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8 - Institutional maintenance as narrative acts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2009

By
Tammar B. Zilber
Edited by
Thomas B. Lawrence ,
Roy Suddaby  and
Bernard Leca
Thomas B. Lawrence
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
Roy Suddaby
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Bernard Leca
Affiliation:
ESC Rouen
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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.

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Type
Chapter
Information
Institutional Work
Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies of Organizations
 , pp. 205 - 235
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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