The study of institutional work has emerged as a dynamic research domain within organization studies. In this essay, we situate the papers published in the Special Issue. We first review the evolution of institutional work as a scholarly conversation within organization studies. We then introduce the papers in the Special Issue, focusing in particular on where they fit into the current scholarly conversation and how they move us in important new directions. Finally, we discuss a set of neglected issues that deserve further attention.

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Based on an in-depth analysis of a field-wide high-tech conference held in Israel after the dot-com crash of 2000, I examine the role and usage of stories in the discursive dynamics of institutional entrepreneurship. Actors who represented different groups in the field were engaged in constructing a shared story of the crisis that reflected and further strengthened the established institutional order. Concurrently, the same actors were also each telling a counter-story of indictment, blaming other groups for the crisis and calling for changes in the institutional order. Institutional entrepreneurship, then, centered on efforts of sense-making through the narration of stories. The three accounts of the high-tech 2000 fall reflected simultaneous efforts of both collaboration in maintaining the institutional order and contestation that could potentially disrupt it. The delicate balance between these contradictory orientations was carried out by the skillful manipulation of explicit and implicit meanings, which was made possible by the use of stories as the medium of, and resource for, institutional entrepreneurship.

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I n this paper I uncover the routine, ongoing practices that sustain institutional multiplicity. Drawing on a comparative study of the two high-tech conferences held in Israel in 2002, I examine how diverse institutions are discursively handled in field-configuring events. Institutional multiplicity was expressed at this site through two identity discourses, one that situated the industry within a national context and another that oriented it toward the global markets. In addition, the conferences were constructed around different best-practice discourses that focused on guidelines for either investment or management. These four discourses reflected and further affected power relations between the field's actors, and they were differentially distributed across separate social spaces between the conferences and within them. The contribution of this study to our understanding of institutional multiplicity lies in demonstrating how it is maintained in practice, politically negotiated between actors, and refracted across separate social spaces.