Bringing values back in: The limitations of institutional logics and the relevance of dialectical phenomenology

Abstract

Since the seminal essay of Friedland and Alford (1991), the institutional logics perspective has significantly influenced organizational research. Extant research understands logics as the assumptions, values, beliefs and rules that provide meaning for institutions and shape the action in organizational fields. However, by obliterating the role of values, organization scholars have confined variation and change to a schema of finite combinations, overshadowing the intrinsic and constitutive role of what Friedland has more recently called institutional substances. In this article, I present the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis with the aim of contributing to a deeper understanding of values in institutions. His dialectical phenomenology challenges the dominant view of logics among organization scholars because it underscores that meanings are not tantamount to logics, but rather the result of signifying acts around imaginary significations. That is, logics stem from imaginary institutions. The contribution of this article is two-fold. First, it presents a Castoridian framework for institutional analysis, whereby logics and the imaginary are interrelated though conceptually distinct. Second, it brings forth the concept of transubstantiation as a way of explicating how actors bring institutional substances into being within and through domains of practice while deferring such substances in discourse and potentially changing them.