The case for an inhabited institutionalism in organizational research: interaction, coupling, and change reconsidered
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The case for an inhabited institutionalism in organizational research: interaction, coupling, and change reconsidered Tim Hallett 1
& Amelia
Hawbaker 1
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper makes the case for an inhabited institutionalism by pondering questions that continue to vex institutional theory: How can we account for local activity, agency, and change without reverting to a focus on individual actors—the very kinds of actors that institutional theory was designed to critique? How is change possible in an institutional context that constructs interests and sets the very conditions for such action? Efforts to deal with these questions by inserting various forms of individual, purposive actors into institutional frameworks have created inconsistencies that threaten the overall coherence of institutional theory and move it farther from its sociological roots. To provide alternative answers, we turn to the growing line of work on “inhabited” institutions. Our exegesis of this literature has two goals. The first goal is to shift focus away from individuals and nested imagery and towards social interaction and coupling configurations. This move opens new avenues for research and helps to identify the spaces— both conceptual and empirical—and the supra-individual processes that facilitate change. This shift has important theoretical implications: incorporating social interaction alters institutional theory, and our second goal is to specify an analytic framework for this new research, an inhabited institutionalism. Inhabited institutionalism is a mesoapproach for examining the recursive relationships among institutions, interactions, and organizations. It provides novel and sociologically consistent means for dealing with issues of agency and change, and a new agenda for research that can reinvigorate and reunite organizational sociology and institutional theory. Keywords Coupling configurations . Institutional theory . Loose coupling . Organizational
sociology . Symbolic interaction Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-02009412-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Tim Hallett [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Ballantine Hall 744, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Theory and Society
The 2014 American Sociological Association meetings included a panel titled with the provocative question, “Does Organizational Sociology have a Future?” Although opinions varied, the mood was somber, and the general consensus was that the golden era of organizational sociology was over. After the meetings the exchange continued online, and in 2015 the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section published a compendium of the discussion in its newsletter. A recent essay in Contemporary Sociology summarized the concerns expressed in the panel and online, articulating the stakes: “many have wondered if it’s a subfield on the brink of irrelevance. Blog posts and a recent ASA session have
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