Reflexive dis/embedding: Personal narratives, empowerment and the emotional dynamics of interstitial events

Abstract

Reflexivity is required for institutional work, yet we know very little about the mechanisms for generating such understandings of the social world. We explore this gap through a case study of an interstitial event that aims to create a community of ‘change-makers’. The findings suggest that such events can generate reflexive dis/embedding through two complementary mechanisms. Specifically, personal narratives of injustice and action and individual-collective empowering generate emotional dynamics that disembed actors from their given attachments and embed them within new social bonds. Through these mechanisms, the event in the case study was able to challenge audience members’ conceptions of self and others and change their worldview. This research advances our understanding of how reflexivity can be developed by uncovering the emotional dynamics crucial to the dis/embedding of actors.

Collective Emotions in Institutional Creation Work

“…Recently, theorists have drawn particular attention to the emotional aspects of institutional formation (e.g. Fan & Zietsma, 2017;Friedland, 2018;Grodal & Granqvist, 2014;Moisander et al, 2016;Ruebottom & Auster, 2017;Voronov, 2014;Voronov & Vince, 2012;Voronov & Weber, 2016;Wright, Zammuto, & Liesch, 2017). Symbolic of this development, Creed et al (2014: 279) have argued that "people are not exclusively emotional any more than they are exclusively cognitive, and institutional theorists should refuse to mischaracterize people as merely either rather than both".…”

“…In particular, we argue physical proximity between support agents and people with immediate personal needs is required to encourage the emergence of hope. This is because support agents need to act resourcefully with what is available and to generate emotional dynamics that dis-embed local actors (Ruebottom & Auster, 2017) from the disaster event and embed them with new community practices. In post-disaster recovery processes, this would enable institutional workers to emphasize practice templates that have developed through earlier interactions in particular places.…”

Disrupting the Gender Institution: Consciousness-Raising in the Cocoa Value Chain

“…This is because it's in these interactions that inequality is naturalised and replicated. Thus, whilst other studies show "moments of self-awareness" (Suddaby el al., 2016, p.229), often brought about by shocks or large-scale events (Ruebottom & Auster, 2017), we show how that self-awareness is created in the everyday.…”

Toward Permeable Boundaries of Organizations?

“…While fully embedded agency is associated with isomorphic compliance and faithful enactment of institutional prescriptions, various factors reduce embeddedness and enable more reflexivity, with the potential to increase agentic potential. These factors include institutional complexity, multiplicity, or plurality (Greenwood et al, 2011;Kraatz & Block, 2008;Oliver, 1991), which highlights simultaneous embeddedness in more than one institutional context (Fan & Zietsma, 2017;Ruebottom & Auster, 2018), institutional biographies, which feature differences in prior embeddedness (Kraatz & Moore, 2002;Suddaby, Viale, & Gendron, 2016), and participation in free, experimental or interstitial spaces Kellogg, 2009;Rao & Dutta, 2012;Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). Each of these factors pertains to boundaries: in the first, organizations are embedded in overlapping field boundaries; in the second, actors have crossed field boundaries, but retain the memory of the institutions of their past jurisdictions; in the third, boundaries around experimental spaces protect occupants from the institutional discipline they would normally face within their own field (Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010).…”

“…Much of this work has focused on defensive boundary work to maintain status quo arrangements or to (often unsuccessfully) try to expand the boundaries of a given profession at the expense of another (Reay, Golden-Biddle, & GermAnn, 2006). Yet, some work shows how actors may be able to partially disembed themselves from their home institutional programing and open themselves reflexively to others from different organizational fields through shared social and moral emotions and emotional energy (Cartel, Boxenbaum, & Aggeri, 2018;Fan & Zietsma, 2017;Ruebottom & Auster, 2018).…”