Institutional Work Lawrence, Thomas B; Suddaby, Roy; Leca, Bernard
07/2009
eBook
The 'institutional' approach to organizational research has shown how enduring features of social life - such as marriage and bureaucracy - act as mechanisms of social control. Such approaches have ...traditionally focused attention on the relationships between organizations and the fields in which they operate, providing strong accounts of the processes through which institutions govern action. In contrast, the study of institutional work reorients these traditional concerns, shifting the focus to understanding how action affects institutions. This book sets a research agenda within the field of institutional work by analyzing the ways in which individuals, groups, and organizations work to create, maintain, and disrupt the institutions that structure their lives. Through a series of essays and case studies, it explores the conceptual core of institutional work, identifies institutional work strategies, provides exemplars for future empirical research, and embeds the concept within broader sociological debates and ideas.
•Temporary adjustments to zone temperature setpoints is one approach for implementing demand response measures during peak cooling periods.•Prior studies concerning demand response have focused ...mostly on the energy savings potential.•This review paper focuses on the thermal comfort perception impacts with zone temperature setpoint changes, even if temporary, associated with demand response measure implementation.
This paper provides a review of the literature concerning the impact of temporarily increased cooling setpoint temperature on occupant thermal comfort during demand response (DR) events in commercial, air-conditioned buildings. We address concerns regarding thermal comfort as it relates to zone temperature modifications that may be implemented as a part of DR measures. Increased zone setpoint temperatures during the cooling season can adversely affect building occupants physically and psychologically, and impair their perceived indoor air quality and self-estimated performance. In some cases, however, improved occupant thermal comfort due to warmer zone setpoint temperatures during DR events has also been reported. In order to reduce the negative impacts on building occupants, DR must be implemented with careful control and monitoring.
There are significant differences in assumptions made about the way people would respond to a thermal environment between the static heat balance model and the adaptive approach, with the adaptive approach offering a wider range of acceptable indoor temperatures. Therefore, application of the adaptive approach could be one option to improve building energy performance by taking advantage of occupant adaptive behaviors during DR events. Depending on the building services and systems available, expectations of the occupants, and the control options they are given to adjust to their thermal environment, occupants could potentially adapt to temperatures higher than what are currently being practiced in buildings. However, an upper limit threshold for temperature modifications, even if temporary ones, must be recognized to minimize adverse impacts on building occupants prior to DR implementation. Therefore, the ideal goal would be to develop menthods that would identify an optimum balance between energy consumption and the building occupant thermal comfort before applying DR strategies.
Prior review papers relevant to DR have generally concentrated on the energy saving potential alone, or where energy savings have been prioritized over occupant thermal comfort. This paper reviews implementation of DR from the perspective of occupant thermal comfort and presents a summary of the most relevant experimental and field studies regarding occupant thermal comfort during DR events in commercial, air-conditioned buildings.
We draw on an in-depth longitudinal analysis of conflict over harvesting practices and decision authority in the British Columbia coastal forest industry to understand the role of institutional work ...in the transformation of organizational fields. We examine the work of actors to create, maintain, and disrupt the practices that are considered legitimate within a field (practice work) and the boundaries between sets of individuals and groups (boundary work), and the interplay of these two forms of institutional work in effecting change. We find that actors' boundary work and practice work operate in recursive configurations that underpin cycles of institutional innovation, conflict, stability, and restabilization. We also find that transitions between these cycles are triggered by combinations of three conditions: (1) the state of the boundaries, (2) the state of practices, and (3) the existence of actors with the capacity to undertake the boundary and practice work of a different institutional process. These findings contribute to untangling the paradox of embedded agency—how those subject to the institutions in a field can effect changes in them. We also contribute to an understanding of the processes and mechanisms that drive changes in the institutional lifecycle.
In this paper, we discuss an alternative focus for institutional studies of organization - the study of institutional work. Research on institutional work examines the practices of individual and ...collective actors aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions. Our focus in this paper is on the distinctiveness of institutional work as a field of study and the potential it provides for the examination of new questions. We argue that research on institutional work can contribute to bringing the individual back into institutional theory, help to re-examine the relationship between agency and institutions, and provide a bridge between critical and institutional views of organization.
Around the world, potentially effective responses to serious social problems are left untried because those responses are politically, culturally, or morally problematic in affected communities. I ...describe the process through which communities import such practices as "high-stakes institutional translation." Drawing on a study of North America's first supervised injection site for users of illegal drugs, I propose a process model of high-stakes institutional translation that involves a triggering period of public expressions of intense emotion, followed by waves of translations in which the controversial practice is constructed in discursive and material terms many times over.
The places in which organizational life occurs can have profound impacts on actors, actions, and outcomes but are largely ignored in organizational research. Drawing on ideas from social geography, ...we explore the roles that places play in institutional work. The context for our study is the domain of housing for the hard-to-house, within which we conducted two qualitative case studies: the establishment of Canada's first residential and day-care facility for people living with HIV/AIDS, and the creation of a municipal program to provide temporary overnight accommodation for homeless people in local churches. In examining these cases, we found that places played three key roles: places contained, mediated, and complicated institutional work. Each of these roles was associated with a distinct ontology of place: places as social enclosures, as signifiers, and as practical objects. Our findings have significant implications for how we understand the relationship between location and organizations and allow us to develop a process model of places, institutions, and institutional work.
The feminist notion of an ethic of care provides a powerful alternative to justice as a central orienting value for the development of moral theory, but it has been largely overlooked in the ...literature on care in organizations. We explore how an ethic of care could be enacted in organizations, arguing that it would involve narrative practices embedded in enduring relationships, such as work teams. We articulate three domains of discursive practice—how members construct their experiences, how they construct their struggles, and how they construct future-oriented stories—and from them identify three specific caring narrative practices: constructing histories of sparkling moments, contextualizing struggles, and constructing polyphonic future-oriented stories. We argue that, together, these practices foster an ontology of possibility—a belief system that emphasizes the socially constructed nature of both past and present and, thus, facilitates action and an appreciation of its limits. We conclude by considering the organizational conditions under which an ethic of care is more likely to flourish and the impact of an ontology of possibility on the resilience of organizational teams who adopt it.
The emerging processual view of institutions has eroded the assumption of institutional stability in favor of a more dynamic view of institutions as ongoing processes, thereby foregrounding the ...question of institutional stabilization. Grounded in a process ontology, we conceptualize institutions as ever-becoming yet enduring social processes that are meaningful and carry prescriptions for actors' legitimate participation. Building on this conceptualization, we develop a theoretical model of the role of temporality in institutional stabilization that explores how three dimensions of institutions (meaning, prescriptions, and participation) are each stabilized by a facet of temporality (temporal patterns, expectancies, and mechanisms), as well as factors affecting each of these links. Our arguments contribute to writing on institutions in relation to temporality, agency, and process.
The experience of temporariness is increasingly prevalent across the world, both for transient populations such as refugees and in work life characterized by precarious employment relationships. In ...this article, we examine how local institutional work can shape people’s experience of indeterminate temporariness and mitigate its pernicious effects. Our qualitative, inductive study is set in refugee camps in Lebanon, where indeterminate temporariness created an oppressive experience of time among Syrian refugees. We document the efforts of an NGO to help refugees rebuild meaningful lives by developing small-scale entrepreneurial ventures – efforts we conceptualize as ‘sheltering work’. Our analysis points to the potential for sheltering work to alleviate the oppressive effects of temporariness by bounding, containing, and structuring individuals’ day-to-day lives. Although sheltering work reshaped refugees’ experience of time, it did not eradicate the oppressive effects of indeterminate temporariness; instead, oppressive and reclaimed experiences of time coexisted, with individuals shifting between them. Our study theorizes sheltering work as a potent form of modest, local institutional work in the face of immutable institutions, and elaborates how individual experiences of time influence embedded agency.
The study of institutional work has emerged as a dynamic research domain within organization studies. In this essay, we situate the papers published in the Special Issue. We first review the ...evolution of institutional work as a scholarly conversation within organization studies. We then introduce the papers in the Special Issue, focusing in particular on where they fit into the current scholarly conversation and how they move us in important new directions. Finally, we discuss a set of neglected issues that deserve further attention.
