Narrating Institutional Logics into Effect: Coherence Across Cognitive,Political,and Emotional Elements

Institutional Logics as Given

The study of institutional logics moved from exploring how they affect organizations to how organizations cope with the pressures from multiple institutional logics (Greenwood et al., 2011). In early studies, institutional logics were assumed to be given, dominant, and deterministic. They were conceptualized as given, that is, existing independent from their constituencies. One monolithic logic governs a social space at any time, and this dominating logic directly and automatically affects all constituencies. Most of these studies examine how a logic shift influences field or organizational structures and practices. More-recent studies of institutional logics focus on how actors cope with multiple logics and use them as resources. According to these studies, institutional logics are not as deterministic because multiple logics are always at play. Which logic will govern is mediated through the agency of actors, who use institutional logics as “a tool kit” (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012: 135–136). Both streams treat institutional logics, deterministic or not, as given. One logic may replace another, or logics may be used strategically, but either way, the logics themselves are given in that their effect is direct and automatic, independent of the people affected by or using them.

Inquiries of institutional logics in decision making exemplify what has been gained and what is still missing in these two understandings of institutional logics. Early on, scholars treated the result of decision making as a proxy for institutional logics. For instance, Thornton and Ocasio (1999) looked at decisions regarding executive succession, documenting the transformation from an editorial to a market logic in the higher education publishing industry. The unit of analysis was the organization as a whole, and decisions were inferred from succession events. Other studies highlight how institutional logics affect decisions about acquisition (Thornton, 2001), structure (Thornton, 2002), and governance (Shipilov, Greve, and Rowley, 2010). Such studies corrected previous models of organizational decision making that ignored their cultural contexts (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012: 95) by demonstrating that institutional logics deeply affect organizational decision making. Yet, these studies reified institutional logics by focusing only on the final results of decision making.

Later, scholars started looking at actual organizational dynamics, including decision-making processes, but again focused on results rather than the process. In a pioneering paper, McPherson and Sauder (2013) analyzed how actors creatively used institutional logics in drug court decision making. They identified four logics that actors used, each associated with a different professional group. By showing that participants sometimes creatively hijacked logics associated with another professional group to push the court toward their desired decision, McPherson and Sauder (2013) thus enriched our understanding of the creativity and agency involved in institutional logics work on the ground. Yet, they, too, offered a limited view of the microfoundations of institutional logics. While their study showed that logics are strategically used, they are taken to be clear-cut and given, ready for actors to use. Further, despite the authors’ reliance on rich ethnographic observations of actual discussions, the participants’ interactions were reduced to narrowly defined aspects: which logics were used and the final decision made. The study presented no data on the unfolding of the discussions and attempted no theorization of the process. A quantified representation of logics makes an appealing argument, but this reduction comes with a price: we hardly understand how institutional logics are worked out in everyday lives in organizations. More broadly, then, most studies of institutional logics treat them as exogenous to social dynamics. The logics are “analytically removed” (Lounsbury, Ventresca, and Hirsch, 2003: 72) or “cut loose from their moorings” (Hallett and Ventresca, 2006: 215) in the day-to-day interactions between people within organizations.

Institutional Logics as Instantiated in Interactions

A new wave in institutional theory—going micro—criticizes macro- and meso-level approaches by questioning their depiction of institutional logics as static packages of meaning. The critique is carried out under a multitude of labels: institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006), inhabited institutions (Hallett and Ventresca, 2006), microfoundations of institutions (Powell and Colyvas, 2008), coalface or working institutionalism (Barley, 2008, 2019), practice-driven institutionalism (Smets and Jarzabkowski, 2013; Smets, Aristidou, and Whittington, 2017), and communicative institutionalism (Cornelissen et al., 2015). Beyond their differences, they all invite a new focus on the “lived experience of organizational actors” (Lawrence, Sudabby, and Leca, 2011: 52) and move from entity-based to process-based, situated, and interactional understandings of institutional logics. Instead of conceptualizing logics as existing and ready-made, these approaches see them as relational, their potential materialized through interactions.

Interactions are central to human action. Embedded in the institutional order, interactions may sometimes serve as channels through which institutional logics spread and may be mere reflections thereof. At the same time, interactions have transformative potential (Cornelissen et al., 2015; Furnari, 2020), as they are inherently creative and emergent (Sawyer, 2003). Interactions unfold between at least two people who share the seemingly same reality (e.g., governed by the same institutional logics) yet may understand and act upon it differently. Through interaction, they co-create an unfolding, dialogic reality (Sawyer, 2003; Furnari, 2020). Thus, interactions have a non-predictable, sum-more-than-its-parts quality (Furnari, 2020) that accounts for their ability to adhere to but sometimes evade institutional pressures. Interactions, then, both reflect institutions and imbue them with “local force and significance” (Hallett and Ventresca, 2006: 213). While acknowledging the importance of interactions to institutional dynamics, “institutional scholars rarely focus on actual interactions” (Hallett and Hawbaker, 2021: 8), and thus our understanding of the relational work of logics on the ground is very limited.

Exploring Institutional Logics in Storytelling Interactions

Directed by the data, I focus on storytelling interactions. While observing board meetings, I became aware of the many stories told in board decision-making processes. Following a Labovian tradition (Labov and Waletzky, 1967; Labov, 1972), I define a “story” narrowly as a unique kind of text composed of “(a) an orientation, which set the scene, (b) a series of complicating actions . . . ending with one that serves as denouement, and (c) an evaluation, which could appear at any point in the story, establishing the importance of the events related” (Polletta and Lee, 2006: 707). The series of events constitute the plotline, “the means by which what would otherwise be mere occurrences are made into moments in the unfolding of the story” (Polletta et al., 2011: 111). Each story may include various characters, including a protagonist who undergoes a transformation (Prince, 1987) and is assisted by a supporting hero (Gabriel, 2000).

I became intrigued by how the stories told in board decision making related to the institutional logics dominating the organization. Decision making through stories at board meetings is an ideal site to examine the work of institutional logics at the micro level as participants negotiate the right line of action based on what is conceived to be an accepted, taken-for-granted understanding of the situation (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012: 95–96). Such interactions are thus a middle ground between individuals and institutions (Cornelissen et al., 2015). In these circumstances—in a condensed here and now—the power of the institution is at stake. Further, stories are central to the spread of institutional logics (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012: 162) and decision making (Abolafia, 2010, 2020; Gibson 2011, 2012). Beyond their theoretical and empirical centrality, story and storytelling offer a rich conceptual and methodological apparatus for the study of the microfoundations of institutions. Specifically, stories are (1) collective social constructions narrated in interaction between storytellers so that (2) these stories can act in the world and (3) are related to both the macro and micro levels. Let me elaborate on these aspects of storytelling that make it an ideal unit of data for studying institutional logics on the ground.

First, telling a story is a collective and interactive social action (Mandelbaum, 2013). Stories are told by interested actors in specific contexts (Mumby, 1993; Gartner, 2007), presenting a particular depiction of the past, present, and projected future (Garud, Schildt, and Lant, 2014). Still, listeners are not just “speaker[s]-in-waiting”; speakers and listeners, by interchanging roles, jointly construct the story (Cornelissen et al., 2015: 13). Tellers indicate that they are about to tell a story, yet they need the recipients to agree and allow them to keep telling (Mandelbaum, 2013). During the telling, listeners intervene by asking questions, adding details, correcting, and expressing emotions (Monzoni and Drew, 2009: 198–199) that may further develop or change the emerging story’s trajectory. The telling of stories ends only once the recipients acknowledge it, or they may offer affirming second stories (Arminen, 2004) or competing counterstories (Lundholt, Maagaard, and Piekut, 2018).

Second, telling stories is constitutive (Vaara, Sonenshein, and Boje, 2016). Stories do not report on events but construct reality. Tellers communicate their stance toward what they are telling (Stivers, 2008) through a “normative point” (Polletta et al., 2011: 111), which comes to be through the selections tellers make (Spector-Mersel, 2011): omitting, connecting, and arranging events as causes/effects chains and assigning specific roles to characters. Further, these narrative constructions not only deliver content but also act in the world (Polletta et al., 2011; Zilber, 2018). People tell specific stories to “do something—to complain, to boast, to inform, to alert, to tease, to explain or excuse or justify” (Schegloff, 1997: 97).

Third, a concrete story is always based on meta-narratives, the cultural repertoire of stories available to the narrators. These meta-narratives (Zilber, Tuval-Mashiach, and Lieblich, 2008), which give the story its “persuasive power” (Polletta and Callahan, 2017: 395), are “systems of beliefs” that provide the “means for understanding, evaluating and constructing accounts of experience” (Linde, 1993: 163–165). ³ Meta-narratives are thus quite equivalent to institutional logics as they “condition actors’ choices for sense-making, the vocabulary they use to motivate action and their sense of self and identity” (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012: 2). Like institutional logics, meta-narratives are not individual mental structures but, rather, cultural, collective constructs that are spread and shared across various social spheres. Still, meta-narratives are not universal but culture-specific. Each culture has a specific repertoire of meta-narratives. Both meta-narratives and institutional logics “operate as a filter through which a group understands its world,” and “both structure and limit what can and can not be seen” (Fligstein, Brundage, and Schultz, 2017: 880; Meyer and Hammerschmid, 2006). Just like institutional logics, meta-narratives act “as unnoticed yet very powerful coauthors when we attempt to simply tell ‘what really happened,’” and they thus have the power “to shape what we say and think” because “their abstract nature typically leads to their being unnoticed and especially ‘transparent’ to those employing them” (Wertsch, 2008: 142). ⁴ This broader cultural basis of situated and local stories directly relates to the new theoretical effort to articulate the connection between interactions and institutional logics.

Stories, storytelling, and narrative theory thus offer a new lens to analyze the construction, collective agency, and micro–macro dynamic in the work of institutional logics on the ground. Using ethnographic research and examining storytelling interactions as possible formative moments in which institutional logics are instantiated, I ask how institutional logics work and are worked out within interactions. What are the mechanisms involved in the work of institutional logics in interactions, and what are their affordances and limitations?

Case Study: Storytelling in Decision-Making Processes at a Rape Crisis Center

I explore how institutional logics are instantiated through storytelling interactions in decision-making processes. I do not strive to make “statistical generalizations” from a sample to a population but, rather, “analytic generalizations” (Schwandt, 2015: 128–130; Tsoukas, 2009) about how people work out institutional logics on the ground. Decision making serves as an extreme case in which the dynamics of institutional logics on the ground are more explicit. My case study is a rape crisis center (henceforth RCC) in Israel. At the time of data collection, the RCC had operated for 17 years. Its activities included support for victims of sexual assault through a 24/7 hotline and individual and group meetings. The RCC also offered educational activities for high school and university students, as well as for police, medical personnel, and lawyers from the Office of the State Attorney because victims might encounter them if they filed a complaint. The RCC also lobbied for legislative change. Volunteers did most of this work. A few paid staff members and an elected board ran the organization.

Board meetings at the RCC were social events in which participants were co-present in the same space and engaged in face-to-face interactions. The board met almost every two weeks during the study period. The board members were five volunteers, chosen annually by the larger body of volunteers. Staff members (between four and six during my fieldwork) were usually present and actively participated in the discussions. ⁵ Board meetings were dedicated to various organizational functions (Schwartzman, 1989: 7), including exchanging ideas, solving ad hoc problems, negotiating agreements, developing policies and procedures, and making decisions. Decisions were made by consensus and related to a vast array of issues. These included setting new employment and work procedures, brainstorming and approving fundraising initiatives, managing the RCC and its space (e.g., allocating funds to buy new air conditioning), engaging with volunteers (e.g., determining how many training courses to open each year or how to celebrate special initiatives by volunteers), relating with external stakeholders (like the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel or the municipality), and setting for the first time an annual plan for the board and the staff.

Shared cultural meaning systems influence board meeting processes in various ways (Lehmann-Willenbrock, Allen, and Meinecke, 2014). The RCC was embedded within Israeli culture, and since data were collected in 1995–1996, my interpretations consider the local cultural context of that era.

Data Collection

Throughout my fieldwork, the board met 33 times. I observed 23 of these meetings, taking verbatim notes. Sixteen meetings were also recorded. The data at the heart of this study are transcripts of audio-recorded board meetings and participant observations (all quotes are translations from Hebrew). I complemented the recordings and field notes from board meetings with extensive data collected during 19 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the RCC. During fieldwork, I spent about two days a week at the organization. I conducted in-depth interviews with 36 individuals, who represented one-third of the RCC population, including volunteers, staff, and board members. I attended regular board and staff meetings and numerous events and activities and collected a wealth of organizational texts, while keeping a detailed field journal. The combination of recordings of lived interactions and ethnographic field materials is especially rich (Wasson, 2016) and suitable for studying the tacit and complex work of institutional logics (Hallett and Meanwell, 2016; Zilber, 2020, 2021). I was thus able to situate the detailed interactional data within my extensive knowledge of the participants, their relationships, the organization as a whole, and the institutional logics that governed it.

Data Analysis

The analysis emerged through a back-and-forth process between the field materials and various analytical steps. As I engaged with the data, what was a messy and open-net exploration developed, with time and iterations, into a more-focused endeavor, which can be portrayed as three layers of analysis, each building on the previous one and adding a different focus: starting with narrative analysis, moving to capture institutional logics, and finally exploring the role of coherence. Together, these analytical layers expose how institutional logics work on the ground.

Deciding on “Feminism from A to Z”

The interactions I detail below occurred at the beginning of a board meeting attended by four volunteers and four paid staff members. As the meeting started (late, as usual), Daphne, a veteran volunteer and board member, asked to raise an issue for discussion. She referred to a public event that had happened a week earlier, titled “Celebrating Feminism from A to Z,” in which representatives of various feminist organizations described their activities. Gilad, a male volunteer, represented the RCC and its male hotline and was to speak about men’s role in feminist activism. Apparently, Gilad said that since things may be very confusing and it is hard to know what a woman means when she says “no,” men should be extra careful and, in case of doubt, seek another partner for sex.

Most board members had not attended the event, and they narrated three different stories about Gilad’s actions. One story was led by Daphne and two by a new staff member, Moran. The three stories offered different understandings of what had happened at the feminist gathering: different plotlines, different protagonists cast in different roles, different ways of framing the problem and the desired solution. None of these stories was told in full as a monologue. Instead, they were crafted by the narrator and co-narrators, who were jointly struggling to select which logic was relevant to the specifics of the issue and how to implement it. Each story was built on—and reconstructed—a different institutional logic. Table 2 summarizes the stories told in this case. While all the stories are relational, emerging through the negotiations between narrators and co-narrators, for reasons of brevity I mark them by the name of the lead storyteller (e.g., Daphne’s story).

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Table 2.

Narrating Institutional Logics: “Celebrating Feminism from A to Z”

		“A Plain Scandal”: Daphne’s Story	“Total Hysteria”: Moran’s First Story	“Gigantic Confusion”: Moran’s Second Story
Cognitive aspects (narrating abstract logics into concrete stories)	Institutional logic	Feminist: gender relations are unequal; result of power relations	Therapeutic: individuals’ actions stem out of their inner world	Feminist: diversity and inclusivity of feminist thought
	Protagonist: Gilad	Villain: chauvinist	Victim: individual in distress	Hero
	Plot	Protagonist depicted sexual harassment as miscommunication between men and women	Protagonist experienced panic and hysteria in a public event and thus spoke nonsense	Protagonist expressed a counter voice and wider confusion in the organization
	Problem	Non-feminist members represent the organization	Organization members are not properly prepared to represent it	Organizational members have different takes about feminism, but their voices are silenced
	Solution/desired decision implied by story	Supervise organization’s representatives	Coach representatives and counsel those who failed	Deliberate organizational ideology
Political aspects	Narrator’s subject position	Veteran volunteer and board member, known for her feminist convictions	New staff members, no experience as volunteer	Outsider
	Recipients’ perception of narrator’s interests in telling the story	Defending the RCC and its image	Clearing herself, as the staff member responsible for educational activities, of responsibility	Clearing herself; destruction out of anger
Emotional aspects	Assigned role to storyteller	Defender of faith	The ideal supportive volunteer	Liberating the masses
	Assigned role to story recipients	Jury (or defaulter)	Supporters (or neglecting a friend)	Inclusive (or exclusive)
	Emotional arc	Shock and bewilderment; alarm, distress; blame and shame; self-righteousness and moral conviction	Curiosity and a desire to understand a fellow human being; empathy; sensitivity	Defiance and criticism; pity and frustration
Coherence		High	Medium	Low
Decision		In the future, the RCC should supervise whoever wants to represent it in public	Board and staff members will speak with Gilad (not clear whether to support or reprimand him)

From Logics to Stories: Cognitive, Political, and Emotional Elements

A systematic analysis of all ten cases of decision making through stories, involving 28 stories, reveals that putting institutional logics into work on the ground followed a similar pattern. First, board members negotiated which institutional logics were relevant and how they were relevant. This negotiation unfolded through the collective narration of various stories, instantiating different logics through cognitive, political, and emotional elements. Once the stories had stabilized, the board was ready to follow the decisions implied by the stories they found most convincing. In choosing which story to accept, the board was influenced by the stories’ level of coherence across the cognitive, political, and emotional elements. Stories with high or moderate levels of coherence across these elements were more influential, and the lines of action they implied were accepted by the board. Figure 1 shows these dynamics.

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Figure 1.

Narrating Institutional Logics into Effect

The issues board members decided upon varied. Still, the repertoire of institutional logics was limited. An administrative logic was involved in nine of the ten cases and was narrated into 11 stories. A therapeutic logic was involved in nine cases and was narrated into ten stories. A feminist logic was involved in six cases and was narrated into seven stories. Table 3 details the ten instances of decision making through stories, the narrations and the logic they instantiated, and the narrators.

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Table 3.

Instantiating Multiple Institutional Logics in RCC Decision Making

Decision Making	Logics at Play			Number of Logics
	Administrative	Feminist	Therapeutic
1. Relations with former staff	Hagar (s)*		Daphne (b), Debbie (b), Amy (s), & Mia (s)	2
2. Fundraising I	Daphne (b)		Hagar (s), Yoav (s), & Amy (s)	2
3. Demonstration	Moriah (b) &Pamela (b)	Daphne (b) &Gilad (b)	Debbie (b), Amy (s), Mia (s), & Hagar (s)	3
4. Fundraising II	Two different stories: Amy (s) & Hagar (s); Moriah (b) & Mia (s)			1 (with different instantiations)
5. TV show	Pamela (b)	Gail (b)	Amy (s) & Hagar (s)	3
6. Feminism A–Z		Two different stories: Daphne (b); Moran (s)	Moran (s)	2 (1 with different instantiations)
7. Resignation of staff member	Two different stories: Daphne (b); Amy (s), Hagar (s), & Gail (b)	Debbie	Two different stories: Debbie (b); Hagar (s)	3 (2 with different instantiations)
8. Municipality	Daniel (b)		Hagar (s)	2
9. Breach of trust	Daniel (b)	Pamela (b)	Mia (s)	3
10. Wronged volunteer	Yoav (s), Amy (s), & Hannah (s)	Daphne (b)	Gail (b)	3
	9 cases; 11 stories	6 cases; 7 stories	9 cases; 10 stories

*

Narrators’ affiliations are indicated as s = staff, b = volunteer board members.

My interpretation of the data suggests that logics do not enforce themselves on their constituencies in a direct and deterministic way. Beyond the influence of storytelling skills that may affect persuasion (Mandelbaum, 2003), I focus here on three elements underlying the process of narrating logics into decisions: cognitive, political, and emotional elements. First, the cognitive element involves narrators and co-narrators negotiating which logic is relevant and how it is relevant. This is a collective, group-level cognitive process of selecting a logic and then concretizing it. Second, narrators tell stories from a specific subject position and given particular interests. Thus, politics affects the way in which institutional logics are instantiated. Third, people get personally involved in the stories. By casting both narrators and recipients in specific roles, the stories elicit emotions that affect further narration and acceptance of the stories. These collective-level elements—cognitive, political, and emotional—are inseparable in the interaction. For clarity, I present them here as analytically distinct. Together, they instantiate institutional logics. Institutional logics, then, are not given but must be worked out on the ground.

Coherence: From Stories to Decisions

It may seem that narrators and recipients were free to choose among institutional logics and freely narrated an institutional logic into a concrete story as they liked (see left-hand part of Figure 1). Analyzing who used which institutional logic to tell stories reveals that participants were quite flexible in using various logics. There is no immediately noticeable pattern connecting specific logics with specific participants or groups of participants who share an organizational role (e.g., staff versus volunteers) or background (e.g., therapists, managers). Still, according to my interpretation of the data, the final decisions seem to have been determined by the degree of coherence among (1) cognition, or the efforts involved in selecting and operationalizing logics into concrete stories, (2) politics, or narrators’ subject position in association with a relevant institutional logic plus recipients’ perceptions of narrators’ interests in telling the stories, and (3) the emotions raised in relation to the roles the stories assigned to narrators and recipients. The content and structure of a story reflect a meta-narrative/institutional logic. The story is told by a narrator who speaks from a specific subject position and interests based on what is considered legitimate and respected under the jurisdiction of a particular institutional logic. And the story invokes certain emotions that are part of an emotional repertoire of a particular logic. However, these elements do not necessarily go together, especially when multiple logics are available, like in the RCC. My analysis suggests that whether there is coherence across these elements relates to the decision made (see right-hand side of Figure 1).

To exemplify the various coherence levels and how they relate to decisions, let us go back to the “Feminism from A to Z” decision making through stories (#6, extended example above). Recall that after hearing three stories, the board decided to follow the decision implied by Daphne’s feminist story and partly the decision implied by Moran’s first therapeutic story. The board decided to regulate who was allowed to represent the RCC and to talk with Gilad, though the content of the talk was left vague. Moran’s second story, echoing a different version of feminism, and the decision it implied (to initiate an open and inclusive conversation about feminism) were ignored. These decisions are related to the coherence of the various stories co-narrated during the discussion. In cognitive terms, Daphne made selections and negotiated with her co-narrators, resulting in a detailed story that resonated well with a feminist logic. In political terms, she told the story from the subject position of a feminist and veteran volunteer and board member, which all resonated well with a feminist logic. Her story assigned her and other board members the role of ideologically committed volunteers, a respected role in the RCC (hinting that they may turn into defaulters should they neglect their duty). Gilad was cast as a villain, but no board members (except Moran) were to share the blame for his behavior. In emotional terms, the story and these roles invoked many emotions, all part of the feminist institutional logic: shock and bewilderment, alarm and distress, self-righteousness, and moral conviction. The three elements—cognitive, political, and emotional—all aligned very tightly. Daphne’s narration was thus highly coherent across the cognitive, political, and emotional elements.

Moran’s first story was less coherent. In cognitive terms, Moran made selections and negotiated with her co-narrators, resulting in a story resonating with a therapeutic institutional logic. All participants except Moran were volunteers, some with training and experience as therapists. Hence, they found the therapeutic story compelling enough. In emotional terms, the therapeutic story invoked a support-relations script in which the audience found itself in the known, experienced role of support givers, invoking institutionalized emotions like empathy and sensitivity. Yet, Moran had no therapeutic training, not even in the RCC’s training course for volunteers. She had no experience in supporting victims of sexual assault. As was apparent from board members’ questions and comments during the collective narration and as indicated in my informal conversations with them after the meeting, board members questioned Moran’s self-positioning as the most familiar, caring, and empathetic person toward Gilad. Some of them thought Moran’s story was self-serving, aimed at clearing herself, because she worked as the head of the educational team with Gilad, from any responsibility for his actions. The roles the story assigned to board members (emotions) aligned with a therapeutic logic but did not align with Moran’s subject position, her perceived interests (politics), and the role she assigned to herself (emotions). The coherence across the cognitive, political, and emotional elements was moderate.

Moran’s second narration was even less coherent. Moran’s narrative selections and negotiations with her co-narrators resulted in a story that reflected a standpoint version of the feminist institutional logic. In political terms, it aligned with Moran’s status as a newcomer, enriching the RCC with a fresh standpoint. Yet, board members were suspicious that Moran was trying to downplay her responsibility for the fiasco. In emotional terms, board members believed that Moran’s second story was critical of the RCC and them personally, and even defiant and destructive, reflecting her temper. It positioned the audience as a dominating elite, who were negligent if not manipulative, which invoked feelings of frustration. This emotional repertoire seemed to resonate with another institutional logic of rebellion or uprising. The coherence among the cognitive, political, and emotional elements was thus low.

No wonder, then, that the decision implied by Moran’s second narration was neglected, and the final decision, to supervise whoever spoke on behalf of the RCC and to talk with Gilad, blended the decisions implied by the highly coherent narration of Daphne and by the moderately coherent first narration of Moran.

Another example of how final decisions relate to the coherence among the cognitive, political, and emotional elements underlying the instantiation of institutional logics involved the board’s discussion of relations between the RCC and the municipality (Table 3, #8) and how to react to the mayor, who had repeatedly postponed a meeting with the RCC to discuss funding. The RCC had been trying to persuade the mayor to raise the city’s financial support. Recently, the RCC had demonstrated against the municipality at a public event, and the demonstration was favorably covered by local newspapers. Two stories were told. ⁹ Hagar, a staff member responsible for financial matters, offered the first story, narrated in negotiation with other participants. According to this narration, a staffer from the mayor’s office had just called and informed her that the mayor had lost his voice and could not meet the following day. The mayor’s aide claimed that since the center “said everything they had to say to the press,” the mayor had lost interest in meeting. Hagar stressed that the mayor’s assistant was rude and aggressive. She felt personally attacked and humiliated as the mayor disregarded the RCC’s service to the city.

Participants were very supportive, asking for more details and exclaiming with empathic remarks (“poor you!”). Amy (staff) even got up, walked toward Hagar, stood behind her, and said,

Throughout Hagar’s narration, Daniel, a volunteer board member, voiced criticism and eventually managed to counter Hagar’s story with another story, which was much more detached and rational, as if expressing the voice of pure reason. He started by saying,

In this narration, which emerged in negotiation with all participants, Daniel explained that given the differences between the RCC and the municipality, the RCC should not engage in a power struggle with them but rather choose a humbler strategy, using flattery and appealing to their mercy. Daniel brought two examples of other organizations: one that tried to break the mayor, to no avail, and another that swallowed their pride, played their role as kiss-asses, and got the money. Hagar intervened with new bits of her story, which were loaded with sexual innuendos:

The exchange became so heated and tense that, as often happens in organizations (e.g., Hatch and Ehrlich, 1993; Hatch, 1997; Jarzabkowski and Le, 2017), board members used humor to diffuse it.

In cognitive terms, through the selections made in the process of co-narration (e.g., focusing on feeling insulted and having difficulty acting in the situation), Hagar’s story instantiated a therapeutic logic. Because the story started by stressing the power relations with the mayor’s office and Hagar’s positioning of herself as a victim, it could have developed to become a feminist story, one of a victim who reads the power dynamics and resists or surrenders to them. However, audience reactions directed the story toward a therapeutic logic. When Amy got up to support Hagar, she took the role of a supporter (and not a sister in activism). Even the humor later built on therapeutic understanding when Mia used a known slogan in social work, “as the saying goes, one must start where the client is.” So, overall, while the story echoed some feminist ideas (e.g., power relations), the collective cognitive effort of selecting a logic and putting it to work resulted in a narration instantiating a therapeutic logic.

In political terms, Hagar was a former volunteer, trained in support, so her subject position as a therapeutically oriented narrator resonated with the therapeutic logic. Further, the board did not suspect self-interest behind her story. Finally, the story cast Hagar as a victim and board members as supporters, invoking emotions like humiliation, hurt, and empathy, which resonated with the therapeutic logic. Thus, there was high coherence across the cognitive, political, and emotional elements of the therapeutic narration.

Daniel’s story was also highly coherent for an administrative narration. In cognitive terms, through the selections made in the process of co-narration (e.g., focusing on the known tension between the municipality and not-for-profit organizations that seek financial support), Daniel’s story instantiated an administrative logic. Daniel spoke out of his experience as a senior manager in a not-for-profit organization, stressing this subject position by sharing examples of other organizations and their attempts to get funding from the city. The board did not suspect self-interest behind Daniel’s story. His story invited everyone to act professionally, invoking feelings of detachment. Hagar’s narration implied that the board needed to support her, both in the here and now of the board meeting and in future encounters with the municipality. Daniel’s story suggested the need to change the approach and consult with experts about how best to interact with the city. Given that both narrations were highly coherent, the board arrived at a blended decision and accepted the course of action implied by both stories: to support Hagar in future encounters with the municipality but to wait and consult with a PR expert before going forward.

Similarly, a fine-grained analysis of the discussion and the final decision made in each of the ten cases suggests that participants at board meetings accepted or rejected stories and the decisions they implied based on coherence: the fit (or misfit) between the concrete story instantiated (cognitive elements), the subject positions of the narrator and their perceived interests (political elements), and the role the story assigned to the narrator and the recipients (emotional elements). The level of coherence across the various elements of the instantiations of logics varied (see Table 4). Conclusive final decisions, drawing clearly on one instantiation of an institutional logic, seem to be related to high levels of coherence (#2, #7, #10). As is often the case in organizations dominated by multiple logics (Greenwood et al., 2011), many board decisions reflected some blend of the resolutions implied in the instantiations of more than one logic (#1, #3, #4, #5, #6, #8, #9). However, in all these cases, decisions also drew on stories with either a high or moderate level of coherence. No decisions were made based on instantiations with a low level of coherence. Whether the final decision was conclusive (based on the decision implied by one narration) or blended (integrating decisions implied by multiple narrations), the level of coherence among cognitive, political, and emotional elements in the instantiation of institutional logics seems to explain the decision made.

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Table 4.

Coherence and Decision Making

Decision Making	Coherence of the Instantiated Logic Across Cognitive, Political, and Emotional Dynamics			Final Decision Implied by the Instantiations of Logic
	Administrative	Feminist	Therapeutic
1. Relations with former staff	High		High	Blended decision: Administrative & Therapeutic
2. Fundraising I	High		Medium	Conclusive decision: Administrative
3. Demonstration	Medium	High	Low	Blended decision: Administrative & Feminist
4. Fundraising II	(1) Medium; (2) High			Blended decision: Administrative (1) & (2)
5. TV show	Medium	High	High	Blended decision: Administrative, Feminist, & Therapeutic
6. Feminism A–Z		(1) High;(2) Low	Medium	Blended decision: Feminist & Therapeutic
7. Resignation of staff member	(1) Medium; (2) Low	Low	(1) High; (2) Medium	Conclusive decision: Therapeutic (1)
8. Municipality	High		High	Blended decision: Administrative & Therapeutic
9. Breach of trust	High	Medium	Low	Blended decision: Administrative & Feminist
10. Wronged volunteer	Medium	High	Medium	Conclusive decision: Feminist

Instantiating Institutional Logics Through Cognitive, Political, and Emotional Elements

In decision-making processes at the RCC, institutional logics were brought into effect through negotiating stories, specifically their cognitive, political, and emotional elements. Whereas previous studies have assumed that logics enforce themselves on people and organizations or are used strategically, my study shows the cognitive effort involved in using institutional logics on the ground. Logics must be selected and concretized in a specific situation. This is challenging, given the multiplicity of institutional logics and their taken-for-grandness. The cognitive effort to select a logic and concretize it—achieved collectively through mundane storytelling by all co-narrators involved, though not consciously motivated or strategic—which underlies narrating logics is not enough. The stories must convince others, which also relates to political and emotional elements.

That the work of institutional logics involves power is well accepted, yet most studies relate this work to episodic power, focusing on the interests of discrete actors (Lawrence and Buchanan, 2017). My study joins efforts to highlight more-systemic power, the “power that works through routine, ongoing practice to advantage particular groups without those groups necessarily establishing or maintaining those practices” (Lawrence and Buchanan, 2017: 480; Jakob-Sadeh and Zilber, 2019), and especially the work of both episodic and systemic power. The narration of institutional logics into effect involves both these kinds of power. Narrators speak from specific subject positions (Phillips and Hardy, 2002), a position within the social system. Subject positions implicate various degrees of discursive legitimacy (Hardy and Phillips, 1998), the right to speak on behalf of broader populations or ideas. This affects narrators’ ability to produce influential texts that participate in organizational and institutional dynamics (Phillips, Lawrence, and Hardy, 2004). Stories reflect the subject position of their narrators and are judged by them. Institutional logics are intrinsic to these political dynamics, as narrators may be carriers of institutions (Scott, 2003) and derive some of their legitimacy from that subject position (Dacin, Munir, and Tracey, 2010; Amis, Munir, and Mair, 2017). For example, in the RCC, given the centrality of the feminist logic, known feminist volunteers and board members were respected, and their attempt to speak on behalf of feminism was well accepted. Collective storytelling is also shaped by power relations among co-narrators or audiences (Mumby, 1993; Gartner, 2007), which are more episodic. In addition, narrators have various interests, some of which may be hidden, relating to both systemic and episodic power, and these interests shape the stories they tell (Schegloff, 1997). All these faces of power, partly systemic and partly episodic, mediate the instantiation of logics on the ground.

Finally, institutional logics are embedded in emotions (Zietsma and Toubiana, 2018). My study shows how emotions as collective phenomena, grounded in their cultural context, relational and intersubjective (Bericat, 2016), are involved in the grounding of institutional logics. While institutional logics shape the emotional repertoire within the organization, emotional dynamics associated with interactions (Collins, 2004) or relational sensemaking (Maitlis, Vogus, and Lawrence, 2013) and stories (Schneider, 2005; Polletta, 2006; Herman, 2007) shape the narration, i.e., instantiations, of logics. Emotions are cognitive in the sense that they partake in meaning-making. Emotions are also political, grounded in power and hierarchy (Manzoor, Nocker, and Boncori, 2022). Indeed, the cognitive, political, and emotional elements that mediate the instantiation of logics on the ground are inseparable. In practice, they are all interrelated. ¹⁰ Further, in the ongoing, collective process of instantiating institutional logics, these elements are interdependent and judged together, through an expectation for coherence, to which I now turn.

Coherence: Constraints on Agency in Bringing Institutional Logics into Effect

My second contribution is to balance current depictions of agency in relation to institutional logics by highlighting the role of coherence. Previous research on institutional logics moved from conceptualizing them as given and deterministic to understanding them as resources that participants can readily use (e.g., McPherson and Sauder, 2013; Giorgi, 2017; van Werven, Bouwmeester, and Cornelissen, 2019). This was a radical change in our understanding of people’s agency in relation to institutional logics. Within this new conceptualization, conceptions of agency were first driven by the multiplicity of institutional logics and the tensions and contradictions between them (Seo and Creed, 2002). McPherson and Sauder (2013) offered an empirical example, highlighting actors’ agency in hijacking logics. Later, the locus of agency moved inward, characterizing institutional logics themselves as decomposable (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012: 7). Given this decomposability, people can selectively mix and match elements from different institutional logics.

In a sense, conceptualizing institutional logics as a tool kit was an overcorrection of deterministic understanding. Institutional logics, like other kinds of resources, do not become resources “until action is taken” (Feldman and Worline, 2011: 630). Moreover, “how the potential resource is used determines what kind of a resource it becomes” (Feldman and Worline, 2011: 630). Slowing down to appreciate the relational and sequential aspects of the process and its outcomes, my interpretation of the data suggests that the process is less individually strategic and more socially distributed and negotiated. In this process, the expectations for coherence limit participants’ freedom to strategically invoke institutional logics in decision making.

For example, hijacking logics was not as easy as McPherson and Sauder (2013) documented in a drug court. In the RCC, a narration invoking a therapeutic logic (cognition) told by a narrator who had no therapeutic training within or outside the RCC was met with suspicion, as board members questioned the subject position and interests behind it (political elements). Such narration was less coherent, and the decision it implied was usually rejected. Thus, coherence limited the narrators’ ability to freely and strategically harness institutional logics in the service of a decision they wanted to promote. Looking at the instantiation of logics through a relational lens exposes the negotiated nature of their use. People told all kinds of stories, but their attempts were sometimes blocked or diverted since the narration is a collective endeavor. Moreover, the stories were evaluated by others, who expected coherence across the narration’s cognitive, political, and emotional elements. The eventual narrations that emerged from this interaction were less strategic and motivated and less open and free. The expectation for coherence across the cognitive, political, and emotional elements draws the boundaries of how and by whom institutional logics can be used.

Indeed, decision making by the RCC’s board differed greatly from decision making in the drug court. Many of the issues that the RCC’s board discussed were ambiguous, and the board perceived them as unique and unprecedented. In a sense, the discussions may be understood as efforts to strip ambiguity away, as is often the case with narratives, employed when the problem is in some way ambiguous or still not acknowledged (Zimmerman, 1992: 438–439). Such uncertainty and ambiguity create space for more framing contests within organizations (Kaplan, 2008). Thus, the struggle over which logics are relevant and how they are relevant may have to do with the high levels of ambiguity at the RCC. In other situations, such as in a drug court (McPherson and Sauder, 2013), participants may have more precedents to build upon, the level of ambiguity may be lower, and hence, institutional logics may be conceived as more straightforward and be used more strategically. Further, in the drug court, the discussions and negotiations involved participants acting from their professional identity. Volunteers and staff at the RCC, serving as board members of a non-profit organization, operated out of their personal and social identities. Identities may have directed, for example, their attention to some issues, how embedded they were within various logics, or the importance they assigned to the decision being made (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012). Ambiguity, precedence, and identity dynamics may be among the conditions that account for instantiating logics in interaction.

While the logics define the space of possibilities for narrators to mold them into characters, plotlines, subject positions, interests, and roles, the expectation for coherence across the cognitive, political, and emotional aspects of the instantiation of logics constrains their use. The agency involved in instantiating institutional logics is a more mundane kind of agency. In the RCC, the work of institutional logics involved ordinary decision-making processes “aimed at interpretation, alignment, and muddling through,” and its effects were “subtle, not particularly abrupt,” and not clearly apparent in the immediate present (Powell and Colyvas, 2008: 277). No heroic actors were involved (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006) and no strategic planning but, rather, a group of people jointly trying to agree on a story and the decision it implicates. In the process, their distributed agency (Garud and Karnøe, 2005) brought logics into effect.

Hence, zooming in on the microfoundations of institutions helps us better understand the conditions under which agency can be exercised and is limited, and this focus strikes a middle ground between the over-deterministic and over-strategic approaches to institutional logics (and see Lounsbury et al., 2021). More generally, my study helps move the theorization of institutional logics away from the heavy imprint of the tool kit metaphor that has dominated cultural sociology since Swidler’s (1986) work.

Why Decision Making Through Stories? Varieties of Instantiations of Institutional Logics

Not all decision making at the RCC required hand-tailoring through narrations and lengthy deliberations. In many decision-making junctions, institutional logics were ready to wear (Creed, Scully, and Austin, 2002), as the board did have ready-made understandings and arguments that smoothed the decision-making process. This raises the question, when would the instantiation of logics require such collective negotiations?

The ten cases of decision making through stories revolved around various organizational issues (as detailed in Table 3). None of these decisions involved human lives or large amounts of money. Still, they were all critical enough for board members to dedicate much time and effort to understand what had happened and what decisions they needed to make. Many of these decisions were conceived as delicate: some touched on conflicts between staff or board members, and others involved conflict between the staff (or board) and RCC’s volunteers or critical external stakeholders. Often, these were people everybody knew and cared about. It was important to the board to reach what they perceived to be the right decisions both in organizational and personal terms. In other words, these were decisions grounded in both emotions and organizational politics.

I focused on instances of decision making by stories. However, institutional logics were involved in other decision-making instances in which stories were not told or were only in an embryonic stage and thus did not spark discussion. Protostories (Gabriel, 2000), or antenarratives (Boje, 2001), are narrative fragments that may or may not be developed into a complete story. They are usually emotionally and symbolically charged, and whether they will develop into a full story has much to do with power relations and issues of legitimacy and credibility (Gabriel, 2016). Protostories may relate to proto-institutions (Lawrence, Hardy, and Phillips, 2002) and serve as accounts that determine proto-institutions’ development into institutions (Hensel, 2018).

More generally, then, while my study focuses on the cognitive, political, and emotional elements relating to the narration of logics, it also draws attention to various factors that mediate the work of institutional logics on the ground, which may relate to the organizational context, personal identities, and the issue at hand. Further research is needed to unpack these factors and the relations between them.

Limitations

The study is limited in scope given that I examined only one organization. The RCC has some unique features that may limit the generalizability of my findings. It relied on volunteers, it was non-hierarchical, and decisions were made by consensus. The majority of the RCC board was women, and the setting of board meetings was feminized. The organization was established to create a safe space for women; many of the issues discussed involved women; and the setting was structured in a way that encouraged personal, emotional, and emphatic kinds of talk, which are usually associated with women (Polletta and Chen, 2013). It may be tempting to attribute the ubiquity of stories and decision making through stories to “women talk” or decision making by consensus. However, previous research has documented storytelling in decision making in masculine and hierarchical settings as well, like Kennedy’s National Security Council during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Gibson, 2011, 2012), the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee (Abolafia, 2010, 2020), and emergency medical teams (Myers, 2022). Still, specific organizational culture or contextual conditions may relate to the way logics are instantiated, and thus a comparative approach that examines such instantiations across various organizations may be fruitful to our understanding of the work of logics on the ground.

Finally, my ethnographic study is limited in its ability to reconnect the microfoundations of logics with their operation on other social levels. If logics are instantiated in micro-level interactions, one can assume that micro-level changes in the construction of logics may scale up to changes in field-level logics (Smets, Morris, and Greenwood, 2012; Gray, Purdy, and Ansari, 2015). Yet, my ethnographic methodology does not allow me to follow this lengthy process empirically. Building on mixed methods, future research may be able to “look both ways at once” (Haedicke and Hallett, 2016: 99; Zilber, 2020) to use the insights stemming from a close examination of ongoing micro-level processes and connect them with longer, macro-level processes.

Concluding Remarks

Thinking of institutional logics as instantiated in interactions does not mean we need to abandon their study as deterministic or strategic resources. ¹¹ We may take a “quantum approach” (Hahn and Knight, 2021: 362) and acknowledge that they are both inherent and socially constructed. Moreover, institutional logics operate on multiple social levels. They thus may look somewhat different from different social and analytical viewpoints (Cornelissen et al., 2015: 22). Institutional logics have “‘social fact’ qualities” as well as a “bidirectional and recursive nature” (Purdy, Ansari, and Gray, 2019: 409). Their ontology may be conceived pragmatically in relation to the social site, the analytical question at hand, and the methods used. When we study institutional logics on the societal or field level by using macro, positivist, and longitudinal approaches, it is fruitful to think of them as given and focus on their consequences. When we study institutional logics on the organizational level by using post-positivist and qualitative approaches, it is productive to think of them as resources people use. When we study the microfoundations of institutions by ethnographic observations in vivo and in situ, it is fruitful to think of them as potentialities that evolve within social interactions. All these views are valid, offering pieces of the rich, complex puzzle of institutional logics and their impact on organizations and our lives.