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Talk of “macrofoundations” helps foreground the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions – dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of microfoundations. Highlighting these aspects of institutions in turn opens intriguing lines of inquiry into institutional reproduction and change, lived experience of institutions, and tectonic shifts in institutional configurations. However, there is a twist: taking these themes seriously ultimately challenges any naïve division of micro and macro, and undermines the claim of either to a genuinely foundational role in social analysis. The authors propose an alternative “optometric” imagery – positioning the micro and the macro as arrays of associated lenses, which bring certain things into focus at the cost of others. The authors argue that this imagery should not only encourage analytic reflexivity (“a more optometric institutionalism”) but also draw attention to the use of such lenses in everyday life, as an underexplored but critical phenomenon for institutional theory and research (“an institutionalist optometry”).

Joining recent calls to focus our attention on how institutional logics work on the ground, I offer a critique of current studies of institutional logics that often offer a macro and reified depictions thereof. I suggest that to fully appreciate how institutions matter, we need to complement these studies with a research program that is based on a constructivist ontology, ethnographic methods of inquiry, and use of theories of action. I exemplify this emerging research agenda, and discuss its broader analytical and empirical implications.

Recent research develops theory and evidence to understand how organizations come to be seen as “actors” with specified features and properties, a core concern for phenomenological institutionalism. The authors use evidence from changes in research designs in the organizational study of institutional logics as an empirical strategy to add fresh evidence to the debates about the institutional construction of organizations as actors. The case is the research literature on the institutional logics perspective, a literature in which organizational and institutional theorists grapple with long-time social theory questions about nature and context of action and more contemporary debates about the dynamics of social orders. With rapid growth since the early 1990s, this research program has elaborated and proliferated in ways meant to advance the study of societal orders, frames, and practices in diverse inter- and intra-organizational contexts. The study identifies two substantive trends over the observation period: A shift in research design from field-level studies to organization-specific contexts, where conflicts are prominent in the organization, and a shift in the conception of logic transitions, originally from one dominant logic to another, then more attention to co-existence or blending of logics. Based on this evidence, the authors identify a typology of four available research genres that mark a changed conception of organizations as actors. The case of institutional logics makes visible the link between research designs and research outcomes, and it provides new evidence for the institutional processes that construct organizational actorhood.

We investigated how an institutional settlement concerning Native Indian gaming (the operation of gambling establishments such as casinos or bingo halls by Native Indian tribes) was preserved over time in spite of three significant challenges. Building on previous literature on settlements and institutional logics, we see settlements as institutional arrangements that manage power dynamics and competing institutional logics. Based on our analyses of the settlement and three challenges in the Native gaming field, we suggest that even seemingly volatile institutional settlements can be maintained when powerful actors balance each other’s ability to modify the settlement and different actors invoke alternative institutional logic(s). We also find that these processes can be facilitated by the embeddedness and formality of the settlement. We contribute to the settlement literature by showing how settlements can be maintained when actors draw on equally strong sources of power and different logics to counter the actions of other actors. Furthermore, we shed light on “how institutions matter” by demonstrating how institutional settlements can facilitate field stability.

The core goal of the “micro-foundational” agenda appears to be less an institutionalism founded in the micro, or reduced to the micro, and more some form of integrative institutionalism: that is, an institutionalism that does justice to the perpetual, co-constitutive interplay of local activities (the micro) and trans-local patterns (the macro). In this chapter, thus, the authors argue for a conscious, explicit embrace of integrative institutionalism; and of the broader agenda that this terminology opens up. Based on this overdue rewording the authors highlight additional problems and possibilities – providing a constructive reformulation and elaboration of the “micro-foundational” agenda as it currently stands.

Borrowing from practice theory to enhance institutional theory has much potential. It may help institutional scholars reconnect with its constructivist, processual origins. Yet previous attempts of borrowing across paradigmatic boundaries – both in organization studies and in institutional theory – teach us that borrowing is not a straightforward adoption. Instead, theories that cross known paradigmatic boundaries go through a process of translation, and may well get lost in the way. In this paper, the author focuses on methodology and points to impediments to the fruitful adoption of a practice-driven approach to institutionalization, and offers ways to overcome them. In particular, the author points to the need to change the focus from process as an outcome to the inner life of the process; capturing action in vivo and in situ; and finding ways to focus on practice yet not lose connection to its institutional context and implications.

This double volume presents state-of-the-art research and thinking on the dynamics of actors and institutional logics. In the introduction, we briefly sketch the roots and branches of institutional logics scholarship before turning to the new buds of research on the topic of how actors engage institutional logics in the course of their organizational practice. We introduce an exciting line of new works on the meta-theoretical foundations of logics, institutional logic processes, and institutional complexity and organizational responses. Collectively, the papers in this volume advance the very prolific stream of research on institutional logics by deepening our insight into the active use of institutional logics in organizational action and interaction, including the institutional effects of such (inter)actions.

Undoubtedly, digital transformation is permeating all domains of business and society. We envisage this volume as an opportunity to explore how manifestations of digital transformation require rethinking of our understanding and theorization of institutional processes. To achieve this goal, a collaborative forum of organization and management theory scholars and information systems researchers was developed to enrich and advance institutional theory approaches in understanding digital transformation. This volume’s contributions advance the three institutional perspectives. The first perspective, institutional logics, technological affordances and digital transformation, seeks to deepen our understanding of the pervasive and increasingly important relationship between technology and institutions. The second perspective, digital transformation, professional projects and new institutional agents, explores how existing professions respond to the introduction of digital technologies as well as the emergence of new professional projects and institutional agents in the wake of digital transformation. The third perspective, institutional infrastructure, field governance and digital transformation, inquires how new digital organizational forms, such as platforms, affect institutional fields, their infrastructure and thus their governance. For each of these perspectives, we outline an agenda for future research, complemented by a brief discussion of new research frontiers (i.e., digital work and sites of technological (re-)production; artificial intelligence (AI) and actorhood; digital transformation and grand challenges) and methodological reflections.

Many international management scholars have expressed concern about whether societal culture changes so rapidly that research which attempts to represent it has little utility. We address this fundamental concern of international management by providing three theoretical lenses to examine the forces that produce and maintain a society's culture: functional theory, neo-institutional theory and complexity theory. We consider principles of progressive change and problems of social psychology from functional theory, the three pillars and conflicting institutional logics of neo-institutional theory and the ideas of stable equilibrium, oscillations and chaos of dynamic systems from complexity theory. Although these three theoretical lenses sometimes produce conflicting explanations of culture change, they often complement each other. Together, they provide a more realistic picture of the dynamics of the societal cultural milieu of organizations than do cultural representations that favour stability or those that completely discount the utility of any attempt at representing cultural continuity.

The authors analyze how conflicting institutional demands become deployed in organizational storytelling in the context of wildlife documentaries. Documentary producers increasingly feel the pressure to entertain the audience, while simultaneously addressing serious environmental issues. Using a mixed-method analysis of BBC wildlife documentaries produced between 2009 and 2017, the authors identify two narrative strategies, alternation and amplification, to balance demands for entertainment and environmental conservation. Alternation switches entertaining and serious content to offset conservation concerns, while amplification uses entertainment to accentuate conservation. Emotions play a significant role in both ways of storytelling. The findings of this chapter contribute to the literatures on institutional microfoundations, storytelling, and emotions.