inhabited institutions
The hallmark of “Indiana institutionalism” is an emphasis on struggle and conflict. Rather than assume the influence of macro-social processes, the scholars around here tend to focus on social movements, legal challenge, and contention. I’d like to draw your attention to a nice paper by my friend and colleague Tim Hallett. The Myth Incarnate is all about coupling processes in organizations, and brings an brings an important psychological dimension to institutional theory.
His question is simple: What happens to an organization when somebody tries to make you actually do the mission statement? In institutional lingo, this is “recoupling.” His example is accountability standards in schools. He has a nice ethnographic study of school where a new principle tried to enforce new accountability procedures. The result? People freaked out:
Turmoil is foremost a state of epistemic distress, but it has another social-psychological component. Epistemic distress involves a collapse of meaning, but eventually teachers responded by reconstructing meanings in ways that defined emergent battle lines. When teachers talked to each other and to me about the past, they were not just describing their experience; they were infusing it withmeaning. ‘‘Turmoil’’was their term, and it is not a neutral one. Talk is a basic element in the politics of signification (Benford and Snow 2000; Hall 1972), and teachers’ ‘‘turmoil talk’’ had political aspects (Emerson and Messinger 1977). Teachers had no formal authority to fight recoupling, but they did have the informal symbolic power (Hallett 2003) to shape meanings. Turmoil has a negative connotation, and teachers used their version of events to construct the recoupling negatively.
I liked this study as an example of where macro-political processes hit the ground and institutions create conflict, rather than resolve them. “Must read” for folks interested in institutional work and organizational conflict.
I’ve read some of Hallett’s prior studies. Very interesting.
I have related a question that is highly relevant to a paper I am revising: Do you think there is a definition or theory of meanings and meaning structures to elaborate the process and context of ‘negotiation’ of meanings. It seems that almost all literature is rather descriptive. That is, meanings are just empirical stories, while “meaning structures” are just another label for shared assumptions that cannot be explicated or analyzed.
From my perspective neither framing or symbolic interactionism really provides any theory of meaning structures. Geertz suggests that meaning structures are networks of interrelated cultural elements, but does not seek to theorize the form or content of those relationships. Zilber 2008 chapter in the green book on meanings seems to strongly suggest that there indeed is no theory of meanings at all. Am I the only one drawing these conclusions?
Henri
April 8, 2011 at 10:16 am
Henri: The closest I can think of is Mohr’s work on semantic networks. He’s also doing a study of networks of meaning (e.g., when people say X, they tend to say Y). But aside from that meaning is one of the understudied issues in soc/orgtheory. Sure, we talk about the importance of imputing meaning in social interaction, but we don’t go further. What Would Omar Do?
fabiorojas
April 8, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Another tool for analyzing meaning structures is semiotic analysis. See, for example, the work of my colleague Klaus Weber and his paper on the mobilization of meaning in the grass-fed meat movement.
brayden king
April 8, 2011 at 5:54 pm
Thanks!
Fabio, I need to check out the more recent stuff. I think I’ve read Mohr’s older work but the new study sounds exciting. A viable empirical approach to develop a more ground-up theory of meanings?
Brayden, I should have mentioned Klaus and others work since I think its a wonderful paper and probably the most impressive empirical approach to tackle meanings (I’ve been investigating/pondering this quite a bit). Yet, Weber et al. never claim that semiotics would to be anything but a descriptive scheme/method. I.e. it elaborates comprehensive meaning structures as sets of oppositions, but does not venture to explain why they come about or why these meanings ‘hang together’ as meaning structures (rather than reamin independent symbols etc). I believe the old Levi-Strauss claims that oppositions actually constitute meanings have been thoroughly rejected and Weber et al are certainly not entertaining that kind of argumentation.
Henri
April 8, 2011 at 6:58 pm