Abstract
This paper makes the case for an inhabited institutionalism by pondering questions that continue to vex institutional theory: How can we account for local activity, agency, and change without reverting to a focus on individual actors—the very kinds of actors that institutional theory was designed to critique? How is change possible in an institutional context that constructs interests and sets the very conditions for such action? Efforts to deal with these questions by inserting various forms of individual, purposive actors into institutional frameworks have created inconsistencies that threaten the overall coherence of institutional theory and move it farther from its sociological roots. To provide alternative answers, we turn to the growing line of work on “inhabited” institutions. Our exegesis of this literature has two goals. The first goal is to shift focus away from individuals and nested imagery and towards social interaction and coupling configurations. This move opens new avenues for research and helps to identify the spaces—both conceptual and empirical—and the supra-individual processes that facilitate change. This shift has important theoretical implications: incorporating social interaction alters institutional theory, and our second goal is to specify an analytic framework for this new research, an inhabited institutionalism. Inhabited institutionalism is a meso-approach for examining the recursive relationships among institutions, interactions, and organizations. It provides novel and sociologically consistent means for dealing with issues of agency and change, and a new agenda for research that can reinvigorate and reunite organizational sociology and institutional theory.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This understanding spans Scott’s legal, normative, and cognitive pillars (Scott 2014). Institutional meanings have a regulative manifestation when they are codified into laws and rules with formal punishments when broken. They have a normative manifestation when they exist as folk expectations that are informally sanctioned. They have a cultural-cognitive manifestation when people are unable to think in alternative ways.
DiMaggio, personal communication.
As with the expansion of the concept of “institutional logic” discussed earlier, this expansion is likewise problematic. As a result, Alvesson and Spicer (2019: 267) lament that “nearly any kind of purposeful action,” however ordinary, becomes institutional: “the mailman reliably delivering letters maintains the institution of the post office; a doctor delegating work to a nurse is preserving the institution of the elite medical profession.”
Although Zilber has published on institutional work (2013), her deft use of ethnography is richly inhabited. We consider her an inhabited institutionalist, but we do not foist that label on her, especially since her work is wide-ranging.
Goffman (1983) goes so far as to describe interaction as its own “order.”
Accountability is an institutional rationale for educational reform that holds that schools should be held to account for their educational outcomes. This rationale emphasizes surveillance, rewards, and punishments, often based on quantitative measures such as test scores.
The identification of the many coupling possibilities that are evident in the inhabited institutional research is a legacy to old and new institutionalism, and they share an important kinship. Although Selznick (1943, 1948) did not use the term loose coupling, he described how the short-term contingencies of day-to-day operations generates an informal system of organization and introduces gaps between work practices and official, formal goals. Likewise, NI developed from local, empirical observations of loose coupling in San Francisco schools (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 1978). To explain the widespread prevalence of loose coupling, Meyer and his colleagues moved up a level of analysis to emphasize the external environment and the legitimacy imperative. As NI continued to evolve in a macro direction so did its data, and studies of field-level diffusion featuring quantitative measures of surface organizational conformity flourished. These studies provided valuable knowledge about the macro dynamics of institutions, but in the process loose coupling became something of an assumption and not a process to be observed or questioned.
As processual approaches go, II would probably be characterized as a “weak” processual approach (although we prefer “tempered”) instead of a “strong” one, because it does, at times, treat organizations and institutional myths as entities (Chia and Langley 2004), although it does not prioritize entities (see also Reay et al. 2019).
We are indebted to one of the reviewers for this phrasing.
As Garfinkel (1967) has shown, a small disruption can go a long way in upending a social order. Garfinkel’s methodological strategy was to use such disruptions to gain insight into the routine, taken-for-granted order that is made visible by the disruption, and the continuity that existed prior to the disruption. Instead of viewing Chicago style interactionism (Blumer 1969) as a competing view, II uses it to examine something else—the emergent meanings that may arise after such disruptions (see also Tavory and Fine 2020).
For example, Blumer argued that even large-scale social changes such as industrialization were ‘neutral’ in the sense that they are ‘indifferent to what follows socially in its wake’ (1990: 9).
Nunn and Cobb demonstrate that II can be as effective for examining reproduction as it is for examining change.
References
Alvesson, M., & Kärreman, D. (2000). Taking the linguistic turn in organizational research: Challenges, responses, consequences. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 35(2), 136–158.
Alvesson, M., & Spicer, A. (2019). Neo-institutional theory: A mid-life crisis? Organization Studies, 40(2), 199–218.
Aurini, J. (2012). Patterns of tight and loose coupling in a competitive marketplace: The case of learning center franchises. Sociology of Education, 85(4), 373–387.
Bakken, T., & Hernes, T. (2006). Organizing is both a verb and a noun: Weick meets whitehead. Organization Studies, 27(11), 1599–1616.
Barley, S. (2008). Coalface institutionalism. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. B. Lawrence, & R. E. Meyer (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 490–515). Newbury Park: Sage.
Barley, S. (2019). Working institutions. In T. Reay, T. B. Zilber, A. Langley, & H. Tsoukas (Eds.), Institutions and organizations: A process view (pp. 199–218). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Battilana, J. (2006). Agency and institutions: The enabling role of individuals’ social position. Organization, 13(5), 653–676.
Battilana, J. (2011). The enabling role of social position in diverging from the institutional status quo: Evidence from the UK National Health Service. Organization Science, 22(4), 817–834.
Battilana, J., & D’Aunno, T. (2009). Institutional work and the paradox of embedded agency. In T. B. Lawrence, R. Suddaby, & B. Leca (Eds.), Institutional work: Actors and agency in institutional studies of organizations (pp. 31–58). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Battilana, J., Leca, B., & Boxenbaum, E. (2009). How actors change institutions: Towards a theory of institutional entrepreneurship. The Academy of Management Annals, 3(1), 65–107.
Bechky, B. (2011). Making organizational theory work: Institutions, occupations, and negotiated orders. Organization Science, 22(5), 1157–1167.
Bechky, B. (2019). Evaluative spillovers from technological change: The effects of ‘DNA envy’ on occupational practices in forensic science. Administrative Science Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839219855329.
Becker, H. (1986). Doing things together: Selected papers. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Beckert, J. (1999). Agency, entrepreneurs, and institutional change: The role of strategic choice and institutionalized practices in organizations. Organization Studies, 20(5), 777–799.
Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. New York: Doubleday.
Binder, A. (2007). For love and money: Organizations’ creative responses to multiple environmental logics. Theory and Society, 36(6), 547–571.
Binder, A., & Wood, K. (2013). Becoming right: How campuses shape young conservatives. Princeton: University Press.
Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Blumer, H. (1990). Industrialization as an agent of social change. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Bouilloud, J.-P., Perezts, M., Viale, T., & Schaepelynck, V. (2019). Beyond the stable image of institutions: Using institutional analysis to tackle classic questions in institutional theory. Organization Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618815519.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bromley, P., & Meyer, J. (2015). Hyper-organization: Global organizational expansion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bromley, P., & Powell, W. (2012). From smoke and mirrors to walking the talk: Decoupling in the contemporary world. Academy of Management Annals, 6(1), 483–530.
Cardinale, I. (2018). Beyond constraining and enabling: Toward new microfoundations for institutional theory. Academy of Management Review, 43(1), 132–155.
Chia, R., & Langley, A. (2004). The first organization studies summer workshop: Theorizing process in organizational research. Organization Studies, 25, 1486.
Clark, B. (1956). Organizational adaptation and precarious values: A case study. American Sociological Review, 21, 327–336.
Clark, B. (1970). The distinctive college. Chicago: Aldine.
Clemens, E., & Cook, J. (1999). Politics and institutionalism: Explaining durability and change. Annual Review of Sociology, 25(1), 441–466.
Cobb, J. (2017). Inequality frames: How teachers inhabit color-blind ideology. Sociology of Education, 90(4), 315–332.
Collett, J., & Lizardo, O. (2014). Localizing cultural phenomena by specifying social psychological mechanisms: Introduction to the special issue. Social Psychology Quarterly, 77(20), 95–99.
Czarniawska, B. (1997). Narrating the organization: Dramas of institutional identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Czarniawska, B., & Sevon, G. (1996). Translating organizational change. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Delbridge, R., & Edwards, T. (2008). Challenging conventions: Roles and processes during non-isomorphic institutional change. Human Relations, 61(3), 299–325.
Denzin, N. (1969). Symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology: A proposed synthesis. American Sociological Review, 34(6), 922–934.
DiMaggio, P. (1988). Interest and agency in institutional theory. In L. Zucker (Ed.), Institutional patterns and organizations: Culture and environment (pp. 3–21). Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Co.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23(1), 263–287.
DiMaggio, P., & Powell, W. (1991). The new institutionalism in organizational analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dingwall, R., & Strong, P. (1985). The interactional study of organizations: A critique and reformulation. Urban Life, 14(2), 205–231.
Dorado, S. (2013). Small groups as context for institutional entrepreneurship: An exploration of the emergence of commercial microfinance in Bolivia. Organization Studies, 34(4), 533–557.
Eliasoph, N., & Lichterman, P. (2003). Culture in interaction. American Journal of Sociology, 108(4), 735–794.
Emirbayer, M., & Johnson, V. (2008). Bourdieu and organizational analysis. Theory and Society, 37(1), 1–44.
Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023.
Espeland, W., & Sauder, M. (2007). Rankings and reactivity: How public measures recreate social worlds. American Journal of Sociology, 113(1), 1–40.
Everitt, J. (2012). Teacher careers and inhabited institutions: Sense-making and arsenals of teaching practice in educational institutions. Symbolic Interaction, 35(2), 203–220.
Everitt, J. (2013). Inhabitants moving in: Prospective sense-making and the reproduction of inhabited institutions in teacher education. Symbolic Interaction, 36(2), 177–196.
Everitt, J. (2018). Lesson plans: The institutional demands of becoming a teacher. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Everitt, J., & Levinson, B. (2016). Inhabited institutions in new destinations: Local sense-making and institutional work in community response to new immigration. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 45(2), 115–142.
Everitt, J., Johnson, J., Burr, W., & Shanower, S. (2020). Examining healthcare institutions by bringing qualitative data from two eras into empirical dialogue. Ethnography online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138120913062.
Fine, G. (2003). Towards a peopled ethnography. Ethnography, 4(1), 41–60.
Fligstein, N. (1997). Social skill and institutional theory. American Behavioral Scientist, 40(4), 397–405.
Fligstein, N. (2001). Social skill and the theory of fields. Sociological Theory, 19(2), 105–125.
Friedland, R., & Alford, R. (1991). Bringing society back in: Symbols, practices, and institutional contradictions. In W. Powell & P. DiMaggio (Eds.), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (pp. 232–263). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Furnari, S. (2014). Interstitial spaces: Microinteraction settings and the genesis of new practices between institutional fields. Academy of Management Review, 39(4), 439–462.
Furnari, S. (2019). Situating frames and institutional logics: The social situation as a key institutional microfoundation. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 65B, 193–209.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Garud, R., Jain, S., & Kumaraswamy, A. (2002). Institutional entrepreneurship in the sponsorship of common technological standards. Academy of Management Journal, 45(1), 196–214.
Goffman, E. (1955). On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, 18(3), 213–231.
Goffman, E. (1956). The nature of deference and demeanor. American Anthropologist, 58, 473–502.
Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums. New York: Doubleday.
Goffman, E. (1969). Where the action is. London: Lane, Penguin Press.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Goffman, E. (1983). The interaction order. American Sociological Review, 48(1), 1–17.
Gouldner, A. (1954). Patterns of industrial bureaucracy. Glencoe: Free Press.
Greenwood, R., Suddaby, R., 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
Greenwood, R., & Suddaby, R. (2006). Institutional entrepreneurship in mature fields: The big five accounting firms. Academy of Management Journal, 49(1), 27–48.
Greenwood, R., Raynard, M., Kodeith, F., Micelotta, E., & Lounsbury, M. (2011). Institutional complexity and organizational responses. Academy of Management Annals, 5(1), 317–371.
Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Lawrence, T., & Meyer, R. (Eds.). (2017). The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (2nd ed.). Newbury Park: Sage.
Haedicke, M. (2012). ‘Keeping our mission, changing our system’: Translation and organizational change in natural foods co-ops. The Sociological Quarterly, 53(1), 44–67.
Haedicke, M. (2016). Organizing organic: Conflict and compromise in an emerging market. Thousand Oaks: Stanford University Press.
Hallett, T. (2007). Between deference and distinction: Interaction ritual through symbolic power in an educational institution. Social Psychology Quarterly, 70(2), 148–171.
Hallett, T. (2010). The myth incarnate: Recoupling processes, turmoil, and inhabited institutions in an urban elementary school. American Sociological Review, 75(1), 52–74.
Hallett, T., & Meanwell, E. (2016). Accountability as an inhabited institution: Contested meanings and the symbolic politics of reform. Symbolic Interaction, 39(3), 374–396.
Hallett, T., & Ventresca, M. (2006). Inhabited institutions: Social interactions and organizational forms in Gouldner’s patterns of industrial bureaucracy. Theory and Society, 35(2), 213–236.
Hampel, C., Lawrence, T., & Tracey, P. (2017). Institutional work: Taking stock and making it matter. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. Lawrence, & R. Meyer (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (2nd ed., pp. 558–590). Newbury Park: Sage.
Hardy, C., & Maguire, S. (2008). Institutional entrepreneurship. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, R. Suddaby, & K. Sahlin-Andersson (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 198–217). Newbury Park: Sage.
Hardy, C., & Maguire, S. (2017). Institutional entrepreneurship and change in fields. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. Lawrence, & R. Meyer (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (2nd ed., pp. 198–217). Newbury Park: Sage.
Haveman, H., & David, R. (2008). Ecologists and institutionalists: Friends or foes? In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, R. Suddaby, & K. Sahlin-Andersson (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 573–595). Newbury Park: Sage.
Hirsch, P., & Lounsbury, M. (1997). Putting the organization back into organization theory: Action, change, and the ‘new’ institutionalism. Journal of Management Inquiry, 6(1), 79–88.
Holm, P. (1995). The dynamics of institutionalization: Transformation processes in Norwegian fisheries. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(3), 398–422.
Hughes, E. (1936). The ecological aspect of institutions. American Sociological Review, 1(2), 180–189.
Huising, R. (2016). From adapting practices to inhabiting ideas: How managers restructure work across organizations. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 47, 383–413.
Hwang, H., & Colyvas, J. (2011). Problematizing actors and institutions in institutional work. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(1), 62–66.
Hwang, H., & Colyvas, J. (2020). What do we talk about when we talk about microfoundations? Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 65B, 377–352.
Hwang, H., Colyvas, J., & Drori, G. S. (2019). The proliferation and profusion of actors in institutional theory. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 58, 3–20.
Jepperson, R. (2002). The development and application of sociological neoinstitutionalism. In J. Berger & M. Zelditch (Eds.), Contemporary sociological theory: New directions (pp. 229–266). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Jepperson, R., & Meyer, J. W. (2011). Multiple levels of analysis and the limitations of methodological individualisms. Sociological Theory, 29(1), 54–73.
Kameo, N. (2015). Gifts, donations, and loose coupling: Responses to changes in academic entrepreneurship among bioscientists in Japan. Theory and Society, 44(2), 177–198.
Kaufman, J. (2004). Endogenous explanation in the sociology of culture. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 335–357.
Kellogg, K. (2009). Operating room: Relational spaces and microinstitutional change in surgery. American Journal of Sociology, 115(3), 657–711.
Kellogg, K. (2011). Challenging operations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
King, B. (2017). The relevance of organizational sociology. Contemporary Sociology, 46(2), 131–137.
Kraatz, M. (2009). Leadership as institutional work: A bridge to the other side. In T. B. Lawrence, R. Suddaby, & B. Leca (Eds.), Institutional work: Actors and agency in institutional studies of organizations (pp. 59–91). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kraatz, M. (2011). Two cheers for institutional work. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(1), 59–61.
Kraatz, M., & Block, E. (2008). Organizational implications of institutional pluralism. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, R. Suddaby, & K. Sahlin-Andersson (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 243–275). Newbury Park: Sage.
Kraatz, M. S., Ventresca, M. J., & Deng, L. (2010). Precarious values and mundane innovations: Enrollment management in American liberal arts colleges. Academy of Management Journal, 53(6), 1521–1545.
Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H., & Van de Ven, A. (2013). Process studies of change in organization and management: Unveiling temporality, activity, and flow. Academy of Management Journal, 36(1), 1–13.
Lawrence, T. B., & Phillips, N. (2004). From Moby Dick to Free Willy: Macro-cultural discourse and institutional entrepreneurship in emerging institutional fields. Organization, 11(5), 689–711.
Lawrence, T. B., & Suddaby, R. (2006). Institutions and institutional work. In S. Clegg, C. Hardy, & T. Lawrence (Eds.), The handbook of organization studies (2nd ed., pp. 215–254). London: Sage.
Lawrence, T. B., Suddaby, R., & Leca, B. (2009). Institutional work: Actors and agency in institutional studies of organizations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lawrence, T. B., Suddaby, R., & Leca, B. (2011). Institutional work: Refocusing institutional studies of organizations. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(1), 52–58.
Lawrence, T. B., Leca, B., & Zilber, T. B. (2013). Institutional work: Current research, new directions and overlooked issues. Organization Studies, 34(8), 1023–1033.
Leibel, E., Hallett, T., & Bechky, B. A. (2018). Meaning at the source: The dynamics of field formation in institutional research. Academy of Management Annals, 12(1), 154–177.
Liska, A. (1969). Uses and misuses of tautologies in social psychology. Sociometry, 32, 44–457.
Lok, J., Creed, W. E. D., DeJordy, R., & Voronov, M. (2017). Living institutions: Bringing emotions into organizational institutionalism. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. Lawrence, & R. Meyer (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (2nd ed., pp. 591–620). Newbury Park: Sage.
Lounsbury, M. & Wang, M. S. (2020). Into the clearing: Back to the future of constitutive institutional analysis. Organization Theory, 1(1), 1-27.
Maguire, S., Hardy, C., & Lawrence, T. (2004). Institutional entrepreneurship in emerging fields: HIV/AIDS treatment advocacy in Canada. Academy of Management Journal, 47(5), 657–679.
Merton, R. (1936). The unanticipated consequences of purposive social action. American Sociological Review, 1(6), 894–904.
Messinger, S. (1955). Organizational transformation: A case study of a declining social movement. American Sociological Review, 30, 3–10.
Meyer, J. (2010). World society, institutional theories, and the actor. Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 1–20.
Meyer, J. (2017). Reflections on institutional theories of organizations. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. Lawrence, & R. Meyer (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (2nd ed., pp. 831–852). Newbury Park: Sage.
Meyer, R., & Höllerer, M. (2014). Does institutional theory need redirecting? Journal of Management Studies, 51(7), 1221–1233.
Meyer, J., & Jepperson, R. (2000). The ‘Actors’ of modern society: The cultural construction of social agency. Sociological Theory, 18, 100–120.
Meyer, J., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–363.
Meyer, J., & Rowan, B. (1978). The structure of educational organizations. In M. Meyer et al. (Eds.), Environments and organizations (pp. 78–109). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Meyer, H.-D., & Rowan, B. (2006). Institutional analysis and the study of education. In H. D. Meyer & B. Rowan (Eds.), The new institutionalism in education (pp. 1–13). Albany: SUNY Press.
Meyer, J., Boli, J., Thomas, G., & Ramirez, F. (1997). World society and the nation state. American Journal of Sociology, 103, 144–181.
Misangyi, V., Weaver, G., & Elms, H. (2008). Ending corruption: The interplay among institutional logics, resources, and institutional entrepreneurs. Academy of Management Review, 33(3), 750–770.
Nunn, L. (2014). Defining student success. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Parsons, T. (1937). The structure of social action. Sociology Thought and Action, 1(1), 32–46.
Pham, J. (2019). Campus sex in context: Organizational cultures and women’s engagement in sexual relationships on two American college campuses. Sociological Forum, 34(1), 138–157.
Powell, W. W., & Colyvas, J. A. (2008). Microfoundations of institutional theory. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, R. Suddaby, & K. Sahlin-Andersson (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 276–298). Newbury Park: Sage.
Purdy, Jill, Shaz Ansari, and Barbara Gray. 2017. Are logics enough? Framing as an alternative tool for understanding institutional meaning making. Journal of Management Inquiry, 28(4), 409–419.
Rao, H., Monin, P., & Durand, R. (2003). Institutional change in Toque Ville: Nouvelle Cuisine as an identity movement in French gastronomy. American Journal of Sociology, 108, 795–843.
Rawls, A. (1987). The interaction order Sui Generis: Goffman’s contribution to social theory. Sociological Theory, 5(2), 136–149.
Reay, Trish, Tammar Zilber, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas (eds). 2019. Institutions and organizations: A process view. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reyes, D. V. (2015). Inhabiting Latino politics how colleges shape students’ political styles. Sociology of Education, 88(4), 302–319.
Riaz, S., Buchanan, S., & Bapuji, H. (2011). Institutional work amidst the financial crisis: Emerging positions of elite actors. Organization, 18(2), 187–214.
Rojas, F. (2010). Power through institutional work: Acquiring academic authority in the 1968 third world strike. Academy of Management Journal, 53(6), 1263–1280.
Schneiberg, M., & Clemens, E. (2006). The typical tools for the job: Research strategies in institutional analysis. Sociological Theory, 24(3), 195–227.
Schultz, M., & Hernes, T. (2013). A temporal perspective on organizational identity. Organization Science, 24(1), 1–21.
Scott, W. R. (2010). Reflections: The past and future of research on institutions and institutional change. Journal of Change Management, 10(1), 2–21.
Scott, W. R. (2014). Institutions and organizations: Ideas, interests, and identities (4th ed.). Los Angeles: Sage.
Scott, R., & Meyer, J. (1983). The organization of societal sectors. In J. Meyer & R. Scott (Eds.), Organizational environments: Ritual and rationality (pp. 129–154). Beverly Hills: Sage.
Scully, Maureen and Douglass Creed. 1997. Stealth legitimacy: employee activism and corporate response during the diffusion of domestic partner benefits. Paper presented at the Academy of Management Meetings. Boston.
Selznick, P. (1943). An approach to a theory of bureaucracy. American Sociological Review, 8(1), 47–54.
Selznick, P. (1948). Foundations of the theory of organization. American Sociological Review, 13(1), 25–35.
Selznick, Philip. 1966 [1949]. TVA and the grass roots. New York: Harper and Row.
Selznick, P. (1984). Leadership in administration: A sociological interpretation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Selznick, P. (1996). Institutionalism “Old” and “New”. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41(2), 270–277.
Seo, M.-G., & Douglas Creed, W. E. (2002). Institutional contradictions, praxis, and institutional change: A dialectical perspective. Academy of Management Review, 27(2), 222–247.
Silver, D. (2018). Figure it out! Sociological Methods and Research online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124118769089.
Simon, H. A. (1957). Models of man: Social and rational, mathematical essays. New York: Wiley.
Strauss, A. (1993). Continual permutations of action. London: Routledge.
Tavory, I., & Fine, G. (2020). Disruption and the theory of the interaction order. Theory and Society, 49, 365–385.
Thomas, J. (1984). Some aspects of negotiated order, loose coupling and mesostructure in maximum security prisons. Symbolic Interaction, 7(2), 213–231.
Thornton, P. (2002). The rise of the corporation in a craft industry: Conflict and conformity in institutional logics. Academy of Management Journal, 45(1), 81–101.
Thornton, P., Ocasio, W., & Lounsbury, M. (2012). The institutional logics perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tomaskovic-Devey, D., & Avent-Holt, D. (2019). Relational inequalities: An organizational approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567–582.
Ulmer, J. (2019). Criminal courts as inhabited institutions: Making sense of difference and similarity in sentencing. Crime and Justice, 48, 483–522.
VanHeuvelen, J. (2019). Isolation or interaction: Healthcare provider experience of design change. Sociology of Health and Illness, 41, 692–708.
Vogel, R. (2012). The visible colleges of management and organization studies: A bibliometric analysis of academic journals. Organization Studies, 33(8), 1015–1043.
Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Willmott, H. (2011). “Institutional Work” for what? Problems and prospects of institutional theory. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(1), 67–72.
Zald, M., & Denton, P. (1963). From evangelism to general service: The transformation of the YMCA. Administrative Science Quarterly, 8, 214–234.
Zilber, T. (2002). Institutionalization as an interplay between actions, meanings, and actors: The case of a rape crisis center in Israel. The Academy of Management Journal, 45(1), 234–254.
Zilber, T. (2007). Stories and the discursive dynamics of institutional entrepreneurship: The case of Israeli high-tech after the bubble. Organization Studies, 28(7), 1035–1054.
Zilber, T. (2012). The relevance of institutional theory for the study of organizational culture. Journal of Management Inquiry, 21(1), 88–93.
Zilber, T. (2013). Institutional logics and institutional work: Should they be agreed? Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 39A, 77–96.
Zilber, T. (2014). Beyond a single organization: Challenges and opportunities in doing field level ethnography. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 3(1), 96–113.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study and Beth Bechky, Nahoko Kameo, Gary Fine, Mark de Rond, Brayden King, and Esther Leibel for their comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Electronic supplementary material
ESM 1
(PDF 153 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hallett, T., Hawbaker, A. The case for an inhabited institutionalism in organizational research: interaction, coupling, and change reconsidered. Theor Soc 50, 1–32 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09412-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09412-2