Into the Clearing: Back to the future of constitutive institutional analysis

Abstract

In the wake of recent scholarly disquiet regarding organizational institutionalism, we argue for a more focused constitutive approach to institutional analysis that concentrates attention on the socio-cultural sources of actors and their behavior. To do so, we suggest that complementarities between world society institutionalism and the institutional logics perspective provide an opportunity to develop a richer, more critical approach to contemporary transformations in economy and society. Building upon nascent empirical directions in world society scholarship, we argue that bridging these theoretical research programs can seed a generative research agenda on the variegated challenges to the established world society order that underpins the liberal capitalist-democracy model. We argue that this should include research on the multiplicity of logics that undergird liberal as well as illiberal beliefs and practices. Foregrounding issues of power and inequality that are grounded in disparate configurations of logics, we suggest that new analytical tools related to the new structuralism and multimodal analysis can help advance the constitutive institutional project for which we advocate.