Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction: theorizing and studying institutional work
- Part I Essays on institutional work
- Part II Studies of institutional work
- 6 Building the iron cage: institutional creation work in the context of competing proto-institutions
- 7 Scandinavian institutionalism – a case of institutional work
- 8 Institutional maintenance as narrative acts
- 9 Maintaining an institution in a contested organizational field: the work of the AACSB and its constituents
- 10 Institutional “dirty” work: preserving institutions through strategic decoupling
- 11 Doing which work? A practice approach to institutional pluralism
- Index
- References
8 - Institutional maintenance as narrative acts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction: theorizing and studying institutional work
- Part I Essays on institutional work
- Part II Studies of institutional work
- 6 Building the iron cage: institutional creation work in the context of competing proto-institutions
- 7 Scandinavian institutionalism – a case of institutional work
- 8 Institutional maintenance as narrative acts
- 9 Maintaining an institution in a contested organizational field: the work of the AACSB and its constituents
- 10 Institutional “dirty” work: preserving institutions through strategic decoupling
- 11 Doing which work? A practice approach to institutional pluralism
- Index
- References
Summary
In this chapter, I address the forms of institutional work involved in symbolic institutional maintenance. Taking a narrative approach, I define symbolic institutional maintenance as the travel of institutional stories across social levels, and I explore the forms of institutional work used to translate societal meta-narratives into organizations and the lives of individuals. Based on the study of a rape crisis center in Israel, I examine the maintenance of the feminist and therapeutic institutions within which the organization was embedded. I follow the feminist and therapeutic meta-narratives prevalent in Israeli society, as they traveled into, and were modified by, the rape crisis center. Further, I follow the use of these societal-level narratives, and the organizational versions thereof, by organizational members, as they strove to make sense of their own lives and identities. I conceptualize this series of narrative acts as institutional maintenance, worked out in the interfaces of various social levels; embedded in power relations; and involving the delicate balance of duplication and change. At the societal level, institutions are embodied within diverse meta-narratives that encode the “taken-for-granted” in shared poetic tropes, like protagonists and villains, dramatic settings and plots. Organizational members carry these institutional meta-narratives into the organization. Still, societal meta-narratives that are taken up within organizations do not simply duplicate the institutional order. Rather, through reinterpretation organizational elites translate them into local – more specific and selective – versions, which are then used in organizational sense-making processes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Institutional WorkActors and Agency in Institutional Studies of Organizations, pp. 205 - 235Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
References
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