Recovering Materiality in Institutional Work

Abstract

This paper focuses on the neglected role of material elements (e.g., objects and spaces) in institutional processes. The work is empirically grounded on the study of two prizes: one aimed at institutionalizing a managerial model in the public sector and the other, a form of patient-centered care in the health services. Grounded on (post-humanist) practice theory, we discuss how materiality participates in the work to support the legitimacy of these approaches. More specifically, we show that material elements share with humans the efforts involved in mimicry, theorizing, educating and reconfiguring normative networks roles. The paper refines and enriches the notion of institutional work by recovering its practice-based sensitivity and is the first step towards re-examining fundamental questions on the nature of situated action and distributed effort in institutional analysis.Keywords: field-configuring events, institutional work, materiality, objects, practice theory, prizes, spaces. 3In their foundational text, Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) explain that the notion of institutional work stems from two traditions: One that acknowledges the role of actors in changing/maintaining institutions -relating to discussions of agency -and another that sees social action as a situated affair, in line with practice theory (Nicolini, 2012;Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, & von Savigny, 2000). While the former stresses "the impact of individual and collective actors on … institutions" (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006, p. 218), the latter highlights the "embodied [and] materially mediated" nature of human activities (Schatzki in Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006, p. 218).Inquiries into how actors are involved in institutional dynamics is a prolific field, as evidenced by the number of researches on institutional entrepreneurship (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009;Garud, Hardy, & Maguire, 2007). On the other hand, the practice-based dimension of the notion has been largely overlooked. This is unfortunate as the tradition "has the potential to provide a robust theoretical foundation for the concept of institutional work" (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006, p. 216).At the core of practice theory we find an insistence on "the critical role of the body and material things in all social affairs" (Nicolini, 2012, p. 4). However, institutional scholarship in general, and empirical studies on institutional work in particular (Perkmann & Spicer, 2008;Rojas, 2010;Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010) have mainly highlighted the constitutive influence of historical and cognitive structures on actions, leaving their material dimension in the background (Hwang & Colyvas, 2011).In this paper, we address this neglected aspect of institutional work (and institutionalism more generally) and show that there is much to be gained if this line of inquiry were expanded to accommodate an awareness of the role played by materiality. We combine the idea that materials (e.g., objects and spaces) are part of the way in which social processes and organizations are enacted and stabilized (...

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