Dear OMT Colleagues,
We would like to encourage you to consider submitting a paper to our stream, Institutions and Emotions: Beyond Cognition, Norms, and Rules in Institutional Theory, which will be part of EGOS 2012, July 2-7, in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Helsinki</st1:place></st1:city>. Details about the stream are available at this link or you can also continue reading below.
http://www.egos2012.net/2011/06/sub-theme-45-institutions-and-emotions/
We are really excited about this emerging topic and hope this stream will foster a growing community of people interested in advancing a broad research agenda in this area. Please feel free to contact any of us if you have any questions about the stream.
Best wishes,
Doug Creed
Institutions and Emotions: Beyond Cognition, Norms, and Rules in Institutional Theory
Doug Creed, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">University of Rhode Island</st1:city>, <st1:country-region w:st="on">USA</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
w.e.douglas.creed@gmail.com
Jaco Lok, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">University of New South Wales</st1:city>, <st1:country-region w:st="on">Australia</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
j.lok@unsw.edu.au
Marc Ventresca, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">University of Oxford</st1:city>, <st1:country-region w:st="on">UK</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
marc.ventresca@sbs.ox.ac.uk
Institutionalists have long recognized cognitive, normative and regulative processes in institutional experience-from Smith's work on moral sentiments, to Selznick's concern with moral communities, to Goffman's analysis of total institutions. This subtheme builds from these valuable foundations to invite explorations of the role of emotions – both lived-affective experiences (feelings) and other non-calculative responses to triggers – in institutional processes and institutional work.
For over two decades organizational scholars have called for making the role of emotions in institutional processes more explicit. Yet emotions remain curiously absent from most institutionalist studies, despite increasing attention elsewhere in organizational research and related social sciences (e.g., Hochschild, 1983; Collins, 1988; Goodwin, Jasper & Poletta, 2001). Recently, a number of scholars have begun to address this concern. Scott (2008) led the way by contending that emotions may operate across the standard institutional 'pillars', interacting emotion with regulative, normative, and cognitive processes. Creed, DeJordy, & Lok (2010) explored how actors experience institutional contradictions, showing both cognitive and emotional processes at work. Indeed, institutions are inhabited by people who bring their whole selves – heart, mind, and body – to the experience and enactment of institutions (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006; Gutierrez, Scully & Howard-Grenville, 2010). Individual emotional investment or disinvestment in a dominant institutional order may also be a critical antecedent of all manner of institutional work (Voronov & Vince, forthcoming).
This emerging body of work provides good reason to believe that institutional processes are driven perhaps as much by lived-affective factors as cognitive-reflective ones. Building on cultural and political psychology and the microsociologies of identity, affect and work (Barley 2009), the emotion-and-institutions focus may also re-invigorate 'standard' analytic problems such as legitimacy and stability, the links between macro and micro institutional processes, and the linkages among rules, roles, resources and logics of appropriateness.
The aim of this subtheme is to take up this challenge by theorizing and elaborating the role of emotions in institutional processes. If we treat emotion itself in institutional terms, what questions should institutional and organizational researchers pose? The challenge for organizational theorists is to develop constructs and arguments without simply replicating what related traditions have already studied. In order to work towards a broad research agenda we welcome contributions on the following questions:
- How do institutions configure the boundaries of 'appropriate' emotional repertoires?
- How do emotions figure as cultural tools or institutional resources in different forms of institutional work?
- How do institutions shape actors' emotions and which emotions are involved in the regulation of thought and behavior?
- What are strategies for targeting the institutional arrangements that regulate emotions? Under what conditions can institutional inhabitants purposively engage with emotions in order to (re)create, maintain, or disrupt the institutional arrangements that regulate them?
- How does emotional commitment to or dissatisfaction with institutional arrangements arise and how might these experiences be related to the propensity to engage in different forms of institutional work?
- How do institutions make particular practices feel desirable or just?
- How are emotions linked to domination and its limits?
- Can tracking the emotions of the field participants provide indicators of institutional change? Are there linkages between different emotions and different moments in a change process?
- How does actors' mastery of emotions or emotional repertoires figure in their capacities for action?
These questions are not exhaustive of possible contributions. We welcome empirical and theoretical papers that draw from standard or innovative research approaches and arguments in organizational institutionalism and kindred approaches, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, social/cultural/political psychology, cultural and social history, psychoanalytic theory, identity theories, social movement theory, relational sociology, sensemaking, and critical perspectives.
References
Collins, R. 1988. Theoretical sociology. <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">San Diego</st1:place></st1:city>: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Creed, W. E. D., DeJordy, R., & Lok, J. 2010. Being the change: Resolving institutional contradiction through identity work. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Academy</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Management</st1:placename></st1:place> Journal, 53(6).
Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. 2001. Passionate politics: Emotions and social movements. <st1:city w:st="on">Chicago</st1:city>: <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Chicago</st1:placename></st1:place>.
Gutierrez, B. Howard-Grenville, J. and Scully, M. 2010. The faithful rise up: Split identification and an unlikely change effort. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Academy</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Management</st1:placename></st1:place> Journal, 53(4).
Hallett, T & Ventresca, M. 2006. Inhabited institutions: Social interactions and organizational forms in Gouldner's "Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy." Theory and Society, 35: 231-236.
Scott, R. W. 2008. Institutions and organizations: Ideas and interests (3rd ed.). <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Thousand Oaks</st1:city>, <st1:state w:st="on">CA</st1:state></st1:place>: Sage.
Voronov, M. & Vince, R. (forthcoming). Integrating emotions into the analysis of institutional work. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Academy</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Management</st1:placename></st1:place> Review.
Doug Creed is an Associate Professor of Management at the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Rhode Island</st1:placename></st1:place>. His work on identity and agency in the legitimation of contested organizational change, including the organizational politics underlying the offering of domestic partner benefits and the ordination of openly gay and lesbian people, has appeared in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Academy</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Management Journal</st1:placename></st1:place>, Organization Science, Journal of Management Inquiry, Journal of Applied Behavior Science, and the Journal of Management Studies. Along with Jaco Lok, Rich DeJordy, Peter Cebon, and Bryant Hudson, Doug is a co-founder of a research group devoted to research on emotions and institutions.
Jaco Lok is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Organisation & Management, <st1:placename w:st="on">Australian</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">School</st1:placetype> of Business, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">New South Wales</st1:placename></st1:place>. Jaco is engaged in research on the microfoundations of institutional theory, which has been published in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Academy</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Management Journal</st1:placename></st1:place>. He is particularly interested in the role of identity in bridging the micro- and macro-levels of analysis, including the role of emotions in processes of identity construction and identification.
Marc J Ventresca is an organizational sociologist on faculty at the <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Oxford</st1:placename>, with research affiliations at <st1:placename w:st="on">Stanford</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> and the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Naval</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Postgraduate</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">School</st1:placetype></st1:place>. His research explores innovation and governance in knowledge- and information-intensive fields, with recent publications in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Academy</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Management Journal</st1:placename></st1:place>, Journal of Management Inquiry, Theory & Society, and Environmental Science and Policy. With Tim Hallett, David Obstfeld, Matt Kraatz and others, he is exploring pragmatist models of action and activity to develop a research approach to 'inhabited institutions'. This work foregrounds institutional innovation and redirects rational choice approaches in institutional analysis.
Douglas Creed
Associate Professor of Management
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">College</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Business Administration</st1:placename></st1:place>
311 Ballantine Hall
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Kingston</st1:city>, <st1:state w:st="on">RI</st1:state> <st1:postalcode w:st="on">02881</st1:postalcode></st1:place>
Phone: 401-874-5806
Fax: 401-874-4312
Email: douglas.creed@uri.edu