Description
Book SynopsisHow do institutions influence and shape cognition and action in individuals and organizations, and how are they in turn shaped by them? Various social science disciplines have offered a range of theories and perspectives to provide answers to this question. Within organization studies in recent years, several scholars have developed the institutional logics perspective. An institutional logic is the set of material practices and symbolic systems including assumptions, values, and beliefs by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences. This approach affords significant insights, methodologies, and research tools, to analyze the multiple combinations of factors that may determine cognition, behaviour, and rationalities.In tracing the development of the institutional logics perspective from earlier institutional theory, the book analyzes seminal research, illustrating how and why influentia
Trade ReviewIn The Institutional Logics Perspective, Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury have crafted a foundational treatise that will be a touchstone for future inquiry on logics. As an explanation for how actors, actions, and context come together in organizational and institutional settings, the institutional logics perspective has found a broad and diverse audience; this book will only widen its appeal. The authors break fresh theoretical ground and offer a solid conceptual footing for the study of logics; as such, the book has much to recommend it. * Mary Ann Glynn, Administrative Sciences Quarterly (forthcoming 2013) *
This book is a must-read. Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury take stock, in a poised and systematic manner, of what has been achieved so far by the Institutional Logics perspective. They also point to what remains to be done. Building on a rich heritage, the Institutional Logics perspective threads the path to new and exciting frontiers a multi-levels theory of institutions, the stabilization of solid micro-foundations, a refreshing return to history and the exploration of the dynamics of identities. The agenda is attractive and this book develops a highly useful road map. * Marie-Laure Djelic, ESSEC Business School *
Over the past generation, neoinstitutional theory has become perhaps the dominant perspective in the sociology of organizations. The institutional logics perspective has became an intriguing alternative that seeks to encompass and extend the insights of neoinstitutionalism to both lower and higher units of analysis. This book goes farther than any prior work in advancing the institutional logics perspective. * Gerald F. Davis, University of Michigan *
The Institutional Logics Perspective is an essential road map to and program for the future development of theories of institutional logic. Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury offer a host of uncharted, under-theorized, unthought, and unexplored causal mechanisms linking the macro and the micro, practice and interaction, value and identity. The authors lay out the inter-institutional system, the doubleness of rationality, the cultural contingency of interest, the ideality of material practice, and the ways in which we have mistakenly assumed that institution effaces agency and hence politics. We are going to have to think and work this text for a while. * Roger O. Friedland, University College Santa Barbara *
No concept in the field of organization studies has been more promising than that of institutional logics and no concept has been more elusive, at times to the point of evanescence. The authors bring institutional logics down to earth, unpacking the concept, tracing its history and exploring its ambiguities, identifying its component parts, and giving each the close attention it deserves. This much-needed and well-conceived volume provides an invaluable service to students of institutions and organizational fields. * Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University *
Table of Contents1. Introduction to the Institutional Logics Perspective ; 2. Precursors to the Institutional Logics Perspective ; 3. Defining the Inter-institutional System ; 4. The Emergence, Stability and Change of the Inter-institutional System ; 5. Micro-Foundations of Institutional Logics ; 6. The Dynamics of Organizational Practices and Identities ; 7. The Emergence and Evolution of Field-Level Logics ; 8. Implications for Future Research
