Toward a Religious Institutionalism: Ontologies, Teleologies and the Godding of Institution^*

Abstract

In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.

Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).

Citation

Friedland, R. (2021), "Toward a Religious Institutionalism: Ontologies, Teleologies and the Godding of Institution^*", Lounsbury, M., Anderson, D.A. and Spee, P. (Ed.) On Practice and Institution: Theorizing the Interface (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 70), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 29-118. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20200000070002