metabolize a protein or how Latinos and whites respond to a particular medication for heart disease? There are two issues. Even if we accept the fact that there are genetic differences in groups of people that correspond to what we imperfectly label as race, those differences are averages. Thus one meta-analysis of drugs for hypertension found that although whites on average responded better to beta blockers than African Americans did, and African Americans on average responded better to diuretics than whites did, 80 to 95 percent of African Americans and whites had similar responses to both treatments (Epstein, 2007: 220). Treating 65

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the average differences as categories might lead to improper treatment for any one individual. This would be true for women too. Moreover, even if the reason for a documented difference was unclear or spurious (often, subsequent studies revealed no difference at all), pharmaceutical companies were still permitted to market the treatment to the group (Epstein, 2007: 221). As I will show, this ended up being more than an abstract risk. But the second issue is: Why focus on those differences? Why assume that the multiple processes that are responsible for disparities in health outcomes can be explained by traits (in this case, biological traits) of women and racial and ethnic minorities? This is the quintessential example of turning processes into a thing: a biological, fixed, inherent feature of people. We know that poverty has a profound effect on health. Whether subjects smoke or not or whether they have experienced discrimination have both been demonstrated to affect people’s response to medical treatment. So why did officials not require that clinical studies compare poor and middle-class people, and people who had experienced discrimination and those who had not, and smokers and non-smokers? The answer is in part that there were not groups mobilized around those categories. But, more important, categories of race, gender, and ethnicity were administratively familiar. They were used by a variety of government agencies to collect data. Still, to apply them to biomedical research was a questionable move. As Epstein (2007) puts it, it risked turning disparities in health outcomes into biological differences. It risked making inequality the result of women’s inherent difference from men and white people’s inherent difference from black people and so on. Not only did it miss the fact that race, ethnicity, and gender are themselves processes rather than fixed states (see, for example, Saperstein and Penner’s (2012) study of how American officials’ racial identification of the same people changed depending on the person’s social status). It also risked transforming into fixed traits the multiple processes that are responsible for health disparities at a given point in time: For example, the experiences of poverty and discrimination that both produce and combine with experiences of stress and poor health and may be passed down over generations. To be sure, these were risks, not certainties. Further research might demonstrate that social or economic processes lie behind the differences initially observed. Simply calling for the collection of data based on race, ethnicity, and gender did not necessarily mean that one was committed to explanations based solely on biological categories. Moreover, advocates for both women and minorities saw the reform of biomedicine as just one component of a larger agenda for ameliorating disparities in health. However, two stories that accompanied the institutionalization of the categories over the next decade made essentialist conceptions of race and ethnicity increasingly central to that agenda. 66

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5.2.2 Stories of the Categories In one story, the categories linked the past to the future of the fight for racial justice. The landmark achievement of the civil rights movement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which collected data on the race and ethnicity of business employees as part of its mandate to combat inequality in the workplace. The practice spread through other agencies and the categories were eventually standardized in the Office of Management and Budget’s Directive 15 in 1977, which established the categories of American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, White, Hispanic origin and not of Hispanic origin (Lee and Skrentny, 2010; Yanow, 2003). When the NIH required that federally funded biomedical research use these categories beginning in 2001, it was symbolically extending the civil rights movement to this new terrain. The story of the categories’ past imbued their use in biomedical research with a social justice intent. The story was evident in the emerging field of genomics. When the Human Genome Project was launched in the late 1980s, scientists associated with the project did not see it as relevant to issues of race. They believed that all DNA was “equal” and relied on DNA samples of convenience from around the world. Project leaders did not weigh in on the debates that preceded the passage of the NIH Act. And when the first draft of the human genome was completed in 2000, genomics pioneer Craig Venter, with President Bill Clinton by his side, proclaimed, “I am happy today that the only race we are talking about is the human race” (quoted in Bliss, 2012: 53). However, as the federal categories diffused though federal agencies, scientists began to claim a role for genomics in combating health disparities (Bliss, 2012, 2015). Genomicists’ earlier unwillingness to recognize genetically meaningful racial categories was abandoned as they embraced a story in which racial categories were the legacy of the civil rights movement. They eagerly promised to identify racial and ethnic genomic differences in the name of racial justice. As Bliss writes, genomic leaders “spoke of inclusion in genome projects as a kind of health-focused Affirmative Action” (2015: 179). Scientists were entrepreneurial in linking genomics to the emerging field of health disparities research, and they managed to gain powerful support from federal agencies. Their agenda included promoting racial and ethnic minority scientists and working with minority communities to bring racial and ethnic minorities into DNA sampling, in addition to accounting for health outcomes by way of racial and ethnic genetic differences (Bliss, 2012). Still, the latter came at the expense of research probing the health effects of access to healthcare and healthy food, the experience of discrimination and poverty, and other social and economic conditions (Bliss, 2015). Treating health inequalities as lodged in physical bodies took on the patina of civil rights activism. 67

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Genomicists’ success in claiming a disproportionate share of the field of health disparities research owed also to a second story. This one connected racial, ethnic, and gender categories not to the past, but to the future. With the development of genomics, this story went, the past of one-size-fits-all medicine would be replaced by a future of personalized medicine, in which treatments would be tailored to a person’s individual genetic makeup. In this story, basing treatment on people’s race or ethnicity, that is, on group-based categories, was a “waystation,” a “step,” a “phase,” a “temporary stage”—these were the terms that were used— in the movement from universal medicine to personalized medicine. As an official in the FDA put it, race-based medicine was a “stepping stone” en route to “target treatment” (quoted in Kahn, 2013: 163). Two other FDA officials similarly wrote, “Race or ethnicity is clearly a highly imperfect description of the genomic and other physiologic characteristics that cause people to differ, but it can be a useful proxy for those characteristics until the pathophysiological bases for observed racial differences are better understood” (Kahn, 2013: 164). An article published in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology anticipated that “the need for classification by race will be replaced by more accurate and specific identification of each individual person’s likelihood of responding to a particular drug therapy” (Kahn, 2013: 164). The use of racial categories was justified, in this account, by the fact that the categories were temporary and necessary to the next step of treating people purely as individuals—and not as members of groups at all.

5.2.3 Stories Outlast the Categories Both stories were evident in the announcement of the first of several racespecific drugs, the drugs a direct consequence of the new standards in biomedicine. BiDil was a treatment for congestive heart failure in self-identified black Americans. The FDA proudly hailed it as “representing a step toward the promise of personalized medicine” (quoted in Kahn, 2013: 110). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the oldest American civil rights organization, partnered with BiDil’s manufacturer to help promote the drug in black communities (Devine, 2006). For the NAACP, as for the federal government, BiDil was an advance for the cause of individualized medicine as well as a society characterized by racial equality (Roberts, 2011). The two stories were joined; BiDil was the next step in the civil rights movement and it was one step closer to a world without group categories at all. In fact, it was not clear that it was either (Kahn, 2013). When the researchers first came up with the drug, which was a combination of two preexisting generic vasodilators, they sought approval for it from the FDA for general, not race-specific, use. Because the study had been conducted for different 68

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purposes and lacked proper statistical controls, however, the drug was not approved. At that point, researchers noticed that the small number of African Americans enrolled in the study seemed to benefit more from the drug than other study participants. Researchers accordingly sought a patent for the drug and then conducted a larger study, enrolling only African Americans. The drug showed such benefit to subjects relative to a placebo that the study was ended early. The drug company secured approval for BiDil for self-identified blacks suffering from congestive heart failure in a dramatically shortened review process. The drug was put on the market at six times the price of the two generic drugs that made it up and Wall Street analysts predicted sales of $1 billion by 2010 (Krimsky, 2012: 115). Despite the FDA’s bold proclamation that BiDil represented an advance for personalized medicine, no genetic mechanism accounting for BiDil’s effectiveness was identified. Rather, self-identified race was taken as a proxy for unexplained genetic variation. This was true even though the study provided no evidence for the claim that there was genetic variation. After all, the study was only of African Americans. Why did the researchers not include black and white study subjects? Presumably, if both groups had benefited, the drug would have been approved for general use. However, the patent for the general use drug was set to expire thirteen years before that of the race-specific drug. The race-specific drug was likely to be more profitable (Kahn, 2013; Roberts, 2011). Although BiDil’s profitability did not live up to expectations, other ethnic and gender-targeted drugs were developed and marketed by drug companies seeking to exploit the possibilities of niche-based marketing (Epstein, 2007; Kahn, 2013). There was certainly a financial motivation to see racial health disparities as caused by genetic differences. However, BiDil was embraced by federal government officials, medical professionals, scientists, and advocacy groups. These groups had long been suspicious of the claim that race was biological. What accounts for the shift? I argue that a biological conception of race, with all the problems that conception had, was made acceptable by stories that treated it as just a temporary step on the way to a post-racial science and a post-racial society. Scientists, policy makers, and advocates could treat race as if what they knew to be a historical and political category was in fact a fixed and biological one because doing so was part of the effort to bring about a racially just society (the first story), and because they would only need to use the category temporarily (the second story). The problem was that they did not do so only temporarily. Even when genomic information became available that made elements of the much vaunted personalized medicine possible, scientists still relied on a biological conception of race. For example, in figuring out how to establish dosing for Warfarin, an anti-coagulant, researchers found that once individual genetic factors were taken into account, race did not explain any of patients’ response 69

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to the drug. Yet they still advised doctors to take account of patients’ race in dosing the drug (Kahn, 2013: ch. 6). The power of the story to sustain the category is also evident in Hunt and Kreiner’s (2013) interviews with primary care physicians about their views of genomics. Physicians talked frequently and confidently about personalized medicine being “just down the road” or “coming down the pike”—again the story of future promise (2013: 230). One physician said, “I imagine in the future we’re going to be able to run blood tests on people and say, ‘Okay, this is what your cytochrome P450 system looks like, so I’m going to avoid this medication and I’m going to choose this’ ” (2013: 230). In fact, none of the fifty-eight physicians who were interviewed actually used genetic testing. But they did draw on pharmacogenetic concepts. They paid attention to family ancestry when the patients were white, and to racial and ethnic group physical markers when the patients were black, Asian, and/ or Latino. They were comfortable taking physical indicators of race as a proxy for genetic variation. One physician explained: The Human Genome Project has proved beyond a doubt that African American males get prostate cancer at younger ages, African American hypertensive patients respond better to certain classes of medications. So to operate blindly, literally, blind to the ethnic and racial is, I think, ridiculous. Because the medical science is there now to say, “No you have to consider it” . . . You know, “You happen to be Black so we should put you on this.” (2013: 232)

Hunt and Kreiner point out that the Human Genome Project showed none of this. But the story of personalized medicine just on the horizon again warranted the use of the category of race in the meantime. When the researchers asked physicians what they believed would make genetic science more useful to them in clinical practice, fully 20 percent of the sample skipped the idea of personalized medicine altogether and instead said that they looked forward to more guidance on how to treat people differently by race. One commented, “When they develop drugs, if they could tell us how the drugs react with different races. We already know that some diseases are more prevalent in different races. So to know the effects that drugs have on different races would be quite useful” (2013: 232). In other words, the story of a future of personalized medicine made acceptable the use of racial categories in the present, but it also sat comfortably alongside the assumption that race was not historical but biological, and thus timeless. The category of race is so deeply embedded in American institutions and practices and assumptions that it remained, as Levi-Strauss (1963) would have put it, good to think with. The stories made it possible to use the categories without worrying about their imprecision: The imprecision was for a good cause and it was temporary. What the stories could not do, however, was to 70

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capture the processual dimensions of inequality; the fact that inequalities in health outcomes were the result of multiple, concatenating, cumulative processes. In fact, the stories made it that much easier to ignore the fact that inequalities were the result of such processes.

5.3 Employment Reform A second effort to combat inequality similarly depended on, and was stymied by, “as if” stories. This one, which I discuss more briefly, centered on inequality in employment. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the American EEOC filed a wave of class action discrimination suits against such corporate employers as A.T. & T., General Motors, Sears, and General Electric. Lawyers for the EEOC arrived in court armed with statistics showing that qualified women were hired and promoted at a rate that was statistically lower than the hiring and promotion of qualified men. This was in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964. However, lawyers tended not to win their cases when they presented statistical evidence. Instead, they were expected to present victims who would testify to their experience of discrimination in hiring and promotion (Schultz, 1990). This would counter employers’ argument that the statistical disparities were meaningless because they reflected women’s own choices. Women were generally uninterested in jobs that traditionally had been held by men, employers argued, even when the job paid better. Logically, however, the evidence that courts called for was meaningless. Just as employers’ argument could not be proved by the testimony of a few women who had not been interested in the higher-paying jobs, so it could not be disproved by the testimony of a few women who had been interested in such jobs. Presumably, some women were interested in the higher-paying jobs and some were not, just as some men were and some were not. What such witnesses could not do was prove that they were representative of the larger pool of eligible workers. But plaintiffs who did present witnesses recounting their stymied aspirations were more likely to win their cases. In a study of fiftyfour sex discrimination cases brought under Title VII between 1972 and 1989, Schultz (1990) found that courts were three times as likely to reject employers’ claim that women were uninterested in higher-paying jobs in cases where the plaintiffs presented anecdotal evidence than in cases where they did not. When judges accepted employers’ argument about women’s lack of interest, they often pointed explicitly to the fact that plaintiffs had failed to produce any individual victims. Why did judges want victims’ stories? Because they needed a liberal story to counter the familiar conservative one. The story told by employers and accepted by some courts was that certain kinds of work were inherently 71

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masculine: They were “heavy” and “dirty” (Schultz, 1990: 1801). Jobs had these features apart from anything that employers did. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that women preferred not to do masculine jobs. It was a matter of common sense, as conservative courts often put it. “The defendant manufactures upholstered metal chairs,” wrote one judge. “Common sense tells us that few women have the skill or the desire to be a welder or a metal fabricator, and that most men cannot operate a sewing machine and have no desire to learn’ ” (quoted in Schultz, 1990: 195). Or, as another judge put it: “Common practical knowledge tells us that certain work in a bakery operation is not attractive to females . . . The work is simply not compatible with their personal interests and capabilities” (1990: 196). What was the liberal counter to that story? The liberal story, which was not much of a story at all, did not take issue with the idea that women’s work preferences were set long before they entered the workplace. But it did reject the notion that such preferences were fundamentally different from men’s. To think otherwise was to engage in stereotyping, which was prohibited by Title VII. If women’s basic values and experiences were not appreciably different from men’s, then, most likely, neither were their work preferences. Women’s underrepresentation in non-traditional work could only reflect employers’ discriminatory stereotyping. The liberal story suppressed gender differences rather than accounted for them. This was why it was so important for plaintiffs to produce witnesses who could testify that they had wanted non-traditional jobs. Again, such witnesses could not prove that their experiences were representative of the larger pool of workers. But they were symbolic. They suggested that women were no different from men in their capacities and aspirations. The good victim, for the court, was one who was genderless, in the sense that she had always seen herself as capable of, entitled to, and likely to secure traditionally men’s work. What was the harm in plaintiffs producing those victims? By corroborating the storyline expected of them by liberal judges, Schultz shows, plaintiffs ended up challenging only some of employers’ discriminatory practices, leaving others intact. By hewing to the liberal story, in which work preferences were formed through socialization processes outside the labor market, plaintiffs were ill-positioned to show that workers’ preferences themselves were influenced by employers’ practices. In their recruiting strategies, employers did more than simply publicize vacancies. They also tried to stimulate interest in those whom they hoped to attract, in part by describing the position and its ideal occupant. Doing so in masculinized ways discouraged women from even thinking about the job as one they should apply for. Yet few courts focused on these effects of sex-segregated advertising. Word-of-mouth recruiting had the same effect but it too remained largely unchallenged. 72

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The problem for women charging sex discrimination was not only that they were forced to style themselves as, but for everything but their sex, like men. The deeper problem was that in the absence of a compelling account of how women came to forge their job preferences, women effectively ceded terrain to conservatives, who did have such an account. The conservative account was detailed, variegated, and meshed with countless stories told in other settings about gender differences and socialization processes. Stories of women having different job aspirations than men made sense when heard against the backdrop of stories of women having different biologies than men and stories of little girls being different from little boys and stories of people having different tastes from each other and stories of mothers providing a haven in a heartless world and fathers bringing home the bacon and so on. The liberal story, which was made up of dry abstractions and denials of a causal chain rather than the assertion of one, was no match for the conservative story, and for the countless other stories against which it was heard. The problem, in other words, was that there was not a familiar story available to plaintiffs in which the protagonist’s aspirations were forged in and through her encounters with real institutions, rather than forged outside those institutions, once and for all time, when she was young.

5.4 Stories and Process It would be easy, but wrong, to say that stories are simply ideological: that they are used to justify decisions that are made for other reasons. In this view, judges in the EEOC cases had already decided to side with employers and came up with stories that supported them. Pharmaceutical companies, for their part, wanted to make money and invoked, on one hand, the cause of racial justice and, on the other, the promise of personalized medicine as a way to justify creating race-and gender-specific drugs. But this view misses the fact that some judges wanted to help EEOC lawyers to tell the stories they needed. And it misses the fact that biomedical researchers and probably some pharmaceutical executives, as well as activists, were truly committed to combatting racial and gender disparities in health. It would also be wrong to say that the stories were ideological in the sense that they reflected a false consciousness that blinded people to their own interests. Against this characterization, it is important to note that researchers who treated race as a proxy for genetics recognized that it was an imperfect proxy. And judges who asked EEOC lawyers to tell a story about women having always wanted men’s jobs did so simply to provide some alternative to the familiar story that employers were able to tell. Researchers, activists, 73

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policy makers, and judges all recognized that the stories they required and the stories they told did not fully capture reality. The problem was that there were not obvious alternatives. There was not an easy way to conceptualize racial inequalities in health not as inhering in people but as inhering in processes of discrimination, stress, and economic displacement; processes that intercut, cumulated, and magnified one another. There was not an easy way to conceptualize men and women’s unequal ability to capitalize on job opportunities as lying in the processes that shaped what they believed they were entitled to. The inequalities in each case were complex, but more important, they were not easily captured by familiar stories. The stories that are familiar to us are ones with protagonists who have goals and aspirations and who confront obstacles that are either externally imposed or are the result of the protagonist’s own weaknesses. The obstacles are events with beginnings and endings. It is difficult to tell a story in which the obstacles that protagonists confront are both outside them and within them; that is, that environmental conditions have lasting biological effects, and effects that protagonists inherit as well as confront in their own lives. This was the problem in the case of biomedical reform. It is difficult to tell a story in which protagonists’ aspirations, indeed, their very identities, are shaped by the institutions they confront. This was the problem in the case of the employment discrimination cases. Was there an alternative? Is there a way to communicate inequalities and their effects that escapes the limitations of familiar stories? I can think of two ways to do so. One is not to tell stories. To say, for example, that an average African American baby has a lower life expectancy than an average white baby is to shift attention away from who the protagonist is or what she does in her life. It is to communicate instead that a variety of processes combine to disadvantage groups of people. It refuses to personalize; rather, it insists on an abstract black baby and an abstract white one. In the case of the employment discrimination cases, the EEOC lawyers might have said: We cannot provide women testifying to their frustrated dreams. Instead, we want to talk about the obstacles to dreaming. In both cases, the object would have been to push audiences to self-consciously suspend their tendency to think in terms of the stories that pass as common sense. A second strategy is to tell stories but in a distinctive genre: that of tragic irony. Norbert Frye (2015) describes the genre as drawing attention to the world in which the protagonist lives, and specifically, to the absurdity of conventional assumptions about human motives and expectations. In fact, a judge used just this genre in dissenting from the decision in the most famous of the EEOC cases: that against the retail giant Sears and Roebuck. In the case, Sears successfully argued that women had not been hired for the higherpaying commission sales jobs because they were put off by the stress that 74

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came with the jobs, which involved selling high-ticket items such as tractors and household appliances. The judicial opinion in the case faulted the EEOC for not offering testimony by women who had wanted the jobs in question. However, in a dissenting opinion, Circuit Judge Richard Cudahy wrote: Huge statistical disparities in participation in various commission selling jobs are ascribed to differences in “interest.” Yet there is scarcely any recognition of the employer’s role in shaping the “interests” of applicants . . . I concede that the government’s case would be stronger if it had produced even a handful of women willing to testify that Sears had frustrated their childhood dreams of becoming commission sellers of roofing, sewing machines or air conditioners. However, even absent flesh and blood victims, I find the willingness of the district court and the majority to accept the interest defense uncritically, and without recognition of its close parallel to the stereotypes that Title VII seeks to eradicate, perplexing and unacceptable. (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1988)

When the judge said that the EEOC’s case would have been stronger if it had “produced even a handful of women willing to testify that Sears had frustrated their childhood dreams of becoming commission sellers of roofing, sewing machines or air conditioners,” he used an ironic genre. As I read him, the judge was trying to make clear the absurdity of requiring women to have aspired always to a job selling air conditioners in order to claim that they were treated unfairly. He drew attention to the gap between a fairy-tale story of people searching for their “dream job” and the reality of labor markets, in which people adapt to the possibilities that are before them, seeking out jobs that promise the most satisfaction (financially, socially, creatively, and so on) and that they think they have a realistic chance of getting (see Boje and Rosile, 2003 on the use of tragic and epic genres for recounting organizational developments). The judge’s use of an ironic genre, as I read it, revealed the limits of the stories that pass as common sense. Certainly, the effectiveness of the genre is by no means guaranteed. In fact, Schultz (1990) quotes the same passage I just quoted about women’s “childhood dreams of becoming commission sellers” to argue that the judge subscribed to the liberal story, not that he was challenging it. In other words, she read the judge’s call for such a story as unironic. This only suggests that the use of an ironic register is a gamble. I want to conclude by asking whether stories are ever good at helping us to understand process. This perhaps is a surprising question to ask since stories are so fundamental to how we represent change over time. After all, a story is an account of a sequence of events in the order in which they occurred, with the meaning of the events only becoming clear in and through their unfolding, and remaining, even then, dependent on the point of view from which the story is told. In this way, as Tsoukas and Hatch (2001) and Langley and 75

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Tsoukas (2010) argue, narrative can capture multiple temporalities, including time as experienced by actors themselves. My concern, though, stems from the fact that stories’ credibility, indeed, their very coherence, depends on their resemblance to already familiar stories. I hesitate to define the bounds of the familiar (are they modern stories? Modern Western stories?). However, in the stories with which many of us are familiar, there are protagonists to whom things happen. It is hard to tell stories in which people and their identities and aspirations are the effects of processes. And it is hard to tell stories in which multiple streams of events intersect to produce effects on the protagonist. The challenge, I have suggested, is to tell unfamiliar stories, and to make the case, sometimes, for not telling stories at all.

Acknowledgments Thanks to the organizers of the 2017 International Process Symposium—Ann Langley, Trish Reay, Haridimos Tsoukas, and Tammar Zilber—for inviting me to write this chapter. Thanks to symposium organizers and participants, as well as to the fellows of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Successful Societies Program, for helping me to figure out what I wanted to say.

References Auerbach, J. D., and Figert, A. E. (1995). Women’s Health Research: Public Policy and Sociology. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 1, 115–31. Bal, M. (1985). Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. C. V. Boheemen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barley, S. R. and Tolbert, P. S. (1997). Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links between Action and Institution. Organization Studies, 18(1), 93–117. Bliss, C. (2012). Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bliss, C. (2015). Biomedicalization and the New Science of Race. In Susan E. Bell and Anne E. Figert (Eds), Reimagining (Bio)Medicalization, Pharmaceuticals and Genetics: Old Critiques and New Engagements (pp. 175–96). New York: Routledge. Boje, D., and Rosile, G. A. (2003). Life Imitates Art: Enron’s Epic and Tragic Narration. Management Communication Quarterly, 17(1), 85–125. Brooks, P. (1984). Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Stories of (and Instead of) Process Czarniawska, B. (1997). A Four Times Told Tale: Combining Narrative and Scientific Knowledge in Organization Studies. Organization, 4(1), 7–30. Devine, D. (2006). NAACP Goes to the Grassroots for BiDil. Bay State Banner, 5 October, http://www.baystate-banner.com/archives/stories/2006/10/100506-07.htm. Emirbayer, M. (1997). Manifesto for a Relational Sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 103(2), 281–317. Emirbayer, M., and Mische, A. (1998). What Is Agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023. Epstein, S. (2007). Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears Roebuck & Company (1988). Heard before the United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit. 839 F. 2d 302. Open Jurist, https://openjurist.org/839/f2d/302. Feldman, M., and Skoldberg, K. (2002). Stories and the Rhetoric of Contrariety: Subtexts of Organizing (Change). Culture and Organization, 8, 275–92. Frye, N. (2015). Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Green, M. C., and Brock, T. C. (2000). The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–21. Hunt, L. M., and Kreiner, M. J. (2013). Pharmacogenetics in Primary Care: The Promise of Personalized Medicine and the Reality of Racial Profiling. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 37(1), 226–35. Kahn, J. (2013). Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a PostGenomic Age. New York: Columbia University Press. Kalcik, S. (1975). Like Ann’s Gynecologist or the Time I Was Almost Raped. In C. R. Farrer (Ed.), Women and Folklore (pp. 3–11). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Krimsky, S. (2012). The Art of Medicine: The Short Life of a Race Drug. Lancet, 379.9811: 114. Labov, W., and Waletsky, J. (1967). Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society (pp. 12–44). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Langley, A., and Tsoukas, H. (2010). Introducing Perspectives on Process Organization Studies. In T. Hernes and S. Maitlis (Eds), Process, Sensemaking and Organizing (pp. 1–26). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, C., and Skrentny, J. D. (2010). Race Categorization and the Regulation of Business and Science. Law and Society Review, 44(3–4), 617–50. Levi-Strauss, C. (1963). The Structural Analysis of Myth. In Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polletta, F. (2006). It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics. Chicago, IL: University Chicago Press. Roberts, D. E. (2011). What’s Wrong with Race-Based Medicine: Genes, Drugs, and Health Disparities. Minnesota Journal of Science and Technology, 12(1), 1–21.

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Institutions and Organizations Saperstein, A., and Penner, A. M. (2012). Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States. American Journal of Sociology, 118(3), 676–727. Schank, Roger C., and Abelson, Robert P. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Newark, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schultz, V. (1990). Telling Stories about Women and Work: Judicial Interpretations of Sex Segregation in the Workplace in Title VII Cases Raising the Lack of Interest Argument. Harvard Law Review, 103(8), 1749–843. Slater, M. D., Rouner, D., and Long, M. (2006). Television Dramas and Support for Controversial Public Policies: Effects and Mechanisms. Journal of Communication, 56(2), 235–52. Tsoukas, H., and Hatch, M. J. (2001). Complex Thinking, Complex Practice: The Case for a Narrative Approach to Organizational Complexity. Human Relations, 54(8), 979–1013. Yanow, D. (2003). Constructing “Race” and “Ethnicity” in America: Category-Making in Public Policy and Administration. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

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6 Processes, Life, and the Practice Plenum Theodore R. Schatzki

Process approaches form a minoritarian vocation in contemporary social thought. The concept of process is regularly used in unconsidered ways that are continuous with untutored uses outside academic texts. But there is relatively little detailed engagement with, or focused conceptual development centered on, the concept—despite a recent burst of process analyses, above all in organization studies and in corners of sociology and geography that engage with pragmatism, Bergson, or Deleuze. The present chapter examines whether lives, practices, and the practice plenum embrace or are themselves processes. To explore this issue, I draw on a slew of prominent notions of process and work with Heidegger’s and Mead’s ideas about action and life as well as my own conception of practices.

6.1 Philosophical Sorting At least three conceptions of process are at work in social analysis today. I will describe these conceptions in order from the least demanding to the most radical. The least demanding conception construes processes as sequences of events. In a recent book, Andrew Abbott writes, “[t]he world of the processual approach is a world of events. Individuals and social entities are not the elements of social life, but are patterns and regularities defined on lineages of successive events” (2016: ix; cf. 202). On this view, the processual character of society is its composition out of tangled event series (cf. Van de Ven, 1992 and Pettigrew, 1997), and processual movement lies in the continual occurrence of new events that extend, conjoin, or conclude such series. These series form the “substrate” of the social process. A typical conception of explanation

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that dovetails with this conception of process is that explanations that cite individuals and social entities actually refer to “patterns in events, activities, and choices over time” (Langley, 2009: 409). What, finally, makes this conception of process the least radical is its unabashed use of the concept of event, which is a prominent ontological category often opposed to other such categories, for example, process and substance (see below). At the same time, lack of radicalness explains the pervasiveness of this concept of process in social research (and in ordinary life). A more demanding version of this first conception of process is that a “[p]rocess is an . . . occurrence that consists of an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in programmatic coordination” (Rescher, 2000: 22). According to Nicholas Rescher, processes instantiate or realize programs, which are rules, patterns, or regularities. Two examples of programs that apply to the process of (human) life are life narratives and stage sequences (e.g. birth, childhood, adolescence, etc.). Rescher holds, moreover, that the developments whose programmatic coordinated unfolding make up a process are not just causally or functionally connected (Rescher, 1996: 38), but also “integrated,” or “unified” (2000: 24). This integration or unification has multiple aspects. One is that the unity of a process is the unity of its program (1996: 41). Another is that processes are wholes (2000: 31). The developments that constitute a given process cannot exist independently of the process (1996: 38): They are temporal parts of a temporal entity. Adolescence, for example, cannot exist independently of the life process; nor can episodes undergone by adolescents. A third aspect is spatial-temporal continuity (2000: 23). The developments that compose a process are continuous. For example, there are no breaks between the stages of the life process, and as long as life unfolds there transpire developments between which no gaps occur. Rescher’s account diverges from Abbott’s in two ways important for my discussion. First, Rescher conceives of processes as unified series of occurrences, not just as series simpliciter as Abbott does. This is important because the idea of an event series is widespread in social thought. Indeed, Abbott’s appropriation of the idea assimilates his processual approach to a wide variety of nonprocessual event-based alternatives. Second, Rescher does not write of events, but of developments. A process consists in a sequence of continuous connected developments, not in a sequence of events. It turns out, however, that this difference is only apparent. For Rescher not only characterizes processes as occurrences, he sometimes calls developments temporally extended events. These characterizations again raise questions about the distinction between processes and events. I return to this issue below. A second overall conception of process is the idea of movement or passage through, in, or by reference to the present. The intuition behind this idea, which was strongly propagated in pragmatism, is that “reality exists in a 80

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present” (Mead, 1932: 1). Usually, the present through, in, or by reference to which movement or passage occurs is the present of experience. A strong version of this idea construes human experience as the place, akin to a stage, where things take place (come on stage), only to recede (exit the stage) as other things replace them. A weaker version treats current experience as the omnipresent reference point for determining which events qualify as present ones. In addition, there are at least three views of what comes and goes in the present and thereby constitutes passage. The first view holds that events are what come and go. This view fosters the idea that processes are continuous series of events that pass through or coincide with the ongoing present of human experience. Many pragmatists advocate this position. A second view avers that it is human experiences themselves, not events as such, that come and go in the present, new experiences constantly replacing extant ones. On this knotty view, the present is the occurrence of experience, and passage—which is not passage through or in a present—is the coming and going of experiences, each of which is necessarily present. This view of passage spawns the idea of a series of presents, that is, a series of present experiences, as well as a picture of time, or better, of history, as such series (cf. Mead, 1929). History is composed, not of event series passing in or through human experience, but of series of (present) experiences. A third view of what passes through experience claims that time itself flows. It is not the passage of events or experiences that makes up the movement of process. Rather, process is the incessant flow of time from the future through the present into the past. On this view, which is found for example in a recent book by Tor Hernes (2014), everything that is, including events and human experiences, is borne on the river of time. Reality, as a result, is composed of endless subsidiary processes. For as time flows, experiences, actions, and events, as well as goods, communication, and bodies, etc., are carried from the future through the present into the past and thereby form historical subprocesses. Humans, meanwhile, always operate in an ongoing present. This means that they always experience the flow of time in the present tense. According to Hernes, finally, a present is all flow (2014: 56), that is, it is open and indeterminate, where “indeterminate” means yet without definite shape (2014: 52, 88). Events and experiences become distinct only once the flow of time carries them into the past and they become possible objects of attention and thought. The third overall conception of a process is that of an unfolding advance. This—Bergson’s conception—is the most radical conception. According to Bergson, process is best known to humans as the dureé of consciousness. Process, however, is omnipresent: All more particular flows such as those of consciousness-action are subsumed into the flow of the universe, and everything that is is deposited by some unfolding advance or other. Curiously, the 81

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central feature of process as Bergson conceived of it is ignored in many accounts that claim to appropriate his conception. This feature is the ongoingness of process, the fact that process qua process ceaselessly unfolds. The image of an advancing wave captures some of Bergson’s idea here: Process is the ongoing advancing curling of the wave. In Bergson’s words (1911 [1907]: 4), dureé is “the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and swells as it advances.” In contrast, most appropriations of his conception (two exceptions are Chia, 1999 and Langley, 2009) in effect treat process as the result of what Bergson calls process: as unceasing change (the result of the relentless unfolding) rather than as unceasing changing, that is, the relentless unfolding in its unfolding. Note that the movement that process so conceived embodies is directionally opposed to the movement embodied in process qua passage in or through the present: It runs, not out of the future through the present into the past (or just from the present into the past), but from the past into the future. This third conception of process is the most radical because it is free of alternative ontological categories. According to Bergson, moreover, there is no accounting or theorizing about process: It can only be intuited. As described, several conceptions or subconceptions of process appropriate the notion of an event. Before continuing, I should briefly indicate why I treat event and process as distinct ontological categories. In considering the relationship between categories, an important issue is generality: which categories subsume which others. Ludger Jansen (2015), for example, identifies occurrents and continuants as the two broadest categories of entity: Whereas occurrents are temporal entities with temporal parts, continuants are spatial entities with spatial parts. Jansen claims that processes and events are two kinds of occurrents, that is, two types of temporal entity. The differences between them are that processes necessarily have a duration, inherently involve change, and can be individuated by reference to their results, whereas events can occur instantaneously and need not involve change. If, for example, the value of my home stays stable this year, this is something that happens, and thus is an event, but it is not a process. Hence, according to Jansen, processes must be cleanly differentiated from events as two types of temporal entity. Contrast this with Johanna Seibt’s claim (2012; see 2003 for a more detailed discussion) that the category of process encompasses both developments (comings-about) and occurrences (goings-on). What contrasts with processes are substances. Whereas talk of substance, Seibt holds, implicates an eternal, static universe, talk of process invokes a world in movement. Whereas the being of substances, furthermore, is defined by what they are, the being of processes is defined by becoming, what they do. Meanwhile, the difference between developments and occurrences—that is, events—is that the former, but not the latter, are directional (notice that this is 82

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Rescher’s view, too). Seibt does not distinguish events from processes as two types of occurrence but treats events as a type of process. I am skeptical that scholastic differences such as those between Jansen and Seibt can be resolved. In the following, I join Jansen in treating events and processes as two sorts of occurrence. I do this because the account of activity as event that I have developed elsewhere (2010) derives from Heidegger, and pace Seibt (2012: §1), the sorts of process theorized by Rescher or Mead are not central to Heidegger’s account of activity and time: Activity-events à la Heidegger are not a type of, or inherently, processes. A long line of thinkers has likewise treated event and process as distinct categories. It is true, as I will explain, that Abbott’s notion of processes as event series converges with Heidegger’s account of existence in an interesting way. But Abbott’s notion—as noted—is parasitic on the idea of events.

6.2 Human Activities in Heidegger and Mead This section examines human activity as an event, highlighting my just mentioned Heideggerian account of this as well as Mead’s ideas on the topic. Subsequent sections will examine lives, practices, and the practice plenum on the basis of considerations aired in the present one. When Heidegger began as a philosopher in the 1910s, the flow or flowing character of human life had captivated some of the leading philosophical minds of the era, including Wilhelm Dilthey, William James, Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, and Alfred Whitehead. Many of Heidegger’s earliest works contain passages that think or refer to the flowing character of experience. With time, however, Heidegger came to prioritize the notion of event over that of flow or process in analyzing human existence. Even though the notion of an event did not explicitly take center stage until Contributions to Philosophy (1999) in the 1930s, the idea that Dasein, human life, happens is unmistakable in the decade prior to that. Combining Heidegger’s explicit claim that existence, or being-in-the-world, happens, with the interpretive claim that being-in-the-world is, centrally, acting in worldly contexts, yields the idea that acting is a happening, that is, an event. In Being and Time, the event of activity has a three-dimensional temporal structure. These three dimensions are the past, present, and future. A key feature of this structure is the simultaneity of its dimensions. It is not the case that they occur sequentially, the past preceding the present, which precedes the future. Rather, as three essential dimensions of any activity, they are always simultaneous: Whenever an action is performed, the performance has past, present, and future dimensions. This understanding of threedimensional time resembles the idea, found in the work of many process 83

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theorists, that specious presents contain elements of past and present (specious presents are present experiences qua undergoings). According to analyses of specious presents, however, the relations borne by what happens in the specious present to the past and future dimensions of this present are causal in character. As a result, these relations establish before and after relations among the three dimensions. This is not true of Heidegger’s three dimensions. Heidegger interpreted the past, present, and future of activity as thrownness, being-amid, and projection, respectively. Thrownness is already being in a world: Whenever someone acts she already exists in a situation, towards aspects of which she reacts. These aspects (and situations) are that from which she departs in acting. Projecting, meanwhile, is being ahead of oneself, acting for the sake of states of affairs and ways of being towards which one comes in acting. Being-amid, finally, is having to do with the entities in the world around one. All told, when a person acts she deals with things stretched out between what she is coming toward and what she is coming from. This structure can be described in the language of teleology. The future, coming toward something, is acting for an end or purpose, the past, departing from something—that is, reacting to or acting in its light—is motivation, and the present is acting (having to do with things). On my interpretation (2010), furthermore, the event of activity is not just temporal in character; it is also spatial in the sense that a person proceeds in the world through places and paths that are anchored in entities in settings of action. The layout of a classroom, for instance, anchors an array of places and paths, sensitively to which teachers and students in the classroom act. In fact, because the layouts of settings (worlds) reflect the teleologies that govern the actions that are performed in them, the temporal and spatial components of human activity are connected. Activity is a temporal-spatial event. Note that this asseveration contravenes the philosophical thesis that events are temporal entities alone. Mead, a contemporary of Heidegger’s, likewise argued that activity is an event. His ideas, however, stand firmly in the tradition of theorists who attend to the flowing character of human life, which Heidegger moved away from at the same time that Mead developed it further. As indicated, Mead believed that reality exists in a present. The present, furthermore, is the site of passage: the coming and going, existence and non-existence, of things. Each coming of something (its coming to be) is an event. Each event, moreover, marks a present. And in the present it marks, the event that is happening is emerging from what preceded it, just as it is moving toward something that will follow. Consequently, both past and future are part of the present: The past is that which is determining the event as it emerges while the future is that for which the event in turn is serving as determining condition. In addition, the event that is happening has a dose of novelty by which it differs from what 84

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conditions it (1932: 24). As a result, the present is defined by an emergent event, a becoming.1 It follows that the ordering of passage, its division into past, present, and future, is grounded in emergent events. Action (more precisely: the commencement of an action) is such an emergent event. An action, therefore, articulates a past, present, and future, the past embracing the conditions under which the action is performed, the future embracing the conditions toward which the action tends, and the present the action itself. In human life, moreover, that toward which an action tends is a future event that, Mead wrote (1938: 343–4), controls the entire complex of events conditioning each other. This future event is the end toward which the emergent event comes.2 Another important aspect of Mead’s account is that the activities that define a person’s presents belong within more encompassing activities, to which he gives the name “social acts.” These acts encompass the activities of different people and are focused on common objects. Both Heidegger and Mead believed that the present is defined by a definite act. This conviction contrasts with, for example, Herne’s claim that what is presently happening becomes definite only once it has receded into the past and become a specific event, whereupon it can be reflected on and its meaning as an event reinterpreted endlessly. This claim is a version of Bergson’s thesis that all segmentation of the dureé of consciousness activity is introduced ex post facto by memory and consciousness. I have addressed this idea at length elsewhere (2010: ch. 4) and mention it here only to emphasize through contrast the shared position of Heidegger and Mead.

6.3 Activities and Lives I want now to place activities as conceptualized in Section 6.2 in the greater wholes or contexts of which they are inherently part. As I see it, there are two such wholes or contexts: human lives and social practices. Lives and practices are two distinct orders to which human activities equally belong. Around the time of Being and Time, Heidegger wrote little about life. As indicated, however, he claimed that human existence consists centrally in being-in-the-world, and being-in-the-world can be interpreted as primarily acting in worldly situations-settings. Human existence, therefore, embraces a nexus of activities, each an event. These events are distinct, successive, and 1 Mead appears to agree with Dewey (2008 [1930]) that events are marked by change, or better, difference in the flow of experience-reality. 2 The parallels between Mead’s analysis of life, Heidegger’s understanding of the three temporal dimensions of activity, and Schutz’s (1967) account of the motivated flow of activity are striking.

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sometimes overlapping. Human existence, accordingly, embraces a series of distinct, successive, and possibly overlapping activities, each with pasts and futures that, in different mixes, can be the same as or different from the pasts and futures of other activity-events. Note that although these events can overlap they do not bleed into one another as Meadian presents do. It is true that activity is continuous in the sense that a person is always active, always performing some action or other, at least so long as he or she is awake (see Schatzki, 2010). But her performances do not merge into one another: They are not part of one unfolding process whose moments either continually emerge (Mead) or are distinguished as distinct events only in retrospect (Bergson). Existence is composed in itself of a series of distinct performances that fill the entirety of a person’s waking day. Activity also forms a central part of life on Mead’s account. I explained that Mead treats actions as emergent events that define presents. He called these presents functional presents (1932: 88)—to differentiate them from specious presents—and noted that specious presents can slip into one another within the scope of a given functional present. As explained, moreover, emergent events, in defining a present, demarcate a past and future defined as what is conditioning the event and what the event, in turn, is conditioning. This idea applies equally to specious and functional presents. All told, then, events, including actions, introduce presents, passage, and temporal dimensionality into experience-reality.3 What’s more, it is conditioning- and conditioned by-relations among actions and other events that qualify the specious and functional presents involved as the series of presents making up a life. Mead, incidentally, was wary of the idea of a series of presents, and the attendant thesis that the past is a series of bygone presents, calling them “metaphysical.” He did not deny that such series exist; he just believed that they cannot be apprehended. For there is no way of grasping a present-that-isno-more as a present, and if it is not grasped as a present it cannot be understood as a past present. For Mead as pragmatist, the past is that which, in conditioning the present, enables the self to anticipate the future and to proceed in action. As that which conditions the present, moreover, the past can vary from one present action to another. As a result, those extensions of past and future that are effected in memory and history writing and in anticipation and forecast are fuller grasps of, respectively, that which is conditioning present activity and that to which present activity is leading (1929: 238, 240). They are not reconstructions of bygone sequences of presents or

3 Mead suggests that there is an absolute world of events (1938: 331). There are, however, no presents or even successions in this world; these phenomena emerge with conscious organisms. Consequently, although events define presents, they do so only within the experience of conscious organisms. Hence the expression “experience-reality.”

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expectations of approaching ones. Thus, although the life process can be metaphysically specified as a temporal sequence of event- (including action-) presents, such sequences are not relevant to the conduct of life. Alternatively, and more relevant for the conduct of life, the life process can be specified as the continuous passing that encompasses the comings and goings of things that bear conditioning relations to one another. The life process is not something spread out over time, but is instead the on-goingness of these comings, goings, and conditioning relations in the present. In other words, the life process is coextensive with the duration of the present (1938: 345) and embraces the continual emergence of new events and actions in present experience. Heidegger’s and Mead’s accounts of action as part of existence or life are cousins. In both thinkers activity defines presents. Each present, moreover, has a past and future, which bear conditioning relations to the present. Both thinkers, consequently, conceptualize a kind of three-dimensional time centered in humanity.4 Mead’s pragmatism, however, leads him to analyze life as process, not in the sense of a series of presents, but in the sense of ever emerging activities in the present. Heidegger, by contrast, accepts beforeand-after time. This acceptance enables him to affirm the idea of the past as a nexus of events, which he dubs the conventional notion of history and assigns to historians as their domain of investigation. This embrace also opens the door to understanding existence as a nexus of activity-events. Is life conceived of in this Heideggerian way as existence a process? Human existence over time is a continuous series of successive and possibly overlapping action performances, or activity presents. Those performances that durate exhibit the unfolding advance that marks process for Bergson and can thus be considered processes. But the unfolding advances of these activities cease with the conclusion of the performances. They are not, moreover, subsumed into a single unfolding advance, whether emerging event presents à la Mead or the ceaseless pressing of the past into the future à la Bergson. And although, as suggested, existence à la Heidegger qualifies as a process on Abbott’s conception of them, I have rejected—philosophically—Abbott’s conception as overly parasitic on the notion of event. So existence is not a process even though some activities are also this. Still, does life qua existence qualify as a process on Rescher’s construal of the latter? There is certainly a strong prima facie resemblance between a continuous series of activity-events and a unified series of connected developments à la Rescher. No program, however, is obviously realized in the series of activities that are central to human life. I am skeptical, for example, that people pursue overall ends that unify all their activities. One could, moreover, annex 4 For discussion of notions of time that portray it as centered in something to do with humanity, see Hoy, 2009.

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the idea of life stages and claim that the series exhibits temporal stages. Doing this, however, distances the program from the ongoing, hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly course and rhythms of the evolving series—for the stages of life seem to make relatively little difference to the specific things people do during these shorter time spans. Rescher might reply that this is just the nature of human life as process. Nonetheless, this distance casts doubt on the cogency of claiming as Rescher does that the unity of life (existence) is the unity of its program. The program seems to be simply an inert periodization of all the things people do. Does the series of activities exhibit some other sort of unity? Seeking an answer in Heidegger leads to the claim that “That Being which is an issue for Dasein in its very Being is in each case mine” (1978 [1927]: SZ 42). Heidegger wrote little more about the mineness of existence, instead discussing at great length (in Being and Time) a contrast between two general ways of being (authenticity and inauthenticity), the possibility of which is grounded in mineness. To explain the unity of the evolving series of activities, I lean toward appropriating P. F. Strawson’s (1959) conception of a person; this conception has the added virtue of being, not just compatible with, but intimately related to Heidegger’s intuition of mineness. According to Strawson, a person, roughly, is that to which both mental states and bodily conditions can be ascribed. This formulation can be easily expanded to include the ascription of actions. Certain activities and conditions (such as identity and the grasp of language) must number among those ascribable to something in order for it to qualify as a person. The key point presently, however, is that ascribability to a person, indeed, the same one person, is a feature of the activities that help compose any given life. Reference to a single person unifies the series. Note that ascribability to a person ensures that there is always someone for whom these episodes are “mine”; Strawson’s thesis captures the public, linguistic side of the mineness of existence. It is important to add that the relation of a person to his or her body is central to personhood in helping determine which activities belong to a given life. To make the non-process character of life qua existence clear, contrast Rescher’s Humean account of a self with Strawson’s Kantian conception of a person. Rescher argues (1996: 108) that the self, or person, is a “megaprocess” consisting of various actual and possible subprocesses, that is, doings and undergoings. This thesis resembles Hume’s conception of the self as a bundle of sensations, though it includes possible subprocesses in addition to actual ones. For Rescher, the self is a structured system of doings and undergoings whose structure lies in the causal and functional relations among its elements. The unity of the person, moreover, is a narrative unity, that is, the unity of a complex system with a unique history. The unity of the self lies in the sinews of continuity and dependence over time that link together the different 88

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developments that compose a particular evolving complex thereof. Interestingly, Rescher (2000: 15) also characterizes the self as a “center of activity” and the megaprocess it is as “leading a life.” These characterizations emphasize agency and choice as features of the self (compare Dreier, 2007), an emphasis that a Humean narratival sense of the self does not clearly support. Before turning to practices, I want to consider a prominent way that organizational theorists have construed life as a process. This approach takes flight on the idea that flow (constant movement, ongoingness) is a mark of process, and it argues that life is a process by way of identifying something flow-like or ongoing-like about activity. The flow- or ongoing-like something in question is constant change, in the form of people constantly doing new or different things. The purest and broadest version of this claim is Tsoukas and Chia’s (2002) thesis that change is inherent in human activity. Similar versions of narrower scope are Orlikowski’s (1996) conceptualization of organizational change as ongoing improvisation and Feldman’s asseveration that people must constantly do different things to maintain routines (Feldman, 2000, 2016: 34–5). What does it mean that change is inherent in human activity? One possible interpretation is that each and every activity is unique because it takes place (1) in unique circumstances or (2) at or on a unique space-time point or line (cf. Langley and Tsoukas, 2017: 4–5). This uniqueness makes each activity different from every other, including from every other instance of its own types. If difference is equated with change, it follows that change is inherent in human activity because every activity is different from every other. Difference, however, should not be equated with change. For sameness, too, is constituted through difference, as are stability and stasis as well. Change is significant difference, sameness is insignificant difference, and which differences are significant is relative to context, which includes whoever contemplates the differences. Another interpretation of the claim that change is inherent in human activity arises from the realization that the world is endlessly on the move, changes, large and small, occurring in endless varying combinations and requiring actors to constantly adjust how they proceed. Under this interpretation, what is constant in human life is adjustment to circumstances, and it is constant due to circumstances—including the actor’s desires and beliefs— never staying the same. Changes of this sort are more pervasive than changes in organizations (Orlikowski) and routines (Feldman) because people continually adjust what they do when acting within organizations or carrying out routines, regardless of whether the organizations or what must be done to sustain routine thereby fluctuates. Adjustment is likewise more fine-grained than are the “tinkering, experimenting, and adapting” (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 577) that continually—not constantly—take place and that lead to changes small and large in organizations and routines. Whether the phenomenon of constant adjustment is significant, and whether particular 89

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adjustments are significant and deserve the label “change,” depends on context. Tsoukas and Chia’s (2002: 572) example of the tightrope walker is instructive in this regard since the significance of the constant adjustments she must make to maintain her balance and travel across the wire is very much contextdependent. In sum, constant adjustment and, beneath it, continuous activity ensure that there is something flow- or ongoing-like about human life. But constant adjustment and continuous activity do not ipso facto amount to constant change. Constant adjustment also does not ipso facto qualify life as a process. On a Heideggerian account of activity, adjusting is something a person does in carrying out actions that take time to perform (e.g. shoeing a horse or stirring a pot); it is a feature of particular activities, and a person is always adjusting because she is always performing some action or other. (A shift in which actions a person performs can also be labeled an “adjustment,” but there is no question of such adjustments being continuous.) In any event, constant adjustment does not occur independently of action performances as a flowing Bergsonian life substrate that is retrospectively broken up into distinct activities. Human life is not utterly in flux and in need of organization. It always proceeds organized and segmented into action performances and other life events.

6.4 Practices and Organizations A second whole or context that activities are part of is practices. According to just about any theory of practice, practices are organized activities. Practices, accordingly, have two components: activities and organization. Practice theories differ in their conceptions of action and of what organizes actions. For Giddens, for instance, action involves “a stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of eventsin-the-world” (1979: 55), and what organizes them are sets of rules and resources. On my account (Schatzki, 2002), actions are construed as doings and sayings carried out through basic bodily doings, and what organizes them are arrays of understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivities, where the latter encompass normativized end-task-action combinations in conjunction with normativized emotions. If activities are construed in a Heideggerian manner as activity-events, a practice embraces an array of such events, which can overlap or be successive and can individually be instantaneous or durate over time. Unlike in a particular life, the activity-events involved befall indefinitely many people, and thus are components of indefinitely many lives. The activity component of a practice thus embraces events that are at once components of disparate lives. 90

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Practices and lives, more specifically, practice organizations and persons are two distinct organizing principles for activity. For different people’s activities to be part of a given practice is for these activities to realize or uphold elements of that practice’s organization: The actions realize the practical or general understandings, uphold the rules, or instantiate the normativized end-project-action combinations or emotions involved. Understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivities also hang together and refer to one another variously, thereby forming arrays other than by being jointly expressed in people’s action; this interrelation comes out when people reflect on and discuss the understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivities that govern, or should govern, their lives. Which practices exist in a given swath of space-time is an empirical matter that rests on which actions and organizing items clump together there. The activities and organization of a practice can and do change, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. Unlike activities, the organization of a practice is not an event, though the realization or observance of an element of practice organization is a feature of an activity-event. For example, the rule, Don’t Smoke, is not an event, though observance of the rule is a feature of the activity of leaving off smoking—if, that is, the person declines to smoke because of the rule. Nor are organizations processes: The components of practice organizations are not developments or events. At the same time, because organizations change they are not atemporal in character (though they are not obviously spatial matters). Organization as I understand it thus differs from Giddens’ (1979) structures, which lie outside space-time. Practice organizations are also not empirical patterns: A rarely or even never observed or pursued rule, end, or task that is part of the organization of a practice does not show up in any pattern, i.e. regularity or generalizable configuration. So organizations are non-empirical (and nonexperiential) temporal arrays. People, furthermore, understand practice organizations, both cognitively and practically, though no participant ever grasps the entirety of a given practice’s organization. And in all cases practice organization is subject to disputation and to evolution or clarification through disputation. In sum, the organization of a practice is an understandable, mutable nonempirical temporal array. It is a kind of structure, as Giddens holds. Practice theoretical conceptions of practice and process organizational conceptions of organization are alike accounts of order. Process conceptions of organization begin from the premise that the world is in flux and conceptualize organization as the imposition of order and stability onto it. Chia, for example writes that “[o]rganization . . . is the repetitive activity of ordering and patterning itself. It is the active intervention into the flux and flow of the ‘real’ . . . the act of arresting, stabilizing and simplifying what would otherwise be the irreducibly dynamic and complex character of lived experience” (Chia, 1999: 224; cf. Hernes, 2014: 39). Tsoukas and Chia add that “change 91

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[as reweavings of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits of action] is inherent in human action. Organization is an attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action” (2002: 570). Organizations in the plural, then, are temporarily established orderings, which can be the site of further organization (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 577; cf. Chia, 1999: 210 and Hernes, 2014: 42, 60). References to flux and to imposed order distance organizations so understood from practices as I conceive of these. Despite this, Hernes has recently developed a processual account of what organizations achieve that closely resembles what practices achieve on my account. As indicated, each activity that helps compose a practice is at the same time a component of some person’s life. In effect, consequently, a practice encompasses components of multiple lives, which in principle can be indefinite in number. Hernes claims, similarly, that an organization embraces a plurality of presents from different lives. The achievement represented by organizing dispersed activity-events as a practice closely resembles the achievement of collecting together dispersed presents in and as organizations. Hernes holds that the sort of order that, imposed on flux, constitutes organizations is meaning structure. A meaning structure is an interconnected nexus of conceptual, human, and material elements that bear particular meanings, for example, interactions in an office constituting a meeting or actions and arrangements amounting to cooking in a kitchen (cf. Laclau and Mouffe’s 1985 notion of discourse). Another term for organization is “organizational meaning structure,” which emphasizes that there is no organization, and no organizations as entities, absent meanings by virtue of which things hang together as wholes (Hernes, 2014: 105). I noted above that Hernes avers that presents flow. Organizations, accordingly, exist only in the past and only as products of human thought and talk: Organizations are performative structures created and sustained through acts of retrospective articulation. They are collections of entities themselves created and sustained as entities—and that means as something that can be perceived and acted on—through reflection and talk (2014: 110). Hernes writes that the flowing presents that compose a social organization all involve social co-presence or interaction, though the interactants need not only be humans (e.g. a person and her computer, or the computer network and the electrical network). These interactional presents form part of an organizational meaning structure once they have concluded and become events that are retrospectively interpreted appropriately. According to Hernes, following Schutz, organizations coalesce and persist as follows: When people interact they so pick up on a variety of cues that the meaning that they subsequently bestow on the interaction-event contains an element of weness (“we talked,” “we watched a movie,” etc.). The more people interact, the more encompassing becomes the we that they attribute to events after the 92

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fact; and the more often people interact, the more solid this we becomes. As more people interact more often, they come to construe their interactions as part of enduring we’s, otherwise known as organizations. Organizations as entities thereby come into existence, and once they exist additional people can join by appropriating organizational we’s to interpret their interactions. Each subsequent interaction is then ipso facto an opportunity either (1) to reinstitute an organization by attributing the appropriate organizational meaning structure to the interaction and other past events or (2) to alter an organization, even which organizations exist, by reworking this meaning structure and thereby reworking what the interaction and other past events mean (cf. Hernes, 2014: 90). People typically use existing systems of meaning to interpret their interactions. As a result, their actions typically uphold organizational meaning structures—and organizations persist. Hernes solves the issue of how social organizations, that is, the multiple interactive presents they comprise, hang together by making the issue retrospective, a matter of people using common systems of meaning to interpret past events.5 It is the ex post facto interpretation of past interactive events as part of a given organization that links these events into the organization. It seems to me, however, that presents have far more inherent determinacy and articulation than Hernes grants them. In particular, as Heidegger and Mead concur, when a person is acting she is doing something specific; this definiteness does not await later interpretation. What she is reacting to and what she is up to are also definite (the past and future). This situation does not imply that all features of activity are definite. For example, what else a person is doing in doing what she intentionally does might not yet be determined (e.g. shooting the Archduke and starting a war); aspects of teleology and motivation can also be indistinct and in need of ex post specification. I also, incidentally, object to the interactional account of social life that Hernes appropriates from Schutz. According to this account, social life is consummated in interactions, and organizations are built up from interactions as entitative we’s through the use of common meaning structures to interpret interactions. This picture ignores the extensive contexts within and across which interactions transpire, i.e. practices and the structures that organize them. The activities that compose a practice are organized by a specific pool of interconnected understandings, rules, and normative teleoaffectivities. These activities forming a practice thus comes about through them realizing or 5 Hernes also speaks (2014: 83–4) of contemplative activity (Deleuze) so fusing instants into a living present that closures, which are what enable reflection and introduce past and future, do not occur. This idea resembles Husserl’s notion of passive synthesis, which in turn resembles the role of imagination vis-à-vis synthesis in Kant on some interpretations of this. It is not clear to me whether Hernes thereby attempts to smuggle already extant, and thus persisting, meaning structures into the living present, thereby prima facie contradicting the idea that the living present flows.

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upholding items in this structure. Organization in the sense of organized actions thus takes the form of actions reinstating the practice’s organizing structure and thereby perpetuating the practice. Note that this perpetuation is effected as activity is performed; it does not await retrospective interpretation. Note, too, that organization in the sense of the structure of a practice does not determine what happens. To organize activities in this sense is, instead, to maintain form; it is due to this organization that what people do perpetuates—or does not perpetuate—practices over time. Can, then, a practice be treated as a process? A practice is clearly not a process in either Bergson’s sense of an advancing unfolding or the pragmatist sense of passage through or in the present. Similarities do, however, exist between practices and processes construed à la Rescher as “integrated series of connected developments unfolding in programmatic coordination.” For instance, the structure that organizes a practice can be likened to a program (though what there is in the world to actions being organized, i.e. forming a practice includes more than patterns and regularities alone; it embraces irregularities and singularities as well). What’s more, the activities that make up a practice are connected (though not just causally and functionally as in Rescher; they are also connected via the organizational structure of the practice). One significant difference between practices and processes is that the activities composing a practice need not be continuous. Another difference is that activity-events are temporal-spatial entities and not temporal ones alone. In sum, although practices are process-like in important ways, they do not strictly qualify as processes. Practices are hybrid entities. As an open array of doings and sayings, a practice embraces a plurality of events that happen organizedly. As just explained, moreover, an activity’s belonging—or not belonging—to a given practice is a feature of that activity as an event (see Schatzki, 2006 for discussion). So not only do the activities that compose a practice happen, but their status as organized, as components of the practice, are features of these happenings. It follows that practices—organized activities—happen. But practice organizations as such do not happen. They are instead a kind of structure—a practically and cognitively understood mutable non-empirical temporal array—that is upheld in activity and can be elucidated in discussion and thought. So a practice is a hybrid composed of events—some of which are also processes—and structure.

6.5 The Practice Plenum To this point I have been suppressing the fact that practices are intimately related to material entities and arrangements thereof. All practices, from 94

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cooking and gardening to those of religion and politics, are interwoven with material arrangements. Because of this, some practice theorists make materiality a component of practices (e.g. Reckwitz, 2002; Shove et al., 2012). In my scheme, by contrast, practices and arrangements are distinct. But practices use, effect, react to, give meaning to, and are inseparable from material arrangements, while arrangements induce, channel, prefigure, and are essential to practices. As a result, social affairs should be analyzed, not by reference to practices alone, but by reference to bundles of practices and arrangements. It follows that in considering whether the practice plenum admits of processes, a crucial question is whether material or physical processes envelop or befall material entities, independent of or in relation to human activity and practices. The existence of any such processes and their interface and entwinement with practices must be given careful thought. However, there is no space presently to address these matters. I will simply assume that material and physical processes exist and bear on or pass through practice-arrangement bundles, directly affecting both the material entities that help compose bundles and the human activities involved. These processes include thermodynamic and biological ones, including flows of materials, energy, and microbes. Note that some material processes help compose bundles; an example is the processes of material transformation under heat, which help compose cooking bundles. Others simply support bundles. An example is the processes involved in the functioning of computer systems, which support the persistence of particular bundles in offices, public spaces, and homes. Practices and material arrangements entwine. The bundles they form, furthermore, connect. The sinews of connection are multiple, including chains of action, shared organizational elements, shared or interrelated temporalities and spatialities (ends and motives, places and paths), physical structures that link material arrangements, and causal relations or processes among the material arrangements involved. Through connections of these and further sorts, bundles join into larger formations. In turn, these formations link— through sinews of the same sorts—into even larger formations. In fact, connections among bundles are such that for some time now bundles have formed one immense interconnected complex that stretches over much of the surface of the Earth, burrows under its surface, and now extends beyond the edges of the solar system (the Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 satellites). This complex is, literally, one gigantic practice-arrangement bundle. I dub this immense complex the “practice plenum.” It is the overall site where social life transpires. The practice plenum embraces two principal types of process: durating activities and material processes of varied sorts. As discussed, moreover, activities are events, and practices are event-process-structure hybrids. I am inclined, meanwhile, to conceptualize material entities as substances 95

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(to be sure, mortal and instable ones), to which events and processes occur, and not as events (or processes) themselves. All this makes bundles—from particular pairings of practices and arrangements (goings-on around the office water cooler) to immense geohistorical formations (an economy)—event-processstructure-substance hybrids. As this formulation suggests, it is a mistake to forsake any of these ontological categories in conceptualizing the social. Nor do relations among bundles introduce additional processes into the practice plenum. Consider, for example, chains of action, which Langley et al. (2013: 10) appropriate as a process-friendly phenomenon. As I conceptualize them, a chain of actions is a series of actions, each member of which responds to the previous member in the chain or to a change in the world that the previous member brought about. Langley et al. are right that such chains constitute an important form of causality in social life. Moreover, action chains embrace series of events and are thus processes in Abbott’s sense. But they do not qualify as processes in any robust sense of the term. To begin with, chains that encompass actions performed at different times or places by different people cannot in their entirety be part of any particular life continuum and thus, among other things, cannot constitute a Meadian passage through experiential presents. It is true that each link in a chain passes through at least one person’s lived experience, namely, that of the actor: A person lives through her own reactions to actions and states of the world. People also can live through other people’s reactions. But the only chains that in their entirety pass through a given person’s lived experiences are face-to-face interactions. The different links of all other chains transpire in different people’s experience. (And distributed passage is not what theorists such as Mead have in mind in conceptualizing process as passage or movement through experiential presents). Nor do action chains form processes as Rescher conceives of the latter. Although the activities and events that are linked in a chain are interconnected, they are often discontinuous. Many chains, furthermore, are not governed by a program. Indeed, social life is crisscrossed by a myriad of haphazard or happenstance chains of action. Because such chains can make a real difference to the progress of social affairs, they cannot be dismissed as negligible. Friends of process such as Tsoukas and Chia often claim that change is endemic in social life.6 This position reflects the fact that process is associated with becoming and flow. I have already indicated that treating activity as an Heideggerian event does not imply that the continuous activity that marks a person’s life amounts to constant change. The flip side of this claim is that

6 See also Connolly’s (2011) account of interacting systems and Elias’ (1978 [1970]) and Gergen’s (2009) images of figurational or relational flows.

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change in continuously active life is better understood as contingent and staccato in nature, that is, as occurring in contingent bursts, small and large. Change is not difference as such; it is significant difference. Difference and significance, however, are highly contingent. Because the past can never pre-fix what someone presently does (cf. the thesis that activity is indeterminate; Schatzki, 2010), it can never pre-fix how current activity differs from what precedes it. The past, in other words, can never pre-fix what differences occur; they are contingent. Action chains, moreover, make the significance of whatever differences in activity occur contingent. The significance of any difference depends on its reception in the world. Because action chains embrace activities that react to other activities or to changes that these other activities bring about, the significance of a given action’s differences from the past rests partly on the number and character of the action chains that spread from it; this is part of what it is for significance to be contextual. (Another part is the role that interpretations of the world and past play.) However, others’ reactions to a given activity are as indeterminate before they occur as the activity itself was before it occurred. Hence, the significance of a particular difference is contingent and happenstance-ful. It follows that changes in social life, like changes in individual lives, are staccato in nature, occurring in indeterminate bursts, micro, small, or large. Chains of action whose developing shape amount or lead to significant change can arise from or pass through any particular activity, and the significance of the chains that radiate from different actions can vary greatly (depending partly on how these chains are further extended). So, the constant reweaving of beliefs and actions that Tsoukas and Chia envision does in fact occur. But it passes, so to speak, under the radar, unless it significantly impacts or inflects the chains of action that radiate from people’s actions both within organizations and so as to connect organizations with one another. It is the nature, consequences, and quantity of action chains that originate in or inflect through and radiate out from particular events that qualifies these events as change or as persistence of the same. A fuller discussion of this topic would have to examine the different sorts of action chain and combinations thereof that are found in social life. My present point is simply that the claim that social change is constant overly homogenizes. Change is better understood as variable in size and uneven in its occurrence. There are two general points to take away from this chapter. The first is that multiple ontological categories—event, process, structure, and substance—are needed to conceptualize social life. These categories are not rivals but allies in the enterprise of understanding sociality. The second point is the staccato, uneven nature of change. The art of understanding change is the art of grasping the hows and whys of irregularity. The many points I have made about practices and processes are less general and of interest primarily to those concerned with these phenomena. 97

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References Abbott, Andrew (2016). Processual Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bergson, Henri (1911 [1907]). Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Chia, Robert (1999). A “Rhizomic” Model of Organizational Change and Transformation: Perspective from a Metaphysics of Change. British Academy of Management, 10, 209–27. Connolly, William (2011). A World of Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dewey, John (2008 [1930]). Conduct and Experience. In John Dewey: The Collected Works. The Later Works, 1925–1953, Volume 5 (pp. 218–35). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dreier, Ole (2007). Psychotherapy in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elias, Norbert (1978 [1970]). What Is Sociology?, trans. Stephen Mennell and Grace Morrissey. New York: Columbia University Press. Feldman, Martha (2000). Organizational Routines as a Source of Continuous Change. Organizational Science, 11(6), 611–29. Feldman, Martha (2016). Routines as Process: Past, Present, and Future. In J. HowardGrenville, C. Rerup, A. Langley, and H. Tsoukas (Eds), Organizational Routines: How They Are Created, Maintained, and Changed, Perspectives on Process Organization Studies (pp. 23–46). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gergen, Kenneth J. (2009). Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Giddens, Anthony (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Heidegger, Martin (1978 [1927]). Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin (1999). Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maley. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hernes, Tor (2014). A Process Theory of Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoy, David (2009). The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jansen, Ludger (2015). Zur Ontologie sozialer Prozesse. In Rainer Schutzeichel and Stefan Jordan (Eds), Prozesse. Formen, Dynamiken, Erklärungen (pp. 17–43). Berlin: Springer. Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Langley, Ann (2009). Studying Processes in and around Organizations. In D.A. Buchanan and A. Bryman (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods (pp. 170–97). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Langley, Ann, and Tsoukas, Haridimos (2017). Introduction: Process Thinking, Process Theorizing and Process Researching. In Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies (pp. 1–25). London: Sage.

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Processes, Life, and the Practice Plenum Langley, Ann, Smallman, Clive, Tsoukas, Haridimos, and Van den Ven, Andrew H. (2013). Process Studies of Change in Organization and Management: Unveiling Temporality, Activity, and Flow. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), 1–13. Mead, George Herbert (1929). The Nature of the Past. In Essays in Honor of John Dewey (pp. 235–42). New York: Henry Holt and Company. Mead, George Herbert (1932). The Philosophy of the Present, ed. Arthur E. Murphy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mead, George Herbert (1938). Passage, Process, and Permanence. In The Philosophy of the Act (pp. 321–56). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Orlikowski, W. J. (1996). Improvising Organizational Transformation over Time: A Situated Change Perspective. Information Systems Research, 7, 63–92. Pettigrew, A. (1997). What Is a Processual Analysis? Scandinavian Journal of Management, 13, 337–48. Reckwitz, Andreas (2002). Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–63. Rescher, Nicholas (1996). Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rescher, Nicholas (2000). Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Schatzki, Theodore R. (2002). The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Exploration of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, Theodore R. (2006). On Organizations as They Happen. Organization Studies, 27(12), 1863–73. Schatzki, Theodore R. (2010). The Timespace of Human Activity: On Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate Teleological Events. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Schutz, Alfred (1967). The Phenomenology of the Social World. London: Heinemann Educational Books. Seibt, Johanna (2003). Process Theories: Crossdisciplinary Studies in Dynamic Categories. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Seibt, Johanna (2012). Process Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/. Shove, Elizabeth, Mika Pantzar, and Matt Wilson (2012). The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes. London: Sage. Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals. London: Methuen. Tsoukas, Haridimos, and Chia, Robert (2002). On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change. Organizational Science, 13(5), 567–82. Van de Ven, Andrew (1992). Suggestions for Studying Strategy Process: A Research Note. Strategic Management Journal, 13, 169–88.

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7 Bringing Process into Structure Combining Network Analyses with Process Lenses to Explore Field-Level Evolution and Changes Amalya L. Oliver

7.1 Introduction The literature on institutional processes in and between organizations within fields and the literature on structural networks of organizations have so far ignored each other. Currently, there are two unrelated bodies of literature, one on field-level process research and the other on interorganizational network evolution or dynamics. In this chapter, I will offer an initial contribution toward an integration of these two theoretical domains and propose ways in which empirical research can help to develop this integration. I claim that such integration is important because it holds the potential to be the foundation for new ways of thinking that advance our understanding of process research in this area. The changing structures of the networks through field-level processes can help organizational scholars better understand the interrelations between process and structure. Similarly, the changing nature of field-level processes can have clear footprints in the structure of the networks. Thus, it may be of great value to find ways to combine these two paradigmatic foci into compatible theoretical and methodological insights. In this chapter, I will explain the essence of network research in fields and discuss a number of central network features. Among these features, I will introduce centrality, connectivity, clustering, density, and assortativity and show their relationship to the study of processes in organizational fields.

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7.2 Organizational Fields, Processes, and Networks The study of organizational fields is central to institutional theory. In studies of fields, scholars have followed change processes and interrelations among communities of organizations over time. DiMaggio and Powell (1983) provided an important field-level focus of study proposing that “an organizational field is a community of organizations that engage in common activities and are subject to similar reputational and regulatory pressures.” They also proposed that a field includes those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983: 148). Under a different theoretical perspective, such fields could be defined as “a network, or a configuration, of relations between positions” (Bourdieu, 1992). However, despite the conception of the term “networks” in Bourdieu’s definition, this structural perspective of networks has not been incorporated in studies of processes within organizational fields. The concept of an organizational field focuses on a set of organizations in a community. Consistent with a process perspective, many studies attempt to understand processes of emergence and change within such communities. In this context, Powell et al. (2005) claimed that “Fields emerge when social, technological, or economic changes exert pressure on existing relations and reconfigure models of action and social structures.” This is a challenging definition to follow in empirical studies, as it requires the measurement of a complex set of pressures and changes in actions and social structures. This may be the main reason that explains why studies of organizational fields have not analyzed the ties between multiple, overlapping networks through time as they form various processes. Another reason for this lack of attention to networks may arise from the absence of common terminologies that could allow for the incorporation of network terms in institutional field research. The organizational literature offers only limited examples of network-based field emergence since such studies require detailed network data over time. This is a significant challenge for organizational scholars interested in networks as a process. The most impressive and valuable exemplary study of field emergence is by Powell, White, Koput, and Owen-Smith (2005). This study shows that the field of biotechnology started when the corporate entrants pursued commercialization strategies. Other institutions including universities, research institutes, venture capital, and small firms (entrepreneurial biotechnology firms) supplanted these strategies. This was the trigger for the establishment of collaborative networks. Organizations within the emerging field started increasing their collaborative activities and established new and diverse ties to other organizations. As a result, cohesive subnetwork constellations formed. At each

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stage in the process, the structural features formed in the field became the condition that set the choices and opportunities available to members of the field. This evolutionary process reinforced the field-level logic characterized by differential connections to diverse partners within the field. The contribution of Powell et al.’s (2005) study is in its ability to show that field emergence is not necessarily dominated by money or market power or by the force of novel ideas. The authors find that the triggers for the emergence of the field were the biotechnology organizations that held diverse portfolios. These portfolios include closely connected collaborators that were positioned in cohesive networks and were central within the network. These organizations and the networks they established in turn shaped the evolution of the field. Powell et al. (2005) were also able to show how structural features, such as density of the network, were critical in enhancing the importance of participants’ reputation and power. Thus, their work suggests that the structure of dense networks, where information can flow and norms for trustworthiness are established and maintained, enhances organizational reputation. This strengthened reputation can increase the ability of an organization to form further collaborations. In addition, they found that the pattern of crosscutting collaborations over external knowledge and learning processes often results in complex situations where a partner on one project can be a rival on another. As a result, the study suggests that the urge to exchange complex knowledge between organizations is more important than avoiding collaborations with competitors. Powell et al. (2005) were able to incorporate networks in the study of field emergence since the raw data consisted of collaborations between different types of organizations over time in the biotechnology industry. Thus, the study could include attention to structural networks as a central force in the field evolution process. Additional studies of field processes can also benefit from a similar conception of structural networks if they define ties as similarities of patterns between any two units. Alternatively, they could focus on ties as critical in adopting patterns over time, in the form of diffusion of logics or work practices over time within a field. The second study I review as an important example is on corporate environmentalism. This research, by Hoffman (1999), offers a longitudinal study that follows changes in the constituency of an organizational field around the issue of corporate environmentalism over a period of over thirty years. This study follows three main variables over the period 1960–93: (1) the organizational field, for which the key question was, Who was relevant in defining legitimate environmental action for U.S. industry? (2) situated institutions, and the question, How was the environmental issue framed and defined

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Bringing Process into Structure within the population of U.S. chemical manufacturers inhabiting the field? and (3) disruptive events, and the question, What events were present at shifting points in the field or institutions? (1999: 354)

The study follows data on participation in federal lawsuits concerning the issue. In the legal analysis, cases involving all industries, not only the chemical industry, were included. This is based on the assumption that “legal activity is a visible manifestation of the relevant actors in an organizational field.” Hoffman correlated the changes in the field with the evolving institutions that were adopted by the U.S. chemical industry. The evolutionary process identified by Hoffman consisted of four stages based on different field membership, interaction patterns, and set of dominant institutions. An interesting finding in the field process is that there is a triggering event for each stage. This event leads to change in the field. Thus, the study’s findings characterize the field-level process by triggering events and these events are followed by change. Hoffman argues that the field-level analyses can reveal the cultural and institutional origins of the impact of organizations on the natural environment. How can this study benefit from a network perspective? I suggest that by measuring the ties between those actors participating in the legal activities, new insights could be revealed. When two actors participate in the same or in similar activities, it shows that they form a connection. When there is an increased density of such connections over time, we can extrapolate that there is an increased legitimacy of such activity. As field density increases, we can expect a change in the field trajectory. The third example I introduce here is the field study by Zietsma and Lawrence (2010). This study contributes to the specifications of the processes and the mechanisms that lead to changes in the life cycle of a field. This research is based on an in-depth longitudinal analysis of an organizational field. Here, the focus was on the conflict over harvesting practices and decision authority in the British Columbia coastal forest industry. The authors aimed to understand “the role of institutional work in the transformation of organizational fields.” The main concepts examined in the study are legitimacy and boundary work—two central concepts within institutional theory. The process that Zietsma and Lawrence (2010) investigate is how actors create, maintain, and disrupt the practices that are considered legitimate within the field, depicting these as “practice work.” In addition, they examine the boundaries between sets of individuals and groups, and these are described as “boundary work.” The examination of the interplay of practice work and boundary work effects change in the field. Zietsma and Lawrence (2010) found that the process of the interplay between actors’ boundary work and practice work created recursive configurations leading to cycles of four stages: institutional

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innovation, conflict, stability, and restabilization. The triggers for the transitions between the stages are contextual factors such as the state of the boundaries and the practices, and activities of actors that lead to change. I suggest that Zietsma and Lawrence’s findings could be improved by taking a network perspective. For example, by measuring network ties as the formal and/or informal working relations between boundary workers we could learn more about connections between actors. Attention to network ties would help to improve theory because it could reveal more nuanced understandings of change. Instead of focusing on measures of direct collaborations, researchers could investigate the similarities of qualities in any two organizations, or similarities of characteristics and/or decisions made at any point in time. Thus, such a field-level study could measure network ties between organizations that adopted similar decisions or adopted similar boundary work providing a longitudinal follow-up on how these change over time. Such quantitative structural insights along with qualitative data from interviews or other data sources could offer corroboration for the documented processes or triangulation of evidence. The fourth example of a field-level study is by Reay and Hinings (2009). This study focused on an organizational healthcare field that, for a long time, was based on competing institutional logics. Such co-existing competing logics facilitated the strength of the identities of different actors and guided their behavior. The interesting finding was that the rivalry between institutional logics in this field was managed by establishing collaborations as a means for taking action. Such collaborative networks are presented as practices that bring together unrelated actors, having different interests, and the authors propose that these processes could lead to changes in institutional logics in a field. Thus, they argue that the formation of networks, even between disparate actors, can impact change in institutional logics in a field (2009: 633). This is an interesting contribution to field-level change processes. However, these networks were not examined with network measurement tools and main concepts, preventing the opportunities to compare across networks. Indeed, not all collaborations are the same, as the paper claims (2009: 635). Collaborations may differ by intention, gaining knowledge purposes or learning expectations. However, the measurements of such collaborations over time could show the structures of different types of collaborations in the field at different stages. For example, one can detect that a new dominant logic follows collaborations that form cohesive small networks. By drawing on a network approach, we could potentially learn how cohesive ties can enhance the move from competing logics to dominance of a single logic. These four field-level process studies are examples of research focusing on field evolution and change processes. There could be additional valuable implications of such studies for the understanding of field emergence, but 104

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these are too complex for the goal of this chapter. The point made here is that the ability to follow changes in the network structure of the field over time, in addition to other qualitative data, could give us a stronger sense of the process of field evolution and change as resulting from network ties between individuals or organizations operating in the field. It is my claim here that the field-level analyses, based on the structure of the interrelations between individual agents or organizations, can offer additional lenses to show how field processes emerge, change, stabilize, or destabilize.

7.3 Process Research Focus In the integration of field-level process theory and research based on network structures, the underlying mechanisms that are associated with the structure of interorganizational networks are particularly interesting. In order to identify future research possibilities based on a study of networks, it is important to first present a process-related theoretical outline that frames the study of changes within the field level. The process approach I chose to focus on is only one of many approaches in the literature (for example, Pentland, 1999; Abbott, 1990; and Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). In explaining her approach to process, Langley (1999) provides a most valuable contribution by arguing that process research is concerned with understanding how things evolve over time and why they evolve in this way. Langley argues that process research consists mainly of narratives about “what happened and who did what when—that is, events, activities, and choices ordered over time” (1999: 692). She offers seven strategies for sense making based on narratives.1 Despite the great value of each of these strategies, this chapter does not necessitate the detailed description of these different strategies and, thus, I will not elaborate on them here. Instead, my point is to highlight the great value in Langley’s consideration of the high level of heterogeneity of sense-making methodologies, showing that there are many ways to describe and analyze organizational processes; yet, as Langley states, “they all have weaknesses” (1999: 706). By using this evolving changes process approach, a structural approach can add value in the effort to depict the relations between actors in the field, and follow changes in these relations. For example, if two actors in the field make the same choices at a certain point in time, they share in fact a network tie. Such ties can be measured across all actors and allow researchers to show, for example, how sense making is defused over time. 1 These include narrative, grounded theory, temporal bracketing, visual mapping, synthetic strategy, quantification, and computer simulation.

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In Section 7.4, I will move into the definition and description of network measures and theory. In the context of field-level process research, networks are viewed as structures that change over time and these changing structures of networks provide evidence and meaning for the process.

7.4 Switching to Networks: What Is a Network? Simply said, a network is a set of ties between nodes. It can refer to different levels of analyses in organizations such as egocentric or dyadic (Mizruchi and Marquis, 2006). There are different types of definitions for networks in the organizational literature and there is no need here to follow them all. A broad definition is offered by Brass et al. (2004), who define a network as “a set of nodes and the set of ties representing some relationship, or lack of relationship, between the nodes.” They refer to the nodes as actors (individuals, work units, or organizations), and add that “Typically studied are strategic alliances and collaborations, flows of information (communication), affect (friendship), goods and services (workflow), and influence (advice), and overlapping group memberships such as boards of directors.” Some networks can be studied simultaneously on two levels, for example on the individual and the organizational levels (Oliver and Liebeskind, 1998; Van Wijk et al., 2008).

7.4.1 Network Features Following the wealth of literature on organizational networks, I specify here two main elements from the network theory: the nature of the ties and the focus of the network analyses. In terms of the nature, we refer to the content of “what” is exchanged between the nodes. The networks under study can focus different types of exchanges. These can include collaborations between organizations where each organization offers complementary research expertise and capabilities to the others (Oliver, 2009; Powell et al., 1996, 2005). Other studies examine ties related to the social capital of firms (Knoke, 1999) or on knowledge exchanges between firms (Carlsson, 2003). In the context of organizational network research, Borgatti and Foster (2003) refer to various concepts including social capital, embeddedness, network organizations, board interlocks, joint ventures and interfirm alliances, knowledge management, social cognition, and categorize them all as “group processes” measures. Network analyses can focus on different structures ranging from egocentric, to the dyadic, and to the whole network or field levels of analyses. On these, I elaborate in Section 7.4.2. 106

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7.4.2 Three Foci of Network Analyses “Egocentric-level” studies focus on the whole set of exchanges or collaborations each unit, be it an individual, a team, or an organization, has with other units in order to enhance its legitimacy, exchange resources, or gain support on various issues. Egocentric measures focus on network structures, but are centered on a specific focal unit. This means that the focal unit is in the center and the network consists of all the ties the focal unit, be it an individual or an organization, has and the context of these ties. Another level of analysis in networks is “dyadic analyses.” Such analysis focuses on the exchange relations between any two units or actors (individuals, teams within organizations, or organizations) (Paruchuri, 2010). Mizruchi and Marquis (2006) argue that such a level of analysis is of particular value when the dependent variable is quantitative and/or involves multiple behaviors that take place within the dyadic exchange such as learning, exchange of resources, and exchange of knowledge experts. In the organizational literature, there are two main streams of research on the dyadic level of analysis: research of interfirm alliances (Gulati, 1995; Gulati and Gargiulo, 1999) and research on firms’ choices of business partners (Podolny, 1994; Keister, 2001; Sorenson and Stuart, 2001). By considering whole networks at the field level, we can follow processes of exchanges or collaborations between organizations in an industry or in an organizational field. One example is the theoretical and conceptual work of Ahuja et al. (2012) who lay the foundations of micro-foundations of networks and micro-dynamics of network change. Another example is the work of Powell et al. (2005) who conduct a longitudinal study of the organizational collaborations in the biotechnology industry in the U.S. They show that different rules for affiliation of organizations in this industry shape the evolution of the interorganizational network. The dynamic data show that the network starts with the early large corporate entrants. These aim for commercialization but need knowledge-exchange alliances with universities, research institutes, venture capital, and small firms. This leads to an increase in the network-based collaborative activities and to the formation of cohesive subnetworks.

7.5 Network Dynamics: Process of Changing Structure The literature on organizational network dynamics has only recently been developing (Ahuja et al., 2012). Network dynamics research follows the process of evolving networks from a structural perspective and it allows network scholars to examine the changes in structure and process over time. 107

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They claim that following and understanding such dynamics is of interest because it allows depicting the conscious role of agency that forms network structures that benefit them. Thus, we can now detect causal relations in dynamic network studies over time. Ahuja et al. (2012) claim that the function and performance of networks may operate at many levels of analysis. They describe a range of networks: networks as institutions behind processes of economic actions, networks as information diffusion mechanisms, or networks that govern constraining mechanisms of opportunism. Since there are industries characterized by rapid changes in terms of expanding industries or the emergence of new organizational actors, dynamic analysis of networks has to be flexible and ready to incorporate new firms entering or exiting the network. The growth or reduction in the number of nodes in the network is an important component related to network processes. The number of nodes in a network can be associated with the increased or decreased flexibility of actors in the network in terms of the alternative collaborative ties they may have. However, the change (increase or decrease) in the number of nodes in a network is not all that can be of interest in such dynamic networks. The entry to, or exit from networks of firms may also change the nature of the ties that are connecting the nodes in the networks and can be an interesting measure for dynamic analyses. Attention to network dynamics suggests that as the number of nodes in a network grows, for example, the network will have fewer ties that are closed (meaning that they are based on closed cliques) as new entrants may challenge the existing ties and offer more rewarding tie benefits. In addition, we may see new types of ties emerging. For example, in a knowledge-intensive industry— such as, the cyber industry, there may be 100 firms that have collaborative ties between them as they exchange the knowledge on technological capabilities. Once the industry experiences some major technological breakthrough, many new start-ups may enter the industry. The new entrants may offer new product-testing facilities that will be attractive to the existing firms in terms of cost-benefits. Thus, new types of network ties may form in the industry. On the other hand, if an industry is declining in terms of its ability to innovate or due to fierce competition between firms, we may observe a reduction of collaborative ties while more mergers and acquisitions may take place.

7.6 Field-Level Networks and Processes As mentioned above, process research is framing questions such as what happened and who did what when—that is, events, activities, and choices ordered over time (e.g. Langley, 1999). Thus, applying a network perspective to 108

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field-level process research means that we aim to depict the interrelations between actors in a field at different stages. Network-based process research can answer some valuable questions. For example, we can ask what change took place in the structure of the interorganizational networks in a field following a major event; which organizations became central in the field following a major change, or how organizations form close associations after adopting a change in their practice. In the context of a field-level whole-network perspective, we can focus on the actors’ centrality in a network (and there is a wide range of centrality measures (Bonacich, 1987; Valente et al., 2008; White et al., 1976). Changes in centrality levels over time can depict a process of becoming more or less connected and, thus, important or powerful. Alternatively, the focus can be on another network feature, such as the organization’s niche in the field (McPherson, 1983). According to McPherson, an organizational niche ties together geography, time, and the social composition of organizations. This measure can help organizational network scholars determine whether an organization is occupying a specific niche in the field. In a process-related study, it is possible to ask whether over time, the niche is expanding or shrinking due to the processes that are taking place in the field or whether the organization remains in the same niche. These changes are meaningful in terms of the organizational field. An expanding niche of connected organizations depicts an increased centrality and legitimacy of the activities conducted by the organizations, while a shrinking niche may indicate the opposite. Similarly, no change in niche composition may depict stability in an organizational field or maybe even inertia, as no new entrants are observed and there are no organizational exits. Analyses based on a whole network are more complex. If the analysis of a network at a single time point is multifaceted due to the various actors and range of ties, the addition of a process dimension makes the analyses extremely complicated. The complexity results from the fact that the network boundaries can change and there are infinite ties and structures that can be examined. Yet, it is important to at least confront this challenge theoretically and methodologically. As indicated above, the organizational field level allows us to follow processes of exchanges or collaborations between organizations in an industry or in an organizational field. An excellent example is the work of Ahuja et al. (2012) who offer a framework that allows organizational scholars to follow the dynamics of organizational networks over time. They claim that due to the infinite number of patterns of network ties, formal studies of network dynamics require a clear articulation of the meaning of each dimension of ties. Their framework includes three main elements: dimensions of network change, dimensions of micro-foundation of network change, and the micro-dynamics of network change. 109

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I would therefore like to elaborate here only on the first dimension of network change. The second and third elements are too complex and not directly relevant for the current integrative review. The first element— dimensions of network change—relates to both the ego network and the whole network. On the level of the ego network, their focus is on the centrality of an actor and the question whether there is a “structural hole” (Burt, 2004, 2009) in its immediate or indirect ties. These two network features can be both explanatory measures as well as outcome measures to depict processrelated questions. The dimensions of network change are manifested at the whole-network level as well. Ahuja et al. (2012) claim that there are five key dimensions of change on the network architecture level. These include: “(1) the degree distribution of nodes, (2) the connectivity of the network, (3) the pattern of clustering in the network, (4) network density, and (5) the degree assortativity of the network” (2012: 436). I will now elaborate on these five dimensions since they can all be relevant for the study of processes in organizational fields. The first dimension of degree distribution of nodes refers to the frequency of ties across nodes. Networks may have different distributions of ties such as a few actors that are highly connected and/or many nodes that have few ties to others. There are networks that can have a similar number of ties for each actor. The degree of ties actors have in the networks are associated with issues related to status, prestige, and power (Gulati and Gargiulo, 1999)—issues that can be both explanatory measures as well as outcome measures of processrelated research on networks. The second dimension, the connectivity of the network, refers to the average tie length that connects between any two nodes in the network. The smaller the average length of tie within a certain organizational network on any kind of tie, the more connected the network is as a whole. This feature of whole networks is associated with issues related to, for example, diffusion of information or knowledge within networks (Schilling and Phelps, 2007). In addition, a high level of connectivity can be associated with a higher level of democratization of the network or a higher level of norms of sharing knowledge and providing reciprocal support between organizations. Again, these could be both independent and outcome measurers associated with networks changing over time. The third dimension is the pattern of clustering in the network, and it refers to the formation of tightly connected groups within the larger network. These connected groups are termed “cliques,” “clusters,” or “closure ties” in the network literature. The emergence over time of such subgroups depicts a process that the network is divided into smaller communities or clusters of firms and may depict different interests, technological specification and foci, or changes in the power structure in these networks. In addition, such changes 110

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in structure can result from issues of trust or opportunistic organizational actions that led to a reduction of network-level ties and the formation of smaller groups (Oliver and Liebeskind, 1998). The analysis of the network over time can show whether the network has more or less clique formation at any time point in the process. Intra-network features (such as the resources exchanged or the new actors in the network) can clarify the clique formation. In addition, this change can be explained by extra-network features (such as the availability of new resources in the environment, or new policies that enhance the opportunities that are open for members of the network). The fourth dimension is network density. This measure refers to the ratio of connections in the network relative to the maximum possible connections based on the number of members in the network. In the context of organizational networks, the density of the network may be reflective of the degree of closure in the network in the sense of ties between two actors that are further connected via other third actors. Such structures usually lead to networks with a high level of trust and a strong level of sharing norms since the possibility of appropriation is relatively small and the norms of trustworthiness are high (Oliver and Liebeskind, 1998). Another possibility is that the increased level of density will be associated with a smaller level of variance in terms of generation of new ideas due to the high level of homogeneity and potential for a high level of social control in the network (Gulati and Gargiulo, 1999). The fifth and last dimension is the degree assortativity of the network. This measure reflects the level of similarity among connected network members in terms of their degree centrality. A degree centrality measure refers to the number of ties each actor has in a network. This whole-network-level measure can have positive or negative assortativity values. A positive assortativity refers to a condition where the high-degree members connect with other highdegree members. This gives network scientists a sense of the strength of the connections between the leading group in the network or the level of homophily among them. The negative assortativity measure refers to cases where actors with high-degree centrality connect to other actors with low-degree centrality. This can reflect, for example, an egalitarian organizational field where high status does not prevent actors from connecting to low-status actors. Alternatively, negative degree assortativity happens in networks where new entrants have important new resources that are of value for the highly connected actors. Studies of this type of process found that (for example, in studies of the biotechnology industry) the new organizational entrants were the new biotechnology firms, while the core organizations were the large pharmaceutical firms. The new biotechnology firms offered complementary resources of knowledge and new technologies that the incumbent firms were lacking. At the same time, the incumbent pharmaceutical firms offered the new 111

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biotechnology firms vertical capabilities of development, marketing, and distribution capabilities (Oliver, 2009; Powell et al., 2012).

7.7 A Field-Level Process Approach Related to Network Research There are different ways to interweave networks and field-level process research. In this chapter, I use the “network to process” lenses that start with the formation of structures by networks, based on collaborations or similarities among actors, at different points in time. From such networks, we can ask questions that aim to explain how the structures depict field-level change. We can ask whether the change in the network is evident in more ties for each actor or whether the network as a whole is more connected or less connected. We can ask whether the change in the network is associated with a higher or lower level of subgrouping in terms of clustering, or we can observe that the network became denser resulting from the events that took place in the network. I would like to offer an illustration for a field level of network-related process. Figure 7.1 illustrates a small example of a field level of network-related process. The figure includes existing organizations in a field at two points in time and the interrelations between them. We can observe some significant changes in the field between the networks in T1 and T2. First, the network has more organizations in T2 in comparison to the number of organizations in T1. This may indicate that the network is experiencing growth probably due to the attractiveness of the field in which the network operates. In addition, we can see that in comparison with T1, there are more collaborations between the Field-level network at T2

Field-level network at T1

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Figure 7.1. Field-level changes in networks over time—an illustration

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different members. In comparison with the two collaborations observed in T1, in T2 we see seven collaborations. This is an indication of a second change, that the network is growing in terms of the formation of collaborations within it and that it is becoming denser, meaning that the density of ties within the network is higher. This change can be associated with a higher level of knowledge exchange, higher level of joint interests, or/and stronger norms of reciprocity in the field. Another change is that we can observe some three-way collaborations evolving in T2. While in T1 there were no organizations with more than one collaboration, in T2 we see one organization that has a collaboration with two other organizations that do not collaborate directly. This is an example of a structural hole or a brokerage position. For example, between organization 7 and organizations 9 and 5 or between organization 8 with 1 and 6 and 7. Such multiple structural holes or brokerage positions that are added to the field at stage 2 may depict the fact that there is a potential for a new integrated knowledge emerging in the field. It may also indicate that a few organizations, that may be ahead of others with innovative leading ideas, managed to occupy brokerage positions within the collaborative system and benefit from other organizations. Finally, we see that the field in T2 has many new collaborations in comparison with T1. We see that at T2 the field is more centralized and that organization 7 is the leading organization in terms of ties with other organizations (having five different collaborations) and organization 8 is the second central organization, having three different collaborations, and one of them is with the most central organization—i.e. organization 7. This structure of the field can tell us how the processes of ties or knowledge flows among the organizations in the network have grown over time due to processes that can be internal to the network or result from external changes or events.

7.8 Discussion: Bringing Process into Structure In this chapter, I suggest that an integration of network-related concepts or measures with field-level process research has the potential of increasing the spectrum of observations and understanding of processes. Process research, based on a multimethod approach that captures both qualitative research and network-based structural research, is a most valuable addition to field change and evolution studies. It still requires overcoming methodological challenges as well as specifying the theoretical understanding of processes. We need to learn further what kind of field processes are taking place and how they add to our understanding of organization theory about change. Empirical research on field-level change and networks over time is likely to face many challenges—on theoretical, methodological, and empirical levels. 113

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On the theoretical level, there is a need for new theories of network evolution and change, which provide benefit for the network as a whole. In this respect, Salancik’s (1995) call for the missing good theories about organizational networks is echoed again. On the methodological level, we need new models and methods that will allow us to compare the changes in networks that include changing compositions of organizations and types of ties and flexible boundaries. It may be possible to compare between two networks that include the same organizations at two points in time. It is a much greater challenge to do so when the network membership is changing and when we want to compare networks at different points in time. On the empirical level, the challenges include the realistic difficulties posed by obtaining longitudinal network data and the complexities of defining network membership and handling networks over time. In addition, there is a need to establish endogenous understanding of the constraints and patterns in each network or field, as they tend to have an idiosyncratic nature. In order to advance the field, there is a need for multiple studies based on empirical evidence of networks as they advance, change, or evolve over time. Bringing to the fore the potential of cross-fertilization of research integration is important. My aim here is to provide some integrating insights between whole-network measures and field-level studies of change and process. We can start by revisiting the five network dimensions proposed by Ahuja et al. (2012) as described above. Now, we want to see how they can have relevance for studies of processes in organizational fields. The first example is of an institutional study of a field that can measure the changes in the degree distribution of actors. A tie between any two organizations can be measured as similarity in certain aspects. A similarity can be in a form of the decisions made by the organizations, in the form of similarity of actions taken by them. Alternatively, a tie may depict a collaboration or a joint action they initiate. These changes can provide evidence for becoming legitimate actors or jointly conducting newly evolving practices in the emerging field. The more ties each actor has over time, the stronger may be its impact or its leadership of the change within the field. The second example is with reference to network density. In the context of field-level process research, we can focus on the degree to which the network density changes in the field evolution process due to some major events that take place. For example, a new policy that provides benefits for collaboration among organizations in a field may result in a greater density of collaborations within a field. Alternatively, in cases of substantial political conflicts within the field we will probably observe a reduction in the density of similarities in the field as the field becomes dispersed or even balkanized. Such changes can also be evident in higher levels of clustering, that shows several smaller groups that may have similar decisions or practices that characterize the field. 114

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Another illustration of the benefits associated with the integration of networks and field-level process research is the use of the concept of “network boundaries.” This concept depicts the rules of inclusion and exclusion of members or participants in the network. This boundary definition, coupled with a field-level process focus, is of importance in the efforts to describe processes within or between organizations. Namely, from a network perspective it is clear that over time the boundaries of the network are changing and the focus on process research needs to offer the theoretical and methodological means to resolve this dynamic. Similarly, network structure concepts such as “centralization” and “decentralization” can explain why or how some organizational processes reach consensus and some develop divergence of actions or opinions. Integration of two mature research frameworks is not an easy task. The first step is, however, increased awareness of the concepts and theoretical lenses that can be “translated.” In this chapter, I tried to offer an overview framework for the study of whole networks using a field-level process perspective. My aim was to contribute to the focus on processes of change in organizational fields with an effort to depict what kind of network measure can be structural evidence for field-level change. My deep conviction is that the integration of network-related concepts with field-level process research has the potential of increasing the spectrum of theoretical understanding and depiction of patterns. Future research that aims to follow changes in organizational fields can benefit greatly by adding the structural perspective of networks to depict patterns within the evolutionary processes. When a field is going through growth and increased legitimacy, we will see more actors joining and increased density over time. When the field is going through a political transition and destabilizing changes, we can expect to observe the formation of subgroups or cliques in the field, and when the boundaries of a field are stable and protective, we would likely see no change in membership of actors over time. The addition of field-level structural research insights along with qualitative data from interviews or other data sources is advantageous in its ability to structurally show the changes in the process and offer an important triangulation of evidence.

References Abbott, A. (1990). A Primer on Sequence Methods. Organization Science, 1(4), 375–92. Ahuja, G., Soda, G., and Zaheer, A. (2012). The Genesis and Dynamics of Organizational Networks. Organization Science, 23(2), 434–48. Bonacich, P. (1987). Power and Centrality: A Family of Measures. American Journal of Sociology, 92(5), 1170–82.

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Institutions and Organizations Borgatti, S. P., and Foster, P. C. (2003). The Network Paradigm in Organizational Research: A Review and Typology. Journal of Management, 29(6), 991–1013. Bourdieu, Pierre (1992). The Logic of Fields. In P. Bourdieu and L. Wacquant (Eds), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (pp. 94–114). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Brass, D. J., Galaskiewicz, J., Greve, H. R., and Tsai, W. (2004). Taking Stock of Networks and Organizations: A Multilevel Perspective. Academy of Management Journal, 47(6), 795–817. Burt, R. S. (2004). Structural Holes and Good Ideas. American Journal of Sociology, 110(2), 349–99. Burt, R. S. (2009). Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carlsson, S. A. (2003). Knowledge Managing and Knowledge Management Systems in Inter-Organizational Networks. Knowledge and Process Management, 10(3), 194–206. DiMaggio, P., and Powell, W. W. (1983). The Iron Cage Revisited: Collective Rationality and Institutional Isomorphism in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147–60. Gulati, R. (1995). Social Structure and Alliance Formation Patterns: A Longitudinal Analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 619–52. Gulati, R., and Gargiulo, M. (1999). Where Do Interorganizational Networks Come From? American Journal of Sociology, 104(5), 1439–93. Hoffman, A. J. (1999). Institutional Evolution and Change: Environmentalism and the U.S. Chemical Industry. Academy of Management Journal, 42(4), 351–71. Keister, L. A. (2001). Exchange Structures in Transition: Lending and Trade Relations in Chinese Business Groups. American Sociological Review, 336–60. Knoke, D. (1999). Organizational Networks and Corporate Social Capital. In Roger Leenders and Shaul Gabbay (Eds), Corporate Social Capital and Liability (pp. 17–42). New York: Springer. Langley, A. (1999). Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data. Academy of Management Review, 24(4), 691–710. McPherson, M. (1983). An Ecology of Affiliation. American Sociological Review, 519–32. Mizruchi, M. S., and Marquis, C. (2006). Egocentric, Sociocentric, or Dyadic? Identifying the Appropriate Level of Analysis in the Study of Organizational Networks. Social Networks, 28(3), 187–208. Oliver, A. L. (2009). Networks for Learning and Knowledge Creation in Biotechnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oliver, A. L., and Liebeskind, J. P. (1998). Three Levels of Networking for Sourcing Intellectual Capital in Biotechnology: Implications for Studying Interorganizational Networks. International Studies of Management and Organization, 27(4), 76–103. Paruchuri, S. (2010). Intraorganizational Networks, Interorganizational Networks, and the Impact of Central Inventors: A Longitudinal Study of Pharmaceutical Firms. Organization Science, 21(1), 63–80. Pentland, B. T. (1999). Building Process Theory with Narrative: From Description to Explanation. Academy of Management Review, 24(4), 711–24. Podolny, J. M. (1994). Market Uncertainty and the Social Character of Economic Exchange. Administrative Science Quarterly, 458–83.

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Bringing Process into Structure Powell, W. W., Koput, K. W., and Smith-Doerr, L. (1996). Interorganizational Collaboration and the Locus of Innovation: Networks of Learning in Biotechnology. Administrative Science Quarterly, 116–45. Powell, W. W., White, D. R., Koput, K. W., and Owen-Smith, J. (2005). Network Dynamics and Field Evolution: The Growth of Interorganizational Collaboration in the Life Sciences. American Journal of Sociology, 110(4), 1132–205. Powell, W. W., Packalen, K., and Whittington, K. (2012). Organizational and Institutional Genesis: The Emergence of High-Tech Clusters in the Life Sciences. In J. F. Padgett and W. W. Powell (Eds), The Emergence of Organizations and Markets (pp. 434–65). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reay, T., and Hinings, C. R. (2009). Managing the Rivalry of Competing Institutional Logics. Organization Studies, 30(6), 629–52. Salancik, G. (1995). WANTED: A Good Network Theory of Organization. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(2), 345–9. Schilling, M. A., and Phelps, C. C. (2007). Interfirm Collaboration Networks: The Impact of Large-Scale Network Structure on Firm Innovation. Management Science, 53(7), 1113–26. Sorenson, O., and Stuart, T. E. (2001). Syndication Networks and the Spatial Distribution of Venture Capital Investments. American Journal of Sociology, 106(6), 1546–88. Valente, T. W., Coronges, K., Lakon, C., and Costenbader, E. (2008). How Correlated Are Network Centrality Measures? Connections (Toronto, Ont.), 28(1), 16. Van de Ven, A. H., and Poole, M. S. (1995). Explaining Development and Change in Organizations. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 510–40. Van Wijk, R., Jansen, J. J., and Lyles, M. A. (2008). Inter- and Intra-Organizational Knowledge Transfer: A Meta-Analytic Review and Assessment of Its Antecedents and Consequences. Journal of Management Studies, 45(4), 830–53. White, H. C., Boorman, S. A., and Breiger, R. L. (1976). Social Structure from Multiple Networks. I. Blockmodels of Roles and Positions. American Journal of Sociology, 81(4), 730–80. Zietsma, C., and Lawrence, T. B. (2010). Institutional Work in the Transformation of an Organizational Field: The Interplay of Boundary Work and Practice Work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55(2), 189–221.

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8 The Interpretation of Design-Based Cues A Processual Approach Micki Eisenman, Michal Frenkel, and Varda Wasserman

8.1 Introduction In recent years, organizational scholars have become increasingly interested in the role of design-based cues as a foundation of institutionalized emotions, behaviors, and meanings (Drori et al., 2016; Jones and Massa, 2013; Jones et al., 2013, 2017; Meyer et al., 2013, 2018; Zilber, 2017). Design-based cues—intentionally designed elements in the organizational environment, such as colors, shapes, or textures—work as cues that convey information both by facilitating a set of uses and functionalities and by evoking emotions and associations (Eisenman, 2013: 18; Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz, 2004; Ravasi and Stigliani, 2012; Verganti, 2009). Because these are salient cues, in that they are material and can be perceived visually and in a tactile manner, scholars expect, at least implicitly, that, as interpretable symbols of broader ideas, design-based cues should have a distinct effect on emotions, behaviors, and meanings (e.g. Bell et al., 2014; Eisenman, 2013, 2018; Jones and Massa, 2013; Jones et al., 2017; Meyer et al., 2013, 2018; Pratt and Rafaeli, 2001; Quattrone et al., 2013; Scott, 2003; Utterback et al., 2006; Verganti, 2009). Our chapter offers a more complex conceptualization of the relationship between design-based cues and institutionalization in that it accounts not only for the information embedded in the cues and the interpretative processes working to understand this information, but also emphasizes that cues and interpretations are processual rather than finite because they vary over time and they interact with each other. Therefore, we suggest that while it may seem intuitive that design-based cues have the potential to facilitate the

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institutionalization of emotions, behaviors, and meanings, achieving such effect is actually more complex and less likely than the literature suggests. Indeed, the literature on general interpretative processes within organizations has already demonstrated that these processes are not necessarily finite (Taylor and van Every, 2000; Maitlis and Christianson, 2014; Taylor and Robichaud, 2004; Weick, 1995; Weick et al., 2005). Additionally, institutional theorists highlight that processes of institutionalization are not necessarily finite (e.g. Phillips et al., 2004; Reay and Hinings, 2005; Zilber, 2008). However, this insight has not yet fully filtered into institutional studies of organizational materiality. Here, we build on past work showing that designs, and particular to our context, workspaces, consist of multiple cues. Within these designs, the same cues can be interpreted in multiple ways and along multiple dimensions (e.g. Elsbach and Pratt, 2007; Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz, 2004; Stigliani and Ravasi, 2012). Additionally, we suggest that design-based cues are also inherently dynamic because cues can change in ways that are more natural (i.e. deterioration) or more intentional (i.e. users’ deliberate adaptation of cues). The potential interactions between the interpretations of the cues, their multiplicity, and changes to the cues interact with the inherent dynamism of interpretative processes. To the extent that cues persist over long durations, cues are more likely to change and their interpretations are more likely to interact. Based on these arguments, we suggest that the interpretation of design-based cues is dynamic and open-ended. We structure this chapter by building our argument in three parts. Section 8.2 focuses on the interpretation of design-based cues. Section 8.3 emphasizes that that interpretation within organizational workspaces involves multiple rather than single cues and that this multiplicity increases the potential for tensions among interpretations. Section 8.4 explores the effect of time on design-based cues and their interpretations. The ideas developed in these three sections allow us to explain the inherent dynamism that characterizes the processual interpretation of design. In our discussion, we demonstrate the ways in which our conceptualization advances current understandings of the relationship between design-based cues and processes of institutionalization.

8.2 Individual and Intersubjective Interpretation of Design-Based Cues Our conceptualization of the interpretation of design-based cues as dynamic identifies interpretative processes, the cues themselves, and changes to the cues over time as potential sources of dynamism. The following sections elaborate these ideas and the ways in which they interrelate. We begin with discussing the interpretation of design-based cues. 119

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The significant body of research on interpretative processes in organizations has shown that organizational life brings forth a continuous array of cues, ranging from natural disasters such as fires to patterns of deference and facial expressions in the context of meetings, for example. Organizational stakeholders extract these cues through both sensory and cognitive channels and give meaning to them (e.g. Taylor and van Every, 2000; Weick, 1995). Because individuals interpret cues in multiple ways, their interpretations are not likely to lead to a clear cumulative interpretation. Additionally, individuals with different cultural backgrounds or from different social strata as well as those interacting in various social contexts interpret information differently (Eco, 1965). Thus, within an organizational setting, there are several sets of interpretations that draw from the mutual embeddedness of individuals in a particular cultural or class-based background or in a particular situational context such as membership in a functional group. So despite being ongoing, interpretative processes also rely on fixed cognitive backgrounds that are resilient to expeditious changes. Furthermore, interpretative processes occur not only as individual-level processes, but also as intersubjective processes. Intersubjective interpretations involve negotiations over the meaning of a cue and, as such, individuals participating in the process are able to suggest their individual interpretations and affect each other’s interpretations (Taylor and Robichaud, 2004; Weick et al., 2005). Thus, interpretative processes are ongoing. Some of these interpretations may become taken for granted over time to the extent negotiations resolve while others may not resolve (c.f. Maitlis and Christianson, 2014). Here, we wish to apply these general insights about interpretative processes to understand how the unique and inherent aspects of design-based cues distinguish their interpretations. Our first argument is that we need to consider both individual and intersubjective levels of interpretation. By and large, past work has focused on finite and individual interpretations by focusing on how cues such as light, motion, size, shape, symmetry, color, or gloss, in that they are aesthetic in nature, are interpreted in an innate, immediate, and sensory manner (Gagliardi, 1996; Rindova and Petkova, 2007; Strati, 1999; Ulrich, 2007). Other scholars focused on the cognitive processing of these cues, as they are symbols with discrete meanings that evoke a broader set of associations at the individual level (Verganti, 2009). An elaborate development for understanding individual interpretations of design-based cues, and one which we will draw on moving forward, was put forth by Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz (2004). They explained that design-based cues can be interpreted along three distinct and independent dimensions. An aesthetic dimension, pertaining to the emotions and affect the cues elicit, an instrumental dimension, pertaining to the ways in which the cues facilitate or hinder a task, and a symbolic dimension, pertaining to the associations the 120

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cues evoke. They studied the introduction of newly designed, and distinctively green, buses to the fleet of a prominent bus company. Their findings documented a range of interpretations for the green color on each of these dimensions. For example, buses evoked a range of reactions in the context of the aesthetic dimension: Respondents considered green buses both beautiful and ugly. Or in the context of the instrumental dimension, respondents considered green buses difficult to see and so unsafe, or as requiring excessive air conditioning and thus energetically inefficient. And in the context of the symbolic dimension, respondents associated green buses with nature, hospitals, military uniforms, terrorist groups, or garbage trucks. This analysis demonstrated that design-based cues are particularly polysemous because each of these three dimensions can lead to multiple interpretations. Yet despite the polysemous nature of these cues, research tends to overlook the ongoing nature of interpretation that these cues trigger and tends to perceive interpretations as finite and individual interpretations. We suggest that such finality is in fact unlikely, particularly in the context of workspaces. More specifically, workspace designs embed cues that enable members of an organization to understand their material environments through ongoing conversations and negotiations about the meanings of the cues within these environments (Siebert et al., 2017). In this context, organizational workspaces enable the ongoing social presence that is the foundation for the social interaction joint interpretation requires because they co-locate members both with each other and with the design cues. As a result, members have many opportunities to sense each other’s emotional reactions and to engage in discussions about the design-based cues. Accordingly, design-based cues trigger processes that lead to intersubjective interpretations of cues (Stigliani and Ravasi, 2012; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011). Importantly, different groups within the same workspace interpret cues differently at an intersubjective level because these interpretations are culturally embedded (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2015). Therefore, a first layer in our conceptualization is the ongoing transition between individual and intersubjective levels of interpretation, and the suggestion that the dimensions introduced by the Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz (2004) framework should be expanded to include the intersubjective level. Specifically, we suggest that members of the organization can arrive at an intersubjective interpretation in the context of the aesthetic dimension when members sense and mimic each other’s emotions and moods (Barsade, 2002). Indeed, empirical research supports the idea that individuals interacting together in the same space often communicate their emotional responses in a way that turns personal reactions into an intersubjective response. For example, Warren (2006) showed how employees’ frustration with designs intending to make their workspace “fun” and “playful” was contagious and that it intensified over time. 121

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Moreover, in the context of the instrumental dimension of design, members can explicitly discuss, exalt, or complain about the ways in which aspects of the design hinder or support various functionalities. A review of data collected by Wasserman and Frenkel (2011, 2015; research notes),1 in their study of the newly designed Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, revealed that, over time, interpretations along both the instrumental and symbolic dimensions were intersubjective. Specifically, in the instrumental context, their data revealed extensive discussions about the windows in the building. These windows were initially sealed, to make the space more secure and more energy efficient, but members of the organization perceived the design of the windows as not allowing fresh air to circulate. The intersubjective interpretation was that windows were a hindrance from an instrumental point of view. In the symbolic context, data revealed how a luxurious space initially designed for formal ceremonies, and as such, intended to be a symbol of luxury positioning the ministry as having high status, was interpreted intersubjectively as wasteful and symbolic of the ministry’s lack of respect for public funds. These intersubjective interpretations coalesced in the context of conversations among members of the organization inhabiting the space and responding to the cues surrounding them. In sum, we argue that design-based cues trigger unique processes of interpretation, as they can be interpreted along three distinct and independent dimensions (aesthetic, instrumental, and symbolic). While they can be interpreted in a finite and individual manner, they are more likely to be subject to intersubjective interpretations that are ongoing, especially in the context of workspace design. The ongoing nature of the interpretation is driven both by the joint presence of individuals and cues within workspaces, which are spaces that encourage intersubjective interpretations, and by the understanding that three distinct dimensions of interpretation, exist and may potentially interact. We now turn to highlighting the effect of having multiple cues within workspaces on these ideas.

8.3 The Multiplicity of Design-Based Cues The interpretative processes we have described are further complicated by the presence of multiple design-based cues. This idea was developed by Elsbach and Pratt (2007), based on their review of the literature on the effects of workspace designs. Their review suggested that cues embedded in designs

1

Throughout our exposition, we use examples from this rich context, believing that offering a broad swath of examples from the same context fortifies our argument that these interpretative processes co-occur in relation to a given workspace design.

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have desirable outcomes (from the organization’s point of view), for example, open-space cubicles may make employees more effective because they facilitate informal interactions. But cues also have undesirable outcomes because open-space cubicles make employees less effective as a result of more interruptions and overstimulation. They attributed the simultaneous presence of both types of outcomes to the inherently inconsistent nature of design-based cues and to the potential for cues to be in oppositional tension, which they defined as a reaction to the multitude and complexity of cues and the ways they interrelate. More specifically, Elsbach and Pratt (2007) linked the tensions to potential contradictions between the three dimensions Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz (2004) outlined. For example, partitions made by potted birch trees elicited positive emotions along the aesthetic dimension and conveyed a sense that the organization is committed to the environment along the symbolic dimension. But at the same time, these partitions failed to block out noises and, as such, failed to be a useful partition from an instrumental standpoint (Elsbach and Bechky, 2007). Beyond the potential for tensions between each of the three dimensions identified by Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz, there also may be contradictions between several manifestations of the same dimension, such as cubicles that have the potential to both make employees more and less effective in their work (Elsbach and Pratt, 2007). Further, there may be different interpretations of the same dimension by different groups within the organization (Elsbach and Pratt, 2007). For example, Wasserman and Frenkel (2015) showed that designers used minimalistic and subdued design cues to convey professionalism. This visual representation resonated with women of higher classes, who perceived order as professional. However, it did not resonate with lower-class women, who perceived order as cold. To add more complexity, interpretation occurs in the context of two distinct, but interacting systems: an emotionally driven experiential system and a rational system (Epstein, 1994; Kahneman, 2003). In the context of the emotional system, information is processed intuitively, automatically, nonverbally, and experientially, with little effort. In the context of the rational system, information is processed consciously and analytically, it requires processing effort and is typically governed by rules. While the aesthetic dimension of cues suggests that they are subject to more intuitive and innate processing, the instrumental and symbolic dimensions and the overall multiplicity of cues reduces the ability of the emotional system to receive and process information in an “uninterrupted” manner. The capacity for mental effort is limited and effortful processes tend to disrupt each other (Kahneman, 2003). Therefore, in the context of the multiplicity of cues embedded in the design, a possible outcome is a potentially reduced ability of design-based cues to elicit individual-level emotions, affects, or sensations in a manner that is 123

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sensed as innate. Furthermore, this multiplicity may hinder organizational members’ abilities to resolve their negotiations about their interpretations of the design-based cues. Such hindrance can either prolong the interpretative process in general or even prevent it from achieving a resolution. The complexity of these interpretative processes suggests they are more likely to be open-ended than finite. We turn next to incorporating the effect of time on these interpretative processes. Building on the dynamism emanating from the shifts between levels of interpretations and the tensions between dimensions of cues and their multiplicity articulated above, we highlight time as a critical force for understanding the likelihood that interpreting design-based cues is dynamic and open-ended rather than finite.

8.4 Time and the Inherent Dynamism of Design-Based Cues Interpretative processes, in that they involve ongoing negotiations, necessitate ample time. While the role of time in processes of interpretation has been acknowledged (e.g. Taylor and van Every, 2000; Weick et al., 2005), the effect of time on design-based cues has rarely been articulated (but see Jones et al., 2013 and 2017 for notable exceptions). We suggest that cues themselves, and the array of cues in a given setting, are subject to change over time. These changes add to the dynamic nature of design and its interpretation. To begin, design-based cues change in response to intentional and unintentional actions as well as in response to exogenous forces. To the extent that designs, such as workspaces, endure, the cues within these designs are more likely to change in a variety of ways. Primarily, over time, cues deteriorate and as such undergo unintentional change. Other changes may be intentional: For example, employees may jam doors that are meant to be sealed and in so doing alter the passageways and spatial layout of the workspace (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011). Or, the organization may decide to repaint the walls. Other changes may be responses to exogenous forces, such as fashions that alter the symbolic associations to a cue. Therefore, we emphasize that reactions to and interpretations of design-based cues are reactions to and interpretations of dynamic rather than finite cues. Furthermore, and as we elaborate below, the initial interpretation of designbased cues differs from the interpretations of these cues over time. Thus, the relative influence of each dimension is likely to vary. This argument allows us to suggest a potential hierarchy among the three dimensions identified by Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz (2004) because they are unlikely to evolve over time in an identical manner. Specifically, we suggest that upon first encounter with a design-based cue, the aesthetic dimension is likely to be more central than 124

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either the instrumental or the symbolic one. As explained, responses to aesthetic cues are immediate and innate, they typically are sensory and do not involve cognitive processing in that they elicit emotions and affect rather than systematic, conscious analyses (Gagliardi, 1996; Rindova and Petkova, 2007; Ulrich, 2007). However, it may take some time to fully discern the affordances or hindrances of the instrumental dimension. And, these may involve some level of expertise (Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz, 2004). So, it may take an employee weeks of work to realize that her chair cannot be adjusted in an optimal way or that the degree of lighting in a space is too dim and leads to headaches. Lastly, the symbolic dimension, in that it involves the evocation and processing of various associations, requires making cognitive connections between symbols and as such may require more processing time. To further explicate, in terms of the aesthetic dimension, design-based cues may go through natural deterioration, in which case they are likely to become less beautiful and to have their ability to elicit positive affect reduced. Alternatively, members of the organization are capable of removing cues that stimulate negative affect and emotions (Elsbach and Pratt, 2007). Such actions, that unfold over time, can neutralize cues that are the source of negative emotions. From an interpretative standpoint, the influence of the aesthetic dimension is likely to fade, especially if it elicits positive affect because positive affect is difficult to sustain (c.f. Baumeister et al., 2001). In other words, negative affect and emotions, in response to the aesthetic dimension of design-based cues, is likely to persist over longer durations relative to positive affect and emotions. This means that the potential of design-based cues to foster positive affect is more likely to be a short-term rather than an enduring effect and, therefore, design-based cues are more likely to have a neutral effect on workspaces (Kahneman, 2003). In terms of the instrumental dimension of cues, the natural deterioration of cues suggests that they may become less useful. So, clear glass windows in areas that are supposed to take advantage of natural light may become dirtier and less clear over time and subsequently let in less light, hindering the performance of various tasks. Alternatively, members of the organization, over time, may find various improvisations and workarounds that circumvent and alleviate instrumental issues, again referring to circumventing the use of hallways that were inconvenient by jamming doors that were meant to be locked and altering the available passageways (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011). From an interpretative standpoint, the effects of the instrumental dimension are likely to solidify over time. So while the instrumental effect may not be clear when members of the organization first encounter these dimensions, these effects are perceived over time. For example, Wasserman and Frenkel 125

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(research notes) found that in the organization they studied, desks were initially screwed to the floor. It took some time for members of the organization to realize that the selected locations for the desks were inconvenient in that they interrupted the flow of work by obstructing people’s line of vision to the areas beyond the workspace. Here again, we suggest that negative stimuli have more impact over the long term. In line with the well-documented tendency to retain negative information (c.f. Baumeister et al., 2001), the complaints about the fixed desks persisted (and ultimately led to releasing the screws locking them in place). Conversely, we suggest that to the extent that the instrumental dimension fulfils its purpose of facilitating an activity or function, for example, furniture that is comfortable and ergonomic, this facilitation is taken for granted. Here, Wasserman and Frenkel’s data reveal that members of the organization did not discuss any aspect of the chairs in the new building, and indeed, these were high-quality ergonomic chairs. Because instrumental facilitation is likely taken for granted and hindrance likely persistent, we suggest that, over time, frustration is more likely to become the basis of intersubjective interpretations of the space and even to drive changes to the cues. In terms of the symbolic dimension, cues may change in response to exogenous shocks, such as fashions. For example, architectural styles may fall in and out of fashion (Jones et al., 2012). Conceivably, members of an organization whose workspace is designed in a fashionable style may perceive their organization as modern and advanced. However, with time, the style will likely fall out of fashion, and its perception as a beacon of modernity will shift. Such shifts may also be affected by explicit conversations about the meaning of the symbol. Relatedly, we posit that the impact of the symbolic dimension increases over time. To explain, some design-based cues are understood as clear representations of more abstract ideas. For example, bigger, more luxurious chairs are commonly associated with higher status in workspaces (Strati, 1999). However, symbols that lend themselves to common interpretations are quite rare and in many instances signifiers are decoupled from the symbols they are meant to convey (c.f. Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2008; Rafaeli and VilnaiYavetz, 2004). Therefore, we perceive the symbolic dimension of cues as existing on an interpretative continuum ranging from symbols that are commonly interpreted to those that are not. This continuum suggests that in the context of the symbolic dimension, some cues will be interpreted quickly and fairly easily while others are the basis for ongoing, and potentially unresolvable, negotiations that endure. Because symbols that can be interpreted in common ways are relatively rare, time is more central to the context of interpreting the symbolic dimension of cues relative to the context of interpreting the aesthetic and instrumental dimensions. 126

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8.5 Discussion 8.5.1 The Dynamic Interpretation of Design-Based Cues and Processes of Institutionalization We emphasized that the interpretation of design-based cues differs from the interpretation of cues that do not have an aesthetic component. The interpretation of aesthetic components elicits innate and sensory reactions at the individual level. These reactions are supplemented both by cognitive interpretations at the individual level and by intersubjective interpretations that are primarily cognitive. As such, interpretations are dynamic because they involve the resolution of two tensions in an ongoing manner: the tension between sensory and cognitive interpretations at the individual level and the tensions between the individual and intersubjective levels of interpretation. The cues themselves are also dynamic forces. These cues are interpreted along three dimensions and the cues as well as the dimensions interact in ways that can contradict or reinforce each other. Additionally, designs, such as workspaces, involve multiple cues. Interpreting cues in relation to each other introduces another source of dynamism because the multiplicity of cues offers numerous potential combinations that require interpretation. In many instances, this dynamism is made more complex by having different subcontexts of interpretation that lead to a variety of ongoing intersubjectivities within the same organization. In addition, cues and interpretations change over time, which requires ongoing interpretations of these changes and is another significant source of dynamism. More specifically, the forces we have identified above suggest that interpretative processes of design-based cues may be affected by a series of potential interactions: When a cue changes, it leads to a change in its interpretation, and these changes become part of the ongoing negotiation about the overall interpretation of other cues in the workspace. To the extent that multiple cues exist, the potential for these linked interactions increases. For example, workspaces may use large windows to bring in natural light, and this light effects the hue of colors used in the space. Time is a central force in these settings: If the organization does not maintain the windows, they bring in less natural light over time, and they may increase the use of fluorescent light. The fluorescent light changes the hue of the colors in the space. Each of these events effects interpretations along each of the three dimensions. So, natural light or the particular hue of colors may lead to a positive effective response on the aesthetic dimension that may become less pronounced over time. The fluorescent light may be a hindrance from an instrumental perspective. And, the organization’s inability to maintain the windows may be interpreted by members of the organization in a variety of symbolic ways, such as a lack of respect for employees or financial distress. Further, each of these events is 127

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interpreted at both an individual level and an intersubjective one, as explained above. Moreover, these changing interpretations increase the likelihood that individuals will make changes to the cues and adapt them to the evolving interpretations (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011). This reactive process demonstrates why design-based cues should be viewed in the context of a dynamic system. The interpretation of design-based cues is inherently dynamic and open-ended.

8.5.2 Theoretical Contributions A core assumption in institutional theory is that social meanings become sedimented and objectified when sign systems become shared by members in a social group (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). Inherently, signs are interpreted and these interpretations are by and large maintained. In this chapter, we have suggested that in the context of sign systems based on design-based cues, shared interpretations are dynamic and, subsequently, their maintenance is unlikely. This argument extends current research working to understand how materiality affects institutional processes in and around organizations. More specifically, recent work has made great strides in this direction by articulating the distinct ways in which verbal and visual sign systems work in the context of institutionalizing new ideas (Meyer et al., 2018). And while these authors acknowledged that visual information is based on multiple cues and has potential for polysemous interpretations, they relaxed this assumption in their development and prompted future work to further pursue these aspects. Additionally, the second edition of the handbook on organizational institutionalism devotes a chapter to linking materiality and visuality to organizational processes (Jones et al., 2017). Here too, authors acknowledge the polysemous nature of material information, but the bulk of their analysis focuses on the finality of interpreting material information as they emphasize how materials can form the basis of shared sign systems that are enduring. Our work builds on these ideas, but rather than highlighting how materiality lends itself to suggesting, sedimenting, and maintaining meanings, we highlight why the inherent dynamism and processual nature of designbased cues suggest that their interpretation may be subject to ongoing flux. We do so by outlining a variety of institutional contexts in which designbased cues affect interpretation and by highlighting that multiple cues are present. These cues may or may not be congruent and are quite likely to be incongruent. In this way, our work addresses calls to examine how the relationship among material artifacts and the organizational context is tied to institutional processes (Jones et al., 2017). Additionally, our work extends our understanding of the relationship between materiality and the durability of shared sign systems. We emphasize 128

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that over time, cues change. In this way, we build on current work that suggests that when studying material sign systems, we should acknowledge that materials differ and that, subsequently, their ability to sediment and maintain shared meanings differs ( Jones, et al., 2013; McDonnell, 2010). Our conceptualization allows us to treat the relative durability of designbased cues in a more precise manner. As suggested in previous work, durability may mitigate some of the dynamism inherent in the system because cues and their interpretations may separate. Repeated exposure to certain stimuli, especially abstract ones, such as responses to dimensions of design, leads to nonconscious and automatic processing (Kahneman, 2003). Thus, design-based cues may be tied to the institutionalization of new ideas when the positive effect of aesthetic dimensions of design is likely to neutralize, as argued. In such cases, positive behaviors and positive emotional states can become institutionalized. When designs elicit positive affects or behaviors, these emotions and behaviors are likely to endure not only when the effect of design succeeds in eliciting these reactions each time, but also when these reactions are institutionalized. Hence, while the design-based cues are dynamic, their effect need not be. For example, Google employees pursue creativity not by being excited by the colors of their workspace each morning but because the pursuit of creativity has become a taken-for-granted behavior that is likely institutionalized. The same holds for the instrumental dimension. Design-based cues that facilitate tasks are taken for granted. When a design hinders performance, members of the organization typically devise a “workaround design” such as jamming a door (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011). In this manner, the instrumental dimension is not evoked repeatedly, but rather, the response to the dimension becomes institutionalized. Highlighting that cues can, in some circumstances, be dynamic and influential and in others taken for granted in a way that stabilizes their inherent dynamism advances our understanding of the relationship between materiality and processes of institutionalization. Here, we add a caveat suggesting that possibly, some design-based cues may be ignored entirely, not participate in the dynamic system we have theorized, and may never affect emotions or behavior, or shape meanings. An additional important extension we offer to the recent work tying processes of institutionalization to materiality is making the shifts between individual and intersubjective levels of analysis explicit. Much of the interest in design-based cues is linked to understanding that, as aesthetic artifacts, they have the potential for eliciting emotional and sensory reactions (Siebert et al., 2017). Our understanding of these reactions draws from psychology, and as such, is at the individual level of analysis. Yet the interest in understanding how design-based cues link to shared sign systems points to intersubjective interpretations. Our framework highlights the shifts between these levels of 129

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analysis and their role in setting a processual interpretative path. Moreover, our framework applies three dimensions for interpreting design-based cues (Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz, 2004) at both levels of analysis.

8.5.3 Future Research Avenues In closing, we suggest several avenues for furthering the investigation we have started here. First, our ideas should be evaluated empirically using longitudinal research designs. As time is a central aspect of our conceptualization, studies should be designed to assess its effects. Overall, workspaces expose members of an organization to the cues over long periods. However, settings vary in this context and our arguments may manifest differently to the extent that settings afford design-based cues time to change, and allow people using and interpreting the cues time to notice these changes and interpret them. Second, the presence of multiple culturally or socially embedded groups within an organizational setting is likely to increase the potential for multiple intersubjective interpretations that interact within that setting. These ideas are particularly applicable to the symbolic dimension as it is the most sensitive to the various types of social and contextual embeddedness of members of the organization. Our approach suggests that in response to design-based cues, each group will negotiate its interpretations until a common intersubjective interpretation of the symbolic dimension surfaces. Also possible is that the fragmentation will limit the formation of any kind of intersubjective interpretation because joint interpretations of symbols require a shared takenfor-granted basis (Boxenbaum and Battilana, 2005). To study these ideas empirically, research designs should compare workspaces in organizations of various sizes and levels of diversity. Arguably, the dynamism and openendedness of interpretations are less likely to manifest in smaller, more cohesive, and local organizations because such organizations are likely to have fewer distinct functional groups, fewer cultural subgroups, or fewer people from various socioeconomic groups, for example. However, to the extent that organizations are large and varied, the open-endedness of interpretations is likely to be more extensive. Third, applying the dimensions suggested by Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz (2004) allows us to separate the aesthetic from the symbolic. In so doing, we are able to make distinctions between emotional responses to design-based cues, that are more immediate, and cognitive responses. This distinction is important as most work on the underlying mechanisms of institutionalization focused on the cognitive interpretation of symbols. Only more recently have scholars turned their attention to the emotional aspects of institutions and institutionalization (Creed et al., 2014; Voronov and Vince, 2012). Our detailed separation of these dimensions sets a foundation for future work 130

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that could explore the ways in which responses to design-based cues are tied to the emotional facets of institutions in greater depth by maintaining the analytical distinction between the aesthetic and the symbolic dimensions. Excitingly, much remains for scholars to explore as they continue to understand the ways in which materiality is tied to processes of institutionalization. What is clear is that material artifacts, in that they can elicit emotional and sensory reactions as well as embedding a range of affordances, work to create and maintain emotions, behaviors, and meanings in ways that are distinct from how we more typically understand institutions and the discursive processes that underlie them. Materiality introduces a range of complexity that has typically been relaxed in institutional research. Our goal in this chapter was to illuminate this complexity.

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Institutions and Organizations Elsbach, K. D., and Bechky, B. A. (2007). It’s More than a Desk: Working Smarter through Leveraged Office Design. California Management Review, 49(2), 80–101. Elsbach, K. D., and Pratt, M. G. (2007). The Physical Environment in Organizations. Academy of Management Annals, 1(1), 181–224. Epstein, S. (1994). Integration of the Cognitive and the Psychodynamic Unconscious. American Psychologist, 49(8), 709. Gagliardi, P. (1996). Exploring the Aesthetic Side of Organizational Life. In S. Clegg, C. Hardy, and W. Nord (Eds), Handbook of Organization Studies (pp. 565–80). London: Sage. Jones, C. and Massa, F. G. (2013). From Novel Practice to Consecrated Exemplar: Unity Temple as a Case of Institutional Evangelizing. Organization Studies, 10, 1–38. Jones, C., Maoret, M., Massa, F. G., and Svejenova, S. (2012). Rebels with a Cause: Formation, Contestation, and Expansion of the de novo Category “Modern Architecture,” 1870–1975. Organization Science, 23(6), 1523–45. Jones, C., Boxenbaum, E., and Anthony, C. (2013). The Immateriality of Material Practices in Institutional Logics. In M. Lounsbury and E. Boxenbaum (Eds), Institutional Logics in Action: Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 39A, 51–75. Jones, C., Meyer, R. E., Jancsary, D., and Hollerer, M. A. (2017) The Material and Visual Basis of Organizations. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. B. Lawrence, and R. E. Meyer (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organization Institutionalism, 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kahneman, D. (2003). A Perspective on Judgment and Choice: Mapping Bounded Rationality. American Psychologist, 58(9), 697–720. Maitlis, S., and Christianson, M. (2014). Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward. Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 57–125. McDonnell, T. E. (2010). Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, Urban Space, and the Interpretation of AIDS Campaigns in Accra, Ghana. American Journal of Sociology, 115(6), 1800–52. Meyer, R. E., Höllerer, M. A., Jancsary, D., and van Leeuwen, T. (2013). The Visual Dimension in Organizing, Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas, Current Developments, and Promising Avenues. Academy of Management Annals, 7(1), 489–555. Meyer, R. E., Jancsary, D., Höllerer, M. A., & Boxenbaum, E. (2018). The role of verbal and visual text in the process of institutionalization. Academy of management review, 43(3), 392–418. Phillips, N., Lawrence, T. B., and Hardy, C. (2004). Discourse and Institutions. Academy of Management Review, 29(4), 635–52. Pratt, M. G., and Rafaeli, A. (2001). Symbols as a Language of Organizational Relationships. Research in Organizational Behavior, 23, 93–132. Quattrone, P., Thrift, N., Puyou, F. R., and Mclean, C. (Eds). (2013). Imagining Organizations: Performative Imagery in Business and Beyond, Vol. 14. New York: Routledge. Rafaeli, A., and Vilnai-Yavetz, I. (2004). Emotion as a Connection of Physical Artifacts and Organizations. Organization Science, 15(6), 671–86. Ravasi, D., and Stigliani, I. (2012). Product Design: A Review and Research Agenda for Management Studies. International Journal of Management Reviews, 14, 464–88.

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The Interpretation of Design-Based Cues Reay, T., and Hinings, C. R. (2005). The Recomposition of an Organizational Field: Health Care in Alberta. Organization Studies, 26(3), 351–84. Rindova, V. P., and Petkova, A. P. (2007). When Is a New Thing a Good Thing? Technological Change, Product Form Design, and Perceptions of Value for Product Innovations. Organization Science, 18, 217–32. Scott, W. R. (2003). Institutional Carriers: Reviewing Modes of Transporting Ideas over Time and Space and Considering Their Consequences. Industrial and Corporate Change, 12(4), 879–94. Siebert, S., Wilson, F., and Hamilton, J. R. (2017). “Devils May Sit Here”: The Role of Enchantment in Institutional Maintenance. Academy of Management Journal, 60(4), 1607–32. Stigliani, I., and Ravasi, D. (2012). Organizing Thoughts and Connecting Brains: Material Practices and the Transition from Individual to Group-Level Prospective Sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal, 55(5), 1232–59. Strati, A. (1999). Organization and Aesthetics. London: Sage. Taylor, J. R., and Robichaud, D. (2004). Finding the Organization in the Communication: Discourse as Action and Sensemaking. Organization, 11(3), 395–413. Taylor, J. R., and van Every, E. J. (2000). The Emergent Organization: Communication at Its Site and Surface, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ulrich, K. T. (2007). Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania. Utterback, J. M., Vedin, B.-A., Alvarez, E., Ekman, S., Sanderson, S. W., Tether, B., and Verganti, R. (2006). Design-Inspired Innovation. New York: World Scientific. Verganti, R. (2009). Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Voronov, M., and Vince, R. (2012). Integrating Emotions into the Analysis of Institutional Work. Academy of Management Review, 37(1), 58–81. Warren, S. (2006). Hot-Nesting? A Visual Exploration of Personalised Workspaces in a “Hot-Desk” Office Environment.” In P. Case, S. Lilley, and T. Owens (Eds), The Speed of Organization (pp. 119–46). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press. Wasserman, V., and Frenkel, M. (2011). Organizational Aesthetics: Caught between Identity Regulation and Culture Jamming. Organization Science, 22(2), 503–21. Wasserman, V., and Frenkel, M. (2015). Spatial Work in between Glass Ceilings and Glass Walls: Gender-Class Intersectionality and Organizational Aesthetics. Organization Studies, 36(11), 1485–505. Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. London: Sage. Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., and Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409–21. Zilber, T. B. (2008). The Work of Meanings in Institutional Processes. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, R. Suddaby, and K. Sahlin (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organization Institutionalism, 2nd edn (pp. 151–69). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Zilber, T. B. (2017). A Call for a Strong Multimodal Research in Institutional Theory. In M. A. Hollerer, T. Daudigeos, and D. Jancsary (Eds), Multimodality, Meanings, and Institutions. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 54A, 63–84.

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9 The Long Walk to Aleppo Institutional Myths, Inhabited Institutions, and Ideals in the Real World Mark de Rond and Tim Hallett

Social life is rarely ever random. Institutions structure many of our everyday interactions and in doing so impose form and consistency on our activities. Yet even as they depend on human activity, they cannot easily be reduced to it: The Catholic Church continues to exist even as its priests and parishioners are asleep, and its prerogatives and faculties remain even when temporarily not enacted (though presumably won’t if never again enacted) (cf. Hodgson, 2006: 3). In much the same way that various forms of religion can be viewed as institutions, we consider the Civil March for Aleppo (CMFA) through the lenses of institutional theory, and especially those theoretical orientations that lend themselves to processual analysis. In doing so we shed light on the non-random if unexpected life of the march, from its auspicious beginnings at a disused Berlin airport to its arrival at the Lebanese-Syrian border. Just as thinking about institutions and process can help us to understand the CMFA, we argue that the march helps us to think about the various ways processes and institutions are connected. We begin with a description of the CMFA, a march for peace that began in Berlin on December 26, 2016 and ended in Halba, Lebanon, on August 13, 2017. This empirical account draws from the field observations and experiences of the first author, who was a regular participant on the ground and member of a virtual team of march coordinators. We tell the story of the march—how it originated, and why, and what it involved on a day-to-day basis—as a means of articulating the difficulties involved in sustaining the march and instantiating its ideals. The narrative highlights a poignant and

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Figure 9.1. Carrying CMFA flags while walking through Serbia. April 2017, © Mark de Rond

divisive episode of the CMFA, namely the decision to avoid walking through Turkey and reroute the march instead through Lebanon. While this decision may seem trivial at first sight, it was to call into question all that the CMFA stood for and became so very nearly its demise. The tale is compelling and might stand on its own. Nevertheless, the second part of this chapter provides an institutional reading of the ethnography, emphasizing the value of a processual, institutional understanding of the march. Read in this way, the ups and downs of the march reflect the cultural ideals, or “institutional myths,” that the march tried to make incarnate, the challenges of tightly linking those myths to substantive practices, the consequences of loosely coupling these practices and myths, and how everyday problems can frustrate the realization of ideals in the real world. The story of the CMFA compels us to reconsider assumptions about loose and tight coupling in organizations. Contrary to much institutional theory, it suggests that, instead of creating conflict, tight couplings may be necessary for avoiding turmoil, and that the creation of various forms of loose coupling in the place of tight couplings can create conflict. Rather than emphasizing a particular organizational form (loosely coupled or tightly coupled ), we emphasize processes, disruptions, and changes to coupling, whether from tight to loose (as in the CMFA) or from loose to tight. 135

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While the march has a specific story such that the empirical details cannot be generalized, the problems that it faced are common and institutional theories can provide a general understanding and a means for examining the similarities and differences inherent in other cases. In addition, the processual nature of the march compels us to think about institutions in a dynamic way, especially regarding the reflexivity people demonstrate in their connections to institutional myths as problems arise that challenge their connections to those myths.

9.1 The Civil March for Aleppo In late November 2016, Polish journalist and activist, Anna Alboth, posted a short video via YouTube on her Facebook page.1 In it she expressed fury at the unfolding situation in Aleppo and mounting frustration at her felt inability to do something to protect civilians and promote peace. She had already opened her Berlin home to a Syrian refugee, she said, but felt that more could, and should, be done. Within twenty-four hours, she had assembled a team of volunteers keen to help her plan a march from Berlin to Aleppo. Together they created a website and wrote an uncompromising manifesto: It’s time to act. We can’t sit in front of our laptops and do nothing. We can’t drink cafe latte and do nothing. We’ve had enough of clicking the sad or shocked faces on Facebook and writing “this is terrible” and “we’re so powerless.” No, we are not! We are far too many! We are going to Aleppo. From Germany to Aleppo, along the so-called “refugee route,” just the opposite direction. We’ve been taught submission to war. We’ve been taught to be afraid of the powerful who pull the strings. We’ve been persuaded to take sides with “the good” and blame “the bad,” to accept the division of people into the better and the worse, the ones who can sleep safely in their own beds and the ones who have to flee for their lives. “That’s just the way it is”—we’ve been told. But we refuse to take it anymore. We’ve just withdrawn our consent. We’re ready to deny powerlessness. We want to go and help people like us, who just weren’t lucky enough to be born in Berlin, London or Paris. Civilians for civilians, we will walk, hand in hand, from Berlin, through the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Turkey— to Aleppo. It’s a long way. Just as long as the refugees had to come to save their lives. Now, we want to do the same to save some other lives. And we’re marching 1

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The manifesto can be found at http://civilmarch.org/.

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together in a big, big group. We are just random, average people. We don’t represent any specific political parties or organizations. We’re carrying these white flags to let the whole world know our message: Enough is enough. This war has to stop! And this war can be stopped. This war can be ended with a few strokes of a pen. But even if we still have to wait for that, we can’t wait and see the suffering of the people of Aleppo. No one deserves what they are going through. It’s no longer a “normal” war, if children’s hospitals become the targets. We don’t want to just observe it from a safe distance. And we won’t! We’re determined to shake this feeling of helplessness and start to act. We’re determined, we’re united and we will march as long as it takes. For peace. Do you also think it’s enough? Do you also want to do more than crying in front of your laptop? Our tears and anger have to be transformed into action. We’ve been passive for too long. This is our action. We are going to Aleppo. What will happen then? Will they send bombs on our 5000-people crowd? Will they dare to do that?! You think we are crazy? We think that it’s crazy to sit and wait until everybody dies. Let’s not wait. Let’s just go there and put an end to this madness. We are starting on 26th December, from Berlin. In a group of 3000 people. Will you join us? Within days, 2,500 people had “signed up” to walk the estimated 2,100 miles alongside her—a number that would dwindle to a handful by the time the march reached the Turkish border—crossing the Czech Republic, then Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, and Turkey. At 10 a.m. on December 26, several hundred marchers left Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld, having had less than four weeks to prepare for months of walking through a bitterly cold and wet winter. Anna’s two young daughters, mother, and husband joined her for the first week, reuniting with her periodically throughout the long walk. The march was coordinated by a virtual group of volunteers back home and a team on the ground, including Anna and a handful of marchers who had been assigned specific responsibilities. The home team worked closely with local lawyers to obtain whatever relevant permissions were required to warrant safe passage across international borders, and new marchers came and went as work schedules permitted. For walkers not involved in planning, the everyday life of the march was simple. Those responsible for breakfast woke up at 6 a.m. to prepare whatever had been purchased from local markets and shops the previous day. Money was tight—some subsisting on five euros a day—and expenses were shared equally, meaning that breakfast typically comprised the previous night’s leftovers, porridge, raisins, eggs, fruit, and one or other variety of local coffee. 137

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Figure 9.2. Cooking eggs for breakfast. Serbia, April 2017, © Mark de Rond

Figure 9.3. Making breakfast after a night on the beach. Thessaloniki, Greece, April 2017, © Mark de Rond

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Even the simplest of foods can taste surprisingly good in the right context. Once the porridge was deemed sufficiently soft to be edible, someone would wake the others by playing the guitar or, in the absence of musical talent, cranking up the volume on an iPhone. Breakfast was served at 7 a.m. with a view to be on the road within the hour. At 8 a.m., everyone would gather for instructions about the day’s route, to be introduced to whomever else had joined overnight, and to remind ourselves (with a collective “Alep! Alep! Alep!”) who we were walking for. Several would offer to carry one of several CMFA flags, others to hang flyers from telephone poles, these artefacts to highlight that this was a demonstration, and to invite those so inclined to strap on their boots and join in. People were invited to enlist for as long as they liked, or could afford time-wise, meaning some stayed for months, others weeks, while the majority joined for a few hours or days before packing it in. The march—single file when on busy roads—was front- and back-ended by fluorescent supervisors who took turns to warn each of us about oncoming traffic. Somewhere near the front would be the route master, equipped with an iPad and the day’s destination. While point-to-point distances varied, a typical day would entail fifteen miles of walking, broken up by lunch served by those who, out of benevolence or for having sore feet, had opted to commandeer our CMFA vehicles instead. Affectionately known as “Habibi” and “Habibti,” two scruffy VW vans served to carry supplies, including anything other than daypacks, and as a mobile headquarters. Each featured the CMFA’s distinctive white flag on the sides— the white indicative of the march’s peaceful intentions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vans’ distinctive features attracted a fair bit of attention, including that of kids in Serbia who took to notching offensive leitmotifs onto the dull orange paintwork, only to be scrubbed off again by volunteers the next day. We would begin each day’s trek unsure of where we would spend the night. One of the core group—a flamboyant Brazilian lawyer—would charge ahead of the marchers on an old motorcycle to negotiate something suitable. The more luxurious abodes were head-to-toe arrangements in schools, churches, and sports halls, the latter allowing for welcome showers, even if often cold. Less luxurious, but not therefore less enjoyable, were farms and barns and beaches, the more agreeable as Winter finally packed it in and Spring arrived. Whilst unaware of the day’s abode, we left many mornings with a “question of the day,” something to mull over during the day’s walk and discuss at the end of it. Every ten days or so, the march would stop for a day’s respite, and a workshop would be organized around a theme of interest to the walkers. In major cities along the route, the CMFA would stage public events designed to raise awareness of the Syrians’ plight among the local population.

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Figure 9.4. Still asleep early one morning in a hay barn. Serbia, March 2017, © Mark de Rond

Occasionally, the question of the CMFA’s purpose was raised and debated. People had joined for different, and often deeply personal, reasons. For some the CMFA captured a private aspiration (e.g. to plant the CMFA flag in Aleppo or to experience war first-hand); others were keen to engage with refugees along the route, whilst yet others were glad to simply help. For most, however, the CMFA did something else as well: Like a religious community, it helped stave off existential anxiety by providing answers to questions of meaning and purpose. This appeasement of existential angst seems to have been an important feature of what drew people to the march in the first place: Many admitted to being motivated by a quest for significance—a desire to make their lives matter—and the CMFA served as a useful fold for these individual quests in giving them expression and definition. Wearied though I might have been from time spent with the CMFA, I also felt energized for having tapped into something that seemed deeply meaningful, even if difficult to articulate. As the manifesto claimed, “We’re determined to shake this feeling of helplessness and start to act.” The question of what this larger CMFA purpose ultimately was remained vague (and not just for me), the more so as the march, to some, had been a response to a particular political moment—the siege of Aleppo—which was lifted part-way through the long walk. It gained significant urgency upon entering northern Greece when the realization hit home that we’d shortly 140

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arrive at the Turkish border: Was this really a march to or for Aleppo? Some individuals were firm in their view that the CMFA would fail if not physically reaching Aleppo and besides, they argued, this is exactly what the manifesto had promised. Yet even if the march was to actually reach Aleppo, then what? Wouldn’t the marchers likely be seen as additional mouths to feed, particularly when not bearing medical supplies or food, as opposed to beacons of hope? If, on the other hand, this was a march for Aleppo, what might that entail in terms of realizing its objectives? Which were what, exactly? By the time the march reached its halfway point in Serbia, the core group had shrunk to two dozen, many of whom had been on foot and living a stripped-down version of life since December 26. The topic of Turkey had been a contentious one well before then, as it was thought unlikely that the Turkish government would grant permission for the CMFA to walk through Turkey as a peace demonstration. Evidence suggested that the government had clamped down hard on its opposition, and especially those who were seen to ally with pro-Kurdish groups. Since the CMFA aimed for peace in Syria (“Enough is enough. This war has to stop!”) and peace would need the Kurds to join the negotiations, it was unlikely that an avowedly apolitical movement could remain so in the context of Turkey. Moreover, the CMFA had become a threat to sympathetic Turkish civilians, which became abundantly clear when the Turkish authorities, after weeks of unpredictable and uncomfortable discussions with a representative of the CMFA, inquired who in Turkey had associated with the march. Their insistence on the names of anyone within Turkey who might have supported the effort in any way, shape, or form was the last straw, the application for permission pulled immediately after. Even if the CMFA had been allowed to walk with Erdogan’s permission, would that risk the march being manipulated by his party for media purposes and thus viewed as an implicit endorsement of his regime? And even if not used for media purposes, wouldn’t the march pose a risk to anyone and everyone who, as a Turkish citizen, might find reason to connect with the CMFA in any way, shape, or form? How could a peace march possibly justify putting others at risk? And if the march decided instead to walk through Turkey incognito, leaving behind any flags or posters or anything recognizably CMFA, wouldn’t this compromise its core values and purpose? The core group decided to stop in Thessaloniki for a “summit”: a week of reflection and discussion. They invited experts on Turkey, group psychology, security, and risk management to provide input into what became a monumental decision for the CMFA. I rejoined them to help facilitate a series of difficult conversations. The seriousness of the challenges they now faced had brought their project close to breaking point. Of the several hundred that started the march in Berlin, only about three or four handfuls remained. To be sure, people were tired, but the problem was not a lack of energy, far from it, as indicated by 141

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Figure 9.5. Deciding on the CMFA’s goals during the “summit.” Thessaloniki, April 2017, © Mark de Rond

their unflagging passion and spirited discussions around the Turkish question. Nor was the issue a shortage of resources. Rather, without the felt experience of progress facilitated by continual walking to help mobilize their individual quests for significance, people had begun to take their leave, corroding what had been a strong, close, and supportive social network in the process. On May 5, the group sat down in a disused factory, now occupied by artists, to define their collective purpose and, when that proved too difficult, opted to articulate their ideals instead. Once they got the latter in place, the former might be easier to pin down. Sat in a circle on a patio outside, the group decided on five ideals: to remind themselves and others of the suffering of civilians in Syria, to engage in dialogue with those they met along the way, to express hope for peace in Syria, to foster connections among those marching, and, at the center of it all, to do this out of compassion. The attempt to crystalize a statement of purpose was perhaps most strongly felt among those involved with the CMFA back home. This virtual team provided legal, financial, and logistical advice, particularly in navigating the hurdles associated with traversing different countries. The obstacles posed by Turkey were acutely felt by this community who, in many ways, had come to feel responsible for the welfare of those marching and protecting the reputation and integrity of the CMFA. In an (ultimately futile) effort to help, and after a relatively unsuccessful summit and series of increasingly difficult 142

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conversations between those on the ground and virtual coordinators, I gave it my best shot in a Slack message: Here’s an attempt to create a Statement of Purpose using the manifesto as a platform. I rephrased certain bits of it to be consistent with the manifesto, yet to also take into accounts concerns raised by you. The purpose of the Civil March for Aleppo (CMFA) is to express solidarity with the people of Aleppo, and Syria more widely, that have suffered the consequences of war. We understand solidarity to mean the following: 1. Drawing attention to the ongoing suffering in Syria by walking from Berlin to Aleppo as a peace march (Use of public transport will only ever be considered if it is the only viable means to continue marching) 2. Public expressions of solidarity through actively engaging with local and foreign media, and social media 3. Believing that, through highly-visible public engagement, we may be able to encourage relevant authorities to increase their efforts at stopping the war 4. Engaging with those we meet on our journey through dialogue about peace building 5. Showing compassion to those we meet along the way, and to each other This Statement of Purpose helps us make choices insofar that every decision will be evaluated against the following criteria: 1. Will doing this help draw attention to the ongoing suffering in Aleppo and Syria more widely? 2. Will doing this enhance our public profile as being a public expression of solidarity? 3. Will doing this increase our public engagement as a movement for peace? 4. Will doing this help inform more people of the terrible consequences of war? 5. Will doing this be an expression of compassion? Even if we couldn’t agree on a shared purpose, I had hoped this shared set of clearly articulated ideals might help the marchers come to a collective view on the complex questions they had to front up to, and make difficult, actionable choices. After all, for each decision they could ask, would doing something help promote any or all of these goals without undermining a single one? But it wasn’t to be. Whatever respite this agreement on ideals provided, it was temporary. Several of the most vocal participants flatly ignored any attempt to pin down a statement of purpose (including the version outlined above) and referred instead to the original manifesto’s pledge to reach the 143

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“promised land.” Others felt they’d had enough of, as they put it, the “blah, blah, blah,” and wished to continue walking into Turkey regardless. Some were vocal in their readiness to “pay the ultimate price,” even if, when prompted, they were never once able to articulate what it was they thought they’d be paying the ultimate price for. Further cracks in the firmament came into view when testing these agreedupon goals against a new set of concerns. For example, if we were to walk through Turkey, and one of us got arrested, would we all stop and stay put out of solidarity to one of our own, or continue to march in solidarity with those still suffering in Syria? Equally, how would we weigh up the benefits of continuing to move towards Aleppo (and, by making visible progress, to mobilize future marchers and their online following) against the risk of being seen to compromise on the CMFA’s manifesto by walking without flags, or as tourists? So why is it that the question of purpose was never resolved? Several possible explanations come to mind. Perhaps the question was never collectively resolved simply because the urgency wasn’t there. So long as they could continue their daily task of walking the refugee route, the sense of progress was sufficient to stave off larger questions of purpose. This is not to say that people hadn’t considered it, nor seen the irony in the CMFA being a march for Aleppo in name, yet the manifesto clear in its aim to reach Aleppo. And it worked perfectly well so long as the marchers were able to continue making progress daily by walking. Progress became a fully embodied experience as the miles inscribed themselves, quite literally, on callused and yet ever blistering feet. Perhaps it wasn’t resolved earlier for fear of finding the emperor really wasn’t wearing any clothes (that there really wasn’t a purpose), that all their efforts (including significant emotional investments) had been in vain? Perhaps it was because of the fear of losing that special experience of social connectedness generated by repeated wandering regardless of the weather, yet being in it together? Or perhaps it was for fear of losing the CMFA’s ability to tap into a set of rare human qualities—of generosity and kindness and physical intimacy— that had marchers find workarounds to avoid conversations about purpose? The summit precipitated a breakup within the core group—with several people taking their leave—after the majority voted to apply for official permission to walk through Turkey. Two members of the core group explained that they could not be part of a movement that took lightly any risk this posed to the integrity of the march, let alone to Turkish citizens. One of the others decided to head for Aleppo by himself and left the morning after to spend the next eight weeks trying, but failing, to negotiate a clandestine entry into Syria. He had become too well known to local authorities, and even the hardiest smugglers wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole. Two other marchers decided to go their separate ways, heading in the direction of Aleppo, through Turkey, 144

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but undecided as to how far to go or indeed what to do along the route. Another few went home or headed for one of the refugee camps along the way in an attempt to make themselves useful. The few that remained meandered through Greece into Bulgaria, and back again to work with refugees in Lesbos whilst awaiting word from the Turkish authorities. When, after six weeks of controversy, they withdrew their application, the decision was made to transit through a Turkish port and take a ferry to Lebanon instead. By this time, the CMFA had shrunk to a small handful.

9.2 Institutional Myths, Inhabited Institutions, and Ideals in the Real World While the CMFA is not an institution in quite the same sense the Catholic Church is, it is shaped by institutional contexts and institutional processes. The CMFA is a form of non-violent protest protected by the institution of the European Convention on Human Rights which allows for peaceful demonstration as a manifestation of the right to freedom of assembly, the right to freedom of association, and the right to freedom of speech. The CMFA can be viewed as a particular instance of this institution—what some might call a “convention” (Hodgson, 2006)—designed to express anger and disappointment on behalf of those suffering in Syria, and in so doing apply pressure on local and foreign governments to stop the war. As such, it is based on, and seeks to express, a set of widespread cultural ideals: solidarity, compassion, amity—or what Meyer and Rowan (1977) term “institutional myths” insofar as it can be difficult to actually enact these universalistic ideals in practice. In what follows we draw from three sociological traditions of institutional thought to understand the dynamic struggles of the CMFA. We rely on “new institutionalism” to examine how the march drew from these “institutional myths” (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). We use the emergent tradition of “inhabited institutionalism” (Scully and Creed, 1997; Hallett and Ventresca, 2006) to examine how the people involved in the CMFA made sense of those institutional myths, how they connected or “coupled” their substantive activities to those myths, and how they struggled to maintain and modify those couplings. We use the tradition of “old institutionalism” to understand the tensions and problems involved in organizing, and the fate of ideals in the real world (Selznick, 1949, 1992). The notion of “institutional myths” can be confusing, so it bears some explanation. When Meyer and Rowan (1977) introduced this term, they were interested in understanding why so many organizations, despite their diverse needs, tended to have very similar organizational forms (e.g. bureaucracy, formal rules and regulations, common policies). They argued that 145

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organizations adopt common forms because those forms reflect widespread “institutional myths,” that is, widespread cultural ideals about how organizations ought to operate (1977: 342). When organizations respond to this institutional context and adopt those organizational forms, they gain legitimacy with the public, and that legitimacy helps organizations to survive, even if those common organizational forms do not make much sense in terms of practical, everyday activity. These widespread ideals are “mythic” in two senses: First, in the legendary sense of a cultural account for how something is, and second, in a potentially false sense that the ideals may not actually be enacted in practice—a condition that Meyer and Rowan describe as “loose coupling” between institutional myths and substantive activity (1977, 1978). Although Meyer and Rowan’s focus is on organizations, their approach belies a much larger cultural sociology (Hallett and Gougherty, 2018). Institutional myths not only describe how organizations “ought” to be, but they also describe how societies “ought” to operate. Thus, in light of the horrors of war, we ought to be compassionate activists and empathize with Syrian civilians, societies anywhere ought to be peaceful and their citizens ought to be able to go about their daily activities without fear, and if they cannot then we ought to exhibit solidarity and call on politicians to ensure a better future. These are widespread cultural ideals that exist far beyond the CMFA and are mythic in the legendary sense. The critical challenge for the CMFA was to make these ideals a reality—or to close the gap between actions and symbols—and avoid the tendency of loose coupling and conformity to myths in the “false” sense. In other words, they wished to make these myths “incarnate” by creating a tight coupling between their actions and these cultural ideals (Hallett, 2010). In this manner, the CMFA departs somewhat from what might be expected in “new institutionalism” (Meyer and Scott, 1983; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991; Schneiberg and Clemens, 2006), according to which symbolic conformity to cultural myths is typically sufficient for most organizations so long as it provides public legitimacy. Indeed, a loose coupling to substantive activity is encouraged as a way to avoid internal organizational conflict. However much public legitimacy the CMFA may have gained by speaking about activism, peace, and solidarity, for the participants this symbolic clothing clearly wasn’t enough, amounting to little more than “clicking the sad or shocked faces on Facebook.” Instead, “Our tears and anger have to be transformed into action.” Instead of focusing on surface conformity, the approach known as “inhabited institutionalism” (Scully and Creed, 1997; Hallett and Ventresca, 2006) delves below the surface and takes a processual view to examine how institutional myths are inhabited by people doing things together, at times in conflict and at times in concert (Hallett, 2010). Regardless of whether these doings result in a loose coupling, a tight coupling, a bricolage, or something 146

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else, the link between institutional myths and activity is the result of collective activity that takes place on the ground—a contrast to new institutionalism’s focus on macro-environments and fields (Binder, 2007). For the participants in the CMFA, as they were inhabiting the universal ideals—or institutional myths—of solidarity, compassion, and amity, a loose coupling was unacceptable (or at least in the beginning). The CMFA was not just about the Syrian people; it was also about the participants in the march and their very real existential angst. They were motivated by a quest for significance—a desire to make their lives matter, “We’re ready to deny powerlessness,” and their actions had to speak louder than words. They did not want their myths to be false, but rather incarnate, necessitating a tight coupling between their cultural ideals and their practices. But how to accomplish this? At first blush, the activity of walking seems rather ordinary. However, for the participants it was central, and as long as they were walking—in the same way and on more or less the same route as the refugees in reverse—they could create and maintain a tight coupling between their practices and their cultural ideals. Moreover, the apparently simple activity of walking required surprisingly little in the way of planning (aside from mapping a daily route with lunch stops), its “organization” informal. This is certainly not to say that the march was disorganized. Along much of the route the marchers could settle into a routine, and it was a routine that provided meaning and existential security, so much so that the marchers could be surprisingly unreflective about the specific purpose of the CMFA. Routines provide order (Garfinkel, 1967), and the routine of walking created a kind of order in the chaotic world around them, chaos that the CMFA was intended to address.2 As long as this routine was in place the marchers could share progress, intimacy, even love, and the ritual carried with it tremendous positive emotional energy (Collins, 2004). As the march made its way through Greece, the possibility of daily progress being halted by Turkey loomed increasingly large and threatened to disrupt this informal routine and all of the positive emotion and security therein. They would no longer be able to walk the route, and this disruption severed the tight coupling between the CMFA’s substantive activities and their abstract ideals, creating “turmoil” (Hallett, 2010): a return to existential and emotional angst. It is one of the great ironies that formal organizations are tools women and men can use to achieve their ideals, and yet they are recalcitrant tools that often end up frustrating those ideals (Selznick, 1949, 1992; Kraatz and Flores,

2 In this, it is important to note that, despite the shared route and activity of walking, the marchers are in a fundamentally different position, and a highly privileged position at that, from that of the refugees. The marchers walk so they can express their ideals. The refugees walk so that they can live.

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2015; Krygier, 2012). To deal with the challenge of Turkey, the group had to transform their abstract ideals into specific goals and they did so by becoming a much more formal organization: They stopped walking and staged a summit, they sought to replace their manifesto with a mission statement articulating their ideals, and they became increasingly dependent on an off-site logistical team to design the means to realize them. With this formalization and specification, intergroup conflicts arose, conflicts that did not exist under the happy tent of more abstract ideals, supported by the daily marching routine. And herein lies the Achilles’ heel of the CMFA and the more general paradox identified by scholars in the tradition of “old institutionalism” (Selznick, 1949; Messinger, 1955; Zald and Denton, 1963): The practical difficulties of linking ideals with specific practices can overwhelm the very purpose of the organization. The responses to the practical difficulty of Turkey took three general forms, each with a certain degree of personalization by the inhabitants of the march. One response was a literal reassertion of the tightest possible coupling between the original ideals and the original activity. That is, for an exceptionally determined few, the response was to keep both the connection of a march to Aleppo, and a march on the refugee route, barriers or consequences be damned. For these inhabitants, this would remain a march to Aleppo along the refugee route, no matter what, even if one had to go it alone, prepared to “pay the ultimate price,” as a couple of the marchers repeatedly insisted. Those few who decided to walk to Aleppo regardless did so convinced that the march—and they—would fail if not physically reaching what the manifesto had claimed to be the bull’s eye. Aleppo and the refugee route were places that carried important significance (Gieryn, 2018; Heaney and Rojas, 2006), and the CMFA could not substitute them with others without losing that significance. A second response was to change from a tight coupling to a bricolage (Binder, 2007). For these inhabitants, the decision was to keep the tight connection of a march to Aleppo, but out of necessity create a loose coupling to the refugee route, departing from it when need be, but with the original goal of making it to Aleppo and completing the “walk” in reverse, albeit on a modified path and with boat, ferry, or public transportation where need be. It was still a very long walk, and even if the direction and destination were not always clear, they continued to plough on out of compassion, to express solidarity, and to hope for peace, ready to meet the world on its own terms, making do with whatever it offered, and giving of themselves in return. A third response involved a larger change: an uncoupling of the original meanings and practices, leading to a new and somewhat different set of couplings. For these inhabitants, the solution to the problem of Turkey was a change of meaning, from literal to symbolic, becoming a march for Aleppo 148

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but not to Aleppo, allowing for a broader range of different substantive practices, such as engaging in dialogue, raising awareness, and volunteering in refugee camps along the way.3 This response created an uncoupling with the required act of marching, an uncoupling with the march to Aleppo, and an uncoupling from the refugee route. These were big changes and for many of the inhabitants this response to the problem of Turkey was deemed too symbolic, even cynical. But those who chose this response saw it as both pragmatic and idealistic: A way to help and to make the myths of activism, peace, and solidarity incarnate, and to do so in a manner that was ultimately more fruitful than what seemed like a doomed effort to enter the city of Aleppo. They felt the march would succeed as long as ideals such as solidarity, compassion, and amity continued to be instantiated on a daily basis. This small group, rather than staying put at the Turkish border, decided to walk north into Bulgaria and, subsequently, south to Lesbos, while awaiting a decision from the Turkish authorities on their application for permission to walk as a peace march through Turkey. Impatient with the lack of physical progress, they decided to spend the eight weeks it took until they finally decided to withdraw their application to the Turkish authorities for permission by engaging with refugees in Bulgaria and Greece. While moving no closer to the city of Aleppo, the act of walking itself helped stave off the anxiety that came with the lack of movement. For each inhabitant, these responses involved a certain amount of personalization—the determination of what kind of coupling between ideals and practices was acceptable “for me.” Each individual response provided a way to deal with the existential anxiety that had been reintroduced with the problem of Turkey, but the divergent meanings and implications for daily practice (what they would actually be doing) created contestation and conflict (Benford, 1993; Heaney and Rojas, 2006). Their conversations became increasingly heated as they argued over whether expressing solidarity should include engaging practically with refugees along the route. After all, to ignore the very people they claimed to be marching for along the refugee route would seem to undermine their ideal of solidarity. So, was the plight of refugees ever meant to be a legitimate focus of the march? Was the march intended to offer comfort to refugees who needed immediate help, or was it for the marchers who needed to feel they were making a difference in the world? If the answer was “both,” was the CMFA really succeeding in serving those diverse goals? Does traveling by public transport (e.g. in transiting through Turkey) compromise the CMFA? The personalized answers to these and other questions brought individual clarity but fragmented the collective. 3 The irony here is that the march was always called a Civil March for Aleppo, even if the manifesto makes it clear that it is a march to Aleppo.

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9.3 Implications for Institutional Theorizing The CMFA is a particularly interesting case for thinking about institutional processes in that it highlights the importance of focusing, empirically, on the couplings between substantive activity and institutional mythologies—a call that resonates with the growing line of work on inhabited institutions (Scully and Creed, 1997; Hallett and Ventresca, 2006; Binder, 2007). The concept of coupling has always been important in institutional thought. However, until somewhat recently, scholars had come to assume that organizational conformity to institutional myths was ceremonial, and only loosely coupled to substantive activity (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Hallett, 2010). With this, new institutionalism assumed that loose coupling was a way to protect organizational routines and avoid conflict, and that tight coupling would create conflict (Meyer and Rowan, 1978). The case of the CMFA turns this thinking on its head to show that, in some cases, the very opposite may be true. The CMFA was at its strongest when it was able to sustain a tight coupling between its institutional mythologies and its substantive practices through the routine of marching. Conflicts arose when various forms of loose coupling were proposed as solutions to the problem of Turkey. Changing to a looser coupling created conflict instead of calm as the options on offer were, by some, seen as too ceremonial and insincere, or quite the opposite of what new institutionalism might expect. An interesting comparison case is Hallett’s (2010) study of how the institutional myth of accountability came to ground in an urban elementary school. Hallett argues that the school was a case of “recoupling,” a change from a loose coupling to a tight coupling, or from a situation where conformity to policy had been mere window dressing to a situation where accountability was enforced and instantiated in core teaching practices. In Hallett’s case, the recoupling created tremendous conflict and turmoil, yet he proposed that the key was not loose coupling or tight coupling alone, but rather the change to coupling, in his case from loose to tight, or from “myth and ceremony” to “the myth incarnate.” He proposed that, like recoupling, an “uncoupling”—or a change from tight to loose coupling— could likewise disrupt cherished routines, arguing that “through uncoupling, the myth incarnate is transformed into myth and ceremony,” which could likewise result in turmoil (Hallett, 2010: 70). The example of the CMFA serves as an illustration of this. Taken together, these two examples direct our attention to coupling as an ongoing, dynamic process, and not a finished structural state (coupling and not coupled). They also draw attention to the social psychological aspects of institutions. The existential angst that participants in the CMFA felt in the wake of the refugee crisis, and for which the march provided temporary relief, 150

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is similar to what has been called “epistemic distress”—a displacement of meaning, certainty, and expectations (Zuboff, 1988; Hallett, 2010)—or “ontological insecurity” (Giddens, 1991). Institutional theorists have long acknowledged the importance of uncertainty reduction (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991), but the implications of this social psychology remain underdeveloped and tend to be placed in the background of empirical research. We suggest that that these forms of psychological distress and security, be they “existential,” “epistemic,” or “ontological,” are important for understanding how and why people engage with institutions (see also Lok et al., 2017). People seek psychological security, and in relation to this quest institutional myths can create some measure of security, as they did for the participants in the early stages of the CMFA. However, the practical challenge of realizing these cultural ideals is not just frustrating and fraught with tension (Selznick, 1949, 1992), they can be a source of psychological distress, as indeed they were for participants in the later stages of the CMFA. And so what started as a well-meaning initiative to walk all the way from Berlin to Aleppo for peace turned into a war of words. Unable to continue walking past the Turkish border, the marchers had no choice but to finally confront the most fundamental of questions: Was this a march to or for Aleppo? And where lie the differences between these two objectives? Many of those walking had long been aware that the question might need addressing at some point—some had raised it publicly—but so long as they were able to continue their daily act of walking the refugee route, they were able to express solidarity with those suffering in Syria and call for an end to the war. Walking allowed them to tightly couple their ideals (particularly solidarity, compassion, and amity) with their actions (walking with white flags, handing out flyers, and engaging local communities into dialogue about the war). When the problem of Turkey forced a change to couplings, many felt unable to collectively transition from a relatively tight coupling to a looser version. The inability to continue walking dislocated the tight couplings—the marchers did not want “myth and ceremony,” they had a deep need for their myths to be incarnate, that was the very purpose of the march. This disruption set the stage for framing contests and disputes (Snow et al., 1986; Benford, 1993; Babb, 1996) that only further highlighted the ways in which the diverse participants in the march had never collectively faced up to what it was that, at the end of the day, they set out to achieve. This is not to say that the march did not succeed in multiple, important ways. Many of those marching had been socially engaged with issues related to those fleeing war, and those hoping to affect political change. Their work continues to this day, and the connections made during the CMFA serve this work well and with noble purpose, despite the many challenges that institutional theory helps to identify and articulate. 151

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References Babb, Sarah (1996). “A True American System of Finance”: Frame Resonance in the U.S. Labor Movement, 1866–1886. American Sociological Review, 61(6), 1033–52. Benford, Robert D. (1993). Frame Disputes within the Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Social Forces, 71, 3, 677–701. Binder, Amy (2007). For Love and Money: Organizations’ Creative Responses to Multiple Environmental Logics. Theory and Society, 36, 547–71. Collins, Randall (2004). Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. DiMaggio, Paul J. and Powell, Walter (1991). Introduction. In Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Eds), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (pp. 1–40). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Garfinkel, Howard (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: Prentice-Hall. Giddens, Anthony (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gieryn, Thomas F. (2018). Truth Spots: How Places Make People Believe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hallett, Tim (2010). The Myth Incarnate: Recoupling Processes, Turmoil, and Inhabited Institutions in an Urban Elementary School. American Sociological Review, 75, 52–74. Hallett, Tim, and Gougherty, Matthew (2018). Bourdieu and Organizations: Hidden Traces, Macro Influence, and Micro Potential. In Jeff Sallaz and Tom Medvetz (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 273–98). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hallett, Tim, and Ventresca, Marc (2006). Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and Organizational Forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory and Society, 35(2), 216–36. Heaney, Michael T., and Rojas, Fabio (2006). The Place of Framing: Multiple Audiences and Antiwar Protests near Fort Bragg. Qualitative Sociology, 29, 485–505. Hodgson, Geoff M. (2006). Economics and Institutions. Journal of Economic Issues, 40(1), 3. Kraatz, Matthew S., and Flores, Ricardo (2015). Reinfusing Values. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 44, 353–81. Krygier, Martin (2012). Philip Selznick: Ideals in the World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lok, Jaco, Creed, W. E. Douglas, DeJordy, Rich, and Voronov, Maxim (2017). Living Institutions: Bringing Emotions into Organizational Institutionalism. In Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver, Thomas Lawrence, and Renate Meyer (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, 2nd edn (pp. 591–620). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Messinger, Sheldon L. (1955). Organizational Transformation: A Case Study of a Declining Social Movement. American Sociological Review, 30, 3–10. Meyer, John W., and Rowan, Brian (1977). Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–63. Meyer, John W., and Rowan, Brian (1978). The Structure of Educational Organizations. In Marshall W. Meyer et al. (Eds), Environments and Organizations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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The Long Walk to Aleppo Meyer, John W., and Scott, W. Richard (1983). Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Powell, Walter W., and DiMaggio, Paul J. (Eds) (1991). The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schneiberg, Marc, and Clemens, Elisabeth S. (2006). The Typical Tools for the Job: Research Strategies in Institutional Analysis. Sociological Theory, 24(3), 195–227. Scully, Maureen and Creed, Doug (1997). Stealth Legitimacy: Employee Activism and Corporate Response during the Diffusion of Domestic Partner Benefits. Paper presented at the Academy of Management Meetings, Boston, MA, August. Selznick, Philip (1949). TVA and the Grass Roots. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Selznick, Philip (1992). The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Snow, David A., Burke Rochford, Jr., E., Worden, Steven K., and Benford, Robert D. (1986). Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation. American Sociological Review, 51(4), 464–81. Zald, Mayer N., and Denton, Patricia (1963). From Evangelism to General Service: The Transformation of the YMCA. Administrative Science Quarterly, 8, 214–34. Zuboff, Shoshana (1988). In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York: Basic Books.

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10 The Discourse of Risk and Processes of Institutional Change The Case of Green Chemistry Steve Maguire and Cynthia Hardy

10.1 Introduction Green—or sustainable—chemistry involves “the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances” (Anastas and Warner, 1998: 1).1 It is a “design philosophy” (Mulvihill et al., 2011) that aims to prevent health and environmental problems associated with industrial chemicals by intervening at the molecular level (Maguire et al., 2013) and using non-hazardous substances (Maguire and Bertels, 2012). Emerging in the 1990s (Maguire and Hardy, 2016; HowardGrenville et al., 2017), the principles of green chemistry have changed how chemistry is taught and researched in universities. Green chemistry is responsible for “nearly 4,800 academic papers, almost 1,000 documented industrial innovations, and 12,400 patented inventions”; and “in 2005 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work in this area” (Howard-Grenville et al., 2017: 525 & 530). Moreover, as businesses replace incumbent, hazardous processes and products with cleaner, safer ones, the market value of green chemistry technologies is expanding from $11 billion in 2015 to an expected $100 billion by 2020 (Pike Research, 2011; Trucost, 2015).

1 The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council (DP110101764) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-20140256); and an Eminent Research Scholar Award from the Department of Management and Marketing in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne.

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We adopt a discursive approach to examine the institutional changes that have taken place in the field of chemistry as a result of the emergence and expansion of green chemistry. We identify two forms of risk translation and show how they have changed the discursive “landscape” (Hardy and Thomas, 2017) by constructing new kinds of “knowing subjects” who are able to act on different “known” objects: “[P]ractices are conducted by human agents located in evolving subject positions associated with an unfolding discursive landscape; these practices produce known objects and, in carrying out these practices, knowing subjects are also produced” (Hardy and Thomas, 2017: 478). These subjects and objects co-exist and co-construct each other in a recursive relationship: As the known object presents itself, “the knowing subject reorganizes himself, changes himself, and begins to function in a new way” (Foucault, 2003: 90), shaping how problems—and their solutions—are conceived of and talked about. Accordingly, even within the context of a pervasive, dominant discourse such as risk, new “conditions of possibility” can be created, facilitating institutional change. In this way, we show the complexity of institutional change and challenge conceptions of “heroic” institutional entrepreneurship (see Hardy and Maguire, 2017). The agency of green chemists does not stem from possessing and mobilizing power sources to change the field: There is no “exercise of conscious, sovereign calculation to achieve desired ends with appropriate means” (Cooper et al., 2008: 675). Rather their agency stems from risk translations that indirectly give rise to new configurations of “knowing subjects” and “known objects” within the dominant discourse, changing the discursive landscape to a certain extent, but not replacing the discourse with another. In the remainder of this chapter, we provide an overview of the work on discourse, risk, and translation. We then summarize changes in the field of chemistry as a result of the emergence of green chemistry. We discuss the nature and effects of risk translation. Finally, we conclude with the implications for further development of green chemistry.

10.2 Discourse, Risk, and Translation Discourses are defined as collections of interrelated texts and practices “that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1979: 49). A “dominant” discourse arises when the texts and practices that comprise it refer to each other in well-established ways, thereby constructing convergent, widely shared descriptions of phenomena (Phillips et al., 2004) which, in turn, establish “who and what is ‘normal’, standard and acceptable,” thereby “institutionalizing practices and reproducing behaviour” (Hardy and Maguire, 2010: 1367). A dominant discourse thus provides a clear language 155

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“for talking about a topic and . . . a particular kind of knowledge about a topic” (du Gay, 1996: 43), with the result that a particular view of “reality” becomes reified and taken for granted (e.g. Maguire and Hardy, 2009). Discourses that are more coherent and structured present a more unified view of some aspect of social reality, which becomes reified and taken-for-granted. The more reified and taken-for-granted the social construction, the more difficult or costly it is to enact behaviors that are not consistent with it, either because it is difficult to conceive of and enact alternatives or because proscribed/prescribed behavior can be more clearly defined and connected to clear, strong sanctions/ rewards. (Phillips et al., 2004: 644–5)

A dominant discourse constructs certain categories of identity as meaningful and legitimate (Hardy et al., 2005), i.e. they “warrant voice” (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Only those individuals who can assume these identities are able to speak and act; and not all individuals are able to take up all identities (Maguire et al., 2004). In other words, “some individuals, by virtue of their position in the discourse, will warrant a louder voice than others, while others may warrant no voice at all” (Hardy and Phillips, 1999: 4). Dominant discourses also produce clearly defined, convergent bodies of knowledge (Foucault, 1980), as well as institutionalized mechanisms for determining which statements count as true or false (Knights, 1992; Townley, 1993). According to this view, knowledge is not “discovered” but, rather, is recognized as a result of being produced by authoritative figures, and by conforming to accepted procedures and protocols (Foucault, 1980). The discourse of risk is a dominant discourse (Hardy and Maguire, 2016), constituted by texts and practices that draw on each other in well-established ways. These texts and practices range from scientific articles to textbooks on risk assessment and risk management to compliance and actuarial reports; and from statistical techniques and emergency simulations to risk monitoring and auditing (for more details, see Hardy and Maguire, 2016). Collectively, they construct a convergent and widely shared meaning of risk as an object of knowledge—they are the means by which we “know” risk. [T]he discourses, strategies, practices and institutions around a phenomenon such as risk serve to bring it into being, to construct it as a phenomenon. It is argued that it is only through these discourses, strategies, practices and institutions that we come to know “risk.” They produce “truths” on risk that are then the basis for action. (Lupton, 2013: 113–14)

Specifically, these texts and practices emphasize realist assumptions (Gephart et al., 2009) that construct risk as “a tangible by-product of natural and social processes [that] can be objectively mapped, measured, and controlled, at least to the extent that science permits” ( Jasanoff, 1998: 94). According to this 156

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dominant discourse, risk is understood to be the probability of an adverse effect or negative event of some magnitude—a harm, hazard, or danger of some kind—that can be managed if the nature of its effects and likelihood of its occurrence can be accurately assessed (e.g. Danley, 2005).2 In this way, unpredictable and uncontrollable hazards are transformed into knowable and manageable risks (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1999; Dean, 1999; Lupton, 2013). This dominant discourse privileges formal, scientific knowledge, empowering some people as “experts” and dismissing others as inexpert. By representing individuals, objects, and activities in particular ways, this dominant discourse authorizes certain actors (i.e. those who are capable of taking up particular risk identities) to construct what constitutes a risk, and to decide how to avoid or manage it. “[The discourse of risk] emphasizes the role of professional languages (such as quantitative risk assessment) and analytic practices (such as cost-benefit analysis) in shaping public perceptions of risk. Authoritative knowledge is created in this framework by people or institutions that master the relevant formal discourses” (Jasanoff, 1998: 94). The dominant discourse privileges risk assessors—the scientists who determine the nature, level, and probability of harm, damage, or loss—and risk managers—often government regulators responsible for taking the necessary measures to reduce risk to some level deemed acceptable (Hardy and Maguire, 2016). It also produces a body of risk knowledge that is assumed to be “true” insofar as its existence has been determined by the application of scientific knowledge derived from the past in highly institutionalized ways (e.g. Knights and Vurdubakis, 2003; Lupton, 2013).

10.3 Discourse and Institutional Change Much of the work on discourse has focused on its constraining effects and the way that it fixes and reifies meanings, limiting what individuals can say and do (Hardy and Thomas, 2014). Certainly, the dominant discourse of risk has severely constraining effects on how risk is talked about, acted upon, and organized (Lupton, 2013; Maguire and Hardy, 2013; Hardy and Maguire, 2016). However, not even a dominant discourse can preclude all possibility

2 In the case of chemicals, risk is defined as a function of hazard (the negative event) and exposure, which is analogous to probability of occurrence and is typically expressed in terms of contact with a chemical present at some level of concentration. For example, the likelihood of cancer is higher from contact with a carcinogen present at 100 parts per million (ppm) than with the same carcinogen present at just 1 ppm.

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of agency. As Hardy and Phillips (2004: 304) point out, there is always some room for maneuver, even within the most dominating of discourses: [D]iscourses are never completely cohesive and devoid of internal tensions, and are therefore never able to totally determine social reality. They are always partial, often crosscut by inconsistencies and contradiction, and almost always contested to some degree . . . actors are commonly embedded in multiple discourses. The tensions between these discourses produce a discursive space in which the agent can play one discourse against another.

By exploiting these contradictions and tensions, actors—intentionally or otherwise—can change meanings and create new “conditions of possibility” (Maguire and Hardy, 2006). Our interest in this chapter is exploring whether and how contradictions in the dominant discourse of risk have helped to bring about changes in the field of chemistry. One mechanism of particular interest is “translation”—a term used by institutional theorists (e.g. Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996; Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008) to counter the dominance of the diffusion metaphor, which “connotes a transmission of a given entity” (Zilber, 2006: 283). In contrast, the translation metaphor suggests a reshaping of meaning as ideas travel within a field. Field members do not transmit predetermined, intact, and unchangeable meanings; rather, meanings are changed as the texts and practices in which they are embedded are “consumed” by other actors in the field. These actors then interpret them, modifying the original meaning, as they go on to produce their own texts and engage in new practices (Maguire and Hardy, 2009). “To translate is to transform, and in the act of transforming a breaking of fidelity towards the original source is necessarily involved” (Brown, 2002: 7). Meanings are thus elaborated and amended in ongoing, complex processes, and can shape the field in unintended or unexpected ways (Hardy and Maguire, 2010). Translation is a concept that also appears in the risk literature, where a small body of work has suggested that “first-order” risks, such as health hazards and environmental harms, are translated into “second-order” organizational risks. Take the example of a safety notice about a slippery floor in a supermarket. As a matter of first-order risk management, the notice is there to protect the public. As a matter of defensive, secondary risk management, the notice is there to protect the organization in the event of legal action should someone slip over, i.e. to communicate that reasonable steps were taken to inform the public. (Power et al., 2009: 310)

In the example above, the risk of injury to an individual is translated into a legal risk to an organization. In doing so, meanings are transformed: The object posing the risk is no longer the slippery floor but the litigious customer; 158

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and the actor at risk is no longer the individual but the organization. Thus, there appears scope within the dominant discourse of risk to use translation to change meanings (Hardy & Maguire, forthcoming). Therefore, we also examine whether and how risk translations have shaped changes in the field of chemistry. In Section 10.4, we provide an overview of the changes in the field of chemistry associated with the advent and growth of green chemistry.

10.4 Changes in the Field of Chemistry The success of chemistry in driving industrial innovation is longstanding, dating back to ancient civilizations. Metal working, soap making, even making fire all represent the manipulation of molecules to achieve some valued functionality. “Modern” chemistry, dating from around the eighteenth century (Ihde, 1964), is responsible for discoveries as diverse as penicillin, polyethylene, and the pill (Lorch, 2015). Traditionally, chemists produce such discoveries through scientific research on the structure and function of chemicals, leading to new chemicals and new ways of making existing chemicals. Commercialization is carried out by industry actors who adopt and apply the discoveries of university or in-house chemists in the form of new technologies. It is the task of scientists outside the mainstream discipline of chemistry, such as toxicologists,3 to investigate whether the chemicals discovered by chemists and commercialized by industry are toxic to humans or other organisms. The study of chemical risks, such as carcinogenicity (risk of cancer), mutagenicity (risk of damage to DNA), and endocrine disruption (risk of adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects) is, in effect, “outsourced” to other scientists. These scientists determine the intrinsic hazards of specific chemicals, and also conduct studies to ascertain how these negative effects relate to different exposure levels, i.e. how much of a chemical is required to result in toxic effects. The results of their activities inform risk management decisions by regulators, who are charged with managing chemical risks to workers, consumers, the public, and the environment. Risk management typically limits exposure to hazardous chemicals to levels considered to be adequately safe. As a result, many toxic chemicals remain in widespread use throughout the economy, giving rise to activity by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the form of advocating greater regulation of chemicals of concern and mobilizing consumer action on products that contain them. Green chemistry is changing these traditional practices. Instead of trying to reduce risk by limiting exposure to hazards, green chemistry “intends to 3 Other scientific disciplines concerned with ecotoxicology, and various branches of medicine.

chemical

risk

include

endocrinology,

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eliminate intrinsic hazard itself” (Warner et al., 2004: 775) and, in so doing, it represents a radical departure from the traditional approach to chemical risk management (Maguire et al., 2013). Green chemists retain chemistry’s traditional concern with functionality, aiming “to optimize the commercial function of a chemical while minimizing its hazard and risk” (ACS, 2017a). In this way, it is hoped that green chemistry discoveries will be commercialized based on their superior performance and/or lower cost, and also as retailers “pull” greener, safer products through supply chains to meet customer demand. Green chemistry aims to be “an innovative, non-regulatory, economically driven approach toward sustainability” (Manley et al., 2008: 743). New teaching practices to make chemistry “green” have been introduced since the 1990s (see Maguire and Hardy, 2016; Howard-Grenville et al., 2017). The field’s first textbook articulating the twelve principles of green chemistry was published in 1998 (Anastas and Warner, 1998). It heralded a significant change in teaching practice by encouraging the incorporation of toxicology into the chemistry curriculum. “Minimizing toxicity, while simultaneously maintaining function and efficacy . . . requires an understanding of not only chemistry but also of the principles of toxicology and environmental science” (ACS, 2017b). Accordingly, many university chemistry departments have signed up for the “Green Chemistry Commitment” to ensure all chemistry majors have “an understanding of the principles of toxicology, the molecular mechanisms of how chemicals affect human health and the environment, and the resources to identify and assess molecular hazards” (Beyond Benign, 2017). Today, there are green chemistry programs at more than forty U.S. universities, as well as at another thirty universities in sixteen other countries (see ACS, 2017c). Research has also changed to conform to the twelve principles. Collaboration among chemists, toxicologists, and environmental scientists is emphasized at the design stage of chemical synthesis (Anastas, 2016: 4325). In this way, green chemists not only discover a chemical’s intrinsic functional properties, but they also develop an informed view of its hazards. Centers of research excellence in green chemistry have proliferated—the Global Green Chemistry Centres Network (G2C2) has more than thirty members on six continents. There are also green chemistry journals such as Green Chemistry, Green Chemistry Letters and Reviews, and Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, countless books, as well as recurring conferences such as the ACS’s Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry International Conference on Green Chemistry. Academics are also increasingly coming together with business and government in green chemistry initiatives. In the U.S., the Green Chemistry Institute (GCI) was created in 1997, bringing together academic, government, and industry stakeholders to advance green chemistry education and research. 160

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GCI allied itself with the American Chemical Society (ACS), and was fully integrated in 2005 as the ACS-GCI (Matus, 2009). It convenes roundtables involving companies from a range of industries, including pharmaceuticals, chemical manufacturers, and biochemicals (ACS, 2017d). The Canadian Green Chemistry Network was launched in 2002, bringing together academic and government researchers, and a Canadian Green Chemistry Forum was created within the Chemical Institute of Canada (Li and Jessop, 2004). In Europe, SusChem was launched in 2004 by academic and industry stakeholders to “revitalise and inspire European chemistry and industrial biotechnology research, development and innovation in a sustainable way,” in partnership with European Union and national public authorities (SusChem, 2017). The German government launched the International Sustainable Chemistry Collaboration Centre in 2017 “to shape the transformation of the chemical sector towards sustainable chemistry” by connecting “stakeholders worldwide across sectors and actors” around innovation and education projects (ISC3, 2017). Business is commercializing the green chemistry discoveries of both academic and industry researchers. The Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge, launched in the U.S. in 1995, recognizes successful attempts to apply green chemistry principles to industrial projects (EPA, 2000). Since then, over 1,600 technologies have been nominated. The 114 award-winning technologies are estimated to have eliminated 826 million pounds of hazardous chemicals and solvents, saved 21 billion gallons of water, and removed 7.8 billion pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents from the air each year (EPA, 2017). The Green Chemistry and Commerce Council, set up in 2005 as a cross-sectoral, business-to-business network working collaboratively to advance green chemistry (GC3, 2017a), formed a Retail Leadership Council in 2013. The council engages with major chemical manufacturers to improve product sustainability and find “ways to accelerate the development and scale up of green chemistry solutions” across the supply chain (GC3, 2017b). Similarly, the NGO-industry collaboration BizNGO is actively working “to promote the creation and adoption of safer chemicals and sustainable materials, thereby creating market transitions to a healthy economy” (BizNGO, 2017). In sum, we can see evidence of significant changes in the field of chemistry associated with green chemistry. In Section 10.5, we explore the role of the dominant discourse of risk and risk translations in these changes.

10.5 Green Chemistry and the Discourse of Risk We analyze changes in the field of chemistry due to the emergence and expansion of green chemistry by mapping the unfolding “discursive landscape” 161

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(Hardy and Thomas, 2017) in the field, allowing us to identify networks of new subject positions and changes in power relations among actors. In particular, we show how two different forms of risk translation—one in relation to chemical risks, and another in relation to organizational risks—create conditions of possibility for green chemistry to change the field of chemistry.

10.5.1 Chemical Risks Green chemistry involves a form of risk translation that inverts the relative importance of exposure and hazard in relation to chemical risks. The discourse of risk defines chemical risk as a function of hazard and exposure. Traditional practices in the field emphasize limiting exposure to chemical risks to acceptable levels: Scientists such as toxicologists engage in a considerable amount of research to establish the exposure levels related to adverse effects, while risk management interventions use this research to align exposure levels with a level of risk deemed acceptable. Green chemistry, in contrast, emphasizes eliminating the risk by removing the intrinsic hazard (Maguire and Hardy, 2016). Green chemists therefore try to remove chemical hazards at all stages of a chemical’s life cycle: from raw materials to synthesis to finished product to waste, as the example of plastics in Box 10.1 shows.

10.5.2 Creating New Conditions of Possibility We argue that risk translations that invert traditional understandings of chemical risks create new conditions of possibility that facilitate institutional change. They do so by changing the way in which the object of knowledge— the molecule—is “known,” which in turn constructs new categories of “knowing subject,” all of which occurs within the dominant discourse of risk. Insofar as traditional chemistry outsources the study of chemical risks, traditional chemists know the molecule only in terms of its structure and function, i.e. as a site of discovery and potential innovation in terms of its use. They are not concerned with hazard. Other scientists, such as toxicologists, do know the molecule as hazardous. However, they also know the molecule in terms of how different scenarios of exposure to it constitute different levels of risk. In privileging exposure over hazard, the object posing the risk is not the molecule per se but, rather, activities that result in an unsafe degree of exposure. The dominant discourse of risk thus creates a “problem,” i.e. activities that result in unsafe exposure to hazardous chemicals. However, it also provides the solution, namely regulations to limit exposure. This, in turn, reinforces the authority of risk-conscious scientists to identify exposure 162

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The Discourse of Risk and Processes of Institutional Change Box 10.1. CHANGING PRACTICES: THE EXAMPLE OF PLASTICS No material is more ubiquitous in our society than plastic: Humans were said to be living in a “plastic age” as early as 1945 (Thompson et al., 2009). Derived from the Greek verb “plassein,” which means to shape or mold, the term refers to a diverse set of materials characterized by their malleability (Freinkel, 2011). In fact, the reason why plastics are so ubiquitous is because of this functionality—they can be extruded, spun, cast, or molded into almost any shape. They are also inexpensive, lightweight, strong, durable, corrosion-resistant, and have high thermal and electrical insulation properties (Thompson et al., 2009). Chemists invented the first synthetic plastic, Bakelite, by mixing phenol and formaldehyde and subjecting the mixture to heat and pressure (ACS, 1993). Bakelite was the starting point of a global industry that, today, makes widely used products such as polyethylene, polystyrene, polycarbonate, and polypropylene, among countless others, employs more than 60 million people around the world, and has made a significant contribution to technological advances in our society (Andrady and Neal, 2009). More recently, scientists outside chemistry have demonstrated how each stage of the life cycle of plastics is associated with chemical risks. First, the raw materials for plastics are often toxic. For example, in the case of Bakelite, phenol is highly caustic and acute exposure can cause death (Toxnet, 2017a), while formaldehyde causes cancer of the nasopharynx and leukemia (Toxnet, 2017b). Second, the manufacture of synthetic plastics depends upon non-renewable petroleum, the extraction and use of which contributes greatly to climate change. Third, converting petroleum into plastics requires toxic intermediate chemicals (e.g. the carcinogen “vinyl chloride” used to make PVC), and occurs at high temperatures and pressures, which exposes workers and communities to risks of explosions. Fourth, chemicals such as phthalates, believed to damage children’s health, are added to achieve desired strength and plasticity. Finally, at the end of their life, most synthetic plastics end up as waste that does not biodegrade, instead accumulating in landfills or habitats as contaminants. The traditional way of dealing with this wide range of risks has been through regulations to limit exposure. For example, to deal with carcinogenic effects of vinyl chloride, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) regulations stipulate that no employee may be exposed to concentrations greater than 5 ppm averaged over any 15-minute period; and signs must be posted with the following warning: DANGER, VINYL CHLORIDE, MAY CAUSE CANCER, WEAR RESPIRATORY PROTECTION AND PROTECTIVE CLOTHING IN THIS AREA, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY (OSHA, 2017). Risks of explosions are managed by establishing “lower and upper explosive limits” for vinyl chloride in air. To deal with risks associated with additives such as phthalates, the European Union has restricted their concentration in PVC toys and childcare articles to 0.1 percent by weight. Waste streams are similarly regulated to limit the concentration of hazardous substances, as well as by imposing labeling, record keeping, and monitoring obligations on waste producers. By inverting the relative emphasis on hazard versus exposure and combining their knowledge of risk with the science of chemistry, green chemists have created new chemical molecules, substances, and processes that are “benign by design” throughout the entire plastics life cycle. For example, they have found ways to make plastic from renewable biomass (plant-based material) rather than petroleum. A company called Natureworks makes the Ingeo brand of plastic comprised of polylactic acid formulated from plant sugars, which is used in 3D printing, building materials, and packaging. (continued )

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Institutions and Organizations Box 10.1. CONTINUED Green chemists have also discovered how micro-organisms can biosynthesize materials, avoiding toxic intermediate chemicals as well as high temperatures and pressures. Companies such as Amyris, BioAmber, and Elevance are commercializing such processes (Watson, 2016). Additionally, green chemists are working with toxicologists to create new plastics additives designed at the molecular level to be non-toxic. Valspar, a major supplier of epoxy can linings, is partnering with NGOs, academics, toxicologists, and brand owners to develop safer alternatives (McGrath and Israel, 2017). Regarding disposal, most of these new bioplastics are compostable and biodegradable.

scenarios, and of risk-conscious regulators to institute, monitor, and police regulations based on them. Meanwhile, traditional chemists need not be riskconscious at all, since their role is simply to stimulate innovation through their discoveries. When green chemistry transposes the traditional relative emphasis on exposure over hazard to privilege the latter, the molecule becomes “known” in a different way. Green chemists, who are knowledgeable about basic principles of toxicology in addition to chemical properties and functionalities, “know” the molecule as hazardous (or not). Further, in the case of molecules with intrinsic hazards, they also know how to go about trying to develop benign substitutes for them using the principles of green chemistry. Within this unfolding discursive landscape, the problem shifts from unsafe exposure scenarios to unsafe molecules, i.e. to hazardous chemicals themselves. The solution to this problem is risk-conscious green chemists who are undertaking research to provide safer alternatives, thereby creating conditions of possibility for the expansion and institutionalization of green chemistry.

10.6 Organizational Risks Organizations are not particularly interested in chemical risks per se; but they are interested in organizational risks. Organizations have long taken risks for the benefit of returns such as profit, innovation, and expansion (Pearson, 2006). But there has also been an emphasis on managing—and avoiding, if possible—certain risks (Gephart et al., 2009), such as regulatory risk, i.e. a threat of increased costs of operating a business, or of an unfavorable change in the competitive landscape, due to new regulations (Investopedia, 2017). More recently, other organizational risks have become the focus of managerial attention, including reputational risk, i.e. a threat of damage to brand equity due to negative judgments of an organization’s actions by key stakeholders (Scott and Walsham, 2005; Power et al., 2009); operational risk, i.e. a threat of 164

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losses due to failures in internal systems (Power, 2005); and strategic risk, i.e. a threat to long-term performance or even the survival of the enterprise due to external events and trends (Slywotzky and Drzik, 2005; Deloitte, 2013; Calandro, 2015). We argue that organizations are more likely to adopt green chemistry innovations when risk translations convert chemical risks into organizational risks. For example, chemical risks translate into reputational risks to retailers when the continued sale of hazardous products is likely to damage their reputations with consumers. NGOs can heighten these reputational risks to retailers by targeting consumer sentiment and using market campaigns to mobilize consumers, threaten consumer boycotts, and undertake shaming campaigns (O’Rourke, 2005). For example, the “Mind the Store” campaign issues an annual report card for some thirty major U.S. retailers evaluating their policies for selling products containing chemicals of concern, which also heightens the reputational risk of retailers who continue to sell products containing hazardous chemicals. Retailers’ actions to manage their reputational risk, in demanding substitute products, put pressure on upstream suppliers. Some large retailers, such as Walmart, have “red listed” certain chemicals, which means Walmart will not purchase products that contain them, thereby threatening suppliers with “toxic lock-out” unless they provide alternatives (Liroff, 2008). This can significantly change the behavior of upstream organizations that manufacture or sell products containing harmful chemicals. Many manufacturing organizations translate chemical risks into regulatory risk, i.e. possible new government regulations that will impose additional costs and restrict business opportunities, which they address through lobbying and public relations, while continuing to manufacture risky products for as long as possible. In contrast, some organizations translate chemical risks into a strategic risk, i.e. the danger of toxic lock-out or “retailer regulation” (Grimaldi, 2017) that could threaten the company’s entire business, especially if it is heavily invested in the chemical in question. Upstream suppliers that translate chemical risks into strategic risks to themselves are more likely to invest in innovation with the goal of adopting safer alternative chemicals in order to eliminate the strategic risk. In sum, translating chemical risks into organizational risks can trigger a cascade of changes that transform supply chains, rippling backwards from downstream practices concerning purchasing, product design, and product offerings through to upstream suppliers that are pressured to innovate in order to find less hazardous materials and technologies that will help maintain their business. The cumulative effect of these “risk translations” (Hardy & Maguire, forthcoming) is to stimulate demand for green chemistry alternatives to hazardous incumbent products and technologies, as the example of BPA in Box 10.2 illustrates. 165

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Institutions and Organizations Box 10.2. CHANGING PRACTICES: THE EXAMPLE OF BISPHENOL A Bisphenol A (BPA) was first synthesized by chemists in 1981. It was, however, chemists in the 1950s who discovered its industrial potential—as a raw material for a plastic called polycarbonate used in baby bottles and other containers, as well as an important component of epoxy resins used for protective coatings on metal equipment and food cans. Today, it is used in a wide range of industries, with sales of US$20 billion expected in 2020 (GVR, 2014). Some scientific studies suggest that BPA is an endocrine disrupting chemical, i.e. it interferes with hormones in ways that lead to reproductive, developmental, and neurological problems and, as such, can pose chemical risks to workers, consumers, and ecosystems exposed to it. While there remains considerable controversy about BPA’s chemical risks, with regulations varying in different countries, retailers have already taken action. For them, BPA’s chemical risk translates into a reputational risk—continuing to sell products containing BPA potentially damages their reputation among consumers and other stakeholders. Heightening these reputational risks have been the actions of a range of environmental and public health NGOs. For example, in Canada, Environmental Defence (2017) staged a “baby rally” in 2007, bringing parents and their babies to the front of the Ontario legislative building to protest BPA in baby bottles and other products. As a result, many retailers have already voluntarily withdrawn baby bottles containing BPA, replacing them with “BPA-free” alternatives. These pressures are rippling upstream. After years of fighting regulations and insisting that BPA did not threaten the health of babies, U.S. manufacturers of baby bottles bowed to retailer pressure and consumer sentiment, and agreed to stop shipping baby bottles made with the chemical in 2009 (Adams, 2009). Retailers are now demanding that suppliers provide BPA alternatives for other products. Following pressure from retailers and NGOs, Campbell Soup Company (2017) announced its intention to abandon cans with BPA by 2018. Crown Holdings (2016: 16), a leading supplier of packaging products, recently noted that “public reports, litigation and other allegations regarding the potential health hazards of bisphenol A could contribute to a perceived safety risk about the Company’s products and adversely impact sales or otherwise disrupt the Company’s business.” As a result, it is “exploring various alternatives to the use of bisphenol-A and conversion to alternatives.” As pressure mounts, some manufacturers are adopting green chemistry discoveries. Valspar, a maker of epoxy linings for can manufacturers, has partnered with green chemists “to design a molecule with the appropriate functionality of a bisphenol epoxy resin minus the undesirable biological activity associated with BPA.” The resulting innovation—tetramethyl bisphenol—is now a key product in the company’s portfolio of non-BPA offerings that collectively are “approved for use in over 100 countries and can be found on over 20 billion cans in circulation today” (McGrath and Israel, 2017).

10.7 Creating New Conditions of Possibility Risk translations that convert chemical risks into organizational risks create new conditions of possibility that facilitate institutional change. They do so by changing the way in which the object of knowledge—the molecule—is “known,” which in turn constructs new categories of “knowing subject,” all of which occurs within the dominant discourse of risk. 166

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When a chemical risk is translated into reputational risk, the object of knowledge is not the chemical molecule at all, but the organization’s reputation. The retailer becomes a particular kind of risk-conscious subject—one that “knows” how the organization is perceived and evaluated by different stakeholders, as well as what its reputation is worth. The dominant discourse of risk creates a problem—products containing hazardous chemicals whose continued sale is likely to damage the company’s reputation, especially if NGOs are active. However, it also provides the solution in that retailers are well versed in practices for managing reputational risk, including the withdrawal of offending products and pressuring of suppliers and other upstream actors to provide substitute products. As the pressure mounts on upstream companies, they also become risk-conscious subjects increasingly concerned with strategic risks that could jeopardize their entire business or, at least, large sectors of it. The “known” object is now their entire business and the problem is the need for sustainable innovations to replace hazardous chemicals. Once again, the risk-conscious green chemist is able to provide safer alternatives, thereby creating conditions of possibility for the expansion and institutionalization of green chemistry. In sum, the discursive landscape shifts with the translation of chemical risk into organizational risk. The result is a new network of risk-conscious subjects—retailers, NGOs, suppliers, manufacturers, and green chemists, each of whom is addressing a different risk but whose actions converge in trying to remove hazardous chemicals, technologies, and products from supply chains. This synergistic action is not necessarily the result of shared interests—their subject positions are different, their interests are different, and even the objects of their risk knowledge are different. Nonetheless, they all come to focus on problems whose solutions can ultimately only be provided through green chemistry.

10.8 Conclusion Our study of green chemistry makes a number of important contributions to understanding the role of discourse in institutional change. First, it shows how even a dominant, apparently homogenous discourse like risk is fraught with fractures and fissures that provide the potential for institutional change. This potential can be exploited through two different forms of risk translation. One form is inversion, i.e. a rearrangement of key elements within a given category of risk. The other is conversion—the conversion of one category of risk to another. Each can result in the emergence of new meanings and practices. Both forms of risk translation are therefore important ways of creating the conditions of possibility for change without a radical discursive overhaul, 167

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offering opportunities for institutional change even in the context of dominant discourses which, by their very nature, are difficult to transform. It is important to note that translation does not allow actors—either green chemists or organizations—to escape the dominant discourse of risk. In fact, risk translations serve to reinforce it, and actors continue to be subjected to it. Second, our study draws attention to how, rather than construct risks in isolation, organizations construct them in relation to other risks. Accordingly, we suggest that translated risks and actions taken to manage them constitute an ecology of risks. Organizational researchers have used the term “ecology” to refer to populations of organizations that compete for resources (e.g. Hannan and Freeman, 1977), as well as the set of organizations brought together around processes of innovation (e.g. Dougherty and Dunne, 2011). The concept as used by these writers aims to convey complexity in terms of a large number of actors with multiple relations among them. However, such work tends to focus attention on actors and treat their interests in an essentialist way. In contrast, we use the term ecology to refer to an interrelated set of risks and the relations among them, which arise through—but are not determined by—risk translations. It is thus the risks that constitute the ecology, not the actors. How an actor behaves is shaped by the particular risk that they translate. For example, a manufacturer behaves quite differently when they translate chemical risk into regulatory risk than when they translate it into strategic risk. The former tends to lead to manufacturers denying accounts of harm and investing in lobbying and public relations, while continuing to manufacture risky products for as long as possible. The latter tends to lead to greater investment in research and development and innovation in order to find substitutes that do not cause harm. Of course, actors are implicated in the ecology since they translate risks and then take action to manage them, thereby shaping the ecology’s composition and the meaning of objects. However, actors’ interests are neither fixed nor predetermined—interests emerge from the risk translations, rather than determining them, as we show in this chapter (Hardy & Maguire, forthcoming). Third, our study shows that green chemists are by no means “heroic” institutional entrepreneurs (see Hardy and Maguire, 2017). Their “agency” does not stem from possessing and mobilizing power sources to change the field or overthrow the dominant discourse of risk. Rather, agency stems from risk translations that indirectly give rise to new configurations of “knowing subjects” and “known objects,” thereby changing the discursive landscape in terms of how problems—and their solutions—are conceived and talked about, albeit still within the dominant discourse of risk. These changes give rise to new conditions of possibility, which do not fully determine outcomes but do make certain outcomes more or less likely. Finally, having counseled against thinking of green chemists as heroic institutional entrepreneurs, our study does suggest that green chemists and 168

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others wishing to remove hazardous chemicals from the economy are now in a position to harness the dominant discourse of risk more proactively through risk translations that convert chemical risks into organizational risks. This will help to circumvent businesses’ lack of interest or knowledge about chemical risks, and focus their attention on more familiar organizational risks. The more organizations become risk-conscious and see themselves as exposed to organizational risks, the more they are likely to change institutionalized practices that take hazardous substances for granted as a presumed necessity for economic progress.

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The Discourse of Risk and Processes of Institutional Change O’Rourke, D. (2005). Market Movements: Nongovernmental Organization Strategies to Influence Global Production and Consumption. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 9(1–2), 115–28. Pearson, G. (2006). Risk and the Consumer in Australian Financial Services Reform. Sydney Law Review, 28, 99–137. Phillips, N., Lawrence, T., and Hardy, C. (2004). Discourse and Institutions. Academy of Management Review, 29(4), 1–18. Pike Research (2011). Green Chemistry Bio-Based Chemicals, Renewable Feedstocks, Green Polymers, Less-Toxic Alternative Chemical Formulations, and the Foundations of a Sustainable Chemical Industry. Research report, Pike Research LLC. Potter, J., and Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage. Power, M. (2005). The Invention of Operational Risk. Review of International Political Economy, 12(4), 577–99. Power, M., Scheytt, T., Soin, K., and Sahlin, K. (2009). Reputational Risk as a Logic of Organizing in Late Modernity. Organization Studies, 30(2–3), 301–24. Sahlin, K., and Wedlin, L. (2008). Circulating Ideas: Imitation, Translation and Editing. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin-Andersson, and R. Suddaby (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 218–42). London: Sage. Scott, S. V., and Walsham, G. (2005). Reconceptualizing and Managing Reputation Risk in the Knowledge Economy: Toward Reputable Action. Organization Science, 16(3), 308–22. Slywotzky, A., and Drzik, J. (2005). Countering the Biggest Risk of All. Harvard Business Review, April, 78–88. SusChem (2017). What Is SusChem? http://www.suschem.org/about (accessed December 6, 2017). Thompson, R. C., Swan, S. H., Moore, C. J. and vom Saal, F. S. (2009). Our Plastic Age. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, 1973–6. Townley, B. (1993). Foucault, Power/Knowledge and Its Relevance for Human Resource Management. Academy of Management Review, 18(3), 518–45. Toxnet (2017a). https://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search/a?dbs+hsdb:@term +@DOCNO+113 (accessed December 6, 2017). Toxnet (2017b). https://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search/a?dbs+hsdb:@term +@DOCNO+164 (accessed December 6, 2017). Trucost (2015). Making the Business and Economic Case for Safer Chemistry: Report for the American Sustainable Business Council and Green Chemistry & Commerce Council. https:// www.trucost.com/publication/making-business-economic-case-safer-chemistry/ (accessed January 13, 2018). Warner, J. C., Cannon, A. S., and Dye, K. M. (2004). Green Chemistry. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 24, 775–99. Watson, B. (2016). Plastic Substitutes and Other Breakthroughs from 25 Years of Green Chemistry. Guardian, October 6. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainablebusiness/2016/oct/06/green-chemistry-growth-25-birthday (accessed January 21, 2018). Zilber, T. B. (2006). The Work of the Symbolic in Institutional Processes: Translations of Rational Myths in Israeli Hi-Tech. Academy Management Journal, 49(2), 281–303.

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11 Making and Regulating Business Judgment Judicial Practice, Logics, and Orders Terry McNulty and Abigail Stewart

11.1 Introduction This chapter analyzes the practice of a judge in litigation when called upon to examine the decisions made by the directors of Continental Assurance of London (Continental). In the case of Continental,1 the litigation started with the liquidator on behalf of the company, seeking personal contribution from the former directors to the company for the alleged losses suffered as a result of the directors’ actions.2 This cause of action triggered judicial action that involved the judiciary considering the particulars of the claim, the response, and the evidence in support, deciding whether to subject director decision making to review at law, and associated issues of liability. The study is timely as there is a growing interest in the treatment of business judgment by the judiciary. While directors make business judgment, judges are called upon to review and regulate the making of business judgments when litigation is brought against directors. Corporate law places directors at the top of a corporate hierarchy, possessed of all of the powers of the company, to pursue the commercial objectives of it. Authority conferred, corporate law does, however, provide for accountability in respect of its exercise, at the instigation of shareholders, the company itself, liquidators, and the state. These accountability mechanisms created at the institutional level of the law are perpetuated and developed through judicial practice across the institutional orders. However, a perceived judicial deference towards business 1 2

Re Continental Assurance Company of London plc (in liquidation) (No 4) [2007] 2BCLC 287. See Insolvency Act 1986, ss 212 and 214.

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judgment is at the center of debate about the controversial relationship between director authority and director accountability in law. Our particular focus of attention is a judge administering company law as it relates to directors’ business judgment. We analyze the “judgment,” a contemporaneous text of the specific judge’s decision by taking a narrative approach to the case (Langley, 1999; Brooks and Gewirtz, 1996), and using theories of practice (Schatzki, 2006, 2017) and logics (Thornton et al., 2012). This methodology, complemented by the application of legal, organization, and social theory to decided case law, enables us to identify a theoretical relationship between the individual judge’s action, collective judicial practice, and plural logics of the social order. Empirically, the judicial practice revealed by analysis of the judgment displays patterns, including beliefs, values, and assumptions, that appear to guide the judge’s frames of reference, the legal theories he engages with, his narrative statements of the law and the facts, and his reasoning whereby he arrives at a decision. We label these contrasting patterns as a “creditorregarding logic,” and a director-regarding, “director’s business judgment logic.” These available but competing logics are “captured” particularly through the language and rhetoric of the judicial narrative, as the judge appears to mediate the contest between the two logics as he reasons his way to a decision through the litigation process. In the end analysis, the judge rejects the creditor-regarding logic and adopts categorically a directorregarding business judgment logic. The authority of the director granted through the institution of corporate law is respected, and the business judgments made pursuant to that authority are afforded protection. The study reveals how available institutional logics, here labelled creditorregarding and director-regarding, are enacted by the relationality between judicial practice and institutional orders. Ultimately, through the judicial narrative of the judgment, as it reveals the agency of the judge within the specific context of the case, we can identify how the litigation process and the judical practice that constitutes the process has the potential to shape the future of the institution of corporate law and reverberate through the adjacent fields of commerical practice and corporate governance. Our bringing to light the connection between individual action and societal order is valuable to practice theories which are subject to criticism that they are unable to attend to the individual or deal with big topics well (Hui et al., 2016: 2) as well as to institutional theory, where the concern is a lack of micro-foundations. The findings reasonate with arguments that the action available to any individual within a practice, the judge in this case, reflects agency as a socially embedded process of engagement (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998).

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11.2 Corporate Law and Litigation against Company Directors Company law is a social structure composed of cultural-cognitive, normative, and regulatory elements (Scott, 2003) that provide stability and meaning to the incorporation and regulation of the registered company and its commercial activities. Corporate law in the United Kingdom derives its mainframe from the combination of hard and soft law legal structures, principally, and for our present purposes, those found in the Companies Act 2006 and the Insolvency Act 1986 (as amended by the Enterprise Act 2002). The field of corporate law also consists of common law precedents, that is judge-made law, whereby judicial rulings in one court bind future courts in specified circumstances. This combination of statute and common law precedent both enables and constrains director activity, and lies at the epicenter of the adjacent field of corporate governance, and the ongoing debate around balancing director authority and accountability. Directors exercise the powers of the company in pursuit of the commercial enterprise, but to counterbalance these enabling provisions, accountability mechanisms are provided, first in the duties owed under the Companies Act 2006,3 and then in the shareholder and other company constituencies’ rights to initiate a cause of action against the director in relation to loss suffered by the company resulting from the exercise of authority.4 In this chapter we study litigation involving the business judgment of directors. A variety of civil (as opposed to criminal) causes of action can be commenced by various parties for a number of reasons. The judge, when considering a cause of action against a director, must decide whether as a part of his practice he is to review business judgments or not. A judge has a degree of discretion as to what decisions he will and will not review, and on what basis. How judges act and rule in litigation with regard to business judgment, while a very practical question, poses a theoretical challenge of understanding the relationship between individual judicial agency and collective practices and logics that prevail within the fields and societal context in which judicial action is embedded. To begin to examine this question further Section 11.3 introduces practice and logics perspectives of organizing.

3

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Companies Act 2006, ss 171–8, 182.

4

See Companies Act 2006, Pt 11.

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11.3 Practices and Logics 11.3.1 A Practice Perspective Practice theorizing is an approach to understanding how people act in social contexts, how actions relate to structures, and how practices constitute reality (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011). The main supposition of the practice perspective is that social life consists of embodied, materially interwoven practices ordered across time and space (Hui, 2016). Amidst the different approaches to practice theorizing that are available Schatzki’s concept of practice, with its linkage between actions, practice organizers, and social order serves our “empirical” and “theoretical” interests in understanding how judicial practice is interpenetrated with social order and consequential for that order (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011). A practice is a pattern filled out by a multitude of actions (Hui, 2016: 53), that is, organized sets of doings and sayings, with human activity tied to the body and the evolving practices of which it is a moment (Schatzki, 2006, 2017). The action and sequences of performances that compose a practice are organized by rules, teleoaffective structures, practical and general understandings. These are normative, teleological, and affective structures guiding what we do and what makes sense. Practices connect to material arrangements— bodies, artifacts, living creatures, and things of nature—to form practicearrangement bundles. Social order consists of bundles of practice that are related, via common actions, chains of action, motivating events, participants in one bundle being intentionally directed to other bundles, physical connections, and causality (Schatzki, 2017: 134). Practices become taken for granted and actors can be seen to take one another into account as they carry out their own such practices. Such bundles connect to form wider constellations of practices and arrangements, and all social phenomena consist of sectors, slices or aspects of “bundles and constellations” (Schatzki, 2017: 133). Bundles and constellations form one gigantic nexus of practices and arrangements, which Schatzki calls “the plenum of practice.” So, for Schatzki and others, the social world is a mesh of material-practice arrangements with people, as social beings, constituted by practices, discourses, and institutions such as government and corporations (Schatzki, 2017; Watson, 2016). The reference to institutions raises the challenging prospect of complementing practice and institutional logic perspectives of organizing. Attention to practice is common to both perspectives, as is a shared interest in discourse and language. A difference, and hence a potential synergy, lies in the contrasting emphasis of the logics perspective on the institutional order of society on the one hand, versus the activity emphasis of the practice perspective on the other. Complementing the practice perspective, the logics perspective views that practices are fundamentally related to institutional logics, such 177

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that identifiable activities can be examined for a relation to the logics, informing these practices. Logics are characteristics of societal orders but actors may draw on multiple, and often contradicting, institutional logics from different orders. Practices differ depending upon the logic they are informed by (Thornton et al., 2012: 132).

11.3.2 An Institutional Logics Perspective Institutional logics are “the socially constructed, historical patterns of cultural symbols and material practices, including assumptions, values and beliefs, by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences” (Thornton et al., 2012: 2). Practices are manifestations and reflections of institutional logics that guide how to act in a particular situation (Thornton et al., 2012: 129–30). The relationality and mutual constitution (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011) of logics, practices, and action are mediated by social interaction mechanisms of decision making, sense making, and collective mobilization. Institutions of society are organized by institutional orders, for example: family, state, religion, market, profession, corporation, and community, each being a domain of institutions built around a key cornerstone institution. Each order is a governance system made up of cultural symbols and material practices that provide a frame of reference, which preconditions sense-making choices. Symbols and material practices are “building blocks” of the order, for example, sources of legitimacy, authority, identity, norms, bases of attention, as well as mechanisms of control that specify organizing principles that shape preferences, interests, and behavior. The “micro-foundations” of the institutional logics perspective theorize that “an array of institutional logics may be available to actors, but only certain institutional logics or categorical elements of logics are readily accessible and likely to be used” (Thornton et al., 2012: 171). Furthermore, “individuals’ ” capacity to recognize and attend to institutional logics and apply them strategically is based on their availability and the accessibility of prior knowledge and experience in relation to the differences in institutional orders of society. Language “embodied in theories, frames and narratives and embedded in vocabularies of practice, provides a critical lynchpin by which institutional logics are constructed and meanings and practices are brought together” (Thornton et al., 2012: 150). Here we see both practice and logics perspectives converge on the importance of discourse, understood here as situated “language in use” (Schatzki, 2017; Heracleous and Marshak, 2004). Schatzki (2017) emphasizes the discursive component of practices viewing language as having a structuring significance for social life in contributing to the hanging 178

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together of “bundles and constellations” (Schatzki, 2017: 140). Similarly, scholars of the logics perspective identify that language mutually constitutes practices and symbolic constructions, through the emergence of field-level vocabularies of practice (Thornton et al., 2012: 149). Logics “are culturally constituted through the emergence of vocabularies of practice, as theories, frames and narratives (three forms of symbolic representations) coalesce into a common language for sense-making, decision-making and mobilization around categories of practice” (Thornton et al., 2012: 149). Common ground which is critical for collective action is based on practices participants share (Bechky, 2003), as well as a common vocabulary about those practices (Thornton et al., 2012). Practices then “are not conceptualized as purely localized phenomena, but are institutionally constituted and shaped” (2012: 135), and so it is that we can identify and connect the worlds of institutions and the worlds of the actors who populate them and practice within them (Lawrence et al., 2011). As with others whose work is heavily discursive (Levina and Orlikowski, 2009), judges’ use of language, including narrative and rhetoric (Gewirtz, 1996) and reading of texts, is critical to their work administering company law. It is to their practice in relation to business judgment, and specifically their actions and decisions in respect of, to review or not review business judgment that the discussion proceeds. To analyze judicial practice this chapter focuses empirical attention on the written text of a judgment.

11.4 Business Judgment and Judicial Practice Business decisions and judgments are an everyday activity in the lives of directors. The contrasting arguments for more or less authority and/or accountability, more or less judicial review, and the rationales and governance implications behind all of these, provoke a need for insight as to what is business judgment, and explanation about how and why judges decide to review or refuse to review business judgment. This concept, the business judgment, has perhaps been “black-boxed” (Woolgar and Neyland, 2013). In law, what we refer to as the business judgment “rule” is sometimes applied and sometimes not, and so through this examination of judicial and director practices we can better understand the existence, practices, and effects of business judgment. “Business judgment” is therefore situated in the work of directors but, more importantly for our present purposes, the work of the judge in review or non-review in the course of litigation. Directors make and judges regulate business judgments. Judges’ practice in litigation is directly related to directors’ practice through the causes of litigation brought by parties 179

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and as such judicial practice transpires in relation to bundles of practices within and across a variety of institutional orders and fields. The litigation process can be understood as unfolding in stages (Langley, 1999). Accountability under law for business judgment is pursued through a cause of legal action, which is initially generated out of a series of events that take place in the field of business enterprise. The cause of action triggers the judicial process within which the judge must decide to review or not review the business judgments of the directors concerned. The judge, when considering action, must decide whether the action taken by the director was negligent or otherwise in breach of statutory provisions, and this requires a judicial review of the actions of the director. The judge, having reviewed or taken a decision not to review business judgments which lead to those actions then arrives at a conclusion and delivers a ruling which in the English common law legal system has the potential to create a legal precedent which is binding on future courts. In this way, the judge can create law, which contributes to the regulation of directors’ action in the field of corporate enterprise, and in turn impacts on the corporate governance mainframe that seeks to balance the director’s legal authority so to act, and the accountability in law for those actions. In the case of the Continental case that follows, the cause of action was commenced by the liquidator on behalf of the company, seeking personal contribution from the former directors to the company for the alleged losses suffered as a result of the director’s actions. The remainder of the chapter examines the narrative account of judicial activity and practice, and specifically how the judge accesses, navigates, and mediates available and accessible plural logics, which characterize the institutional orders within which this practice is embedded.

11.5 Data Collection and Analysis Case law exemplifies the idea that texts circulate within and inform practices (Schatzki, 2017; Maguire and Hardy, 2013), it is core to the institution of law. Case law represents an account by a participant actor, the judge, who organizes a set of events and accounts of actions into a cohesive whole narrative. In keeping with a view that language constitutes activity and practices, cases are a highly reliable record of what individual judges say and do, in this instance, when deciding whether to review or not review the decisions of the director. By affording immersion in the case of litigation and by being rich in revelation of the doings and sayings of judges and other parties to the litigation, cases facilitate understanding of how judicial action is organized, what was done, what could have been done, what was brought to the judgment, and what was 180

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not. As such they afford a practice ontology and processual understanding (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011; Langley and Tsoukas, 2017; Langley, 1999). Continental concerned a very expensive liquidation, the costs of which well exceeded £6 million. The hearing ran for seventy-two days and the recorded judgment was reported over 154 pages in length (95,167 words). An abductive analysis (Locke et al., 2008) of the case was developed by drawing on the empirical data offered by the full text of the judgment, and connecting that to theories of practice and logics, to generate a theoretical account of how individual action relates to collective practices, logics, and orders. The case was subjected to several iterations of reading, analysis, discussion, and presentation involving two researchers, that is, the authors, one of whom is a lawyer. The text was first analyzed for indicators of the four organizers of practice: “rules, understandings (general and particular), and teleoaffective structures.” With a developing sense of understanding of the practice at the level of individual actor—Justice Park—we then sought to understand and embed this appreciation of judicial practice in its institutional context by augmenting the practice perspective with a logics perspective. Further readings enabled us to identify institutional orders and logics involved in the case. The components of practice and orders pointed the way to the logics, by relating judicial practices when reviewing the business judgment of the directors to wider patterns of cultural symbols and practices (Thornton et al., 2012). By seeing the judge as an actor engaged in practice that relates to several institutional orders, we sought to understand and draw out the logics at play in the cases that are characteristic of one or more orders. Analytically, we focused our attention on those aspects of the raw data of the recorded judgment where the judge reasons and decides. This process of analysis and interpretation included searches and coding of language and emotion using NVivo computer software. Word occurrences and combination frequencies allowed us to capture data revealing the judge’s behavior in fleshing out his reasoning and showing his use of vocabulary and frames of reference. These data inform our finding that the case involves two logics, labelled here as creditor-regarding and director-regarding. These two logics represent alternative values and beliefs at play and which inform the final judgment in this case.

11.6 Research Findings 11.6.1 Facts The case concerned the collapse of a small insurance company, and the liquidators sought contribution to the company’s assets from the directors on the grounds of wrongful trading and breach of the duty of care. 181

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The wrongful trading claim was brought on the basis that the directors kept on trading, when they knew or should have known that the company was insolvent. The breach of duty claim related to specific payments the directors had made. One of the principal issues at the heart of the litigation was that had an appropriate accounting policy been adopted by the company, the directors would and should have appreciated that the company was insolvent, and they would and should have stopped trading. This case reflects the efforts of the liquidator, on behalf of the company (in liquidation) and its creditors, to persuade the court, to exercise discretion granted to it under the corporate insolvency legislation, to order the former directors to make significant personal contributions to the company, and to compensate it for the losses suffered because of the directors’ actions. This provision is designed to increase the amounts available to the liquidator to pay the company’s creditors. In the event, the liquidator’s case failed on all counts and the judge refused to hold the directors liable. In what follows, our attention is directed to the judge’s review of the business judgments of the former directors—decisions taken to apply certain accounting principles, and to keep on trading. Our analysis of the text of the judgment first identifies the plurality of logics encountered by the judge throughout the litigation process. Then it analyzes judicial practice which reveals the agency of the judge, but also the collective practices of judges in past cases to which the judge refers as precedents relevant to his practice, and how through practice judges navigate these plural logics. Finally, it connects the analysis of logics and practices to institutional orders of society, the institution of corporate law, and the associated field of corporate governance.

11.6.2 Logics In the recorded judgment of Continental, the narrative reveals the focus of the judge’s attention, that is the business judgment of the company’s directors, and the implications for and impact of this on the company’s creditors. Throughout this narrative, we can detect patterns in the practices and symbolic representations, including beliefs, values, and assumptions, that guide the legal theories he engages with, the judge’s frames of reference, and his narrative statements of both the law and the facts. We label these patterns as a “creditor-regarding logic,” and a director-regarding, “director’s business judgment logic.” CREDITOR-REGARDING LOGIC

The judge, in his consideration of the position of the company’s creditors, blends concepts of corporate and insolvency law to guide his consideration and actions regarding the protection, redress, and remedy available to the 182

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company’s creditors in respect of losses suffered by the company as a result of the business judgment of the directors. Blending legal concepts of director duties and creditor interests, the judgment narrative reflects how these considerations encourage the law to elevate the interests of the creditors in an insolvency situation: “when a company is insolvent the directors, in fulfilment of their duties to the company, must recognize that the persons with the primary interest in it have become the creditors rather than the shareholders.” The judge uses frames of reference which reflect his concerns for creditors, and the protections and remedies he has at his disposal with regard to their position in the liquidation that has befallen the company. So he frequently considers “the point of view of the creditors,” different “kinds of creditors,” “unsecured creditors,” “creditors’ interests,” their “position” in relation to each other and “improvements” and “worsening” in that position. He addresses “the losses to creditors,” “deficiency to creditors,” “assets available to creditors,” and the question at the heart of the litigation, the “duties owed” to creditors. In summarizing the complex and lengthy sequence of events leading up to the liquidation of the company, and constructing the “case story,” the judge engages in a narrative describing the complexity of those events, the changing fortunes of the company, referring in minute detail to board meetings, witness recollections, and minutes of these meetings. As the judge observes, “This has been a very protracted case in every way . . . The hearing before me was very long, and I am afraid that this judgment is very long to match.” In parts the judge uses a simplified example, to express his interpretation of the law, to “bring out the question of principle” as it applies to the facts of the case, an example which reveals a creditor-regarding logic which will inform his decision making: I describe a simplified example which brings out the question of principle . . . The continued trading . . . (must) make the company’s position worse, so that it has less money available to pay creditors, rather than to leave the company’s position at the same level. It must make the company’s position worse before it becomes appropriate for the court to order the directors to make a contribution.

And throughout, there is reference to the available creditor-regarding logic, the judge claiming to have “every sympathy for the creditors . . . for the very real misfortunes of the creditors.” But the judge nevertheless allows “other considerations,” in which we identify a competing logic, to guide his decision making. This we observe as a director-regarding, “director’s business judgment logic.” Again, we see how this logic directs his theoretical considerations, characterizes the frames of reference, and defines the judge’s narrative of events and the law. DIRECTOR’S BUSINESS JUDGMENT LOGIC

Inherent within the director’s business judgment logic is an assumption, a belief that directors under the enabling provisions of corporate law can, and 183

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indeed are required, to exercise all of the legal powers of the company to carry on the business of the company, and that accordingly, subject to certain requirements and conditions, judicial deference should be paid to the director’s business judgments made in the course of this exercise. The law which enables the director and confers this discretion also constrains the director by imposing duties on directors requiring that they take reasonable care, skill, and diligence when exercising their powers. The director’s business judgment logic therefore has two distinct but related essential characteristics: director authority and director accountability. The narrative of judgment reflects as it engages with legal theory around the corporate form, the board of directors that sits at the top of the corporate hierarchy, and the law which confers authority and also imposes duties on directors in the exercise of this authority. The judgment refers to the director’s express “authority” and “implied authority,” and to “the nature and discharge of directors’ duties,” the “competence and understanding” required in the exercise of their powers. Directors “have a duty to use reasonable care and skill and to act in good faith.” But there are then theoretical distinctions to be made when examining the level of “care and skill” expected, and the judge goes on to expand this through frames of reference around “standards.” The judge refers throughout to concepts of reasonableness and fairness when examining “the standards the law expects,” referring to an objective minimum standard of skill and care, in relation to a director of the type of company concerned, which objective minimum can be raised subjectively depending on the characteristics and experience of the particular director: The duty is not to ensure that the company gets everything right. The duty is to exercise reasonable care and skill up to the standard which the law expects of a director of the sort of company concerned, and also up to the standard capable of being achieved by the particular director concerned.

Reflecting this director-regarding business judgment logic, the judge in this case concludes that the directors have met those standards and have demonstrated a “wholly responsible and conscientious attitude.” Despite that, “with hindsight it can now be seen that the judgment which the directors formed did not work out . . . that does not mean it was a breach of duty on their part to form it” and that “the directors behaved with a full and proper sense of responsibility.” Again, in the narrative of the law but in the narrative of events giving rise to the cause of action, the judge expands on the standards of care and skill, again reflecting a director-regarding logic. The directors of Continental are directors of an insurance company but the judge comments on standards. In my view they would have been expected to be intelligent laymen. They would need to have a knowledge of what the basic accounting principles for an insurance company were . . . They would be expected to be able to look at the company’s

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These directors, the judge concludes, meet the standards of skill and care required and expected. He contrasts the present case to previous cases where a creditor-regarding logic would appear to have persuaded previous judges to a finding of liability: None of the previous cases in which directors have been held to be liable has been remotely like this one. Typically, they have been cases in which the directors closed their eyes to the reality of the company’s position and carried on trading long after it should have been obvious to them that the company was insolvent and that there was no way out for it. In those cases, the directors had been irresponsible, and had not made any genuine attempt to grapple with the company’s real position. Having heard the evidence I am wholly satisfied that none of the directors viewed the position lightly, or approached it in a perfunctory manner, or had any inclination to bury his head in the sand and just hope that the problems would go away . . . On the contrary, they considered it directly, closely and frequently.

So, in the end analysis, we can see that the judge in this case firmly rejects the creditor-regarding logic and adopts categorically a director-regarding business judgment logic. The authority of the director granted under the institution of corporate law is respected, and the business judgments made pursuant to that authority are afforded protection. The judge appears to go further agreeing with the submissions of the directors’ legal representatives condemning the liquidator’s complaints as “infested with hindsight and (which) wholly ignore the realities of being a company director.” The accountability, protection, and remedy sought by the liquidator on behalf of the company and its creditors are denied. The judge concludes that “the way in which the directors reacted . . . was entirely appropriate . . . and the liquidators’ case for liability . . . has not been made out. Accordingly, it fails.” This manifestation of plural and competing logics, creditor-regarding and director-regarding, provides a rich illustration of how multiple logics exist in this domain of corporate law. Our interest lies in how this plurality manifests in the practices of the judge, and the implications of this for the broader societal context in which this judicial practice plays out. We now move our analysis forward, operationalizing Schatzki’s concept of practice with 185

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particular attention to organizers, with a view to linking this judicial practice to a broader societal and institutional context.

11.6.3 Judicial Practice For Schatzki (2017), organizers of practice are: rules; general and practical understandings; and teleoaffective structure. Throughout the narrative of the judgment, the organizing effect of the rules of law and procedure on the judicial practice under consideration is clearly apparent. These rules include those that come from statute (which the judge refers to as “the law”) and those that come from the established common law, previous case law (which the judge refers to as “the cases”). The doctrine of precedent operates as a system whereby a judge in the present case is bound by decisions of judges in previous cases, and so lends a collective character to the judge’s practice. These rules are described and ordered as the reference point whereby the judge reviews and “judges” the behavior, good and bad, of the directors, and the business judgments they made, and the rules prescribe the actions the judge may take in relation to this. The judge sets out “the full texts of sections 212 and 214 of the Insolvency Act 1986,” the words of which “are at the very heart of this case” and which “give to the court a discretion to declare that a director (or former director) is liable to make a contribution to the company’s assets.” Having referred to the statutory rules, the judge moves on “to mention the cases” to which he gives “proper consideration . . . in forming (his) . . . conclusions in the present case.” The rules, however, only intermittently and partially determine what the judge does and says (Schatzki, 2017). It is the understandings expressed by the judge around this statement of the rules that further shape the practice. General understandings include such things as concepts and values, and in our study, includes concepts of the corporation at the heart of commercial life, and how corporations are populated and directed by categories of corporate actors, namely directors, boards, and chairmen. It is also generally understood that corporate enterprise is often heavily reliant on credit, and that credit as a concept is only viable if those extending credit are afforded some protection in relation to the attendant risk associated with it. We can detect the judge’s general understandings around duties and the values and concepts of care, skill, and diligence expected of directors, but also notions of reasonableness and fairness in terms of protections and remedies that should be available to creditors. These general understandings inform the judge’s action, “drawing a number of threads together and considering the matter in a relatively general way.” We see a general understanding of the dilemmas directors face when the company gets into financial trouble, and the unenviable position and the 186

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decision they face, “the difficult decision,” to shut down and go into liquidation or carry on trading “and hope to turn the corner.” There is a general understanding of the personal risks the directors face, culturally significant understandings about “courage” and the stigma of taking “the coward’s way out.” General understandings may be seen here to have an integrating function, integrating the judicial practices into an overarching cultural formation (Welch and Warde, 2016) as to what standards of behavior, what levels of care and skill we expect of directors in such situations, what levels of personal risk we expect them to bear, and the extent of the accountability we demand of them. The judge demonstrates this understanding in a series of rhetorical questions (Gewirtz, 1996). In this case, when the directors were confronted in June 1991 with the unwelcome news that Continental had suffered large and unforeseen losses . . . Could they have decided intuitively that Continental’s position was hopeless, that the business should be closed-down instantly, and that a liquidation should follow rapidly? Obviously not. Could they there and then have calculated for themselves, avoiding intuition, that Continental was insolvent already and must close down? Again, the answer is: obviously not.

We understand the judge to be engaging in general understandings of notions of pragmatism, common sense, and efficiency required of the directors in confronting the financial crisis facing the company. The judge refers throughout the judgment to the skills, abilities, and the capacities he employs as he reads and evaluates the documentary evidence. “Having listened,” “considered,” and “re-considered” the oral evidence, the judge then has to evaluate that evidence. We regard these as “practical understandings” used by the judge in settling his version of the facts, from which he then goes on to consider the law, and the arguments of legal counsel on the law. His legal and analytical skills then allow him to interpret and apply the law to the facts as he sees them. In this way the judge describes how he “reasons” his way to a judgment. Telos can be identified in the narrative of the judgment in the judge’s empathy for the directors and the “unenviable dilemma” they face regarding the decision, the business judgment, to trade on, or cease trading and proceed to liquidation. The judge’s tacit approval of the way in which the directors “approached” the position, taking a “wholly responsible and conscientious attitude both to (the company’s) position and to their own responsibilities as directors,” can be contrasted with his apparent condemnation of the liquidator on behalf of the creditors, who in the judges’ view, had an “unrealistic” and unreasonable expectation of what the directors should and should not have done in the situation in which they found themselves. The judge, appearing keen not to encourage defensive business practice, cautions that if directors are judged too harshly, “with the benefit of hindsight,” such 187

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an “austere approach” may lead directors to rush too soon to put their companies into liquidation for fear of being sued for wrongful trading. The judge empathizes with directors who find themselves in this no-win situation: if the directors decide to close down immediately and cause the company to go into an early liquidation, although they are not at risk of being sued for wrongful trading, they are at risk of being criticized on other grounds . . . creditors . . . will complain bitterly that the directors shut down too soon . . . liquidating too soon can be stigmatized as the coward’s way out.

It is in the plurality of the creditor-regarding and director-regarding business judgment logics, as these manifest in the actions and practice of the judge, and the way in which he navigates these through the process of the litigation and the organization of his judicial activities, that we identify links to the broader societal activities within which these judicial and director activities take place. These competing logics, captured in the agency revealed through our analysis of judicial practice, serve to demonstrate the link between those practices and the institutional context within which they take place. Judicial practice, as a manifestation of these competing logics, has implications at a broader societal level for the ongoing tussle between director authority and director accountability.

11.6.4 Logics, Practices, and Links to Institutional Societal Orders The judge’s practice reveals the judge acting as an agent of the state, with the discretion to operate a significant redistribution mechanism, whereby he can order one group of citizens to assign assets to another, exercising a “bureaucratic dominance,” focusing attention on the status of one group, the creditors, in relation to another, the directors, with the potential to redistribute assets and capital between them. The judge must decide whether to hold the directors personally liable for the business judgment to continue trading (which with the benefit of hindsight turned out to be the wrong decision), informed by a creditor-regarding logic, affording remedy to the creditors, or, whether informed by a director-regarding logic, to protect the directors and their business judgment on the basis that it was made with the appropriate levels of skill and care. On the facts of this case the judge’s actions appear to be informed by a director-regarding logic, which leads him to conclude that it would be “an extraordinarily harsh result” if the directors were found personally liable. At the level of the legal profession, the narrative is an intimate account of this professional aspect of his practice, and in particular the “reasoning” component of that practice. The issue before the judge, the cause of action, has at its center the behavior of directors in relation to the companies they 188

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serve, and towards specific corporate constituencies such as shareholders and creditors. The judgment is therefore cast in the institutional context of the corporation, a cornerstone institution of society, addressing the functions, composition of, and relationships of delegation and reliance between its various organs, principally in this case the company itself, with its creditors and directors. The judge is ever mindful of the “reality of commercial and corporate life” and the difficulties, events, and other happenings to which the company is subject, as well as the board processes around these, are exhaustively examined in this case. The significant implications of this at the institutional and societal level is that if such an order is made, it offends the fundamental principle of the corporation as a separate entity and of limited liability which provides the very cornerstone of the institutions of the corporation itself, and the institution of corporate law that enables and constrains its creation and existence. Finally, there are related but distinct communities who have an interest in the judicial practices around the review of the business judgments of directors. These include the community of corporations in aggregate, shareholders and the wider corporate investment community, the corporate creditor community, and the corporate director community. Each of these communities is affected by the judicial practice which administers corporate law and the rules regarding director authority, director duties, and accountability in respect thereof. The law provides that directors are expected to adhere to norms of behavior and are subject to duties, so as to afford protections to the communities who have a stake in the companies they direct. Nevertheless, the judge in this case appears keen to protect the director community, and not “to set the standard required of the directors at an unrealistically high level” or “beyond what (the law) expects.” At the societal level of the director community the judge is concerned that “if the non-executive directors were liable to pay millions of pounds to the liquidators in this case, it is hard to imagine any well-advised person ever agreeing to accept appointment as a non-executive director of any company,” with associated implications for the talent pool available to boards. As a summary of empirical findings, the judicial narrative of judgment captures competing logics, here creditor-regarding and director-regarding business judgment logics, as they are revealed through the agency of the judge. This we have uncovered through a “Schatzkian” analysis of the judge’s narrative and we demonstrate through this analysis how these logics are characteristics of institutional orders (Thornton et al., 2012) perceived here as the institutional orders of state, profession, corporation, and community. Applying our combined theoretical perspective to our analysis of the narrative, we illustrate how this judicial practice is embedded in a broader societal context. 189

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11.7 Discussion This analysis contributes to theorizing about process, practices, logics, and accountability. It shows that practice theory can address “big topics.” It demonstrates that process and practice theorizing are intertwined. It is novel in combining practice and logics perspectives, theoretically and empirically, to capture plural logics and show a connection between agency, practice, and institutional order. Finally, it throws a fresh light on accountability and how to study practices that constitute accountability. The study lends weight to advocates of practice theory who refute criticism that it cannot handle “big topics” and that it neglects the individual (Hui et al., 2016: 2). It treats litigation processes as significant events whereby judges play a key role, with consequences that go beyond the winners and losers in each case. The making of law, the regulation of business judgment in this instance, has the potential to reverberate through practices, fields, institutions, and orders over time. The study shows this by linking the individual practices of the judge in this case to the institutional orders and domains across which those practices are played out. By addressing the institutional and legal implications of the judge’s practice, as it relates to the decisions and actions of directors, the study shines a light onto the wider governance debate, revealing mechanisms, processes, and outcomes of director accountability at law. Our conceptualizing judicial practice in a processual way engages with the legal ruling as a narrative to reveal how a judge enters the process of litigation in its ultimate stages, drawing the process to a close through a ruling and the delivery of a judgment. Set from within the context of the wider litigation process, the study delves deeper into judicial processes and practices by analyzing the judge’s account of his individual actions, seemingly from when he first evaluates the evidence, settling and organizing his version of the sequence and series of events and others’ accounts of actions, into a cohesive narrative of the facts, and then “reasoning” his way to a ruling, before explaining and justifying his decision and decision making. This narrative, with all its language-in-use (Schatzki, 2017), is shown to be infused with practice organizers such as rules, understanding, and telos. This is one way in which the analysis reveals that process meets practice. The vocabularies of practice, found in the “stories” and facts of the case before the judge, the statements of the law, and the vocabularies of the judicial reasoning, afford us to encounter communications between the advocates for the liquidator, the defendant directors, and the judicial response to the same. Judges summarize the facts, make sense of events, reach and rhetorically deliver a ruling. In these observations we can appreciate the judge’s agency, encompassing sense making, choice, and ultimate decision making. But in keeping with practice theory 190

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this agency is to be understood not as individual, but rather collectively constituted judicial practice shaped by past judicial practice, future aspirations, and institutional logics. In this way the study makes a theoretical connection between individual agency and societal order through practices and logics. By attending to practices and logics the study is different to existing work in a couple of key respects. First, other studies have skillfully uncovered a relationship between law and logics (McPherson and Sauder, 2013) but that analysis involved multiple parties each with a different logic. This study is different in that it centers on a single actor—a judge—a significant social actor, faced with competing claims, navigating available and accessible logics, captured by the analysis (Reay and Jones, 2016), and expressed here through the dichotomy of “creditor-regarding” and “director-regarding” logics. Second, it is unusual to find studies that attempt to actually and explicitly offer a theoretical and empirical combination of practice and logics perspectives. Having used a narrative approach to identify and follow up a common interest in language and discourse (Schatzki, 2017; Thornton et al., 2012), the study captures plural logics, makes a connection between practice and social order, and shows the judge exploiting the agentic opportunity afforded him through the process of litigation. The judge’s agency is socially and temporally embedded, informed by the past, through the doctrine of legal precedent, the cultural phenomenon whereby judicial practice in the present invokes the past through the judge’s attention to previous cases, and where the judge’s own aspirations and judgment have implications for the future (Emirbayer and Misch, 1998). Temporality features as the judge mentions, considers, follows, and applies precedent cases as part of his own immediate practice. Judicial practice in Continental is thereby generated out of, and contributes to a dynamic collective of judicial practice, and has the potential in turn to constitute and shape the institution of the law itself. Beyond the boundaries of the law and work of the judiciary the case situates judicial practice as part of the category of organizing practices known as “corporate governance” (Thornton et al., 2012). This case lends rare insight into how judicial practice is embedded within the field of corporate governance, a practice which directly tackles the thorny and topical issues around director accountability within boards, to the companies they serve, but also and to other communities of corporate stakeholders, such as creditors. The relationship between corporate governance and law warrants further research for greater understanding. The question of what is perceived as a legitimate intervention by courts and others such as regulators has taken on greater significance in the light of the financial crisis and more recent events when boards and directors were perceived to have been incompetent in the judgment of risk. Debate about the consequences for directors and what cases 191

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should and should not be reviewed at law is a matter of international legal and public debate fueled by the variety of international practice in the matter of business judgment. By way of concluding, we offer the research and this analysis as an approach to opening up further analysis of regulatory activities and practices that have a strong discursive and textual component. Our focus on judges, rather than consultants (Levina and Orlikowski, 2009), is distinctive for its attention to text as a core feature of practice and institutional order, the production of which can have significant consequences for a range of adjacent fields, practices, and actors. In this regard, there is scope to consider other situations where actors and agency are being increasingly drawn into practices of review and regulation. Such research could be about those social actors in regulatory roles who review the work and conduct of others in commerce, public services, or those who lead public and quasi-public inquiries into events in the aftermath of crises which seemingly have, or threaten to have, a destabilizing effect on established logics and order.

Acknowledgments This chapter is part a study of “Business Judgement and the Courts” funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom. We are also grateful for the comments of Professor Andrew Keay, Joan Loughrey, Trish Reay, Tammar Zilbur, and anonymous reviewers on earlier versions of the chapter.

References Bechky, B. A. (2003). Sharing Meaning across Occupational Communities: The Transformation of Understanding on a Production Floor. Organization Science, 14, 312–30. Brooks, P., and Gewirtz, P. (1996). Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in Law. London: Yale University Press. Emirbayer, M., and Mische, A. (1998). What Is Agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103, 962–1023. Feldman, M. S. and Orlikowski, W. J. (2011). Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory. Organization Science, 22(5), 1240–53. Gewirtz, P. (1996). Narrative and Rhetoric in Law. In P. Brooks and P. Gewirtz (Eds), Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in Law (pp. 2–13). London: Yale University Press. Heracleous, L., and Marshak, R. J. (2004). Conceptualizing Organizational Discourse as Situated Symbolic Action. Human Relations, 57(10), 1285–312. Hui, A. (2016). Variation and the Intersection of Practices. In A. Hui, T. Schatzki, and E. Shove (Eds), The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners (pp. 52–67). London: Routledge.

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Making and Regulating Business Judgment Hui, A., Schatzki, T., and Shove, E. (2016). Introduction. In A. Hui, T. Schatzki, and E. Shove (Eds), The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners (pp. 1–8). London: Routledge. Langley, A. (1999). Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data. Academy of Management Review, 24(4), 691–710. Langley, A., and Tsoukas, H. (2017). Introduction. In A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies (pp. 1–25). London: Sage. Lawrence, T. B., Suddaby, R., and Leca, B. (2011). Institutional Work: Refocusing Institutional Studies of Organization. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20, 52–8. Levina, N., and Orlikowski, W. J. (2009). Understanding Shifting Power Relations within and across Organizations: A Critical Genre Analysis. Academy of Management Journal, 52(4), 672–703. Locke, K., Golden-Biddle, K., and Feldman, M. S. (2008). Making Doubt Generative: Rethinking the Role of Doubt in the Research Process. Organization Science, 19(6), 907–18. Maguire, S., and Hardy, C. (2013). Organizing Processes and the Construction of Risk: A Discursive Approach. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), 231–55. McPherson, C. M., and Sauder, M. (2013). Logics in Action: Managing Institutional Complexity in a Drug Court. Administrative Science Quarterly, 58(2), 165–96. Reay, T., and Jones, C. (2016). Qualitatively Capturing Institutional Logics. Strategic Organization, 14(4), 41–454. Schatzki, T. R. (2006). On Organizations as They Happen. Organization Studies, 27(12), 1863–73. Schatzki, T. R. (2017). Sayings, Texts and Discursive Formations. In A. Hui, T. Schatzki, and E. Shove (Eds), The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners (pp. 126–40). London: Routledge. Scott, W. R. (2003). Organizations: Rational, Natural and Open Systems, 5th edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Thornton, P. H., Ocasio, W., and Lounsbury, M. (2012). The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process. New York: Oxford University Press. Watson, M. (2016). Placing Power in Practice Theory. In A. Hui, T. Schatzki, and E. Shove (Eds), The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners (pp. 169–82). London: Routledge. Welch, D., and Warde, A. (2016). How Should We Understand “General Understandings.” In A. Hui, T. Schatzki, and E. Shove (Eds), The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners (pp. 183–96). London: Routledge. Woolgar, S. and Neyland, D. (2013). Mundane Governance: Ontology and Accountability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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12 Systematic Heterogeneity in the Adaptation Process of Management Innovations Insights from the Italian Public Sector Davide Nicolini, Andrea Lippi, and Pedro Monteiro

12.1 Introduction In recent years, a growing number of scholars have embraced the notion that variation is intrinsic to the process of diffusion of administrative and managerial practices (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Ansari et al., 2010, 2014). This understanding emerged from the convergence of three research programs: the work by Scandinavian institutionalism on the travel of ideas and the translation of innovation (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005; Frenkel, 2005; Boxenbaum and Battilana, 2005; Morris and Lancaster, 2006; Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008); scholarship on the glocalization of organizational forms and practices (Saka, 2004; Frenkel, 2005; Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson, 2006; Drori et al., 2014); and studies of the adaptation of innovations during their diffusion (Ansari et al., 2010; Saka, 2004; Frenkel, 2005; Djelic and SahlinAndersson, 2006; Drori et al., 2014). Authors from all these research programs problematize the previously accepted assumption that innovations spread like ink in water (Rogers, 2010). Instead, they submit that adopters modify management innovations according to their contexts and in light of their interests (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005). Thus, the very idea of diffusion has now been expanded to include adaptation as a constitutive element (Ansari et al., 2010). We signal this shift in theoretical sensitivity by using the term “diffusion” in inverted commas throughout the chapter (employed in the sense of “diffusion cum adaptation”). Similarly, we use adaptation as a general reference to the changes management innovations

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go through in their “diffusion”—a process labelled in the literature in various ways, such as variation, translation, editing, and glocalization (Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008; Gond and Boxenbaum, 2013). Early studies on this topic conducted by exponents of the Scandinavian neo-institutionalism school remained close to the idea that “diffusion,” adaptation, and translation should be studied processually one case at a time utilizing proximal and longitudinal methods of inquiry (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005). This was particularly because this work focused on variation to problematize the then prevailing view that management ideas and practices remained constant when they “diffuse.” More recently, however, scholars have started to explore the existence of patterns and mechanisms in adaptation. The attention has been focused especially on two aspects: the underlying causes of adaptation processes (Sahlin-Andersson, 1996; Campbell, 2004; Boxenbaum and Battilana, 2005; Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008; Gond and Boxenbaum, 2013); and the relationship between the spread of innovations in a field and adaptation dynamics at the organizational level (Ansari et al., 2010; Fiss et al., 2012; Compagni et al., 2015). While the former has attracted significant attention, the latter remains still largely unexplored and authors have called for more attention to the link between organizational and interorganizational levels in the study of management innovations (Volberda et al., 2014). In this chapter, we respond to this call by investigating the process through which the best practice approach (henceforth “BP”—plural or singular as the context admits) made inroads into the Italian public sector. Through a combination of survey and case studies, we trace how an idea that originated in the private context has been reinterpreted and practiced in the Italian public sector, exploring its adaptation among a population of sixty-five earlyadopting BP projects. Our case is particularly illuminating because its conditions are different from those explored in previous research. Existing studies in fact often tend to focus on cases when (1) the management innovation has clearly identifiable sources; and (2) it is backed by a brokering agency with established authority vis-à-vis adopters (Ansari et al., 2010, 2014; Fiss et al., 2012; Gond and Boxenbaum, 2013; Compagni et al., 2015). For example Ansari, Reinecke, and Spann (2014) investigate the diffusion of a very specialized management practice across sites of a multinational company guided by clear “owners.” Conversely, in this chapter we explore an adaptation process in the absence of a univocal source or powerful brokering agents. We find that in Italy the “diffusion” of BP happened in a bottom-up manner and that its early adopters drew on a variety of sources and models (this is quite different from the “diffusion” of BP in other European countries around the same time, see Bowerman et al., 2002; Ball et al., 2002). Of interest here, and the focus of this chapter, is the fact that such an idiosyncratic process did 195

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not produce pure heterogeneity but a systemic one. More specifically, there were clear patterns in the adaptation of the management innovation. We argue that these patterns—and the lack of tensions, resistance, or concerns with fidelity among users of different versions—can be accounted for in terms of the power relations in the public-sector field (an aspect that is rarely thematized in the existing literature on management innovations). To that end, we employ insights from institutional theory to show how the social position of the adopting organizations and the overall structure of the field shaped the process of “diffusion” of the management innovation (Lockett et al., 2014; Battilana, 2011).

12.2 Theorizing the Process of “Diffusion” of Management Innovations 12.2.1 From Diffusion to “Diffusion cum Adaptation” For much of the twentieth century, social sciences scholars and policy makers endorsed the view that new practices and ideas diffuse within a population or field through communication-based processes of contagion (Rogers, 2010; Strang and Soule, 1998; Van de Ven and Hargrave, 2004). The implicit principle was that “information” is transmitted unchanged and its success depends on the nature of the sender, the object diffused, and the fit with the receivers. Adopters are often depicted as passive and easily influenced; the focus is on responsive adaptive behavior; and the driving force behind the diffusion of innovations is assumed to be either the acquisition of a competitive advantage or normative compliance (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005; Johnson and Hagström, 2005). This undersocialized view of the circulation and take-up of innovations was problematized in the 1990s by a number of studies, which shed light on the active role of adopters in the diffusion process (Scott, 2008; Strang and Meyer, 1993; Strang, 2010). These studies suggest that the idea of mechanical imitation underlying much of the previous work on diffusion is inadequate. Innovative practices are necessarily reinterpreted in the light of the prevailing interests and system of relevance of the adopting organization as “a selfconsciously interpretive process underlies most adoption” (Strang and Soule, 1998: 276). Because of this inevitable process of interpretation, transfer necessarily implies modification and the output of an organizational transfer process may be significantly different from the input (Strang and Kim, 2005). These critiques led to the development of the so-called translation model of innovation circulation (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000; Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005; Johnson and Hagström, 2005; Boxenbaum and Battilana, 2005; Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008; Pipan and 196

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Czarniawska, 2010). This strongly processual approach makes two main assumptions. First, the movement in space and time of any new idea is in the hands of those involved at each step. Each of these actors shape the innovation to their own ends, thus sustaining its further travel. They may “accept it, modify it, deflect it, betray it, add to it, appropriate it, or let it drop” (Latour, 1987: 267). Instead of a process of transmission, we thus have a process of continuous and contingent transformation, reshaping, and local adaptation (Latour, 1987; Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000; Strang and Kim, 2005). This process has been described by various authors as “contextualization” (Latour, 2005), “hybridization” (Djelic, 2001), “editing” (Sahlin-Andersson, 1996), “bricolage” (Campbell, 2004), and “ideational adaptation” (Frenkel, 2005). Second, there are always several possible competing interpretations of any idea, each serving a particular set of interests. Hence, the “diffusion” process should always be regarded as a political project that takes place within specific power dynamics ( Johnson and Hagström, 2005; Nicolini, 2010). Most of the early studies from a translation perspective were conducted by scholars from the Scandinavian Institutionalism school who used in-depth single longitudinal studies in order to highlight how actors reshape practices during adoption (see Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008: 222 and Ansari et al., 2010: 71 for a discussion). Attention to patterns was limited to the study of regularities in the different processes of adaptation at the organizational level (SahlinAndersson, 1996; Campbell; 2004; Boxenbaum and Battillana, 2005; Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008; Gond and Boxenbaum, 2013). To be clear, the emergence of adaptation patterns was not ignored but simply remained unexplored: Although occasional mention is made of the institutional and organizational dynamics shaping the adaptation of organizational practices, the contingent conditions of how much variation unfolds during “diffusion” (and whether adaptation patterns emerge) remained largely unexplored.

12.2.2 The “Diffusion” of Management Innovations Things changed with the increasing acceptance of the idea that innovations change as they “diffuse”1 in mainstream management studies (Strang, 2010; Ansari et al., 2010). Attention turned to the relationship between the processes of interorganizational “diffusion” and intra-organizational adaptation. Ansari and his co-authors, for example, put forward a theoretical framework for analyzing how practices vary as they diffuse in a field and are implemented Somewhat confusingly, some of these scholars continued to use the term “diffusion” to refer to the process, although the meaning of the term had greatly changed. In order to signal such change, in this text we use the term “diffusion” in inverted commas. 1

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within organizations. The framework is based on the assumption that adaptation will depend on the technical, cultural, and political fit between the diffusing practice and the adopting organization. Different forms of dynamic fit will trigger different take-up, especially in terms of fidelity and extensiveness—i.e. similarity with the original prototype and dosage of the implementation throughout the organization (Ansari et al., 2010: 71 and 72). The framework has been used subsequently to explore variation in “diffusion” of management innovations in a number of empirical studies. For example, Fiss, Kennedy, and Davis (2012) studied the spread of the controversial practice of offering “golden parachute” contracts to executives in firms exposed to a takeover. They find that population-level factors (e.g. information availability and contestation) as well as organization-level ones (e.g. stakeholder and takeover exposure), affect both the extensiveness of adoption and similarity of the model that circulates. In short, because of the contested nature of the practice, adopters stuck to the same model that they could justify in terms of “peer pressure.” Ansari, Reinecke, and Spaan (2014) examined how organizations anticipate and purposefully influence adaptation. They found that a multinational corporation uses specific strategies to manage the tension between standardization and variation in management practices as they diffuse across the corporation. Scarbrough, Robertson, and Swan (2015) investigated the “diffusion” of resource planning. They found the initial development of the innovation was strongly driven by the vested interests of the professional groups that gathered around it. They attended to the effort of reframing and supporting the innovation in tandem with organization-level actors who enacted and continually adapted it. As the innovation gained momentum, it was objectified in software, thus reducing its flexibility. In the end, this process gave rise to technology market mechanisms that then drove the innovation’s spread, supplanting the role the professional association played in this respect. While these studies shed light on the relationship between an organizational-level process and field-level dynamics, they all operate within a fairly restricted set of assumptions. First, most of these and other studies assume the existence of an original source guarded by specific brokering agents promoting the diffusion process (Canato et al., 2013; Ansari et al., 2010, 2014). As a matter of fact, only if we assume a well-defined and recognizable “original” with associated “brokers” can we discuss issues of fidelity and extensiveness of adoption as do, for example, Ansari et al. (2010), or the ways managers consciously “prepare” an innovation, such as quality management, for its variation (cf. Ansari et al., 2014). Second, and strictly related to the above, many of these studies pay little attention to power dynamics and usually assume the authority of the originating source and/or brokers vis-à-vis adopters. This idea is common both to 198

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traditional diffusion studies which traditionally privilege a focus on role models and trendsetters (Rogers, 2010) and studies of institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). These perspectives assume that imbalance is due to positional authority, resource dependency, and cognitive legitimacy (as in the case when the innovation has been subject to theorization; see Strang and Meyer, 1993) or a combination of all three. Cases when such imbalance does not apply are rarely contemplated. This goes against one of the basic assumptions explored by the translation school introduced above: All “diffusion” is fueled by the interests of adopters. Accordingly, it represents a political project that takes place within specific power dynamics that exist in many formations. These interests and power dynamics, as suggested by institutional theory, are in turn shaped by the social position of actors within a field. Failing to pay attention to the configuration of a field in which organizations are embedded and the power dynamics within it may therefore hamper our understanding of how and why adaptation in “diffusion” happens in the first place.

12.3 Research Setting and Methodology To investigate the relationship between field-level “diffusion” of management practices and organization-level adaptation, we focused on the adoption of the BP approach in the Italian public sector. In the next three sections, we explain the rationale of the study, the choice of the Italian case, and our methodology.

12.3.1 Best Practice: A Management Practice in Motion The notion of “best practice” has an uncertain origin traditionally attributed to the Scientific Management movement. Yet, it became a buzzword only in the 1980s when firms started to investigate and compare levels of performance (Davies and Kochlar, 2002). The expectation being that once “best practices” of superior organizations had been identified, these would be adopted leading thus to improved performance (Spendolini, 1992). Three characteristics are typical of how BP are used in the private sector (Bowerman et al., 2002): • Best practices are identified through highly codified, systematic assessments. • Conducting benchmarking is part of a step-wise search for improvement. • Participation is voluntary and confidential (data are kept within firm boundaries). 199

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In the early 1990s, the BP approach spilled into the public sector mainly thanks to its association with the New Public Management (NPM) movement. NPM and post-NPM reforms strongly advocated a shift from policy making to management skills (Christensen and Lægreid, 2011). This went hand in hand with identification and comparison of quantitative results and the establishment of league tables and minimum performance thresholds. Thus, collecting, comparing, and showcasing BP became a key governance strategy to promote efficiency and value for money (Bowerman et al., 2002; Ball et al., 2002; Papaioannou et al., 2006). The European Union (EU) was a particularly enthusiastic adopter and promoter of BP due to its political positioning at the time. Indeed, analysts commented that starting from the 1990s “in the EU, benchmarking, it seems, is everywhere” (Arrowsmith et al., 2004: 311). At the time of our research, BP was therefore a practice in motion, which made it a fitting object for our inquiry into the “diffusion” of management practices.

12.3.2 Research Setting: Why Italy? The Italian public sector has a number of particularities that traditionally differentiate it from other European countries (Capano, 2003). More specifically, two of its characteristics make it particularly suitable for our study: the segmented and decentralized nature of the Italian public sector; and the lack of traditional central agencies supporting the uptake of new practices in public-sector organizations. THE SEGMENTED AND DECENTRALIZED NATURE OF THE ITALIAN PUBLIC SECTOR

The Italian public sector includes central organizations such as governmental bodies, national institutes, and ministries; and peripheral ones QUANGOs (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations), municipalities, charities, foundations, and associations. These central and peripheral organizations coexist in a loosely coupled relationship that is resultant from two historical processes. The gradual transformation of the unitary nature of the state, and the enlargement of the public sector through the involvement of quangos and private bodies (Capano, 2003). First, in recent years, the Italian state has gradually moved towards a “quasi-federalist” model (Lippi, 2011) through decentralization and the devolution of power to its regions. This resulted in a strong segmented field and a redundant (and often ambiguous) multilevel system of governance in which central and local agencies deal with the same issues. Second, the Italian public sector is characterized by a large number of arms-length bodies and quangos. While some of these were established as a form of patronage by ruling politicians, they became of key importance in the 200

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late 1990s when the NPM reforms promoted delegation and outsourcing of power to private organizations (non-governmental organizations, associations, foundations). Segmentation and delegation were accelerated by the state’s crisis of legitimacy following the scandals and financial crises of the 1990s and the increasing pressure of separatist movements (i.e. Northern League Party). By the end of the 1990s the Italian public sector was characterized by a sharp distinction between “traditional and insider” central bodies and “emergent and outsider” peripheral organizations (Capano and Giuliani, 2001). The former controlled the definition of specific policies and the distribution of resources while the latter were left in charge of piloting new ideas and fueling change. THE LACK OF STRONG BROKERING AGENCIES FOR INNOVATION IN ITALY’S PUBLIC SECTOR

The particular way in which innovations spread in Italy’s public sector is well illustrated in the process through which NPM was introduced in the country. Italy did not experience a single brokering agency supporting the uptake of NPM, unlike, for example, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries where NPM ideas were introduced through mandatory policy initiatives issued by central government—often under a regime of central controls and inspections (Ongaro, 2006; Mele and Ongaro, 2014; Kuhlmann and Wollmann, 2014). In contrast in Italy reforms were introduced reforms were introduced in a piecemeal fashion through redundant legislation and spontaneous initiatives (Cepiku and Meneguzzo, 2011; Ongaro, 2006). The absence of a single brokering agency left ample scope for local adaptation. Local authorities, foundations, associations, and other national agencies ended up implementing NPM tools autonomously or only partially coordinated by central governing bodies (ministries). In summary, the nature of Italy’s public sector makes it particularly suitable for studying the “diffusion” of management innovations in the absence of a strong model and powerful central brokering agency, thus complementing the extant literature. In addition, given the existence of well-identifiable and varied positions within the public field, this setting is also ideal to map out the influence of distinct social positions and power relations in the adaptation process and the possible emergence of patterns.

12.3.3 Data Collection The data for this chapter stem from a large study carried out in two phases between 2005 and 2011. The first phase comprised: (1) a review of Italy’s public-sector literature and an exploratory round of interviews; (2) a survey; 201

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Institutions and Organizations Table 12.1. Data sources Exploratory interviews 2005

Survey 2005

Case studies 2005

Survey 2011

Aim for data

Explore the Italian context and construct sample

Examine the main characteristics of adopters

Understand adaptation patterns in detail

Investigate longitudinal development of initiatives

Data-collection method

Semi-structured interviews

25-item email/postal survey

In-depth case Phone studies interviews (12–18 interviews)

Sampling method

Expert consultation

Snowballing

Theoretical

Respondents of 2011 survey

Usable sample

N = 20 (officials in central and local government, academics, and consultants)

N = 65 (out of 71 contacted)

N=4

N = 49 (out of 65 contacted)

and (3) four in-depth case studies. The second phase included (4) a review of all the cases contacted in 2005. The data set is summarized in Table 12.1. We carried out an in-depth review of the literature on change and improvement in the Italian public sector and interviewed a number of expert informants, including officials in central and local government, academics, and consultants (N = 20). The questions were on the adoption of the BP approach, their origins, diffusion, and the critical issues that emerged. We also elicited a list of existing BP initiatives. This initial sample was subsequently expanded through a web search and, most importantly, “chain referral” or “snowball sampling” (Biernacki and Waldorf, 1981; Faugier and Sargeant, 1997). The sampling, which yielded a list of seventy-one projects, stopped when different informants started to repeatedly mention the same projects. On the basis of the results from the interviews, we designed and piloted a postal survey. The survey was mailed or emailed to individual contacts in all the projects identified. The twenty-five-item questionnaire investigated the duration, aim, and rationale of the projects. It gathered information on the ways in which BPs were identified and “captured,” who decided when a BP should be considered as such, and on what basis. It also investigated how the BPs were stored and disseminated, whether there was any follow-up, and what effects ensued from their implementation. The authors contacted about half of the potential respondents by phone or email to explain the purpose of the research and to encourage them to complete the survey. Sixty-five usable questionnaires were returned and constitute the basis of our analysis. After the survey, we conducted four case studies to raise understanding of specific issues. The case studies were selected on the basis of theoretical considerations to include two organizations for each main adaptation pattern 202

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identified. We chose projects that had been running for at least three years, as we wanted the case studies to capture some of the experience of and evolution in using the management innovation. Each case study involved between twelve and eighteen on-site face-to-face and telephone semi-structured interviews. We also gathered a large amount of documentary materials, from project briefs to websites and, of course, BP reports. In 2011, we returned to the field guided by the results of the first round of analysis. We aimed to contact all the original 2005 participants, from both the exploratory interviews and survey. Of the 65 original participants, 49 were available for interview in the 2011 phase. Others were no longer involved in the project or the project was no longer running. In each case we collected basic narrative information on what had happened since 2005. Interviews were conducted mostly by phone and lasted between fifteen and forty-five minutes.

12.3.4 Data Analysis The data from the 2005 exploratory survey were analyzed using a combination of descriptive statistics, statistical analysis, and qualitative content analysis. We first tabulated all the responses and ran some basic descriptive statistics to get a general picture of the phenomenon using histograms and frequency distributions. We analyzed both types of initiatives and their distribution over time. We then cross-tabulated the results and studied the relationship between responses. The only significant relationship that emerged (p < 0.01) was between the position of the organizations studied (central versus peripheral organizations) and the type of initiative these organizations had implemented. In parallel with the statistical analysis of the survey, we also conducted a content analysis of the case studies. The interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed jointly by two of the authors using a thematic analysis approach (Boyatzis, 1998; Braun and Clarke, 2006). The two types of data were used in combination during three joint analysis meetings when we worked together to analyze and interpret the data. During the analysis, a consistent pattern emerged across quantitative and qualitative data, which suggested that our cases could be classified into two distinct adaptation ideal types. We were first alerted about this by reading the comments of at least two informants, one from a local administration and one from a non-governmental association. In the interview transcripts, they described their projects as “networking” initiatives aimed at building a space for interactions and exchanges. They also explicitly tried to differentiate what they were doing from the central government, which was accused of wasting time and money and of building what 203

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was somewhat derogatorily called “best practice museums.” Given that the distinction had already been identified in the literature (Hansen et al., 1999), we returned to our data and progressively refined the two ideal types by combining questions from the questionnaires and categories stemming from the content analysis. Using these criteria, we recoded all the cases; a minority of disputed cases (< 10 percent) were consensually allocated after discussion. During this phase, evidence from the survey was triangulated with the results from the interviews, our in-depth case studies, and the analysis of documents and web sites. This enabled us to allocate cases on the basis of what the project did rather than what respondents said it did, thus minimizing the potential legitimating bias in the survey. This revealed the importance of the power relationships between central and peripheral agencies. Once again, we returned to our data and moving back and forth between data and interpretation we generated the framework discussed in Section 12.4.

12.4 Findings 12.4.1 Best Practice: The Travel to Italy After spilling from the private to the public sector by the mid-1990s BP had become an integral part of policy at the EU (Dorsch and Yasin, 1998; Arrowsmith et al., 2004). BP were also widely used in EU countries such as the United Kingdom (Bowerman et al., 2002; Ball et al., 2002) and Sweden (Kuhlmann and Jäkel, 2013). By contrast, in Italy the wave of interest was just starting to emerge and a steady rise is observable only from the very early 2000s onwards making this country a late adopter of BP (Figure 12.1). However, the later take-up of the idea did not mean it was any less popular. As summarized in Figure 12.2, BP initiatives quickly became popular with the diffusion of the BP approach following the well-known “S-curve” pattern (Rogers, 2010).

12.4.2 Best Practice in Italy: An Unsystematic Arrival from Many Sources While BP became popular, there was no overarching plan, vision, or specific legislation promoting it (Ongaro, 2006). The central government launched a variety of BP projects to support the spread of the approach. However, this did not add up to any formal top-down program and the central government limited itself to providing general calls for action, thus leaving substantial autonomy for organizations at all levels and making its adoption voluntary. Without a policy or legislation to define uses and scope, organizations experimented with the management innovation throughout the country, which took root in a bottom-up, unsystematic fashion. 204

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5000

4000

3000

2000

1000

0 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Figure 12.1. Number of entries for term “best practice” in Factiva

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 New BP initiatives

Total number of active BP initiatives

Figure 12.2. Number of best practice projects in Italy according to our survey

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The lack of clear top-down program was accompanied by the reliance on a multiplicity of “sources” in the identification and implementation of this management idea. In our survey, respondents pointed to several different models and 31 percent of respondents openly admitted that they operated in an “intuitive approach taking only general inspiration from existing codified benchmarking methods” (survey). The following list presents the different models mentioned by respondents which suggests that the idea of BP was actively constructed (or reconstructed) in each location building on a variety of sources: • European Foundation for Quality Management Excellence Model; • models issued by transnational standardization agencies, e.g. EUREPGAP certification scheme; • ISO model; • example of use of BP in other European public sectors collected through visits and documents; • industry practitioners (e.g. from FIAT); • international agencies (e.g. OSHA); • benchmarking consultants from industry; • EU calls for funds; • academic literature on benchmarking in industry; • EU cross-national projects (e.g. Helios); • benchmarking in industry manuals and how-to books; • EU project evaluation criteria. The variety is so extreme that it is reasonable to ask whether this was really a process of adaptation and editing rather than a process of radical reinvention through patchwork and bricolage. In Section 12.4.3, we provide a brief glimpse on the variety of ways in which BP was adapted in the Italian context.

12.4.3 Best Practice in Italy: From “Best” to “Good” Practice The vast majority of BP projects in our sample used some loose form of informal benchmarking, whereas performance benchmarking, which is the most common approach in the private sector and in other EU countries (Van Dooren et al., 2015), was carried out only rarely. Informal benchmarking refers to the comparison work process with that of the best competitor based on qualitative and, in our case, anecdotal evidence. In the case of performance benchmarking, the process is conducted in a structured and rigorous manner using specific standardized metrics (Spendolini, 1992). In fact, fewer than one 206

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in five projects used quantitative data and systematic methods to determine what counted as a BP. This minority (four cases in all) were projects that used standardized, non-financial metrics such as the European Foundation for Quality Management Business Excellence Model or the Vision Framework. Overall, the selection was often made in what looked like a methodologically crude manner: Almost 45 percent of the projects relied for the most part on self-nomination, while another 16 percent identified BP through personal and professional contacts and ties. While hard data were seldom used to identify BP, most projects singled them out by using explicit ex-ante evaluation criteria. Yet, here as well, the methodological frameworks were set up in an ad hoc fashion, often without referring to common standards. On this note, it is significant to observe that the very way the BP notion was linguistically translated in Italian follows this fading attention to systematic assessments. In most cases, adopters used the term “good praxes” (buone prassi), underplaying the explicit reference to rankings and assessments in the original expression—i.e. “best” practices. In light of this view of BP, most projects aimed at identifying and highlighting notable examples. This was pursued through intensive use of ceremonial advertisement, usually referred to as “dissemination activities.” Only a few projects did not wind up with a major workshop, congress, or event. Specifically, in 30 percent of projects surveyed, this promotional activity was associated with an award or formal celebratory recognition. These were mostly prizes of a symbolic nature and only in a minority of instances did small sums of money change hands (Monteiro and Nicolini, 2015). The practice of awarding prizes was evenly distributed among all organizations and was used slightly more by central agencies.

12.4.4 Adaptation Patterns: Inventories and Networking Spaces Given the lack of a central agency promoting or brokering the innovation and the distinctive bottom-up way of adopting the BP without clear sources, one might have expected multiple unrelated adaptations of the BP approach. Yet our findings revealed this was not the case. In fact, rather than complete heterogeneity, we found that the outcomes of the “diffusion” had produced a field characterized by systematic heterogeneity. There was a certain method in the apparent Italian madness as, according to our analysis, the BP approach was mostly used by public-sector organizations in projects according to two ideal types: inventories and networking spaces.

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Institutions and Organizations Box 12.1. EXAMPLE OF BEST PRACTICE INVENTORY LearningGov In 1998 a large, Rome-based government agency for the promotion of professional education and employment launched a major initiative to develop and disseminate BP emerging from previous European Community-funded projects. The aim was to identify and formalize procedures raising standards in the areas covered by the agency (such as vocational training, distance learning, access to employment, and equal opportunities). The BP were identified by members of the organization among European Communityfunded initiatives in the four previous years. The evaluation criteria were set by the agency and included: (1) projects’ ability to identify and address issues in a given field; (2) the breadth of the projects’ scope; (3) their innovativeness and transferability; (4) the existence of a clear project strategy; and (5) the overall quality of the results. Projects were investigated using a structured questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The results were summarized in short standardized reports illustrating the origin and development of the initiative, its main results, and why the project constituted “good practice.” The reports, about three pages long, were collected in several volumes published internally (and therefore not available to the general public). The exercise and its results were discussed at a workshop held in Rome in 2001.

Inventories are those projects that aim to build large (often very large) BP databases. These were usually set up by large, central government agencies, which carried out “surveys of best practices” in their own jurisdictions (e.g. the Ministry of Labor created a database of BP in employment, training, work welfare, and entrepreneurship). Inventories counted for about 60 percent of our total sample and about two thirds of all initiatives promoted by central government agencies fell within this category (65 percent of our sample). The overt goal of inventories was to create a reservoir of excellence cases to be imitated. This meant that “transferability” was usually an important criterion: The expectation was to identify and archive cases that could be easily reproduced in multiple contexts. An instance of this first ideal type is provided in Box 12.1. Networking spaces (or “market place” as one of our informants called them) were projects in which BP exchanges were based on personal encounters between members of organizations belonging to the same field of interest and hence subject to the same challenges, pressures, and constraints. According to our informants, this common condition constituted an intrinsic drive to “steal useful ideas from one another”—a phenomenon that is well known and discussed in depth in the so-called “community of practice” literature (Wenger, 1998). As a local administration manager put it: We come to these BP meetings to see what’s on offer, what other people are doing, how much it would cost us to do the same thing . . . it’s mostly “give and take” . . . it’s like a marketplace . . . we talk, we try to understand, and if there is something we like, we take it home.

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Systematic Heterogeneity in Management Innovations Box 12.2. EXAMPLE OF BEST PRACTICE NETWORKING SPACE SchoolNet SchoolNet is a private foundation that since 1999 confers a prestigious national award for the most innovative teaching and management practices in primary and secondary schools. The prize money supports future innovative projects rather than past achievements. Winners are invited to the award ceremony and given high media visibility. Unlike the case of other prizes, however, this is only the beginning. SchoolNet in fact considers the award as a “mean to an end rather than an end in itself.” Winners become members of the growing network that SchoolNet manages and actively facilitates. This takes the form of one-to-one visits, peer assist, and networking events. SchoolNet describes itself as the provider and facilitator of networking opportunities in support of mutual learning. Interestingly enough the database with the description of the BP of winners was discontinued after three years as it did not provide value for money and was not aligned with the mission of the organization that aims to promote and sustain innovation.

In the networking pattern, most of the promoters’ efforts went into the establishment and facilitation of exchange processes. The idea of the marketplace suggests that BP can be traded in an open forum where people pool their experience. As another informant put it, the goal in networking spaces is, “setting up an exchange space and ensuring that there is enough stuff on offer.” Although catalogues of BP also existed in these initiatives, these were less structured and not conceived as an aim in themselves. In summary, when BP approaches were translated in terms of networking spaces, the emphasis was less on identifying the extent to which BP are transferable via specific evaluation criteria and more on creating opportunities for dialogue between practitioners and managing a network of relationships to sustain the exchange of excellence cases. Box 12.2 provides an example of an instance of this second ideal type. A summary of the attributes of the two models of adaptation is provided in Table 12.2. Table 12.3 reports the distribution of models around cases. It suggests that some amount of variation did exist within the two groups and that the situation in the field was not totally black and white. This is something to be expected given that our categories identify adaptation ideal types (see Gerhardt, 1994 for a discussion). For example, many of the agencies that translated the idea of BP in terms of networking spaces also established a database of sort (so that these organizations had both inventories and a networking space). However, other aspects of our research support the validity of the distinction. Most significantly, the practitioners were fully aware of the differences between the two models and the need for their organizations to embrace one 209

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Institutions and Organizations Table 12.2. Characteristics of adaptation patterns Inventory

Networking space

Main user

Central organizations

Peripheral organizations

Basis for selection of BP

Presumed evidence of excellence

Relevance and capacity to trigger dialogue between practitioners

Overall aim

To establish ideal models to inspire imitation

To sustain innovation by revealing what is going on within a network

Typical way to make BP available

Database in official web site or printed publication

Community of practice

Table 12.3. Distribution of adaptation patterns across cases

Central organizations Peripheral organizations

Inventory

Networking space

20 18

7 20

rather than the other. For example, one of our informants contrasted “markets squares” (our networking spaces) with what she called a “practico-teca.” This was a made-up and derogatory term that combined the Italian words for “practice” and for library (biblio-teca). The term was used to convey the idea that for this informant inventories were perceived as unhelpful. In her words: The effort to map the world on a 1:1 scale is worthless from the perspective of those who have to take action . . . modelled practices are of little use . . . if they’re too long I don’t have time to read them . . . if they’re too short they are worthless . . . to understand what people do, you need to talk to them. (Charity Manager)

During our follow-up study, we noted that many organizations later abandoned the inventory approach as in the case of SchoolNet in Box 12.2. Indeed, in 2011 we found that none of the networking initiatives still actively operated a BP database. This change and the presence of hybrids as noted before thus underscores that adaptation is a process which unfolds in time, while we were only able to take a static snapshot of it.

12.4.5 Adaptation Process and Positions in the Public-Sector Field To gain some further insights into the emergence of the pattern in adaptation, we zoom in briefly on two cases: EduGov and EcoCounty. These organizations occupy different positions in the Italian public sector (EduGov is a central agency while EcoCounty is a peripheral administration) and adapted BP benchmarking in opposite ways.

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EduGov is a large government agency for the promotion of education with headquarters in Florence and regional offices across the country. Founded in the 1920s as a national archive and museum of education, it is financed by (and operates under the control of) the Ministry of Education. In 1995, in the middle of a major revision (and elimination) of existing historical quangos, EduGov was tasked with managing the register of all educational projects funded by the EU. As a national agency, EduGov was only officially expected to collect information about administrative details and store project documents. Yet, managers at EduGov soon grasped the opportunity to expand this archival work beyond auditing purposes. Rather than merely acting as an administrative archive, they sought to establish themselves as a documentation center recording the innovative efforts of the Italian education system. The word “and the dissemination of best practices” was added to their mission “EduGov aims to provide . . . information on educational resources, projects and technologies in order to facilitate educational innovation and the dissemination of best practices” (from EduGov documents, emphasis added). In short, in order to increase its legitimacy and ensure its long-term survival, the agency sought to position itself as the main center for the promotion of excellence in the Italian school system. The creation of the BP inventory coincided with the introduction of a number of laws that gave Italian schools the power to partially modify the national curriculum at the local level. The Ministry of Education was looking for a central repository where all innovative ideas developed locally could be made widely available and disseminated. As one of the informants at EduGov explained, they were interested in combining their traditional bureaucratic style of central control through ministerial decrees and memorandums with a form of “co-ordination based on participation and emulation between schools.” The BP approach was then an occasion to develop this monitoring work. EduGov set up an inventory with exemplary cases developed by schools across the country. Schools sent forms featuring both standardized data and discursive information on their BP to local partners who employed an established set of criteria to sift through the applications. Selected BPs were then divided between excellent and outstanding and an award was presented to the latter. In the mid-2000s the database contained over 3,000 records (2,984 marked as excellent and 382 outstanding) and in 2009 there were 944 outstanding projects. By creating a panoramic view of innovations promoted by others, EduGov helped the ministry to provide a model of what a devolved school system may look like in practice and made itself indispensable in the process. At the time of writing this chapter, the agency is very active.

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The attempt by EduGov to create a large, comprehensive inventory of BP aimed at documenting and influencing the pedagogical orientation of Italian schools can be contrasted with the case of EcoCounty. EcoCounty is a provincial (county) administration in northern Italy and one of the first in the country to develop a specific plan pursuing Agenda 21 objectives (an international action plan for sustainable development created in 1992). The province drew up a local program to put its general principles into effect through specific events under the aegis of an “Agenda 21 Forum” with the participation of diverse stakeholders. Until 2001, these forums were conducted in a traditional conference format. In early 2002 the local administrators decided to use a participative mode in order to capitalize on local achievements and give them wide visibility. Together with a small consulting firm specialized in participatory policy making, the province started to gather BP. However, the way they went about it was very different from EduGov. Rather than collecting forms with the main goal of creating a database, the consultants carried out a number of outreach interviews through snowball sampling based on suggestions from province workers and contacts from previous events. In their words: “[we were] seeking people who had stories to tell . . . for example, a councilor who promotes recycling, whether if it fails or succeeds, has a lot to tell” (Consultant for EcoCounty). Identifying BP was a way to survey existing projects and enable people to meet and learn from one another. People were asked not only what they did, but also their interests and availability to engage in future projects. In the words of one original promoter: “The important thing is that they represent good examples to trigger a virtuous cycle . . . we wanted people to say ‘if they have done it, we can do it too!’ But also ‘I do not like how they did it: we’ll do it in a different way’ ” (Member of EcoCounty team). This suggests that the aim was not to collect and store information but to forge partnerships and build a network of actors willing to promote initiatives on such themes as recycling or renewable sources. The results of the collection of BP were summarized in a number of “What we did in practice” reports which were then used by the provincial administration to draw up its strategic plan and to establish its funding priorities. These priorities also became the topics of a number of BP groups which met regularly for two years, discussed examples arising from both local and distant experiences, and exchanged materials and tools (from accounting templates to contracts). The meetings were held as away days and special attention was paid to providing spaces where informal contacts and one-to-one conversations could take place. TWO CO-EXISTING PROCESSES OF ADAPTATION

Interestingly enough, our study did not reveal any form of attrition, conflict, or competition among these models of using BP. In fact, we found that 212

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organizations that used one model often also took part in initiatives promoted by agencies that had interpreted BP in a radically different way. For example, the organizer of one of the networking spaces we studied candidly told us that he checked inventories: “to understand the direction of the national policy, which topics are foregrounded and what sort of things they want us to focus on.” Interviewees seem to accept that a division of labor existed between the two alternative models of using BPs. This contrasts for example with the competition between large inventory initiatives: We found several central agencies collecting BP on the same topic often under a regime of “dynamic tension.” For example, when in 2005 the Ministry of Welfare announced the establishment of a “comprehensive” inventory of BP, we heard promoters and managers of existing inventories complaining about wasteful redundancy and arguing for the superiority of their inventories both in terms of coverage and methodology used.

12.5 Discussion We claim that our findings on the emergent adaptation patterns underpinning the “diffusion” of BP in the Italian public sector advance organizational scholarship in three ways. First, we qualify the increasingly popular idea that management innovations need to be made to fit to the new contexts and organizational conditions in order to be adopted (Ansari et al., 2014; Sahlin-Andersson, 1996, Frenkel, 2005; Gond and Boxenbaum, 2013). Second, we claim that interests and interpretations stemming from the configuration of fields and the position of adopting organizations in them go far to explain the uptake of innovations and the related reconfigurations they go through (Boxenbaum, 2006; Zilber, 2006). Finally, we suggest that the bottom-up convergence towards certain adaptation patterns we observed in our case is an example of a more general “diffusion” process (Mazza et al., 2005; Lippi, 2000; Fiss et al., 2012). We therefore put forward a framework to explain the convergence or divergence of adaptation patterns in the diffusion of management innovations based on power relations between innovation brokers and adopters.

12.5.1 Qualifying Adaptation: When and How Does It Happen? A significant body of scholarship proposes that novel ideas undergo significant variation as they cross national, industry, and organizational borders. Our case study helps to qualify this increasingly accepted idea by drawing attention to the boundary conditions within which the process unfolds. We argue that most case studies of “contextualization work” (Gond and 213

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Boxenbaum, 2013), “fitting” (Ansari et al., 2010), “theorization” (Strang and Meyer, 1993) and “framing” (Morris and Lancaster, 2006; Boxenbaum, 2006) build on a hidden assumption that is rarely expressed. They have assumed a management innovation that has a high degree of objectification, in a context with a clearly identifiable source, and one where active brokers promote the innovation (Saka, 2004; Boxenbaum and Battilana, 2005; Boxenbaum, 2006; Ansari et al., 2015). These conditions make innovations less interpretively flexible which in turn generates the need for the adaptation efforts listed above. However, this condition was notably absent in our case. The BP approach was almost never objectified or carried by artifacts; original models were notably absent; ideas on how BPs could be used were many and they were derived from a variety of models; and no visible sources of authority were governing the process. Therefore, questions of fidelity (Ansari et al., 2010) never arose as the issue would be “Fidelity to what?” This is not only a matter of semantics. The nature of what is being adapted or made to fit affects the work associated with the process (Perkmann and Spicer, 2008; Gond and Boxenbaum, 2013). It is one thing to implement something rather freely according to one’s local interpretation of a popular idea circulating via fragmentary hints, tips, and exemplars; it is quite another to adapt or tweak or edit something that has a recognizable form and is backed by some existing source of authority. The two imply and require different levels of empowerment, different types of work, and may potentially trigger different dynamics (e.g. control and resistance). Innovations that have been successfully packaged into a “closed box” (Latour, 2005) can hardly be taken apart at will and reused freely. Specific agents exist that ensure that this does not apply, such as the case of accreditation agencies for management tools (see e.g. Scarbrough et al., 2005). A very different situation applies when no closed box exists, so to speak. This explains why in our case adopters could claim to use a highly particular modification of the BP approach (e.g. without benchmarking or similar forms of systematic assessment) and still call it “best practice” without triggering disputes. In summary, our case suggests that different modes of adaptation (or contextualization, or fitting, or framing) apply depending on some of the existing boundary conditions. More specifically, our study suggests that issues of fidelity discussed in the literature apply especially when a (management) innovation is highly objectified (as in the case of resource planning discussed by Scarbrough et al., 2015) and/or supported by an institutionalized normative apparatus (see e.g. the example of safety procedures in Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000). Other mechanisms and dynamics are likely to operate when such conditions do not apply. What such dynamics may look like will become clearer once we examine in the next sections why in spite of the lack of a 214

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strong translating agency in the Italian case we ended up with a clear pattern at field level.

12.5.2 Adaptation Patterns and Field Configurations Although the uptake of BP in Italy was linked to a number of loosely linked sources, we did not end up with a totally idiosyncratic landscape. On the contrary, the management innovation was modified in comparable ways according to organizational and institutional conditions. This can hardly be explained on the basis of external social forces such as general belief systems or the work of (institutional) entrepreneurs (Miller and Garnsey, 2000; Boxenbaum and Battilana, 2005; Lounsbury, 2008; Delmestri, 2009). All adopters belonged to the public sector and as such they utilized the same general outlook and value system. At the same time, no obvious institutional entrepreneur existed—indeed, as we explain above, the field was characterized by a multitude of intermediaries and sources. Therefore, our conclusion is that the resulting allomorphic2 configuration of the field can only be understood by taking into account specific situational circumstances. In this, we agree with Saka (2004) when she suggests that “not only broader institutional belief systems or logics, but also the interpretative schemes and interaction patterns of actors shape practices.” We argue in particular that the emergence of such distinct adaptation patterns of the BP approach can be explained in terms of the combination of two features of the Italian public sector: the urgent need for legitimization and the very structure of the field dividing organizations between center and periphery. The two operated in tandem and neither can explain our findings on its own. The constant need for legitimization is common to all organizations (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) and especially public ones. While it is particularly acute in disaffected democracies such as Italy’s (and in many other countries) where citizens harbor a deep mistrust of politicians and public institutions (Torcal and Montero, 2006), no organization in the public sector can do without it. As for the division between center and periphery, of itself this distinction is not sufficient to explain such a strong polarization in the adaptation pattern. For example, work by Compagni, Mele, and Ravasi (2015) conducted in the healthcare system in Italy shows that while central and peripheral actors in a field tend to cognitively frame innovations 2 Allomorphism captures the idea that systematic diversification processes lurk beneath the surface appearance of generalized take-up (Lippi, 2000). According to the Collins Dictionary, “allomorph” in linguistics indicates “any of the phonological representations of a single morpheme. For example, the final (s) and (z) sounds of bets and beds are allomorphs of the English noun-plural morpheme.” In chemistry, allomorph designates “any of two or more different crystalline forms of a chemical compound, such as a mineral.”

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differently (e.g. threat versus opportunity), this does not automatically translate into different patterns of adaptation. In their case, the position in the field affected mostly the timing of adoption but did not shape adaptation (and indeed in their case strong isomorphism tendencies were present). It is only when positioning and legitimacy needs are considered together that the systematic heterogeneity emerging from our data can be understood. Consider, by way of example, the case of organizations such as EduGov and similar central government agencies. For this type of organization, collecting and archiving knowledge constitutes an effective way to gain legitimacy and justify their existence in the eyes of the Italian public, the elected government, and even the EU. To be noticed by these stakeholders, projects ought to be as large and as visible as possible—often with hundreds of BP Cases archived. The efficacy of such archives is only marginally relevant, for the aim is to justify the use of resources (many EU funding initiatives include the request to create a BP database listing cases of excellence among those funded). Critical to our discussion is that peripheral organizations were pursuing the same aim— legitimization. However, the outcomes were dramatically different. At the local level, BP projects were quickly perceived as a way to provide legitimacy by helping peripheral actors to gain recognition as valid autonomous and accredited decision-making hubs (against the center). This is why parts of local governments and associations used the same initiative as the center (inventories of BP) in striving to establish their autonomy from the latter. In so doing, they symbolically and practically stated that what counts as “good” (or “bad”) in areas such as sustainability, education, or modernization of the public administration can also be decided at the local level. As laws giving more autonomy to local organizations were passed (see above), peripheral organizations started to use the BP approach to independently promote specific agendas at the local level through networking spaces. The expectation being that once officials have the chance to directly learn about “experiences elsewhere,” they can use it in a rhetorical way to trigger action in their own constituency, nurturing a grassroots movement. In short, since organizations in central and peripheral positions anticipated similar benefits they used similar adaptation patterns (Boxenbaum, 2006; Zilber, 2006). Their purposes were “neither arbitrary nor dependent on the subjects’ idiosyncrasies” and tended to be general in the sense that individuals placed in the same positions would tend towards similar choices (Brym and Hamlin, 2009: 90).

12.5.3 Towards a Framework of Adaptation Dynamics One of the most surprising results of our study is that we did not observe any notable tension or conflict in the emergence of the adaptation patterns 216

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previously described. The relative lack of conflict is surprising insofar as the control over standardization and variation of innovations is inherently an arena of and for power struggles (Nicolini, 2010). What counts as an appropriate variation of an idea can in fact have material consequences, which at times led to tensions. Indeed, the literature has documented many cases of forceful top-down impositions of a particular way of interpreting an innovation (Bruland, 1995). This includes research on the use of the BP approach in more centralizing nations such as in Germany and the United Kingdom (Bowerman et al., 2002; Greiling, 2005). For example, Ansari, Reinecke, and Spaan (2014) show that managers usually try to control which elements of a practice are allowed to vary and how. Studies also document struggles over how much autonomy exists in the adaptation of practices across organizations and open conflict regarding which version of the innovation should be adopted (e.g. Meyer and Höllerer, 2010). The literature is full of cases in which conflict results in cosmetic adoption (Erlingsdóttir and Lindberg, 2005) or decoupling between acceptance and implementation (Gondo and Amis, 2013). Interestingly enough, many of these studies were conducted within multinationals where the headquarters usually has significant control over the process (Ferner et al., 2004) or in countries with a strong central government (Erlingsdóttir and Lindberg, 2005 studied reforms in Sweden). As we discussed above, the conditions underpinning these cases were different from those we encountered in Italy where there was no evidence of a central authoritative brokering agency and the diffusion proceeded in a bottom-up fashion (rather than top down). In this final section, we use the distinctiveness of our case vis-à-vis previous studies to construct a framework that accounts for different outcomes of the adaptation process depending on the balance between the power of the brokering agency and the autonomy of adopters. The framework is summarized in Figure 12.3. Quadrant 1 in Figure 12.3 captures the scenario explored by scholars who studied the relationship between organizational-level adaptation and fieldlevel spread of management practices (Ansari et al., 2010, 2014; Dokko and Gaba, 2012; Canato et al., 2013). It also applies to a broader literature that examines consistency and variability in the spread of human resource management practices within organizations, especially multinational companies (Bowen and Ostroff, 2004, Nishii and Wright, 2008). This represents the traditional situation in which the brokering agency enjoys significant power so that prospective adopters have relatively few degrees of freedom. Examples of this quadrant include other cases in which the “diffusion” process is led by actors with a high position in an organizational structure (see e.g. the case of coerced implementation of Six Sigma in General Electric by Canato et al., 2013), or orchestrated by a body with established formal power in a field such 217

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high

Power of Brokering Agency low

2

4

Conflictual/Decoupled Adaptation

3 Heterogeneous Adaptation

Allomorphic Adaptation

low

high Autonomy of Adopters

Figure 12.3. A model of adaptation dynamics

as a professional body, or an evaluation agency (see e.g. the role of professional associations in Scarbrough et al., 2015). In short, in this scenario the convergence towards a clear pattern depends on the top-down work of brokering agents that carefully support the diffusing innovation, often carefully managing its contextualization. Quadrant 3 captures the situation described in our case in which there is no clear brokering agency (or one with little power in terms of governance of the field) and adopters enjoy high autonomy. In this case, we expect adaptation patterns to emerge in a bottom-up fashion with some level of mutual mimesis and acceptance among adopters. Tensions and conflict are rare because there is an understanding that different organizations carrying out different types of activities have different ongoing concerns. Quadrants 2 and 4 refer to cases where the power balance is more uncertain and a plurality of adaptations unfold. Quadrant 2 captures the familiar case of divergence when the “diffusion” of innovations is associated with a plurality of competing “versions.” Several examples of this situation have been captured in previous studies (Meyer and Höllerer, 2010; Scarbrough et al., 2015) which usually indicate two typical behaviors among adopters: resistance and decoupling. As an example of the former, a study of the arrival of the contentious practice of shareholder value in Austria studied by Meyer and Höllerer (2010) triggered a number of disputing interpretations from groups with distinct interests without the emergence of a clear (winning) pattern. As for the latter, it is well documented how organizations may adopt an innovation symbolically without implementing it substantively through the process of decoupling (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2008; Haack and Schoeneborn, 2015). 218

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Finally, Quadrant 4 corresponds to cases where both the brokering agents and expected adopters have low power and autonomy. In these cases, we would also expect little convergence and a patchy take-up (McCabe, 2011; van Veen et al., 2011). This is the situation that mostly resembles one of cacophony or pure heterogeneity in the field and is best exemplified by studies of management ideas with low popularity. These usually do not have clear proponents and their take-up is usually fueled by the interest of adopters, who double as promoters (van Veen et al., 2011). Yet, their lack of independence and relevance in the field makes them unable to sustain the visibility of any particular adaptation pattern. For example, in a study of how management ideas from a United States management guru arrived in a fragmented way in the United Kingdom banking sector, McCabe (2011) shows how employees themselves modified the idea to a point where it bore almost no resemblance to the original. However, these employees lacked the necessary power and “capital” to promote their local interpretation across organizations. Although we have discussed how exemplary empirical studies fit into the four quadrants, their position should not be considered mutually exclusive and permanent. Rather, we expect to find a mix of adaptation dynamics in any situation. In addition, because power is dynamic in nature and so is the nature of management innovations, cases might move from one quadrant to another should conditions change. Hence, if or when power conditions in the field are altered, adaptation processes may change accordingly. This may happen in the case of different innovations within the same context or in the case of the same innovation over time. A typical example would be a change in the nature of the brokering agency (a less centralizing government, or a new CEO with a strong centralist view). In this hypothetical situation, bottom-up convergence could be quickly undermined through the introduction of new stringent standards resulting in the break of a truce among models leaving adopters in a state of dispute (a process that could be represented as a move from Quadrant 3 to Quadrant 2).

12.6 Conclusions In this chapter, we set out to study the relationship between organizationallevel processes of adaptation and field-level processes of “diffusion” of a management innovation in the absence of strong sources and without a powerful brokering agency. We found that the BP approach assumed a strong local flavor as it gravitated around one-off selections of BP in an unstructured manner with a focus on showcasing and sharing. The presence of such a strong re-creation drive did not result in a totally idiosyncratic landscape but rather in systematic heterogeneity across organizations that we explained in 219

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terms of comparable interests stemming from similar positions in the publicsector field. The chapter makes three main contributions. First, we expand and refine the idea that innovations need to be “made to fit” to new contexts by pointing out that this applies mostly in the presence of clearly identifiable sources and well-packaged management innovations. We suggest that the process and dynamics are likely to be different in the presence of different conditions. In so doing, the chapter responds to the call for more fine-grained analysis of how practices vary as they spread (Fiss et al., 2012). It also demonstrates the benefits of conducting studies in non-traditional contexts where some of the taken-for-granted conditions (e.g. the presence of a strong corporate actor) do not apply. Second, the chapter highlights the value of situational interests and interpretations in explaining the uptake of innovations and resulting field configurations. In particular, we show how specific adaptation patterns emerge in relation to the positions and interests of adopters in the field. Although previous literature has discussed variation dynamics, the focus was mainly on degrees of variation in relation to environmental/organizational conditions (Ansari et al., 2010, 2014; Fiss et al., 2012). Our study advances the debate by showing the mechanisms through which management innovations vary as they diffuse, and adaptation patterns may emerge. Third, we develop a framework that accounts for different outcomes of the adaptation process depending on the balance between the power of the brokering agency and autonomy of adopters in a field. The framework enriches and expands existing theory and sheds further light on the relationships between interorganizational mechanisms of diffusion and intraorganizational implementation and adaptation (Ansari et al., 2010: 68). In addition, we offer empirical evidence that interests and relationships among adopters have as much theoretical purchase as accounts based on the fit between the innovation and adopters (cf. Ansari et al., 2010). While the general organizational and management literature on innovations and knowledge often mentions the importance of power dynamics, the study of how this applies in the case of the “diffusion” of management innovations is still underexplored (Peeters et al., 2014). In so doing, we recover a central insight of the translation perspective on how adaptation is underpinned by the interests of adopters. Our study opens interesting directions for future research. First, the multimethod approach paves the way for further studies that bridge the organizational and the field levels. As we suggest above, new phenomena and unexpected insights may stem from addressing such issues in fields and national contexts that are different from those traditionally considered in the management literature. In particular, this may lead to interesting 220

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questions such as: Are the mechanisms suggested here generalizable? Do other conditions apply in different organizational fields? What happens in different national contexts? Second, our model is admittedly speculative and further research will be necessary to refine it and test its validity. Finally, further interesting insights can be derived if one also considers the temporal dimension of the phenomena and more research will be needed to understand how different fields moved between quadrants. By their nature, most studies in the translation and glocalization traditions (reviewed in the first part of this chapter) focus on the here and now or confine themselves to reporting events over relatively short periods. Longitudinal research could reveal how and whether patterns persist through time and whether allomorphism (systematic heterogeneity) is a lasting state or simply a transitional one towards isomorphism.

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Institutions and Organizations Kuhlmann, S., and Jäkel, T. (2013). Competing, Collaborating or Controlling? Comparing Benchmarking in European Local Government. Public Money and Management, 33(4), 269–76. Kuhlmann, S., and Wollmann, H. (2014). Introduction to Comparative Public Administration: Administrative Systems and Reforms in Europe. London: Palgrave. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lippi, A. (2000). One Theory, Many Practices: Institutional Allomorphism in the Managerialist Reorganization of Italian Local Governments. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 16(4), 455–77. Lippi, A. (2011). Evaluating the “Quasi Federalist” Programme of Decentralisation in Italy since the 1990s: A Side-Effect Approach. Local Government Studies, 37(5), 495–516. Lockett, A., Currie, G., Finn, R., Martin, G., and Waring, J. (2014). The Influence of Social Position on Sensemaking about Organizational Change. Academy of Management Journal, 57, 1102–29. Lounsbury, M. (2008). Institutional Rationality and Practice Variation: New Directions in the Institutional Analysis of Practice. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 33(4), 349–61. Mazza, C., Sahlin-Andersson, K., and Pedersen, J. S. (2005). European Constructions of an American Model: Developments of Four MBA Programmes. Management Learning, 36(4), 471–91. McCabe, D. (2011). Opening Pandora’s Box: The Unintended Consequences of Stephen Covey’s Effectiveness Movement. Management Learning, 42(2), 183–97. Mele, V., and Ongaro, E. (2014). Public Sector Reform in a Context of Political Instability: Italy 1992–2007. International Public Management Journal, 17(1), 111–42. Meyer, J., and Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 340–63. Meyer, R. E., and Höllerer, M. A. (2010). Meaning Structures in a Contested Issue Field: A Topographic Map of Shareholder Value in Austria. Academy of Management Journal, 53(6), 1241–62. Miller, D., and Garnsey, E. (2000). Entrepreneurs and Technology Diffusion: How Diffusion Research Can Benefit from a Greater Understanding of Entrepreneurship. Technology in Society, 22(4), 445–65. Monteiro, P., and D. Nicolini (2015). Recovering Materiality in Institutional Work: Prizes as an Assemblage of Human and Material Entities. Journal of Management Inquiry, 24, 61–81. Morris, T., and Lancaster, Z. (2006). Translating Management Ideas. Organization Studies, 27(2), 207–33. Nicolini, D. (2010). Medical Innovation as a Process of Translation: A Case from the Field of Telemedicine. British Journal of Management, 21(4), 1011–26. Nishii, L., and Wright, P. (2008). Variability within Organizations: Implications for Strategic Human Resource Management. In D. B. Smith (Ed.), The People Make the

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13 Data as Process From Objective Resource to Contingent Performance Matthew Jones, Alan F. Blackwell, Karl Prince, Sallyanne Meakins, Alexander Simpson, and Alain Vuylsteke

13.1 Introduction As Langley and Tsoukas (2017: 6) put it, a process orientation “does not deny the existence of states, events, and entities, but insists on unpacking them to reveal the complex activities and transactions that take place and contribute to their constitution.” Such an unpacking of states, events, and entities would now seem relatively well recognized in relation to complex social phenomena such as identities (Howard-Grenville et al., 2013), routines (Feldman, 2000), and organizations (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Some “stronger” versions of process theory even extend this unpacking to the constitutive elements of these phenomena, such as actors and artefacts. Thus, for Rescher (1996: 53), “physical things” are regarded as “no more than stability waves in a sea of process,” while Nayak and Chia (2011: 283) observe that “individuals themselves must similarly be understood as relatively stabilized effects of social relations and event clusterings.” Processes, it would seem, “go all the way down.” Yet still there would appear to be a limit to how far this argument is taken in respect of one particular “entity” that is increasingly identified as important in contemporary organizations, namely data. In this chapter we seek to unpack the “the complex processes that are involved in and contribute to” the constitution of data and to show that data too may be understood as a contingent process rather than the objective resource that is portrayed in the literature. Such an exercise would seem timely in the light of widespread claims, not just from information technology companies such as IBM (Mojsilovic, 2014) or analytics software vendors (Connolly, 2016), but also by the Sloan

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Management Review (Ransbotham, 2015) and the chief executive of the United Kingdom Civil Service (Manzoni, 2017), that we have entered an “age of data.” In the following we therefore first describe the definition of data in the information sciences to demonstrate the prevalence of entitative conceptions, before showing how these are also found in three domains of organizational theorizing that are particularly focused on data. Drawing on evidence from an ongoing multidisciplinary study we then present an analysis of how data are used and reused in intensive care to demonstrate that they are not a raw material that exists “out there” in the world independent of any use that may be made of them. Rather data are enacted (or sometimes not) in particular, situated practices that can be highly consequential for the activities that draw on them. Some implications of this process view of data for organization studies are then discussed.

13.2 Data as a Fundamental, Objective Resource In the information sciences it is generally taken as axiomatic that data are fundamental entities that represent, describe, or record reality. It is data that constitute other phenomena, therefore, and they themselves have no internal processes. As the widely cited definition by Davenport and Prusak (1997: 9) puts it, for example, data are “simple observations of states of the world.” In a similar vein, Kitchin (2014: 1) describes data as “the raw material produced by abstracting the world into categories, measures and other representational forms.” The fundamental character of data is also evident in representations that portray it as the “base or bedrock of a knowledge pyramid” (Kitchin, 2014: 9) resting on “the world” and over which lie, successively, information (the meaning added to data), knowledge (the action potential gained from the processing, management, and use of information) and wisdom (the ability to apply knowledge sagely). While the implicit hierarchy of this representation is contested, for example by Tuomi (1999) who argues that information is not created from data, but rather data are created by putting information into a predefined structure that determines its meaning, this does not get very far in unpacking the constitution of data. That the information sciences view data as fundamental elements does not always mean that they are considered immutable, though, or that they accurately represent reality, or that the meaning given to them is not subject to human interpretation. The data themselves, however, are seen as being “out there” in the world with some a priori, and relatively enduring, existence independent of any use that may be made of them. The prevalence of this view of data is reflected in terms used to describe practices associated with data, such as “mining” and “curation.” As Checkland and Holwell (1998) 228

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note, this view is also consistent with the etymology of the term data, from the Latin dare, to give, even if, in practice, much discussion of data focuses on the subset of data that are selected for attention, that might more accurately be termed capta, from the Latin for taken. The information sciences also suggest that data is not a homogenous concept. Kitchin (2014), for example, proposes that data may be of different kinds. That is, they may be of different forms (quantitative or qualitative), or be differently structured (structured, semi-structured, unstructured ), or be of different types—indexical, enabling identification and linking, attribute, representing particular characteristics of a phenomenon, and meta-data, data about data. Data may also be generated in different ways—they may be captured directly, derived through processing or analysis of other data, produced as a byproduct of other activities (a category Manyika et al. (2011) refer to as exhaust), or transient (captured, but never processed or stored). So too may they be intentionally created for a particular purpose (primary data), created by one person but used by another (secondary data), or they may be processed, for example as counts or descriptive statistics, before being made available for use by others (tertiary data). Whether or not this is a complete account of the possible kinds of data (computer scientists, for example, distinguish between objective and subjective data (Smith, 1996) and see causal relations between these categories and a number of the kinds of data identified by Kitchin (2014)), it indicates that there is a need for caution in making claims about data in general.

13.3 Conceptions of Data in the Organizational Literature The information sciences are not alone in adopting an entitative conception of data. A similar view is also found in the organizational literature, especially in recent organizational theorizing that assigns a central role to data, such as the Audit Society (Power, 1997); evidence-based management (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006); and “big data” (Barton and Court, 2012). All of these treat data as a naturally occurring resource. Thus the Audit Society (Power, 1997), or as Bowerman et al. (2000) argue, the broader “performance measurement society” of which it may be seen as one aspect, is predicated on an assumption that the data that record the measures of performance provide a sufficient representation of the relevant practices for them to be used as the basis for control. As Power (1997: 69) puts it, “auditors verify on the basis of evidence.” Whether or not the reliability of the data may be considered to be compromised by self-reporting (Bowerman et al., 2000), the rise of this new form of governance, especially in the public sector, has been associated with a massive growth in the volume and variety of data gathered and reported (Ozga, 2009). 229

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Evidence-based management similarly sees data as the basis for superior organizational performance, replacing “formal authority, reputation and intuition” (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006: 74). Although acknowledging that data “are not necessarily reliable or informative in themselves” (Rousseau, 2012) and may need to be transformed before they can become the organizational facts that should guide decisions, proponents of evidence-based management identify “raw” data as the ultimate source of evidence of “what works.” Moreover, while their critics question whether evidence is ever “simply out there waiting for the researcher to find” (Learmonth and Harding, 2006: 247), their concern is more with “who determines what the best evidence is and on what topics evidence is gathered in the first place? Improving decisions with regard to what criteria or from which perspective?” (Hornung, 2012: 390), than with how data come to be constituted in the first place. The most recent data-centric development of significance to organizational practice has been that of “big data.” Recognizing the proliferating volume, variety, and velocity of computer-based data that contemporary organizations produce in the course of their activities there is growing interest in exploiting this resource for organizational transformation and competitive advantage (Barton and Court, 2012, Manyika et al., 2011). “Data is the new oil” (Verdino, 2013), as its proponents like to claim. For some, big data is seen as extending the reach of evidence-based management, enabling managers to “decide on the basis of evidence rather than intuition” (McAfee and Brynjolfsson, 2012: 63), while for others it opens up a whole new mode of analysis in which advanced algorithms applied to large data sets can make discoveries and create new knowledge without human intervention (Anderson, 2008; Dhar, 2013). Largely absent from these arguments, however, is any consideration of how these data are produced. While differing in their emphasis, therefore, a common thread across these literatures is the notion that organizations, intentionally or as a byproduct of their activities, create a body of data that constitutes a more or less comprehensive, accurate, enduring, and independent record of their practices. Suitably analyzed, these data can then form the basis for improved organizational performance. A closer examination of how these data come to be created, however, might lead one to be more cautious about assuming their objectivity and independence.

13.4 Unpacking Data in Practice In order to explore the complexities of the constitution of data we draw on findings from an ongoing multidisciplinary study of data reuse in a medical setting. This would seem an appropriate context in terms of data-focused 230

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organizational practices as medicine is specifically identified as a model for evidence-based management (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006) and is widely cited as a key application domain for big data (Raghupathi and Raghupathi, 2014). Audit is also a major purpose of data reuse in healthcare. Within the medical field, intensive (or critical) care units (ICUs) in acute hospitals would seem a particularly suitable location in which to pursue this exploration as they routinely record large volumes of both quantitative and qualitative data about patients and their treatment in computer-based clinical information systems (CIS) to support patient care. Manor-Shulman et al. (2008), for example, calculated that in 2005 more than 1,300 data items were already being recorded about a typical intensive care patient in a period of twenty-four hours. This figure is likely to have increased significantly as more, more accurate, and faster data-gathering devices have been introduced since then. ICUs are therefore one of the primary centers of data-oriented healthcare. It should be emphasized that our findings relate only to the transactions and activities concerned with the way in which data are recorded and retrieved in the course of clinical practice and not with those practices (or decisions) that follow from the use of the data. While there is much that could be said about how data may inform clinical decision making (Politser, 1981) or about how the data revolution in healthcare has the potential to transform clinical practice, especially in intensive care settings (Celi et al., 2014; Ghassemi et al., 2015), the focus of this chapter is only on how data come to be available to inform practice in the first place. Nor do we consider what may happen when data are lifted out from the settings in which they are produced and are aggregated into the sorts of large-scale datasets that are the focus of the “big data” literature (cf. Busch, 2014). It is not that the issues discussed in this chapter may not be significant for clinical decision making or “big data,” but it would seem important first to understand what constitutes the data that are used in clinical practice, or aggregated into these large-scale datasets.

13.4.1 Methods Our interest in data emerged from a study of CIS implementation and use that began in 2005 when an ICU in a United Kingdom National Health Service hospital was planning to replace their paper-based records with a CIS. The initial research involved observation of work practices and semi-structured interviews with a sample of senior and junior doctors, nurses of all grades (from trainees to nurse practitioners) and allied health professionals (pharmacists, dieticians, and occupational therapists). In total thirty-six interviews were carried out, with sixteen nurses, ten junior doctors, six consultants (senior doctors), two dieticians, and two pharmacists. Observations were also 231

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carried out on twenty-five days over three different periods. Interviews focused on perceptions of data in intensive care prior to CIS introduction and experience of CIS use and its effect on work practices as the system was implemented. Observations included shadowing ward rounds, sitting with staff as they used the CIS and inviting them to talk about what they are doing, as well as passive observation of work practices with, and around, the CIS. For the past two years the study has been expanded to a further four ICUs that use a CIS from the same vendor. In total nineteen interviews with five doctors, three nurses, and two IT/data staff have been conducted across the five sites during this phase and observations have been conducted at each site. These interviews and observations have specifically focused on activities related to the reuse of data. Authors also attended user group meetings organized by the CIS vendor, enabling further informal conversations with clinicians regarding their reuse of data. The transcribed interviews and observation fieldnotes are the primary sources we draw on in our illustrative description of data in intensive care. These showed that there was considerable commonality in the issues encountered in the use and reuse of CIS data across the sites, so the evidence presented is a composite of findings from all five ICUs. The description was initially prepared by the first author and checked (and corrected where necessary) by the other authors, one of whom is a senior consultant intensivist at one of the sites, through circulation of drafts and discussion at project team meetings and in email exchanges. Figures 13.1 and 13.2 were developed iteratively in dialogue with the description as a means of summarizing the processes by which data come to be constituted in the CIS and by which these data are subsequently enacted in clinical work practices.

13.4.2 Data in Intensive Care Because of the severity of their medical condition, ICU patients require frequent monitoring of a wide range of physiological, and neurological, parameters. Attribute data on many of these parameters are captured continuously by sensors attached to or, in some cases, inserted in the patient’s body and transmitted directly to the CIS. These data are recorded periodically, at frequencies varying from once a minute to hourly, depending on the requirements for clinical decision making. Data captured other than at these recording intervals are transient and are not stored in the CIS. Additional data, such as the patient’s sedation score or fluid balance, are captured or derived by clinical staff and entered into the CIS manually (using the keyboard of the CIS computer). The CIS also holds data on the patient’s treatment, including: a record of the medicines prescribed and of their administration; pathology laboratory results 232

All actions by clinical staff in course of a patient’s stay

All patients physiological & neurological parameters

Current model of relevant parameters of condition & reporting

Parameters & actions that can be monitored with available technology

Set of actions that can be recorded

Set of parameters that can be monitored to assess patient’s condition

Figure 13.1. The becoming of data

Set of actions considered necessary to record treatment

Set of parameters considered necessary to assess patient’s condition

Staff time & attention to recording

Actions that are selected & recording is possible & completed

Parameters that are selected & recording is possible & completed

Device malfunction, misplacement, disconnection

Sets of actions that are recorded in CIS

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Knowledge of available data

Knowledge of CIS

Current model of condition

Experience

Specialism

Super user determines if data request can be met

Clinician identifies data needed to address patient’s condition

No Can data request be met? Yes Super user modifies data request in light of known data

Clinician formulates data request No

Yes No

Use query tools to assist data extraction

Attempt data extraction directly

Clinician abandons query

Clinician formulates new data request

Clinician modifies data request

Figure 13.2. The making of data

Super user identifies data and processes needed to meet request

Clinician places data request with super user

Clinician attempts data access themselves?

Yes

Attempt manual data extraction

Use query tools to assist data extraction

Attempt data extraction directly from database

No

Yes Data extraction successful?

No

Data extraction successful? Yes

Data are processed to suit request

Data are processed

Data in practice

No data

No data

Data in practice

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(which may be fed directly into the CIS or need to be entered manually); physiotherapy assessments; and nutrition records. While entry of much of the data is highly structured, with pull-down menus and tick-boxes, enabling them to be converted to quantitative values, there are also free text fields in which doctors, nurses, and allied professionals record qualitative commentaries about treatment plans, observations, and medical notes. Data entry screens for the particular CIS studied are highly customizable and were often designed to match the layout of familiar documentation. This was described by a nurse involved in CIS implementation: “if you have a paper chart . . . So you literally take your paper, don’t you, and you copy it into a computer.” As a result, however, different ICUs may record the same data in different formats, under different names, and in a different order, making it very difficult to develop common methods to access data. As a doctor commented: “I guess the problem with [this CIS] is ultimately that it is so customisable so it’s not like going into [another CIS] where everyone uses the same programme, we’re all using the same program but where you log your lines may be very different from where I do.” In the particular CIS studied, the underlying SQL database is also hidden from users, most of whom only encounter the data entry screens and are unaware of the form in which the data are held. This database has a flat-file structure in which data are stored in fields comprised of long lists of numerical values or text strings without any differentiation between data of different kinds (e.g. quantitative/qualitative, captured/derived/exhaust). The naming of the database fields is highly customizable and tends to be quite cryptic (as only a select group of “super-users,” who are involved in setting up and maintaining the database, are ever expected to encounter them). As new parameters are added to the database over time or changes are made to the way in which existing parameters are recorded, new fields are added to the database, but the old fields are retained (and just not updated). It is consequently hard to make sense, from the database itself, what the data in particular fields represent or to find the fields corresponding to particular parameters. A doctor described the problems encountered in making sense of the data: they have not found it easy to cope with the changes that have happened over time. The simple ones you would expect such as new fields being put in or different characteristics of the different parameters you want to look at, some of them being calculated fields and some of them being actual recorded fields and then being classified in all sorts of strange ways.

Staff involved in extracting data therefore need to maintain secondary records that map parameters to the current database fields holding the relevant data. The primary use of the CIS is in immediate care of individual patients. Clinical staff consult the CIS to get an understanding of the patient’s 235

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condition and their response to treatment, with the values for different parameters over time displayed as graphs and/or numbers on screens located at each bedside. The numerical and textual description provided by the CIS may be informed and supplemented by observation of the patient. As each patient is typically cared for by a single nurse who spends most of their work time at or near the bedside, they are under almost continuous surveillance. In addition, at a number of times over the course of the day, a group of doctors, senior nurses, and allied professionals conduct ward rounds at which they review the treatment and progress of each patient. With decisions on the patient’s treatment and records of the delivery of care also being documented, the CIS provides a rich and comprehensive description of the patient’s condition and the care they received over the course of their stay in the ICU. As a senior nurse observed: So everything, all the observations, blood pressures, heart rates, things like that. All the recordings from all the monitors and machines, they all filter in automatically. All the assessments for all the patients, all their health, mobility, pressures, all assessments, all those kind of forms. All the patient demographics, the patient details, that’s all on here. And then all the drugs and the prescriptions are all on here so they all come up when they’re due. All the notes, everything, from a doctor’s perspective. All their notes, all their records, all their assessments. Ward rounds. Everything is all completed in here. The microbiologists come up and use it, the dietician uses it. Physios use it, they’ve got their own area. The OTs have got their own bit. Speech therapists have got their own bit.

Over time, therefore, the CIS database accumulates highly detailed records for many patients, becoming a potentially key source of data for audit, research, and performance measurement.

13.5 The Nature of Data in the CIS In order to appreciate the nature of data in the CIS it may be helpful, drawing on the distinction between data and capta (Checkland and Holwell, 1998), to consider in more detail what goes in to the CIS that makes up the data that are available to be attended to, as well as what capta are actually attended to in practice. To start with the data recorded in the CIS, it is necessary to recognize some particularities of the context within which this recording takes place. Thus, while it may be the case that sensors transmit values automatically to the CIS, these readings may not always be accurate. Sensors may be disconnected, displaced, or malfunction, so there may be values missing from what should be a continuous record, or the record may contain inaccuracies. 236

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Nurses are also expected periodically to validate data to ensure that erroneous values are flagged and corrective action taken to restore correct recording. Nevertheless, with the pressures of care for severely ill patients, there may not always be time to check the data being recorded properly and erroneous values may be overlooked. A doctor observed “It’s only as good as what people put in right? Well some of it’s validated alright, [but] it is quite a common mistake, that people validate stuff that shouldn’t have been entered.” This situation can be further exacerbated where data need to be entered manually, as clinicians become adept at finding the quickest way to “keep the CIS happy,” even if this may lead to an incomplete, or even inaccurate, record. For most clinical staff, moreover, CIS data entry has a low priority compared to the immediate care of the patient and so may not always be completed at the required time. As a result there could be temporal inconsistencies between data fields. There is also considerable variation in what, and how much, staff write in free text fields, so there was little consistency in their content. “Some [nurses] seem to write almost like a review of the day,” a data analyst observed, “where they are preparing mentally the handover they’re going to give for their colleague . . . whereas other people in fact probably write it down on a paper towel or a piece of paper and then throw that away.” While ostensibly providing a complete and accurate record of ICU care practices, therefore, there could potentially be significant errors, inconsistencies, or omissions in the CIS data. It is also the case that the data held in the CIS represent a particular selection of items that are generally considered to be relevant to the care of patients and that these are recorded in ways that reflect both current understanding of their significance and the capabilities of available technology in terms of the frequency, accuracy, and appropriate units with which to represent a particular parameter. These understandings and technological capabilities evolve over time and there may therefore be discontinuities in the data series as new data conventions are adopted. One site, for example, changed the units for recording haemoglobin levels, with the result that historical data were an order of magnitude different from recent values. If the accuracy of the data in the CIS as a representation of the “state of the world” is potentially problematic, this is no less the case with the way in which clinical staff understand the patient’s condition through the CIS data. The conventional view of this process is that the clinician extracts data from the CIS that represent a particular phenomenon that is considered relevant to a specific clinical “problem” that they are seeking to address, e.g. why is this patient’s blood pressure changing in this way? The data that represent a phenomenon and their relevance to the problem may not be fully known, however, and there is a particular challenge in clinical decision making where data indicate that a patient is not responding to intervention in the way 237

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expected by the standard model of a condition. This could lead to discussions in ward rounds about whether the data were wrong, or whether they were being interpreted incorrectly. A further issue may be that the experience and training of individual clinicians lead them to consider particular representations of the patient’s condition as offering more relevant insight than others in certain situations. To address this, as was noted, the CIS may present the same data in different ways and/or present tertiary data derived from the primary values. As the data analyst at one hospital put it “They had lots of different—well Mr So and So likes to see his layout like this, Mr So and So likes his layout like that.” Different doctors examining the same patient may therefore act on different data, presented in different ways. Even if there is agreement on what capta are relevant to a particular situation, clinicians may respond to them differently. Experienced clinicians, for example, seem to be able to identify patterns in data at a glance, in ways that are not apparent to their more junior colleagues. Similarly, clinicians may pay greater attention to certain data items rather than others, depending on their specialism and their experience of what they consider to be comparable cases. Any errors, inconsistencies, and omissions in the data held in the CIS, however, may not be critical for the immediate care of a patient, as CIS data are rarely the sole reference point. Direct observation, knowledge of the patient over the course of their treatment to date, and social processes around the CIS, such as discussions on ward rounds or handover meetings between staff shifts, can all help to fill in gaps in the record, identify potentially anomalous data values, and provide contextual information on the circumstances behind particular items of data. Such supplementary sources will rarely be available, however, if data are subsequently reused. The priority accorded to immediate care also means that from the point of view of most clinicians, CIS data are viewed as exhaust, a byproduct of day-to-day clinical practice rather than a primary focus of attention. Anything that interferes with immediate care, for example by requiring extra data to be recorded, is likely to be rejected, even if this would make the data more useful at a later date. Similarly, design efforts are focused on supporting immediate use, often by replicating, as far as possible, established ways of working and presentations of data, even if this may make reuse more difficult. As almost all staff only interact with these familiar representations they have little cause to consider the CIS as a data repository or to reflect on the longer-term utility of the data it holds. When invited to consider how they might use CIS data to improve patient care, therefore, they had little awareness of the data that might be available or ideas on the uses it might be put to. “The problem is,” as one doctor put it, “we have lots of data, we just don’t know what to do with it.” Where clinicians do consider the potential for reusing CIS data, for example for audit or research, they typically have little conception of how feasible it 238

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might be to access the data they require. “They don’t necessarily understand the nuances of the data that they’re asking for. How easy it is to get that data, how difficult it is and what not,” as a doctor involved in CIS development commented. Furthermore, lacking the expertise to interrogate the database directly and unaware of the specific way in which data were held in the CIS, they are often unable to formulate suitably structured queries to extract data relevant to the questions they might wish to investigate. “The way they ask questions reveals that they don’t understand a lot about how databases are structured so they will ask for stuff, they want things with all sorts of criteria that wouldn’t be specified in a database, so not that easy to get out,” a CIS data analyst observed. In each ICU, however, there were a few staff, usually who had either been involved in the implementation and customization of the CIS, or with duties that required them to extract data, for example for national audit, who encountered the CIS more regularly as a data repository. Many of these “super-users,” however, coming from a clinical background, lacked the technical skills to extract data from the CIS database and had no time or incentive to acquire them. Recognizing this, the vendor had provided some simple tools to support extraction, but these were very limited in their capabilities and not easy to use. The few individuals involved in data extraction who came from a technical background, in contrast, usually lacked understanding of the clinical relevance of data. As a doctor observed: I’ve been to sessions where the guys sit down and tell you all about this stuff but they don’t think like doctors, they’re not doctors and that’s right, the way a system analyst or a programmer writes makes perfect sense to them, it makes no sense to a doctor, it is looking at it from a completely different viewpoint and the two are virtually unrecognisable.

IT staff were therefore able to extract data with some facility, but might not know whether these were the correct data to answer the question the clinician had in mind. Much of the data in the CIS database was therefore practically inaccessible for the majority of clinical staff. As a representative of the CIS vendor acknowledged, “this is a system for putting data in, not for getting data out.” Even if data could be extracted, whether using the vendor’s tools or with the help of colleagues with the requisite technical skills (a scarce resource in all ICUs) they are rarely in a format that can be easily integrated with clinical practice. Rather, the extracted data tend to be in the form of long, cryptically named lists of values that require further processing to be meaningful to clinicians. As an IT specialist put it “each of the parameters, like we might name, using heart rate again, we might see it as that in the front end but actually in the back end it’s got a parameter ID. So that might be, you know, 239

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a four digit number for example.” This processing is needed not only to transform the data into a format that makes sense from a clinical perspective, but also to handle anomalous and missing values (minor errors and inconsistencies would be unlikely to be detected). Nor would clinical questions necessarily be answerable directly with the available data. Processing of data to derive clinically meaningful parameters or to identify or link values for the same patient at specific instances over time was also often required before the data could be used. From the point of view of clinicians, therefore, the data, even if accessible, were not a resource that could be readily drawn on. Nor is there just a single way in which clinicians seek to reuse data. Potential reuse practices include: extracting specific data items that are required to be reported to national clinical audit bodies or to test research hypotheses; identifying particular patients to be included in a research study; providing a record of treatment for a coroner’s inquest into the cause of a patient’s death; monitoring use of particular drugs or treatments; monitoring the clinical performance of the ICU; and seeking to identify historical comparators to inform treatment of contemporary patients. Each of these will require a different selection and specificity of data items with different sensitivity to levels of timeliness, accuracy, and completeness. The United Kingdom Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre, for example, mandates the monthly reporting of a specific data set from which comparative performance metrics can be derived. Aware of the potential significance of these data for the funding and reputation of ICUs, however, clinicians may seek to ensure that data are entered such that they present their ICU in the best possible light. This does not mean that false data are entered, but that where data entries rely on clinical assessment of a patient’s condition there may an incentive to report cases in particular ways. There may therefore be inconsistencies in the way comparable cases are reported between different ICUs. Nor, despite the awareness of the potential of CIS data as a resource for research, was this used as much as expected. As one doctor commented: “We felt when we got the system originally how much the opportunity was for generating ideas and data for research, but we’ve never really been able to make much of that opportunity, partly because of the interrogation of data.”

13.6 Constituting Data In contrast to the literature that views data as a valuable resource that is readily available for anybody who wants to use them, therefore, the practices of data recording and use in intensive care present a more complex and dynamic picture. Rather than there being a static reserve of “raw” data out there in the 240

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world waiting to be extracted, what is held in the CIS database, and comes to be identified as data, is the product of a number of contingent processes that are shaped both socially and technologically. The data held in the CIS do not so much represent “the world,” as record certain aspects of the world deemed by current models to be the relevant parameters that clinicians should pay attention to and the particular clinical actions that are considered as constituting treatment. Nor, for various technical and practical reasons (e.g. equipment malfunction, human error), does what gets recorded always accurately reflect those aspects. Such discrepancies may be fairly rare and may not be consequential for clinical practice, but they mean that the data held in the CIS do not necessarily present an accurate picture of the phenomena they are considered to represent (and it may not be possible to identify, from the data alone, where any discrepancies may lie). Nevertheless, while clinicians’ subjective experience of “the world” (that the data are considered to represent) may sometimes play a significant role in their practice, for example where observation of a patient may modify a treatment decision, patient care tends to be largely based on data held in the CIS, not least because these data constitute the record through which clinical performance is assessed. The process of selecting what states of the world should be recorded and of establishing social and technical procedures for recording them, as well as the practical contingencies that may affect these procedures, all serve, therefore, to influence what becomes data, as they are recorded in the CIS database. While unrecorded states of the world and states of the world that are inaccurately or incompletely recorded may still contribute to clinical practice, it is only the stored contents of the CIS database (and multitudes of others like it) that constitute the “data” invoked in discourses around, for example, evidence-based practice, performance measurement, and analytics. That the existence of data as a perceived resource is the outcome of constitutive processes, however, is not the whole story. Further activities and transactions will also be involved in (re)constituting the “data” as they are actually used in organizational practices. In this respect it would seem important to distinguish between two contexts of data use in clinical practice. The first is during the immediate episode of care, where there are resources available to supplement and correct the representation provided by the CIS data. While CIS data may still play an important role in clinical practice in this setting, awareness of, and the means to correct, errors and deficiencies in the record as well as the availability of other data that are not formally recorded mean that CIS data are less influential. Upon completion of the episode of care, however, the CIS record becomes the primary data source, with almost no complementary data against which it can be offset. While this does not make the CIS data the sole reference point for practice, as clinicians’ interpretations may be 241

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affected by other influences, such as experience and training, the absence of alternative data sources makes it harder to question the picture presented by the CIS data. In the second, post hoc, context of data use a further attenuation of the relationship between the clinicians and the CIS data is created by the practical inaccessibility of the data for most clinicians. Thus, without immediate familiarity with the data, clinicians lack reliable grounds on which to base their understanding of what data might be available to them in the CIS. When coming up with data requests, they therefore draw on an idea of the data that they believe the CIS to hold, which may not always be accurate. Reliant, furthermore, on intermediaries who may be clinically knowledgeable, but often with limited data-extraction skills or technically knowledgeable but lacking clinical understanding, it is often difficult for clinicians to come up with data requests that are both technically feasible and yield clinically meaningful results. It is not just that the “state of the world” may not be fully recoverable from the CIS data (as a result of the contingencies of what ultimately gets to be recorded in the database), therefore, but most clinicians may not be in a position to judge how well the data that they receive in response to their requests correspond to the “state of the world” that they were expecting to recover and so have to take this on trust. In the absence of any corrective mechanism, however, it is the results returned by the specific database query (however accurate, or inaccurate, these may be in representing the phenomena the clinician is seeking to understand) that will typically be what counts as “the data” that inform clinical practice. It may also be the case that data requests fail, either because they are poorly formulated, because the data that the clinician is looking for do not exist in the CIS database, or because the super-users (and/or clinicians) lack the time or skills to develop an effective query. There may therefore be no data returned in response to a request, and from a clinical perspective, they may be considered not to exist (except as the clinician’s conception of them potentially influences their interpretations). This is not to say that there is not some value in the CIS database that may correspond to the clinicians’ conception, but that unless this can be identified and retrieved, it cannot be made into a data item that could contribute to clinical practice. In many circumstances, the possibility of identification and retrieval depends on the resources that it is considered reasonable to devote to data extraction. The perceived value of the data relative to other uses of the same resources will therefore be an important consideration influencing whether data become available in practice. In the intensive care context, this means that the priority accorded to immediate care and clinicians’ lack of engagement with historical CIS data provide little incentive for data reuse and a great deal of the recorded data are therefore unavailable to contribute to clinical practice. 242

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Figures 13.1 and 13.2 summarize some of the key activities and transactions of data recording and data extraction that contribute to the constitution of the data held in the CIS, and the constitution of the data that are available to clinicians (both in the immediate episode of care and, potentially more significantly, in subsequent analysis of the CIS database).

13.7 Discussion 13.7.1 Data as Process Data have traditionally been viewed in the organizational literature as naturally occuring entities that represent, describe, or record the world. The task of the organizational researcher is then to identify patterns in these data that reveal significant insights on the ordering of the world. Debates about data in organization studies thus tend to focus on which data most accurately represent particular phenomena, or about the appropriate interpretation of what those data show. While these debates are central to the understanding of organizations that we develop, the data themselves are taken as given. While this view may be sufficient for much organizational analysis, in this chapter we have sought to unpack data, to show how they are actively constituted. Rather than being “simple observations of states of the world” that are “out there,” waiting to be found, data, we suggest, are what is found when they are looked for. What is available to be found, moreover, is itself a contingent outcome of a complex of activities and transactions, some of which, in relation to data in ICUs, we have sought to describe above. Although our findings relate only to this one context, it would seem reasonable to suggest that similar processes may be expected to operate in relation to more convential organizational data, whether in accounting, performance measurement, or marketing. What is available to be found will necessarily be a subset of what is “out there” as the complexity of the world exceeds the reasonable technological and cognitive limits on the amount of data that can be recorded and paid attention to. What counts as data is thus not something absolute and independent but an often purposeful selection. Although the scope of this selection may be expected to expand as the technology for recording and visualizing data advances, it will always be a subset. Even if this subset is considered complete in relation to some particular aspect of the world (or as near to it as technological reliability can achieve); without attention to the selection we cannot know how well the data represent the phenomenon we are studying. What is found, moreover, is typically not “the state of the world,” but some mediated representation of it, for example as measured by some technology or 243

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recorded by a person. In this sense, it is what the technology or person records that defines what data are. A patient’s temperature is what is measured by a temperature sensor. This is not an ad hoc process, but depends on a particular understanding of what temperature is that is instantiated in the design of the sensor. For Tuomi (1999: 109) “data therefore exist only after such a prejudgement is made.” Even then, there may be discrepancies between what is measured and what is actually recorded in the database and it is only the latter that will be available to be found subsequently. Nor is it just that only a selection of the universe of “observations of states of the world” are capable of being recorded or of being attended to in practice. There is typically a further, stringent selection among these possible states of the world that limits recording to just those “states of the world” considered relevant to a particular practice (in this case the care of critically ill patients). This selection depends upon an understanding of the world and how it operates that, following Fleck (1981), develops within a particular “thought collective” (in our case of modern medicine, but in principle also of, say, accounting, strategy, or operations management). This argument may even be extended yet another stage to the very existence of data. As Gitelman and Jackson (2013: 3) put it, “[l]ike events imagined and enunciated against the continuity of time, data are imagined and enunciated against the seamlessness of phenomena.” Although in the intensive care setting, the parsing of phenomena into data was not in question in everyday practice, we should acknowledge that the identification of data is an act of interpretation. This does not mean, however, that data are purely a social construction, fabricated by the users in conformance with their understanding of the world. That the capta “seen” by observers are influenced by theoretical frameworks and by their coherence with other available data, does not require us to abandon the belief that, in the intensive care context, there is, or was, a patient whose blood pressure is, for clinical purposes, adequately represented by a number held in the CIS database. What is recorded in the CIS, however, is a value that we assume to be an accurate representation of the patient’s blood pressure at that particular time. Which particular parameters, and not others, are viewed as significant to the patient’s treatment and what these values signify (and hence how they contribute to clinical practice) may vary from one clinician to the next, depending on their specialism, experience, and their assumptions about the current condition of the patient, even while they share a common theoretical framework and set of data. Clinical training (or accountancy training) may serve to standardize interpretations of particular data items, but there may be many ways of understanding what combinations of items are meaningful and what they signify. Seeing data as a process therefore is not to deny that there are real phenomena they refer to, but to 244

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identify data as the product of social and organizational practices that are themselves shaped by these phenomena.

13.7.2 “Data in Principle” and “Data in Practice” While we might expect that all data that are recorded are, in principle, potential capta within certain clinical practices (otherwise why would they be recorded?), this assumes that the purposes of data recording, that are driven primarily by the requirements of immediate care of the patient, coincide with those that might motivate the subsequent use of the data, which may not be the case. A lot of data may be quickly reviewed in the course of the immediate episode of care, to check that they fall within expected ranges for example, but may not be looked at again if the patient does not get readmitted to ICU and their condition and treatment is considered unexceptional. Even without the technical difficulties of extracting data and the workload pressures that discourage data reuse, only a portion of the data in the CIS may therefore be subsequently looked for. The technical difficulties also mean that even some data that are looked for may not be found. These data that are not looked for, or are not available to be found when they are looked for, may thus be considered only to be “data in principle.” They form a background, of which clinicians may be aware, but never come into focus as specific values. Similarly in organizational studies there may be many types and sources of data that could be drawn on in any particular research project, but only some of these will be feasible, or perhaps be considered legitimate, to use. It is only those data that are able to be brought to attention for some purpose (which may not necessarily be functional) that we may consider as “data in practice.” These “data in practice” are rarely individual data items, but rather sets of data items that are often selected in combination with other sets, for example all values for the arterial blood pressure of a patient over a particular period and the corresponding values for their heart rate for the same period. There may be many different purposes for which data may be selected and therefore many different selections of “data in practice” from the same database, although some of these may share particular data items or sets. As a result, however, the “data in practice” for different users, and for the same users in different situations, may be quite distinct. In organizational studies where researchers are likely to have more control over, and involvement in, the recording of data, the gulf between data in principle and data in practice may be much smaller. Nevertheless, there may still be situations in which an intermediary is needed to gain (partial) access to data or where large data sets may be analyzed for different purposes by different researchers or by the same researcher at different times. Not all data in principle may therefore be data in practice for every study. 245

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13.7.3 Implications of a Processual Conception of Data Such a view of data would seem quite different from the typical portrayal of data as a “bedrock” or “raw material” (Kitchin, 2014). Contrary to the assertions of “big data” proponents, data are not a “natural resource” (Verdino, 2013), rather what becomes data is a contingent record of a contingent selection of what we pay attention to in the world. Nor do we necessarily know how these contingencies may affect our understanding of the phenomena that data are taken as representing, both because the contingencies of recording are often not visible after the event and because the particular aspects of phenomena that are represented by data are rarely questioned. Data are thus less of a sure foundation for evidence than is commonly suggested. This is not just because they omit important information or are subject to bias, as Rousseau (2012) discusses, but because the processes constituting the data are often inaccessible and frequently unrecognized. Even if we believe that the possible omissions, errors, and inconsistencies in the data that are recorded are not significant for practice and that the “states of the world” that the data are considered as representing provide a sufficient understanding of the phenomena of interest, however, the specific phenomena that are deemed to be of interest (and hence that are recorded as data) themselves reflect a particular system of thought. The evidence that may be obtained from data is therefore necessarily limited to the phenomena that this system of thought deems appropriate to record, and further limited by what aspects of these phenomena it is feasible and economical to record. The transparency that audit and performance measurement seeks to promote (Power, 1997) can thus only ever be selectively provided by data. In itself, the idea that data provide a selective picture of the world that they claim to represent and that this is significant in shaping our knowledge is well recognized in science studies (cf. Gitelman, 2013; Leonelli, 2015). Whether framed in these terms or not, it may also be seen to lie behind many debates in organization studies in which the evidence for particular accounts of organizational phenomena is contested. The notion that the existence of data entails an act of interpretation (Gitelman and Jackson, 2013), however, would not seem so widely acknowledged in organizational research where the conventions on what counts as data are arguably more established. The process perspective on data advanced in this chapter may be seen to lie somewhere between these two conceptualizations. Taking the existence of data on clinical (and organizational) phenomena as relatively uncontested, we have sought to show that there are at least two additional processes that are necessarily involved in the constitution of data, whether for organizational research, or clinical or managerial decision making. First there is the selection of what instances of data are recorded and second there is the selection of 246

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certain of those instances for use in some practice. It is only the data that are available to the researcher, clinician, or manager at the end of these processes that can become the basis for organizational theorizing, or clinical or managerial decision making. Data as process therefore provides a corrective to influential contemporary discourses that present data as an objective and reliable representation of the world as it is. Unpacking the processes by which data come to be constituted, both initially and in subsequent use, may help us to problematize claims that data are simply a natural and neutral basis for organizational practice. Tracing the transactions and activities that bring data into being can allow us to open the contingencies and choices involved to scrutiny. This may not directly undermine the legitimacy of data-centric visions of organization, but it can challenge the notion that they offer an unmediated and uncontestable picture of organizational life. This is the case too, of course, with the data that we use in our research, not least in the work presented in this chapter. Method sections, especially of a reflective character, may expose some of the processes at play, but do not ultimately provide full access to “the state of the world.” As Hernes (2008) argues, this does not mean that explanation is impossible, but that we need both to recognize the contingency of the states, events, and entities that we chose to focus on as evidence of processes and outcomes, and to acknowledge our agency in this selection. In presenting an account of these processes at work in the intensive care setting we also provide an illustration and expansion of the observation of Hernes (2008: 147), following Checkland and Holwell (1998), that in process-based research there are “no data, only capta.” Following this through in organizational research poses significant challenges, as Langley and Tsoukas (2017) discuss, but if we are to take the implications of a strong process perspective seriously then these challenges cannot be ignored. Drawing attention, as in this chapter, to the processual character of the data on which we base research will not be enough, in itself, to overcome these challenges, but, to the extent that it destabilizes often unquestioned assumptions, it may help to provoke reflection on what our research can (hope to) tell us about the phenomena we study.

13.8 Conclusion In this chapter we have sought to extend the processs perspective that has enriched our understanding of organizational phenomena to what is generally perceived to be one of the most fundamental elements of organization and one that is seen as becoming increasingly significant in contemporary organizational life, that is data. We have argued that, far from being a natural 247

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entity that can, as influential discourses suggest, be simply “mined,” data are the contingent product of complex social and technical processes and that the organizational practices in which data are used both shape, and are shaped by, the transactions and activities that constitute their particular character. Although we base our argument on evidence from medical practice, we would propose that the findings apply not just to literature that emphasizes the importance of data in contemporary organizations, but also to the assumptions of organizational research.

Acknowledgments This chapter is based on research funded by the Health Foundation, an independent charity working to improve the quality of healthcare in the United Kingdom.

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Data as Process Ghassemi, M., Celi, L. A., and Stone, D. J. (2015). State of the Art Review: The Data Revolution in Critical Care. Critical Care, 19, 118–26. Gitelman, L. (2013). “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gitelman, L., and Jackson, V. (2013). Introduction. In L. Gitelman, (Ed.), “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (pp. 1–14). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hernes, T. (2008). Understanding Organization as Process: Theory for a Tangled World. Abingdon: Routledge. Hornung, S. (2012). Beyond “New Scientific Management?” Critical Reflections on the Epistemology of Evidence-Based Management. In D. M. Rousseau (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Evidence-Based Management (pp. 389–403). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howard-Grenville, J., Metzger, M. L., and Meyer, A. D. (2013). Rekindling the Flame: Processes of Identity Resurrection. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), 113–36. Kitchin, R. (2014). The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. London: Sage. Langley, A., and Tsoukas, H. (2017). Introduction: Process Thinking, Process Theorizing and Process Researching. In A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies (pp. 1–24). London: Sage. Learmonth, M., and Harding, N. (2006). Evidence-Based Management: The Very Idea. Public Administration, 84(2), 245–66. Leonelli, S. (2015). What Counts as Scientific Data? A Relational Framework. Philosophy of Science, 82(5), 810–21. Manor-Shulman, O., Beyene, J., Frndova, H., and Parshuram, C. (2008). Quantifying the Volume of Documented Clinical Information in Critical Illness. Journal of Critical Care, 23(2), 245–50. Manyika, J., Chui, M., Brown, B., Bughin, J., Dobbs, R., Roxburgh, C., and Hung Byers, A. (2011). Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. Washington, DC: McKinsey Global Institute. Manzoni, J. (2017). Public Services and the New Age of Data. Civil Service Quarterly, https://quarterly.blog.gov.uk/2017/01/16/public-services-and-the-new-age-of-data/. McAfee, A., and Brynjolfsson, E. (2012). Big Data: The Management Revolution. Harvard Business Review, 90(10), 61–7. Mojsilovic, A. (2014). The Age of Data and Opportunities. http://www.ibmbigdatahub. com/blog/age-data-and-opportunities. Nayak, A., and Chia, R. (2011). Thinking Becoming and Emergence: Process Philosophy and Organization Studies. In H. Tsoukas and R. Chia (Eds), Philosophy and Organization Theory (pp. 281–309). Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Ozga, J. (2009). Governing Education through Data in England: From Regulation to Self-Evaluation. Journal of Education Policy, 24(2), 149–62. Pfeffer, J., and Sutton, R. I. (2006). Evidence-Based Management. Harvard Business Review, 84(1), 62. Politser, P. (1981). Decision Analysis and Clinical Judgment: A Re-evaluation. Medical Decision Making, 1(4), 361–89. Power, M. (1997). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Institutions and Organizations Raghupathi, W., and Raghupathi, V. (2014). Big Data Analytics in Healthcare: Promise and Potential. Health Information Science and Systems, 2(1), 3. Ransbotham, S. (2015). Secrets in the Age of Data. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/ article/secrets-in-the-age-of-data/. Rescher, N. (1996). Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rousseau, D. M. (2012). Envisioning Evidence-Based Management. In D. M. Rousseau (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Evidence-Based Management (pp. 3–24). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, B. C. (1996). On the Origin of Objects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tsoukas, H., and Chia, R. (2002). On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567–82. Tuomi, I. (1999). Data Is More than Knowledge. Journal of Management Information Systems, 16(3), 107–21. Verdino, G. (2013). From the Crowd to the Cloud. Marketing Insights, 35(2), 26–30.

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Index

Note: Figures, tables, and boxes are indicated by an italic ‘f ’, ‘t ’, and ‘b’, respectively, following the page number. Abbott, A. 79, 80, 83, 87, 96 accountability 150 company directors 174–6, 179, 180, 184, 187–91 action chains 96–7 activities Heidegger 83–90, 93, 96 Mead 83, 84–5, 87–6, 93 practice plenum 95–7 practice theory 90–4 adaptation process of management innovations 194–221 Ahuja, G. 107, 108, 109, 110, 114 Alboth, A. 136–7 Aleppo march 6, 134–51 Ansari, S. 195, 197–8, 217 assortativity, networks 110, 111 audit 229, 231, 238, 240, 246 Audit Society 229 Austria, shareholder value 218 authority, company directors 174–6, 179, 180, 184, 188, 189 Barley, S. 17–18, 49–50, 52, 53–4, 55, 56 being-amid 84 benchmarking, best practice approach 199 EU 200, 206 Italy 206–7, 210, 214 Berger, P. 17 phenomenological institutional theory 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 institutions as collective accomplishments 38 ontological status of institutions 40 Bergson, H. consciousness 81, 85 phenomenological institutional theory 34 process 81–2, 87, 90, 94 best practice (BP) approach 195–6, 199–217 Binder, A. 50 biomedical reform 62, 64–71, 73–4 biotechnology field 101–2, 107, 111–12 bisphenol A (BPA) 166b boundary work 103–4

Bourdieu, P. 48, 101 Bowerman, M. 229 Brass, D. J. 106 bricolage best practice approach 206 Civil March for Aleppo 146, 148 brokerage positions, network analyses 113 brokering agents, management innovations 195, 198, 201, 214, 217–19, 220 business judgment 175, 179–80, 182, 183–6, 188–9, 191–2 Canada coastal forest industry 103–4 green chemistry 161, 166b case law 175, 180–1, 186 Catholic Church 39, 134, 145 centrality, networks 109, 113, 115 Checkland, P. 228, 247 chemistry changes in the field of 159–61 green chemistry 6, 154–5, 159–69 risks 157n, 158–69 Chia, R. 89, 90, 91–2, 96, 97, 227 Chicago School institutionalism 14–19, 50 Civil March for Aleppo (CMFA) 6, 134–51 clinical information systems (CIS) 231–47, 233f, 234f Clinton, W. 67 cliques, networks 110–11, 115 closure ties, networks 110 clustering, networks 110–11, 114 communities of practice 208 connectivity, networks 109, 110 consciousness and meaning 34–5, 37 process as the durée of 81, 85 Continental Assurance of London case 174–6, 180–92 corporate environmentalism 102–3 corporate governance 176, 180, 190, 191–2 corporate law 174–6, 179–92

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Index coupling loose see loose coupling tight see tight coupling creditor-regarding logic 175, 181, 182–3, 185, 188–9, 191 Creed, D. 24, 51 cross-level institutionalism 8 cultural ideals, Civil March for Aleppo 146, 147 cultural sociology 47, 48 data 7, 227–48 “age of” 228 “big” 229, 230, 231, 246 conceptions in organizational literature 229–30 creation 229 curation 228 as fundamental, objective resource 228–9 generation 229 medical 230–47, 233f, 234f mining 228 as process 243–5 implications 246–7 strong process view 3 types 229 unpacking in practice 230–6 Davenport, T. H. 228 Davis, G. 198 decoupling, adaptation process of management innovations 218 degree assortativity, networks 110, 111 degree distribution of network nodes 110 density, networks 102, 103, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115 Denton, P. 45 design-based cues 5–6, 118–31 dynamic interpretation of 127–8 individual and intersubjective interpretation of 119–22 aesthetic dimension 120–1, 122, 123, 124–5, 126, 127, 129, 130–1 instrumental dimension 120–1, 122, 123, 125–6, 127, 129 symbolic dimension 120–1, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130–1 multiplicity of 122–4 time and inherent dynamism of 124–6 developments 82 Devo 26–8 diffusion 158 of management innovations 194–204, 207, 213, 217–18, 219–20 phenomenological institutional theory 38–9 process view 2, 3 DiMaggio, P. 48–9, 53–4, 55 institutional entrepreneurship 19, 20 institutional agency 18

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“old” and “new” institutionalism 44, 48 organizational fields 101 directors, company 174–6, 179–92 director’s business judgment logic 175, 181, 182, 183–6, 188–9, 191 discourses 155, 167 dominant 155–9, 166–9 risk see risk discourse EcoCounty (Italy) 210, 212 ecology of risks 168 EduGov (Italy) 210, 211, 212, 216 Elevance 164b Elsbach, K. D. 122–3 employment reform 62, 71–5 entrepreneurship institutional see institutional entrepreneurship social 20–1 environmentalism, corporate 102–3 epistemic distress 151 Espeland, W. 52 ethnicity, and biomedical reform 62, 64–71, 73–4 European Convention on Human Rights 145 European Foundation for Quality Management Business Excellence Model 207 European Union (EU) best practice approach 200, 204, 206, 216 green chemistry 161, 163b events Heidegger 84, 85–6, 90 Mead 84–5, 86 practice plenum 95–7 practice theory 90–4 and processes, distinction between 80, 82–3 evidence-based management 229, 230, 231 existential angst 140, 147, 149, 150–1 Feldman, M. 89 field 1, 15 chemistry 159–61 life cycle 103–4 management innovations, adaptation process of 215–16, 220–1 network analysis 100–15 translation 158 Fine, G. A. 51 Fiss, P. 198 Foucault, M. 155 Frenkel, M. 122, 125–6 gender biomedical reform 62, 64–9, 73 employment reform 62, 71–5 genomics 67–70

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Index Germany best practice approach 217 green chemistry 161 Giddens, A. 14–15, 90, 91 Gitelman, L. 244 Global Green Chemistry Centres Network (G2C2) 160 glocalization of organizational forms and practices 194, 221 “golden parachute” contracts 198 Gouldner, A. W. 24, 51 green chemistry 6, 154–5, 159–69 Green Chemistry and Commerce Council 161 Green Chemistry Institute (GCI) 160–1 Greenwood, R. 12 Hallett, T. 24, 150 Hardy, C. 155, 158 Hayakawa, S. I. 22 Heidegger, M. human activity 83–8, 90, 93, 96 lives 83, 85–90, 96 Hirsch, P. M. 44 Hoffman, A. J. 102–3 Holwell, S. 228, 247 Hughes, E. C. 35 Human Genome Project 67, 70 Hume, D. 88, 89 Husserl, E. 34, 93n IBM 227 ideals Civil March for Aleppo 135, 146, 147–8, 149 cultural 146, 147 institutional myths 146 information sciences 227–9 inhabited institutionalism (II) 23–5, 50–2 Civil March for Aleppo 145, 146–7, 150 working institutions 25 institutional allomorphism 215, 221 institutional dynamics 2 institutional entrepreneurship 19–21, 22, 155, 215 green chemistry 168 working institutions 25 institutional fields see field institutionalism 12–18, 25 Chicago School 14–19, 50 working institutions 25, 26 Meyer 47 Scandinavian management innovations, adaptation process of 194, 195, 197 translation 3 institutional isomorphism 48, 199, 216, 219 institutionalization process 1

strong process view 3 value infusion 45 institutional logics dynamics 7–8 inhabited institutionalism 25, 50 judiciary 175, 177–9, 181, 182–6, 188–91 organizational fields 104 process view 1 strong 3 institutional myths accountability 150 Civil March for Aleppo 135, 145–6, 147, 150, 151 inhabited institutionalism 50, 51 institutional orders 178 judiciary 175, 181, 189, 190, 191 institutional theory boundary work 103 diffusion and translation metaphors 158 legitimacy 103 management innovations, adaptation process of 196, 199 phenomenological 33–40 process view 1, 2 strong 3, 4–6 rethinking through a process lens 6–7 institutional work 21–3 dynamics 7 focus 53 Selznick’s influence 45–6 strategies 23f strong process view 3 institutions as collective accomplishments 37–9 interactionist perspective 14–15 ontological status 40 process- and action-based definition 35–7 process view 1–2, 34 strong 2–7 symbolism 39 transcendental quality 39 interactionism 14–17 interaction orders 16–17, 18 inhabited institutions 24 inventories, best practice approach 207, 208b, 208, 209–10, 210t, 212–13 EcoCounty 212 EduGov 211 ironic genre 74, 75 isomorphism, institutional 48, 199, 216, 219 Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs 122 Italian public sector, adaptation process of management innovations 6–7, 195–6, 199–217 Jackson, V. 244 Jansen, L. 82, 83

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Index judiciary 6, 174–92 employment reform 71–3, 74–5 Kant, I. 88, 93n Kaynak, E. 26 Kennedy, M. 198 Kitchin, R. 228, 229 Koput, K. W. 101–2 Langley, A. 96, 105, 227, 247 Lawrence, T. B. 21–2, 23, 103–4 legitimacy institutional myths 146 Italian public sector 215–16 network analyses 109 organizational fields 103 life narratives 80 lives and activities 85–90 Heidegger 83, 85–6, 87, 96 Mead 84, 85, 86–7 practice plenum 95 practice theory 90–1 loose coupling Civil March for Aleppo 6, 135, 146, 148, 150, 151 institutional myths 146, 150 strong process view 3 Lounsbury, M. 44 Luckmann, T. 17 phenomenological institutional theory 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 institutions as collective accomplishments 38 ontological status of institutions 40 Lupton, D. 156 management innovations, adaptation process of 194–221 Marquis, C. 107 materiality, and design-based cues 119, 121, 128–9, 131 McPherson, M. 109 Mead, G. H. human activity 83, 84–5, 86–7, 93 lives 84, 85, 86–7 phenomenological institutional theory 35 practice plenum 96 meaning structure 92 medical data 230–47, 233f, 234f Merton, R. 44 Messinger, S. L. 45 Meyer, J. W. 46–8, 49, 51, 53–4, 55, 56 institutional myths 145–6 Mizruchi, M. S. 107

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Natureworks 163b Nayak, A. 227 Nelson, B. J. 18 neo-institutionalism 15, 18, 195 institutional work 21 process view 2 network analysis 5, 100–15 network dynamics 107–8 networking spaces, best practice approach 207, 208–10, 209b, 210t, 212–13, 216 networks assortativity 110, 111 centrality 109, 113, 115 clustering 110–11, 114 connectivity 106–7,109, 110 density 102, 103, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115 New Public Management (NPM) 200, 201 niches, organizational 109 “old institutionalism” 44, 47–8, 145, 148 ontological insecurity 151 operational risk 164–5 organizational risks 164–5, 166b, 166–7, 169 Orlikowski, W. J. 89 Owen-Smith, J. 101–2 personalization, and Civil March for Aleppo 149 personalized medicine 68, 69, 70, 73 personhood 88 phenomenological institutional theory 4, 33–40 Phillips, N. 156, 158 policy making, and stories 61–75 Powell, W. W. 48, 49 “old” and “new” institutionalism 44 organizational fields 101–2, 107 Power, M. 158, 229 practical understandings 177 actions 91 judiciary 181, 186, 187 practice plenum 94–7, 177 practices 155 practice theory 5, 90–4, 177–8 judiciary 175, 181, 185–8, 190–1 phenomenological institutional theory 38 practice work 103–4 pragmatism 80, 94 Mead 86, 87 Pratt, M. G. 122–3 process advancing unfolding conception of 81–2, 87, 94 conceptions of 79–83 event conception of 79–80, 83, 87

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Index process view 1–2 strong 2–7 weak 2 Prusak, L. 228 public affairs professionals 26–8, 27f race, and biomedical reform 62, 64–71, 73–4 Rafaeli, A. 120–1, 123, 124, 130 Reay, T. 104 recoupling 150 regulatory risk 164, 165, 168 Reinecke, J. 195, 198, 217 reputation of intensive care units, and clinical information systems 240 organizational 102 reputational risk 164, 165, 166b, 167 Rescher, N. 80, 87–9, 94, 96, 227 resistance 218 risk 155 chemical 157n, 158–69 discourse see risk discourse ecology 168 operational 164–5 organizational 164–5, 166b, 166–7, 169 regulatory 164, 165, 168 reputational 164, 165, 166b, 167 strategic 165, 168 risk discourse 6, 155, 156–9 green chemistry 161–9 translation 158–9, 167–8 conversion 167–8 green chemistry 162, 165, 166b, 166–7 inversion 167–8 Robertson, M. 198 Rojas, F. 22 Rowan, B. 49, 51, 145–6 rules 177 actions 90, 91, 93 judiciary 181, 186, 190 Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism 1 Salancik, G. 114 Scandinavian institutionalism management innovations, adaptation process of 194, 195, 197 translation 3 Scarbrough, H. 198 Schatzki, T. R. 177, 178, 185–6, 189 SchoolNet (Italy) 209b, 210 Schütz, A. phenomenological institutional theory 33, 34–5, 36 social life 93 scripts 15

Scully, M. 24, 51 Sears and Roebuck 74–5 Seibt, J. 82–3 selfhood 88–9 Selznick, P. 44–6, 47, 50, 52–3, 55, 56 Sloan Management Review 227–8 social acts 85 social entrepreneurship 20–1 social life 93 non-random nature 134 practice plenum 95, 96, 97 social organizations 93 social worlds 15–16, 16f inhabited institutions 25 sociology, “cultural turn” 47, 48 Spaan, A. 195, 198, 217 stories 5, 61–76 allusiveness 63 capsule 64 plotlines 63–4 verisimilitude 63 strategic risk 165, 168 Strauss, A. L. 15–16, 25 Strawson, P. F. 88 structural holes, network analyses 113 structuration 14–15 institutional entrepreneurship 19 Suddaby, R. 21 Swan, J. 198 Sweden, best practice approach 204, 217 Syria, Civil March for Aleppo 6, 134–51 teleoaffectivities 177 actions 90, 91, 93 judiciary 181, 186, 187, 190 teleology 84, 93 Thomas, R. 155 Thornton, P. H. 178, 179 tight coupling Civil March for Aleppo 6, 135, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151 institutional myths 146, 150 time flow conception of process 81 Tolbert, P. S. 17 Townsend Organization 45 tragic irony genre 74, 75 translation 3, 155, 158 of management innovations 194–7, 199, 209, 215, 220–1 network analyses 115 risk discourse 158–9, 167–8 conversion 167–8 green chemistry 162, 165, 166b, 166–7 inversion 167–8 Tsoukas, H. human activity 89, 90, 91–2

255

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Index Tsoukas, H. (cont.) practice plenum 96, 97 process orientation 227, 247 Tuomi, I. 228, 244 Turkey, and the Civil March for Aleppo 135, 141, 144–5, 147, 148–9, 150, 151 uncoupling Civil March for Aleppo 148–9 institutional myths 150 understandings actions 90, 91, 93 general 177 actions 91 judiciary 181, 186–7 judiciary 181, 186–7, 190 practical 177 actions 91 judiciary 181, 186, 187 United Kingdom best practice approach 204, 217, 219 Civil Service 228 clinical information systems 231–47 Companies Act 176 corporate law 176, 180 Enterprise Act 176 Insolvency Act 176, 186 Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre 240 United States best practice approach 219 biomedical reform 64–71, 73–4 biotechnology industry 107 Civil Rights Act 67, 71 civil rights movement 67, 68

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corporate environmentalism 102–3 Department of Labor’s Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OHSA) 163b employment reform 71–5 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) 65, 71, 73, 74–5 Federal Drug Administration (FDA) 65, 68, 69 green chemistry 160–1, 163b, 165, 166b “Mind the Store” campaign 165 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 68 National Institutes of Health (NIH) 65, 67 NIH Reauthorization Act 65, 67 Office of Management and Budget 67 Venter, C. 67 Ventresca, M. J. 24, 51 Vilnai-Yavetz, I. 120–1, 123, 124, 130 Vision Framework 207 Walmart 165 warfarin (anti-coagulant) 69–70 Warren, S. 121 Wasserman, V. 122, 125–6 Weber, M. 34, 36, 44 White, D. R. 101–2 working institutions 4, 25–8, 27f workspace designs 119, 121–30 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) 45 Zald, M. N. 45 Zietsma, C. 103–4