Instituting, de-instituting and under-instituting the complexities of production: struggles on the shop floor

Abstract

Institutions frame social life, yet the power to institute is unequally distributed among social positions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the daily struggles undertaken by workers, engineers and management at a glass containers plant over the (de‐)institution of production complexity, this article provides a discussion of the processes and conditions that co‐shape each agent's ability to fully institute – i.e. to enforce as public and formally recognised – a production‐related idea or rule across the factory's uneven social fabric. It is argued that ambiguous, inequality‐driven under‐instituting processes may occur and perform key roles in complex, hierarchical production organisations.