Institutional Work

Citation

Bazin, Y. (2010), "Institutional Work", Society and Business Review, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 306-309. https://doi.org/10.1108/sbr.2010.5.3.306.2

Neo‐institutionalism is now one of the main approaches in organization theory. Rooted in Durkheim's and Weber's works, following Parsons's and Merton's developments, this stream of research emphasizes the questions of legitimacy and “taken‐for‐grantedness” in social life. Imported during the late 1970s in the study of organization (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), it has founded its first clear definition in DiMaggio and Powell's seminal book The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis in 1991. Becoming dominant also means being a focal point for criticisms. Often focused on a macroscopic perspective with a strong emphasis on cultural processes, many attacks have been made on the inability for institutionalists to address phenomenon such as agency, change, skilful actors or social practices. The focus was made on the way institutions shaped the behavior of organizational actors, making them over‐socialized agents unable to act on their own. The proposition made by Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca in this book is an attempt to tackle part of these issues. The concept of institutional work could constitute a start in a full inclusion of “actors and agency in institutional studies of organizations” (the subtitle of the book).

Defining institutional work as “the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions” (p. 1), the authors aim at establishing a broader vision of agency in relation with institutions. Their goal is to understand the practical actions of individual and organizational actors in their attempts to create, maintain and disrupt institutions. This is a claimed extension of the recent neo‐institutional literature that has significantly focused on the processes through which actors affect the institutional arrangements within which they operate. However, this recent perspective has sometime portrayed actors mainly as powerful institutional entrepreneurs able to dramatically shape institutions. These developments were a necessary roundabout on the way to an explicit incorporation of agency into institutional theory. The heroic dimension of actors needs now to be put into perspective in order to remember that all actors are embedded in an institutionally defined context – thus, the need for a micro‐foundation of institutional research. According to the authors, this need can be fulfilled by the practice approach.

Acknowledging the fact that institutions provide both template for action and regulative mechanisms that enforce those templates, the analytical focus of institutional work is made on how action and actors affect institutions. Therefore, the analysis is oriented around three key elements: it should “highlight the awareness, skill and reflexivity of individuals and collective actors”, generate “an understanding of institutions as constituted in the more or less conscious actions of individuals and collective actors” and “it would identify an approach that suggests we cannot step outside of action as practice” (p. 7). To Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca, the association of practices and creating institutions has been abundantly developed in the literature within which they identify roughly three main types of work: rules and boundaries reconstruction, the reconfiguration of actors' belief systems and the alteration of abstract categorizations. The maintaining of institutions, for its part, has received less attention despite the fact that even powerful institutions require maintenance. Two categories of actions are identified by the authors: ensuring adherence to rules systems and reproducing existing norms and belief systems. Finally, the process of disrupting institutions has traditionally been associated with creating institutions whereas three specific forms can be identified: the disconnection of rewards and sanctions for some practices, the dissociation of practices from their moral foundation and the undermining core assumptions and beliefs.

What makes this book interesting is that Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca have really put the emphasis on the conceptual foundations of its central concept. Indeed, in order to specify what institutional work is and is not, they address several important issues, sometimes left aside by neo‐institutionalists. Doing so allows them to narrow the concept in order to more clearly point at specific phenomena. With this focus on the activities of creating, maintaining and disrupting rather than on their accomplishments (creation, maintenance and disruption), institutional work appears to be an ever‐accomplishing practice. Thus, the need to examine the unintended consequences of purposive actions. Indeed, these actions can either reach or miss their initial goal, but they can also achieve something completely different – which invites scholars to move beyond a linear view of institutional processes. This logically brings the authors to tackle the idea of intentionality already included in the very definition of institutional work as a purposive action. However, they leave the debate open between an approach defining institutional work as actions motivated by their potential institutional effects and a broader definition including all human practices having any institutional effects. This question of intentionality has major consequences on the studies that they structure and the authors “do not expect consensus in this domain” (p. 14).

This introduction strengthens the notion of institutional work by providing it with conceptual foundations. However, the examination of the concept of institution remains mostly rooted in an organizational neo‐institutionalist perspective. A step backward could have been interesting considering the critical tendency of the argument. First, a broader sociological approach would enrich the analysis; from Goffman to Giddens, many sociologists have developed strong basis for the analysis of institutions, why not strongly referring to them? Second, a step aside toward anthropology might have been inspiring; having studied cultural practices for decades now, this field could have some insights. An overview of Douglas's work seems salutary to us for any attempt to fully understand institutions (for more information see her 1986 book reviewed in this issue). Even though an introduction cannot provide a complete conceptual framework for the notion of institutional work, it also cannot skip that fast over the essential definition of institution that is only sketched here – however, maybe simply taken‐for‐granted. Finally, another problem stands in the lack of analysis of the notion of work. The reasons which led the authors to choose the word “work” instead of “activity” or “practice” remain unclear to us. Not that the expression “institutional work” is a mistake, its genealogy is solely missing. However, this concept proposed by Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca appears to be extremely powerful in the contributions made further in the book – contributions that fully participate in the clarification of the notion.

The first part of the book is composed of four essays on institutional work. It opens on Battilana and D'Aunno's examination of the paradox of embedded agency which tackles the unaddressed issue of individual‐level conditions for strategic actions in institutional theory. They develop a relational perspective of agency through three dimensions: iteration (habit), projection (imagination) and practical evaluation (judgment). It allows them to articulate agency with the different types of institutional work. Then, Kraatz develops the institutional work of leadership inspired by Selznick's contributions. Considering organizations as inherently political structures where leaders must transcend their narrow administrative role, he identifies seven categories of institutional work: symbolic manipulation, creating formal structures, making value commitments, creating coherence, maintaining integrity, making character‐defining choices and self‐transformation. Next, Marti and Mair shift the focus away from powerful centrally positioned actors to the ones evolving in the margins. These latter engage institutional work in an experimental manner to produce “provisional institutions”. Concluding this first section, Hargrave and van de Ven explore the issue of contradiction and dialectic relation to institutional work. To them, effective institutional work is always a skilful combination of creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions.

The second part of the book is composed by six studies of institutional work. First, Zietsma and McKnight explores how institutional work involves iterative phases of conflict and cooperation during the early stages of an emerging organizational field. To them, institutions are the ongoing compromised products of these episodic processes. Then, Boxenbaum and Strandgaard Pedersen use the emergence of the Scandinavian institutionalism both to present its main characteristics – in particular its tradition to analyze agency in institutions – and to use it as a case study of institutional work. Next, Zilber focuses on the processes of maintaining institutions, investigating how elite agents use stories to ensure the diffusion and maintenance of organizational values. In the same focus, Trank and Washington present a multiperspectival investigation of institutional work of legitimating institutions with the study of the AACSB's work. Their study reveals the practices through which central agents work to maintain the impact of institutions. They underline the importance of attending to field‐level heterogeneity in order to understand the interplay of different institutional strategies and organizational identities. In their analysis of the transformation of the Czech Republic, Hirsh and Bermiss come to propose a novel form of institutional “dirty” work aiming at preserving institutions through strategic decoupling. Finally, Jarzabkowski, Matthiesen and van de Ven develop a practice‐theoretic approach to institutional work that provide an integrated view in the face of institutional pluralism.

Chapter by chapter, the notion of institutional work slowly gets clearer. Its boundaries emerge from the different uses made and, finally, the concept shows its heuristic relevance. However, it still lacks one final clarification. From the seminal article by Lawrence and Suddaby in 2006 to this particular book, a strong emphasis is made on the theory of practice whereas only a few of the studies of this book really build on this notion of practice – the last chapter being the strongest on that point. Lawrence, Leca and Suddaby tend to skip over the very concept that they present as essential. The practice perspective has only emerged for the last decade in organization theory and is already used as a legitimate frame of reference. Yet, there is no unified approach and a quick overview cannot constitute a solid basis for analyses. Without going into a full review of literature in philosophy (Turner), sociology (Bourdieu and Giddens) or even anthropology (Levi‐Strauss and Ortner), some developments made in organization theory should at least be considered. Building on Schatzki's ontology of the site, Jarzabkowski's strategy‐as‐practice or Gherardi's texture of workplace learning for example might suffice to constitute an embryo of conceptual framework. This book clearly lacks of a full development on the notion of practice if it wants to benefit from its theoretical and methodological enrichments.