Abstract
In this article we investigate the role of technology and meaning in the institutional work of newsmakers. By analysing ethnographic data from an Italian business newspaper undertaking a project integrating the print and online newsrooms, we show how technology makes certain actions possible – and even proposes action – for the journalists, in their enactment of the institution of business news. Drawing on Callon’s notion of agencement and Battilana and D’Aunno’s conceptualization of human agency in institutional work, our analysis shows that action is taken in the interaction between humans and non-humans, and changes in technology might trigger institutional work. The institutional work of journalists is performed by means of both old and new technologies; if new technologies trigger institutional work by proposing new actions that need to be made meaningful by the journalists, old technology functions as a ‘law book’, where the institution of business news is inscribed. The journalists then use this ‘law book’ to interpret the new actions.
Introduction
News as it is enacted in newspapers has been around for centuries; the first Italian newspaper, Gazzetta di Mantova, was established in 1664. The newspaper as a paper artefact has been an integral part of the lives of most of us: useful for informing and updating about global and local events, as well as for wrapping fish and flowers. The birth of the specific institution of news that the newspaper in this study produces, namely business news, is practically intertwined with the history of general news. News about merchandise, ships and their cargo, alongside advertisements, was an essential part of newspapers as they developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. During the past decades, however, business and financial news has become an institution in its own right, with rules and norms for how to cover it, intersecting with the related institution of business journalism (Grafström, 2006; Kjaer & Slaatta, 2007). Generalist newspapers have increased their share of business and financial content, and newspapers, magazines and TV channels that specialize in covering financial news have become fixed items in the media landscape.
With the advent of the Internet, newspapers around the world have been attempting to master the skill of producing news online and adjusting their method of making news to the new medium, at the same time as upholding their operations of the old print newspaper. The Internet has put the ‘new’ in news into focus since it offers the possibility of making news even newer by allowing it to be updated continuously around the clock. In the online newsroom, cries to stop the presses are a thing of the past.
So what happens when the institution of business news is enacted with a new technology – the website – that eliminates deadlines and physical distribution constraints since it can be constantly updated, has infinite space and allows click measurements? How do newsmakers work to produce business news with this new technology, and what happens when the old print ways of producing business news meet the new online ways? We will explore these issues in the empirical section of this article, which builds on an ethnographic study at Il Sole 24 Ore, the largest Italian financial newspaper, between 2007 and 2008, when an ongoing online–offline integration project was taking place. This setting is particularly suitable for the investigation of the role of materiality in institutional work, as the website opens up new possibilities for covering and publishing business news while at the same time its production remains located in the newspaper newsroom.
Based on this study, it is our theoretical attempt to bring to institutional studies a better understanding of how human agency is possible in relation to its material counterpart and how technology interacts with the work of human actors to create meaning and make sense of what is done. By bringing technology – specifically with the idea of distributed agency and agencement (Callon, 2008) – into the analysis of institutional work, we aim to show how institutional work takes place amidst a sociotechnical arrangement that has a bearing on the intentional efforts of human actors to affect institutions. Within institutional studies it has been shown that technological shifts can trigger institutional change (e.g. Barley 1986; Battilana and D’Aunno 2009; Clemens & Cook, 1999; Hargadon & Douglas, 2001; Streeck & Thelen, 2005). However, we still lack a more detailed understanding of how changes in technology trigger and influence institutional work specifically (Barley, 1986, p. 78, for instance, discusses how new devices ‘alter the organizational and occupational structure of radiological work’), as well as studies illustrating how technology – new and old together – plays an active part in institutional work. If institutional order is inscribed into matter (technological as well as other) – as Czarniawska (2008; Joerges & Czarniawska, 1998) and others have convincingly shown – then what part does technology – old and new – play when human actors are trying to do work on the institutional order? And how is technology used by institutional workers who are engaged in making sense of new practices in an arrangement where old and new technologies coexist? Our specific empirical setting – a financial newspaper newsroom – provides a good case for investigating these matters. It, in fact, illustrates how new technology creates a need for institutional work on the part of the human actors (journalists making sense of new practices and deciding what is and what is not good business news) and how journalists are at work to create and institutionalize new ways of enacting business news online. It also shows how technology can be seen as an active part in this institutional work as the website proposes new actions and the print newspaper in which the old institutional order is inscribed guides journalists in evaluating these new actions.
The remainder of the article is structured as follows. First, we introduce our theoretical foundations in two sections: one section on institutions, meaning and institutional work, and a second section on the question of agency and agencement. We then present the method we used to conduct the empirical study, and the presentation of the case follows. In the analysis we discuss three areas of action: ‘What sort of news to cover?’, ‘How to prioritize news?’ and ‘What is not news?’ A concluding discussion closes the article.
Institutions, Meaning and Institutional Work
Organizational institutionalism has been one of the favourite approaches among students of organizations ever since its revival in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the new institutionalists (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983/1991; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Meyer & Scott, 1983; Tolbert & Zucker, 1983; Zucker, 1977). The forefathers of institutionalism, Berger and Luckmann (1967, p. 54), thought of institutions as the ‘reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors’. Institutions have then been conceptualized as ‘production systems’, ‘enabling structures’, ‘social programs’ or ‘performance scripts’ by Jepperson (1991, p. 145), but also as habitualized action, which ‘refers to the behaviours that have been developed empirically and adopted by an actor or set of actors in order to solve recurring problems’ (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996, p. 180). Institutional theory has contributed to explain the actions of organizations and their people, by dismissing rational-actor models and instead stressing the unreflective, routine and taken-for-granted nature of most human action and by seeing interest and actors as themselves constituted by institutions. Institutions thus relieve people of mental work (Czarniawska, 2003) and ‘free the individual from the burden of “all those decisions”’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p. 53).
Berger and Luckmann (1967) stress how institutions provide human action with meaning at the same time as actors continuously ascribe meaning to action and institutions. In a more recent text, Luckmann writes: Social reality presupposes intentional activities. Social worlds are constructed, maintained, transmitted, transformed and, occasionally, destroyed through social action that is meaningful to those who engage in it. Interactions are meaningful when they lead to results that were intended by them. But they are equally meaningful in another, often painful sense, when the consequences of the action differ from those originally intended. (Luckmann, 2006, cited and translated by R. E. Meyer, 2008, p. 527)
Recently, there has been a renewed interest in incorporating and focusing the role of meaningful action in institutional analysis (Meyer, 2008; Powell and Colyvas, 2008; Zilber, 2008, 2009). Zilber (2008, p. 162) broadly defines the concept of meaning in an institutional context as that which is ‘signified in institutional structures and practices. … “Meaning” refers then to that which is not structure or practice per se – that is to the untangible.’ The interest in the role of meaning and ‘the ideational aspects of institutional processes’ (Zilber, 2008, p. 151) coincides with a growing attention to actors and agency from an institutional perspective, which has brought researchers to investigate how actors embedded in institutional settings affect institutions (the ‘paradox of new institutional theories of organizations’, as identified by Holm, 1995, p. 398 and later called the ‘paradox of embedded agency’ by Seo and Creed, 2002).
Calling for greater attention to the role of human actors and their practices in institutional analysis, Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) and Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca (2009, 2011) recently coined the term ‘institutional work’ to refer to ‘the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions’ (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006, p. 215). The stream of institutional work aims not only to highlight and study those intentional actions taken in relation to institutions that are obvious and dramatic, but also those that are ‘nearly invisible and often mundane, as in the day-to-day adjustments, adaptations and compromises of actors’ (Lawrence et al., 2009, p. 1). Thus, in the recursive relationship between institutions and action, institutional work scholars are primarily interested in action and its intentional direction toward institutions; the notion of agency is therefore central to institutional work.
Agency and Agencement
The institutional work concept has emerged as an attempt to escape the overemphasis on ‘heroic “entrepreneurs” and great “leaders” who bring change intentionally, strategically and creatively’ (Hardy & Maguire, 2008, p. 213) and has brought agency back into institutions. Inspired by the sociology of practice (Barley & Tolbert, 1997; Bourdieu, 1977, 1990; Giddens, 1984; Schatzki, Knorr Cetina & Von Savigny, 2001), social constructivism (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; de Certeau, 1984; Gergen & Thatchenkery, 1996) and organizational ethnography (Zilber, 2008; Czarniawska, 1997; Kunda, 1992), Lawrence and Suddaby (2006, p. 219) called for attention to be directed toward ‘the creative and knowledgeable work of actors which may or may not achieve its desired ends and which interacts with existing social and technological structures in unintended and unexpected ways’. Regardless of its intended or unintended consequences, intentionality is central to the determination of what is institutional work: ‘without intentionality, actions may have profound institutional effects but still not be institutional work’ (Lawrence et al., 2009, p. 13).
Despite its centrality – ‘creative and knowledgeable work’, ‘purposive action’ and ‘intentionality is central’ – agency has enjoyed limited exploration in institutional work. Among the few attempts, Battilana and D’Aunno (2009) proposed a fruitful venue. Building on the work of Emirbayer and Mische (1998), they viewed agency as characterized by three dimensions, corresponding ‘to the temporal orientations of agency, allowing us to examine forms of action that are more oriented respectively to the past, the future and the present’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 971): iteration, projection and practical evaluation. The iterational 1 dimension of agency refers to ‘the selective reactivation by actors of past patterns of thought and action, as routinely incorporated in practical activity, thereby giving stability and order to social universes and helping to sustain identities, interactions and institutions over time’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 971). The projective dimension refers to ‘the imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action, in which received structures of thought and action may be creatively reconfigured in relation to actors’ hopes, fears and desires for the future’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 971). The practical–evaluative dimension refers to ‘the capacity of actors to make practical and normative judgments among alternative possible trajectories of action, in response to the emerging demands, dilemmas and ambiguities of presently evolving situations’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 971). These dimensions are simultaneously present in any action to varying degrees, and they are related to each other as embedded in the flow of time. Battilana and D’Aunno (2009) argued that viewing agency as multidimensional might enhance our understanding of institutional work and proposed a matrix of actions intersecting the different aims of institutional work – creating, maintaining or disrupting institutions – with the different dimensions of agency.
Although Battilana and D’Aunno’s work is indeed a useful point of departure, the traditional assumptions about agency being a solely human property remain largely unquestioned, and the study of the technological structures interacting with human actors’ work, mentioned by Lawrence and Suddaby (2006), so far remains a declaration of intent. Actors remain primarily human beings and agency remains primarily ascribed to human individuals. Without denying the human prerogative of institutional work, we argue that human and non-human (material) agencies are mutually responding counterparts of a distributed agency that produces collective actions, by mobilizing a large number of (human and non-human) entities taking part in the action. We propose here to take insights from science and technology studies (Callon & Law, 2005; Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Latour, 1991, 2005) and to draw on Callon’s concept of agencement (Callon, 2008) – referring to agency as collective and distributed in a sociotechnical arrangement – in order to shed new light on institutional work. By doing so, we follow the example of several scholars who have called for and tried to bring materiality into institutional analysis (see, for example, Czarniawska, 2008; Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski & Barley, 2001; Pinch, 2008).
In Callon and Caliskan’s words, ‘agencements denote sociotechnical arrangements when they are considered from the point [of] view of their capacity to act and to give meaning to action’ (2005, p. 24). They are arrangements of humans and non-humans, which have the capacity to act; both humans’ and non-humans’ ability to act – that is, agency – is only possible in their mutual relationship, and its realization as action is only possible in the interaction between human and material agency. Agency is thus distributed in a network of human and non-human entities that acts. In this arrangement, various entities propose solutions that an individual in isolation would not have thought about or had access to. In other words, ‘specialists of distributed actions say that each of the actors makes proposals to the other actors in the course of action, and that it is these proposals that act as affordances’ (Callon, 2008, p. 35). This reasoning is close to what other scholars have called sociomateriality, challenging the separation between technology, work and organization (e.g. Orlikowski & Scott, 2008).
Our attempt to bring agencement into institutional work aspires to remedy a theory that has accorded priority to the human subject through an asymmetric distribution of agency, ascribing it all to human beings and none to the material world (Pickering, 1993). 2 However, even if our goal here is to make it more even and to take materiality seriously by assigning it agency, i.e. specifically technology, we do recognize differences between human and non-human agency. As Pickering (1993, p. 564) claims, non-human agency is ‘temporally emergent in practice’, as its form is never decisively known in advance, and humans continually explore it in their everyday work. Human agency, conversely, is characterized by intentions (Pickering, 1993). Nevertheless, we place human agency – purposiveness, intentionality and will, all these things denoting agency – in a necessary relation to non-human agency within a network of entities that acts collectively.
Specifically, drawing on Callon’s notion of agencement and Battilana and D’Aunno’s (2009) conceptualization of multidimensional human agency, we look at how institutional work unfolds in a setting in which old and new technologies coexist. The introduction of the new into established arrangements triggers contradictions and dilemmas which call into question old taken-for-granted ways of working as well as make individuals more intentional and self-conscious (e.g. Seo & Creed, 2002). In such circumstances, people might engage in more visible instances of institutional work to make action meaningful in relation to institution(s). It is thus on such instances that we focus in this article.
Methods
This article builds on organizational ethnography (Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Lofland & Lofland, 2001; Emerson, Fretz & Shaw, 1995, 2001; Schwartzman, 1993) that one of the authors conducted at Il Sole 24 Ore, the major Italian financial newspaper (Kärreman & Alvesson, 2001; Tuchman, 1973, 1978; Tunstall, 1971). The core of the study was a six-month period of ethnography between 2007 and 2008, during which one of us spent three to five days a week at the newspaper (Raviola, 2010). The focus was the project to integrate online and offline news work, then being undertaken at the newspaper, including the launch of a newly designed website. This project represented a particularly interesting point of entry to the field because it triggered new ways of working in the newsroom.
Data generation
The ethnographer conducted direct observations of journalists’ daily work by rotating around different sections in the main newsroom. In a given section, she spent eight to twelve hours a day for two weeks observing the editor and the editor’s assistants in addition to talking to the journalists about their daily work. She also took part in two of the three daily newsroom meetings: the eleven o’clock meeting, in which the agenda of the day was set, and the five o’clock meeting, in which the front page was decided upon (see Figure 1).
An Ordinary Day in the Newsroom.
Apart from daily conversations with the journalists, she conducted about 50 formal interviews with editors and managers. She regularly interviewed the vice-chief editors, the managers of both online and printed news production, as well as personnel and IT services. Documents were collected, both those produced in the journalists’ daily work, such as their design of the section pages, and those concerning organizational and strategic issues.
Data analysis
In terms of empirical data, the study generated over 30 notebooks of field notes, interviews and documents, amounting to a total number of 2,100 handwritten pages, with an average of 200 words per page. Part of the analysis had already started while in the field. The notebooks were organized into three columns: one column for time, a second for notes and a third for immediate comments. Notes were taken only on odd pages. Once a week, the ethnographer reread her field notes and wrote her comments on the blank even pages beside them. A deeper analysis was then conducted once the fieldwork had been completed.
We proceeded by first reading all of the ethnographic notes in chronological order so that we could reconstruct step by step what was happening and obtain a broader view. Then, we performed a ‘jet-lagged’ version of grounded theory. In particular, we were inspired by two critical analytical processes in grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990): coding and memoing. Since the field notes were mainly on paper, we coded them on paper, starting from very open coding and progressing to concentrate, as the analysis progressed, on the most recurrent codes once a story started to emerge. During the coding, the ethnographer also proceeded to transcribe and translate stories of episodes and fragments of notes, which we filed under certain codes and on which we wrote memos to record our reasoning from their comparison. We reduced these many codes through theoretical concepts, which were used to lift the initial and grounded codes to a more abstract level (Burawoy, 1998).
Although not systematically, for the analysis of some codes that emerged as significant and recurrent, we used the constant comparative method (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Martin & Turner, 1986; Turner, 1981). This means that in our memos we compared material that we had coded under a certain label within a given note set (each day of observation was a note set) in order to understand what that piece of material said about that given code. As we proceeded with the analysis of each code, we also compared material from successive note sets. In performing this comparison, elements of narrative analysis (Czarniawska, 1997, 2004) helped us by improving our analytical understanding of the material, in particular our understanding of how stories were constructed in documents and interviews and how certain narratives could be deconstructed. We found the Hernadi’s hermeneutic triad – explication, explanation, exploration – particularly useful together with efforts of deconstructing our interlocutors’ narrative by identifying and questioning dichotomies. For the purpose of this article, we choose to illustrate three areas of action, which emerged out of the analysis, with field events that we think are good illustrations of these respective areas (Kunda, 1992; Silverman, 2005): selecting news, prioritizing news and distinguishing news from advertising.
Il Sole 24 Ore and its Integration Project
Il Sole 24 Ore, 3 based in Milan, is Italy’s biggest daily business newspaper and sells 350,000 copies per day. In 1997 Il Sole 24 Ore launched a news website, ilsole24ore.com , the content of which was produced by a separate team of journalists not formally belonging to the print newsroom. An online section was incorporated into the main newsroom in 2000. Although it has been present in the organization for over ten years, the online section and its journalists had been operating separately from the print section until an explicit online–offline integration strategy was formulated in 2007 and the launch of a newly redesigned website was planned as a symbol of the integration. Our empirical study was conducted during the period when the integration of print and online news production was to be implemented and the new website launched (see Figure 1 for an account of an ordinary day in the newsroom).
In the name of integration, a number of changes in staffing and roles were made in the newsroom. First of all, it is widely recognized across the whole organization that the then chief editor was very involved in the integration project; ‘The chief editor really believes in it’ was a mantra among the journalists. Then, from the summer of 2007, a senior print journalist with high status who had been working for the newspaper for 20 years was given the mandate of coordinating the website and the newspaper. New people who had experience of working with online news were also recruited to the online newsroom. Furthermore, an important step in the integration project was the signing of a union agreement for the multimedia work of journalists.
Analysis: The Institutional Work of Journalists in the Integrated Newsroom
From our field material we identified three areas of action – selecting news (what sort of news to cover?), prioritizing news (how to prioritize news?) and distinguishing news from advertising (what is not news?) – made by the agencement (journalists + newspaper + website) involved in news work. In the following text, we illustrate and analyse these areas of action by focusing on field episodes that we describe in some detail. For each of these areas, through a close analysis of interview and observation material, we show journalists’ institutional work, as it is triggered by new technology, and how both old and new technology is involved when journalists are making their actions meaningful in relation to the institution of business news.
What sort of news to cover?
The possibilities for real-time updates and the infinite space for articles and thematic sections that the website offers raise issues relating to what sort of news is appropriate for Il Sole 24 Ore. The new technology (website) offers possibilities for action – indeed proposes action – to the journalists that differ from the action the print proposes and the journalists engage in on the newspaper. The website, unlimited in space both for the development of articles and the number of thematic sections, allows for broadening of the coverage, i.e. from specialist to generalist, at a relatively low cost. In one of our interviews, an online desk editor explains that despite
ilsole24.com
having fewer visitors than the generalist corriere.it and laRepubblica.it, it is ‘anyhow one of the biggest Italian websites, also in the generalist competition’, even if we do not ‘treat news in the same way as the generalists do’. This possibility of being a generalist website proposed by the web technology, however, leads the editor to make a practical evaluation: I think this [should we be more like a generalist website or stick to our financial focus] is one of the issues that the publisher will need to face in the future. That is to say once we have established that Il Sole 24 Ore … when Il Sole 24 Ore is given the right equipment, when the lengthening of times and days will be decided [referring to an ongoing discussion about extending the web journalists’ working hours, which relates to the union agreement for multimedia work], deciding what to do.
Thus, contrary to the newspaper, which has a limited number of pages and competition among the covered subjects is a zero sum game in which more generalist news means less financial news, the website provides possibilities for generalist news coverage, in addition to business news. The question is whether this is the right direction to go. It is on this point that the desk editor calls for a decision from ‘the publisher’; the publisher, being part of the management of Il Sole 24 Ore, ‘will need to face’ this issue in the future, ‘deciding what to do’. The publisher is thus called upon to conduct institutional work (in the sense of Kraatz’s (2009) notions on leadership as institutional work), to project the website into the future and to decide whether it will produce ‘business news’ or ‘general news’. This will contribute to solving the journalists’ current practical dilemmas of evaluating what news to cover.
The editor continues: Here the specificity of Il Sole 24 Ore comes in. The specificity is to have in our natural legacy an apparatus able to make in-depth financial, economic, legal analysis. For example, a lot of the contacts [online readers] that we gain, we gain them through search engines … Let’s take the special [webpage] on pensions. [Readers] will stay longer on our website than on other sites because they recognize our natural supremacy in this area, for our capacity, for the added value we can give, for the credibility of our name and thus for the guarantee that we are an authoritative voice … almost like the tax agency when it comes to the discussion on such a matter.
Here the editor specifies that the projective work that he has urged the publisher to carry out should build on the tradition of the newspaper. He talks about this tradition as ‘nature’, thus making it eternal and universal, and argues that whatever projective institutional work the publisher (in collaboration with the journalists) undertakes it must reiterate what Il-Sole 24 Ore is, i.e. its supremacy is recognized by everybody and therefore should be reinforced. This iteration of the past as a prerequisite for the projection of the future seems accordingly to produce institutional work aimed at maintaining ‘business news’ as it is enacted in print.
However, the editor also opens up for new possibilities. Since the number of online readers coming from search engines is ‘of absolute importance for us’: We need to be absolutely able to embrace the natural extension of working hours and update, which creates the need for us to be also a daily, a generalist website. Because, if I exemplify, if my publisher decided tomorrow that the Il Sole website should also be updated on Sundays, I cannot forget that on Sundays the central material is sport and thus I must be able to deal with non-financial topics. Thus, how to combine business news, which is the flower in our buttonhole [an Italian saying for what we do best] and of real value added with the capacity for being on the market, by also identifying topics that are not congenial to us?
At Il Sole 24 Ore journalists know what the new working practice of updating online news on Sundays (which has previously not been done) will lead to: dealing with sports news that previously has not been considered proper. However, the action resulting from journalists taking the new opportunities proposed by the website raises a practical–evaluative dilemma. Institutional work is in the very recognition of a dilemma regarding how to evaluate this action and how to relate it to how Il Sole 24 Ore and its journalists are enacting ‘business news’.
Yet, the reconstruction of habitual practices inherited from the print newspaper set hints at possible solutions to the practical dilemma, as the online editor continues: But very often without thinking about it, it happens to us to do such a thing as the [print] newspaper does. It is not that we do not talk about soccer matches. We talk about them, and then we go and look at the economic and financial state of the companies. We need to do the same thing for the online newspaper.
Thus, the actively reconstructed past assumes a normative function for the present and allows the job to be carried out. By focusing on the economic aspects of football the dilemma is solved, and work can go on.
The following episode further investigates how temporal dimensions of agency interplay to make meaningful an action which is recognized as problematic. In October 2007, after a few months of negotiations around the union agreement that would seal the online–offline integration, a meeting involving the whole newsroom was held to discuss the agreement. During this meeting, the chief editor introduces the agreement and focuses especially on what is called the clause of ‘voluntarity’: a clause in the union agreement stating that the contribution of print journalists to the website would be voluntary. As a counterpart to this clause, the agreement stipulates the hiring of additional journalists for the online newsroom, an upgrade of the content management system and an extension of working hours in the online newsroom to 7.00–23.00 from Monday to Friday and 8.00–20.00 on Saturdays and Sundays.
After the chief editor’s introduction, a discussion develops concerning the website, its content and its relation to the print newspaper and its journalists. An old-timer online desk editor takes the floor and raises a few issues. He urges the chief editor to engage in a discussion about which editorial line to follow and what should guide the news work, especially on Saturdays and Sundays. In his speech, he refers to three specific situations in which he had responded to the propositions made by the website, but in which he now recognizes practical–evaluative dilemmas: Yesterday afternoon when the issue of Burma [a massacre in Burma] exploded, it was a case that has raised some issues. They shot people in a town square. The question is: shall I go with the subprimes [financial crisis] or do I decide to open with that? What path do I take? I would like the chief editor to tell me/us what path he wants to undertake for Il Sole 24 Ore, as an economic and financial newspaper. Because, for example, the increase of the working hours is right and [those parts of the agreement are unproblematic], but we play it by surrendering to the generalist newspaper. Three-quarters of our work last Sunday was on sports. What is our path? This morning a brigadist [a member of Red Brigades, a Marxist-Leninist organization, which was responsible for numerous terrorist initiatives in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s] was arrested. How much does this belong to Il Sole?
In each of these situations, the online editor is given the proposition to update the website with news differently from the way the print newspaper would propose, and he accepts this proposition. Thus, the result is that an action is taken: Burma was indeed the opening story on the website; sport is indeed a major topic on the website when it is updated on Sundays; the news about the brigadist was indeed included in the website coverage. However, this action has consequences in terms of institutional work, in that the editor recognizes a practical–evaluative dilemma in each of these situations: Is this right or wrong? Are we as an organization enacting ‘business news’ properly when covering Burma, sport and the brigadist?
The online editor concludes by saying that without knowing which path to take – without the imaginative generation of a future trajectory of action – ‘everything is more difficult’. Without an explicit and shared connection with the institution of ‘business news’ giving meaning to the emergent present, dilemmas such as these will keep reappearing, and the journalists at Il Sole 24 Ore will not enjoy the problem-relieving effect of institutions but rather have the burden of ‘all those decisions’, as Berger and Luckmann (1967, p. 53) put it.
As the meeting continues other journalists discuss this issue and express the ‘need for rules’ to implement relating to the clause of voluntariness. Some find it problematic that the integration between online and print news production will rely on the journalists’ ‘will’. The chief editor, urged by many to make projections for the future, makes two interventions. The first one insists on voluntariness: A big part of the newsroom wanted it. It was included for future memory as protection for some colleagues to be able to say no to the fifth piece [article] per day. I hope that the sense of responsibility of this newspaper will go beyond the voluntariness written on the agreement draft. If one has to use a rifle, I do not accept it.
The chief editor presents voluntariness as a future advocate for the journalists’ professional freedom, thus counting on that the loyalty of journalists to journalism and the newspaper itself will make them want to contribute online content. Here, the chief editor does not provide an answer with regard to the dilemma raised by new technologies for business news but rather anchors its projection into the future to another institution, namely that of journalism, which has a strong influence on all of the journalists present. 4
On this note, stressing the collective belonging to journalism, a number of interventions unfold from journalists who have experienced online news work and report on the beauty of it. These journalists emphasized the satisfaction derived from real-time feedback from the readers and the adrenaline of real-time updating, which is ‘the essence of journalistic work’, as one of them says. They project a future in which the web will dominate, overlooking the practical–evaluative dilemmas articulated earlier by the online editor.
Thus, when the online editor takes the floor back, responding to alternative proposals for organizing integration, he returns to the urgency of institutional work: The main point is what type of information [business or generalist]? This we need to decide! Shall we follow the information of the [print] newspaper, which is typical of this newspaper, with a structure dedicated to our public of reference: Italy, politics and foreign affairs, without any generalist temptation?
At this point, the chief editor makes his second intervention and directly answers the question: We will never have photo galleries which give 50% of website traffic [like some generalist newspapers] … There is a form of misconception of the web, deriving from our history, which makes us take inputs more from the paper. [He refers here to criticism levelled against the poor web literacy of the newsroom.]
By saying this, the chief editor prepares the floor for his projection, by acknowledging that the website, even with all of its new technical possibilities, invites new dilemmas such as using photo galleries to generate traffic. He delegitimizes this practice. He also recognizes that the past – and old technology – do play a role in the way that the newsroom interacts with new technologies, precisely because the print newspaper has been and is produced and strongly present in the newsroom. He, however, opens up the possibility that this might be wrong – ‘a misconception of the web deriving from our history’ – and needs to be changed. Thus, he imagines a future trajectory for action in a balance between continuity and change: We need to keep the significant trait of journalism of Il Sole but with online modalities … We need to have a website 2.0 that is graphically different but not giving up the seriousness and punctuality of Il Sole 24 Ore.
He anchors his projection on the print newspaper, by assimilating the need to have a modern website to the reasons that he had given for the recently made investments in newspaper design and printing plants as well as calling for ‘transfer[ring] Il Sole know-how without cynicism’ to the website in order to expand the print’s ‘seriousness and immediacy’ to the web. Specifically, he cites the example of the print Sunday culture supplement, which has gained a very high reputation while being outside the boundaries of business news. He concludes that not having an appropriate ‘window on the Web … closes its [Il Sole 24 Ore’s] doors to modernity’.
Thus, the chief editor imagines a future in which efforts must be made to uphold the quality of Il Sole business news and to keep ‘belonging to [the] world’ of ‘the sophisticated public’ of business news, while its boundaries might be loosened on the web. He argues: On Saturday and Sunday we can cover sports because it has an economic dimension; I do not see why the reader should be passed on to another portal, but we can’t be Gazzetta.it [a sport newspaper website].
How to prioritize news?
Not all news has the same relevance, as news enters the newspaper pages in a certain order and size, reflecting its degree of relevance; page 1 is more important than page 60, and the upper headline is more important that the lower one. Prioritizing the news becomes critical when designing the front page, which is discussed during the afternoon editorial meeting (see Figure 1). The front page is the most visible space on the newsstands and is believed to present an overview of the newspaper’s coverage – shaped by strong isomorphic forces in the field (Boczkowski, 2010) – and to influence both the public agenda and the readers’ purchase.
Online articles can be accessed individually, without going via the home page (which is how readers accessing articles via search engines read articles). This means that on its own page each article is the main content, disregarding its importance in relation to other news. The home page (or thematic section pages), on the contrary, gathers several pieces of news and thus requires their prioritization. As the new technology allows updates whenever journalists consider them most appropriate, it proposes several alternative patterns of action; news making it onto the home page might be the latest, the most important or the most clicked (clicks are measurable!). On this matter, in an interview, an editor argues: No, I don’t think [there is a difference between online and print business news production] … I’ve always thought that journalism is basically a method, a method to satisfy your curiosity about things … Once you have this, the rest is a matter of sensibly organizing what you find, of establishing a hierarchy of the information units that you find, of comprehending priorities …
Then he continues: Let’s say that you can differentiate … It’s clear that online is about the five lines in real time … there’s always a little bit less of the news hierarchy problem. The priorities are given by time. You change your roll, and that’s it. It’s difficult to do the wrong opening, let’s put it that way. It changes every 20 minutes … They [news items] stand out by themselves.
In the first part of the conversation, the editor seems to conduct institutional work to maintain the institution of business news (and the related institution of journalism), saying that despite all of the technical changes things remain the same; he reiterates the good old rules of ‘establishing a hierarchy’, born and developed in print.
However, the solution of continuity in his following argumentation reveals the recognition of a dilemma in practice; how does the comprehending of priorities, resulting in the news hierarchy, happen when journalists work on the website? He answers the question by establishing the difference between print and website; as the website makes proposals for real-time updates, the journalists take this possibility and ‘change [their] roll and that’s it’. ‘The five lines in real time’ are implicitly opposed to the in-depth, long, 24-hour-durable news in the newspaper. In other words, his practical evaluation seems to be directed toward acknowledging a (non-problematic) change in the way the institution of business news is enacted. However, even this production of difference in action related to old and new technologies, with the human actors being the same (journalists) and the technology thus accounting for the difference, carries traces of old technology onto the new; the editor mentions the ‘roll’, referring to the old technology of a roll with the characters of newspaper pages that serves as a master copy for printing the newspaper copies.
On the website the opening headline is updated several times a day, together with other home page news. This is compared to print, which cannot be updated once printed – only by printing a second edition or a totally new issue the next day. The journalists’ practice of updating the online newspaper (called turning by the journalists) is related to the print front page. Most often, especially in the morning, the opening 5 of the website replicates the opening of the newspaper, as this short conversation shows.
OK. So [Journalist I], let’s open with the derivatives.
Yes, like the newspaper.
We’ll also link it to the Asian markets.
Here the senior journalist refers to the insertion of links to related articles under each main headline of the home page. Thus, while the iterational agency of the journalists, using the print newspaper as a point of reference, reinforces the practical evaluation of online news priorities, the prioritizing of news retained from the newspaper is reconstructed by associating it with previously written articles on related topics, made possible by digital hyperlinks.
The convergence between the newspaper front page and website home page happens especially in the morning, when the newspaper seems to have heavier institutional weight in activating its reiteration on the web. The physical newspaper, distributed to everybody in the newsroom (see Figure 1), may act as a mnemotic tool (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) that triggers iterational agency. As a morning opening becomes the second or third headline, a new piece of news is entered, or a second or third headline attains a higher position on the home page, the convergence of iterational and practical–evaluative agency on online news priorities may shift during the day and lead to contested situations, as discussed earlier.
However, the following episode illustrates how the online newsroom agencement’s action can take a different trajectory than raising contested dilemmas. Three journalists in the online newsroom are discussing what to keep and what to eliminate from the home page.
What can we take away from the home page?
There was that thing about Finmeccanica [an Italian international conglomerate].
In any case I think the opening is strong for us there. Because here we have something happening, while on Alitalia [an Italian airline company] nothing new.
On Alitalia, nothing new, I agree.
Therefore, we can get by.
Tyssen Krupp [an elevator company] is from yesterday.
‘The quality of life in cities’; we keep it because it is often looked at. It’s on top of the contacts [number of readers]. The same goes for the annual research by Il Sole. Last year I had to answer e-mails from municipalities about the ‘quality of life’ ranking a month after it was published. So we decided to keep it.
Tomorrow the local newspapers will talk about the ranking because I have seen that ANSA [a news agency] has referred to it today.
Then we’re the only ones who have the entire ranking.
The choice of opening the home page with Finmeccanica builds both on a newspaper-like evaluation of business news – ‘the opening is strong for us’ – and on an appreciation of the website’s possibilities for real-time updates – ‘here we have something happening’. At the same time, removing Tyssen Krupp because it is yesterday’s news and moving down Alitalia because there is not much happening right now, and not because they are not relevant, both rely on the possibility of continuously updating the website. This action is not contested, as no practical–evaluative dilemma is recognized. Rather we see a sort of institutional work by the journalists, who marry both newspaper-derived classification of business news and website-derived updates of business news. In this instance of institutional work, iteration and practical evaluation seem to converge.
In the next part of the conversation, the possibility of flexibly updating the website interacts with the new possibility of measuring clicks. The quality-of-life ranking of Italian cities, developed by Il Sole 24 Ore, is kept because it generates many media-noise-producing clicks. The number of clicks makes it acceptable for the website to retain news for a long time, even a month, as opposed to the print newspaper. The measurement of clicks here allows for a difference between the website and the newspaper and at the same time, contrary to previously analysed dilemmas, for the non-recognition of this difference as problematic.
What is not news?
The distinction between journalistic and advertising/promotional content is of core importance to journalists. Their job is to produce news, while marketers and advertising managers deal with promotion and advertising. As the field of business news has been institutionalized and professionalized, its inherent tension has become increasingly relevant to business journalists: how to keep news and advertising (promotion, advertorials) separate (Pallas & Strannegård, 2010). Since financial news is dependent upon companies as sources for its news, at the same time as business news should critically scrutinize these very companies, the act of keeping news and promotion separate is of the utmost importance for the legitimacy of business news. At Il Sole 24 Ore the design of the newspaper pages, including both journalistic and advertising content in mutually exclusive and graphically distinct spaces, results from daily negotiations between an editor and an advertising person, whereas the rest of the newsroom simply receives the working foliation (the page outlines, see Figure 1).
The crossing of the line between journalistic and advertising/promotional content has always been a very sensitive issue in the newsroom, both on paper and online. Since quartos 6 and advertorials have been shunned by the norms of business news, the practices of making them are clearly demarcated from the practices of the rest of the newsroom; people, space and resources are clearly devoted to them and thus kept separate from the rest of the newsroom. Journalists not assigned to work on a quarto or an advertorial cannot by chance place their article on such a page. At the time of the study, ilsole24ore.com had a design layout with sections in salmon pink, in white and in light blue, which were organized into compartments called boxes. Access to any of these sections was technically possible for journalists. The light blue boxes were, however, used primarily by the marketing department as promotional space for the products of Il Sole 24 Ore’s e-commerce shop. There were also other boxes dedicated to regular advertisements, not accessible to journalists.
The following episode, concerning a thematic sub-website and the main website, presents an instance of institutional work triggered by a young journalist accessing the forbidden blue promotional boxes: something that was made possible by the website. The junior journalists working for the sub-website and their editor were going around Milan in their branded Smart car, collecting interviews, videos and photos to construct into articles once back in the newsroom. On one of these occasions, the editor and a technical team were ready to stream live content on the sub-website, with junior I sitting in the newsroom with a mobile connection to her editor and checking that everything was working well.
As had been the custom since the beginning of online operations, live streaming was announced on the main news website home page in the morning. Senior I, a senior online editor, had taken care of it. After a couple of hours, when the streaming was about to start, senior II noticed that the announcement had disappeared from the main website home page. He then encouraged junior I to post the announcement of the live streaming on the ilsole24ore.com home page. Senior II suggested that she should use the little boxes, the light blue ones. Junior I did as she was instructed, after further encouragement from another journalist, and with the technical support of the graphic assistants, as she had never inserted anything in those boxes before.
The live streaming started, and the announcement was now on the home page in one of the blue boxes. At this point, senior I came closer to junior I: Let me ask you a question out of curiosity. You have to tell me clearly. If this website enters the advertising space, and I’m not saying it for nothing, I won’t write even one single line about it anymore. If that’s advertising, none of it will enter the news space. It’s incredible! I put a post on the home page, and I find that the news turned into advertising after two hours!
The action produced by the agencement website + journalists + graphic assistants – placing news in a blue box – is contested by senior I, who engages in institutional work to make sense of it: ‘if that’s advertising’ (practical evaluation), ‘none of it will’ be news (projection). Senior I delegitimizes this action by recognizing it as violating the institution of business news. His practical evaluation classifies it as a mistake, irreversibly disrupting the institution.
Defending herself from senior I’s attack, junior I said that it was senior II who told her to do this. Then, senior I continues his institutional work: ‘These doubts have existed since the birth of journalism.’ Leaping into the past and reactivating it to evaluate the current situation, the editor’s institutional work consists of recognizing the action which had just occurred, made possible by the new technology, as a well-known type of action violating the institution. This typification solves the practical–evaluative dilemma: If it’s an advertisement, we’ve solved a problem. If it’s advertising, it isn’t journalism any longer. At least here there is not even the hypocrisy any longer. My role is to take care of journalism!
Senior I’s institutional work finds support in the newsroom, albeit only partially. When junior II, collaborating with junior I, returns to the newsroom and hears about what has happened, she strongly shares senior I’s evaluation. She goes even further by making a projection into the future: ‘We have to fight for this website’, considering that safe-keeping the institution of business news by adhering to newspaper-like habits was necessary to give their work the meaning of news. However, later in the afternoon with the return of senior II, who had suggested putting the announcement of the live streaming in the blue box, he sees that the announcement is still on the home page, even though the event is over. Thus, he prompts the junior journalists to see to it that they take away the live streaming announcement from the home page of the website; his reproach concerns the respect of the website affordances. Junior II reacts:
Ok, but may I say something? We use the little blue box only when there is [advertising].
Put it wherever you like. I gave this suggestion just because from there it is possible to put a direct link to the [thematic] website. 7
The usability of the website, the facility with which it can be accessed and the importance of maximizing the clicks are all of greater interest to senior II than the newspaper-like norm of distinguishing between journalistic and advertising space. Thus, he was indifferent to the ongoing institutional work making sense of that action as a mistake.
Concluding Discussion
Our empirical investigation of institutional work has focused on the interactions between human and non-human agency that make action possible, and it has highlighted the efforts made by journalists at Il Sole 24 Ore to relate action, collectively produced, to the institution of business news and thus to give meaning to the action and affect the institution. Based on the episodes analysed above, we will in this section discuss what we have learnt about institutional work. First, we will highlight the dynamics of agency in institutional work as emerged in our episodes. Then, based on these dynamics, we will reflect on the relationship between technology, meaning and agency in institutional work.
The dynamics of agency in institutional work: Convergence, divergence and misvergence
We started our journey by pointing out the neglect of non-human agency in institutional work. We show in our episodes that news work is conducted by an agencement of journalists + technologies (old and new), in which agency is distributed and collective rather than being an exclusive property of individual human actors. Material agency is ‘temporally emergent in practice’ (Pickering, 1993, p. 564) and as such seems to propose actions that the practical–evaluative agency of journalists might recognize as typical or as practical dilemmas. The episodes analysed show how the website, as a new technology, in different circumstances invites journalists to perform actions to which journalists respond in different ways. If we look at the episodes that we have described in this article as instances of institutional work that depart primarily from practical evaluations – ‘What sort of news to cover?’, ‘How to prioritize news?’ and ‘What is not news?’ – this dimension of agency is intimately intertwined with the other agentic dimensions in the effort to ascribe collective meaning to this action.
In our episodes one can see how the act of collectively deciding whether an action is appropriate or not, and thus assigning purpose to the action, makes the action meaningful (Luckmann, 2006, cited in Meyer, 2008). In our study, making action meaningful constitutes institutional work, as actions cannot be perceived as ‘purposive’ until a purpose has been ascribed to them. Hence, in our specific case it is not until the journalists collectively have decided whether an action is appropriate or not that one can describe their actions as purposive institutional work.
In the episodes reported in this study, every instance of institutional work encompasses interplay between the three agentic dimensions that in our empirical episodes take three forms. The journalists’ efforts to practically evaluate their actions, to iterate past ones and project future ones, as they are made possible by technologies, might lead:
in different directions;
in the same direction;
against the institution.
We call these forms respectively divergence, convergence and misvergence. As shown in Table 1, these terms emphasize the different dimensions of agency, pointing out the different (di-), the same (con-) and the wrong (mis-) direction (vergence) for actions ‘taken in relation to the institution’ (Lawrence et al., 2009, p. 1) of business news.
Summary of the Empirical Findings.
Our first episode presents a case of divergent institutional work. The acceptance by journalists of the proposal by the website to deliver news outside the boundaries of business news raises practical–evaluative dilemmas: shall we cover only business news or general news as well? The answer to this dilemma is contested between an iteration of a newspaper-like enactment of business news and a projection of a different need for the website. While the journalists in practice cover news that is not strictly business news, the effort of retrospective–prospective identification in the future – the imagination of what we will be in the future, based on our past knowledge – is crucial to solve the dilemma. As calls are made upon the chief editor to set out the future direction of the online newsroom, it seems that in this sense leadership might be understood as institutional work (Kraatz, 2009; Washington, Boal & Davis, 2008).
Our second episode presents a case of convergent institutional work. In this case, the acceptance by journalists of the proposal by the website to modulate the pace of news updates to the possibilities of real-time and click measurement is not seen as problematic. This manifests itself in two ways. First, the recognition of a difference between the practices of news work on paper and online can be ascribed to the mere characteristics of the medium, but the evaluation of these practices puts them within the boundaries of the universalized and eternalized institution of journalism (‘Once you have this, the rest is a matter of …’). Second, the choice of news on the website, responding to the possibility of updating news whenever journalists consider it appropriate and measuring clicks on each article, is related to the choice of news made in the newspaper, and they lead to the same result. In other words, the action is supported both by the selective reiteration of newspaper-based past choices and by new practical openings on the website.
Our third episode presents a case of misvergent institutional work. In this case, the acceptance by journalists of the proposal by the website to place news in an advertising space is recognized as wrong. The iterational agency, recognizing this action as a typical case in news work and locating it in the category of a problematic case, shapes the evaluation of the current practice as not respecting the institutional norms of business news. This disrespect is interpreted as a mistake and as such should be corrected in order to be able to project the website news work as business news in the future.
Technology, meaning and agency in institutional work
The divergent, convergent and misvergent instances of institutional work illustrated in this article highlight ‘the ideational aspects’ (Zilber, 2008, p. 151) of institutional work. As we discussed above, when journalists at Il Sole 24 Ore identify a situation as a dilemma, and engage in institutional work by ascribing meaning to their actions, they do so by drawing on past experiences at the same time as projecting this meaning into the future. To be active in the present they need to make action meaningful by relating it to the realized, what has been, and the realizable, what will become. Mead, whose work inspired both Emirbayer and Mische, and Berger and Luckmann, said that ‘reality exists in a present’ (Mead, 1932/2002, p. 1), but ‘the immediacy of the immediate situation is extended by our ability to imaginatively construct a sense of past and future’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 968). Our empirical episodes show that this extension results from the active efforts of institutional workers and their use of technology. In fact, the selective reiteration of past habits, patterns and customs, performed by humans in collaboration with non-humans (the print newspaper actively participates in the reconstruction of the past), constructs ‘the way we do business news here’, while at the same time anticipates and founds the imagination of the future. It is in the actively selective reconstruction of the past and prospective anticipation of the future, which are related to each other, that the practical emergent action is made meaningful, as in these temporal dynamics it is placed in relation to the institution at the same time as it affects it. Our study also shows that in the struggles between different temporal dimensions of agency, through which meaning is assigned to action, technology acquires an important role.
Scholars before us have pointed out that over time some institutional responsibilities are handed over to technology (Joerges & Czarniawska, 1998), to the extent that ‘inscribed in machines, institutions are literally black boxed (Whitley, 1972)’ (Czarniawska, 2008, p. 774). The print newspaper and its technical production system carry inscriptions of the institution of business news. We have shown in our study how the print newspaper, carrying inscriptions of the institution of business news as enacted by Il Sole 24 Ore, is used to give meaning to the new actions related to the website. The study thus shows how new technology, differently from old technology, can act as an opener of the black box of institution and thus trigger institutional work, while the old technology acts as a mnemonic device to evaluate current situations and makes the past ever present. The print newspaper is the object of reference in problematizing the current situation, recognizing types in it and judging it as appropriate or inappropriate, representing the past knowledge used to anticipate the future.
In other words, the print newspaper acts as the ‘law book’ of business news at Il Sole 24 Ore, used to evaluate what is the proper and improper way to act in a given situation. As a law book, it contains inscriptions of the fundamental principles of business news, as well as of resolutions of past contestations. Thus, when in the presence of new actions proposed by the website, the journalists evaluate it in relation to how the institution of business news has been enacted in the past. In performing this practical evaluation, they use the newspaper as if they were consulting the law book of business news. Some new actions might be recognized as unprecedented cases and thus call for a discussion on how to proceed with them; others might be recognized within an existing chapter of the law book. An example of the latter might be our episode ‘What is not news?’ which illustrates a case in which an action is recognized as a typical violation of a fundamental principle of business news, inscribed in the newspaper chapter on distinction between advertising and information. The unprecedented cases might be solved by adding an amendment to the law book: that is to say by accepting and institutionalizing a new action. The episode ‘How to prioritize news?’ illustrates a case in which the newspaper’s prioritizing principle in the law book is amended by including the website as a special case in the newspaper chapter; the episode ‘What sort of news’ illustrates, instead, a case in which the newspaper’s business news coverage is amended by including a new chapter for general news coverage on the website.
We thus understand the process of consulting the law book, interpreting it and adding new sections to it as an example of institutional work. This highlights two aspects of institutional work. First, the use of the print newspaper as the law book of business news cannot but be subject to interpretation; inscriptions can be interpreted in different ways, just like the law can be, and it is in this process of interpretation that meaning and technology are intertwined in institutional work. This interpretative process thus opens up the way for intentional action since the interpretations can be directed toward different enactments of business news. Second, as amendments represent the institutionalization of new action by means of their inscription in technologies, this expanded law book, consisting of the newspaper and the website, is an active object that will serve as a consulting tool for evaluating actions made possible by new technologies to come. In the setting of Il Sole 24 Ore in the future when a new technology comes along, the enactment of business news on this new medium will be governed by how journalists interpret the ‘law book’ of past technologies. We therefore prophesy that whatever possibilities future technologies propose to journalists at Il Sole 24 Ore, those that are misvergent regarding the institution of business news as previously enacted on paper and the web will neither be deemed appropriate nor accepted. Thus, even though future technology may propose such action as the customization of newspaper content (for instance, automatically generating content based on previous reader behaviour or on the demographics of the reader), a total blurring of promotional and journalistic content or content based on the geographic location of the reader made possible by GPS position, these proposals will only be accepted if journalists can make a positive interpretation of them based on the mnemonic device of old technologies. This also means that the paper newspaper in a sense will persist even on the day when there are no more print newspapers, since the newspaper will have actively shaped the way in which norms of business news, as enacted on paper and the web, are inscribed in future technologies.
Our study has raised a number of issues whose further investigation would advance our understanding of institutional work. First, based on the study reported in this article, we have discussed how journalists in retrospect are making action meaningful and how this act of ascribing meaning constitutes institutional work directed at the institution of business news. This opens up questions as to when and how such actions as reported here as triggering institutional work become themselves institutionalized, as ‘this is how we do business news at Il Sole 24 Ore’. Once this happens, how does it then stop being institutional work (in the sense of purposive action aimed toward a certain institutional outcome) and instead become taken for granted as the everyday practices of Il Sole 24 Ore journalists? Second, as we have mentioned in our analysis, in our attempt to study institutional work in relation to business news, we have inevitably bumped into related institutions, such as journalism. This illustrates the problem of treating institutions as if they were and could be isolated from other institutions. We therefore think that a fruitful way for future studies of institutions and work would be to investigate how institutional work unfolds in the intersection of several institutions, and how each of these institutions affects and is affected by this work.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Special Issue for their insightful and very helpful (and often humorous and encouraging!) comments during the editing process. We would also like to thank the Hat Order sisters for their firm support and insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping International Business School, Sweden, and the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation for the generous funding that made this research possible.