Moving Institutional Logics Forward: Emotion and Meaningful Material Practice

Feeling Our Way Back to the Future

Institutional theory, as various scholars have pointed out, has been cognitive in its orientation. Lawrence and Suddaby, who pioneered the “institutional work” approach, explicitly suggest that we look to cognitive, as opposed to affective, elements in accounting for practical action (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006, p. 218). In the institutional logics approach, Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury emphasize “vocabularies of practice” and modular “categorical elements” that can be decomposed and transposed (Thornton et al., 2012). Institutional logics, they argue, focus attention and thereby activate schema of action, identities and goals which both provide accessible “knowledge structures” through which situations “congruent” with those structures are interpreted and social interaction is ordered such that these become the premises of decision-making at both the micro and macro levels (Thornton et al., 2012, pp. 83–91, 93–95). In their approach neither identities, nor goals, which necessarily contain evaluative elements, have any emotional content, shaping action primarily through cognition (pp. 86–87). Changing situations offer “opportunities for cognitive change” (p. 100). While we know that emotions effectively focus attention, for Thornton et al. institutional logics operate through a semantic register, through “specialized vocabularies” that condition decision- and sense-making (2012, p. 96). Although they recognize in passing that “emotional energy” is an element powering the social interactions that generate the common meaning of a situation, and variable identification with an identity and a logic is a critical determinant not only of which logics prevail and the extent to which they depend on regulative and normative pressures, emotion is not itself theorized as part of their micro-foundations of an institutional logic. “The effects of institutional logics are mediated through the cognition of social actors interacting with other social actors in negotiation and cooperation” (Thornton et al., 2012, p. 102).

Given their critique of the neglect of persons and the social negotiation of meaning in institutional logics approaches, one would expect emotion to be theoretically salient in the “inhabited institutions” approach (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006). It is not. While Hallett and Ventresca are quite correct that “institutions” are often deployed as abstract uniforms “ready to wear,” the inhabited approach they outline specifies neither the role of emotion in persons’ readiness to wear it, nor in whom one is when so dressed.

Hallett and Ventresca exemplify their approach through an insightful and subtle re-reading of Gouldner’s account of the displacement of personalistic, trust-based management by a new rationalized, impersonal managerial regime that used sanctions to enforce compliance with rules in a gypsum mine (Gouldner, 1954). Their account is, in fact, suffused with feeling. The movement from informal to formal authority, from worker autonomy to bureaucratic rule, was based both on a movement from craft to industrial understandings of work, and on a shift from supervisors who shared a social life with workers outside the mine towards managers who did not. The actual forms of bureaucracy—whether ignored ritual forms, forms mutually accepted by managers and workers, or conventions enforced by sanctions—depended on social interactions in the mine itself. There was no invariant bureaucratic logic; each system had its own pathway to comparable productivities.

Hallett and Ventresca argue that it is through “social interactions” that institutions are “inhabited,” “infused with meaning” and different types of bureaucracy are “produced” (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006, p. 226). Yes, but: the social interactions that condition the actual operation of bureaucratic forms are not institutionally neutral either. They depend on what value is at stake and are grounded not only in the positionality of workers and managers within the firm, but in other institutional logics. The value of life, in terms of mine safety regulations, is tied to “representative bureaucracy” and the solidarity between managers and workers it promotes, whereas the value of profitability is linked to “punishment-centered bureaucracy” and its antagonisms. Human life and profit, of course, have a primary locus: family and capitalism. Workers and managers seem to be negotiating domain-specific constellations of institutional logics.

The social interactions of the previous “indulgent” pattern were grounded in, as Gouldner argues, kinship and friendship, or as one of the workers recounted, in a “fine sentiment.” Because so many of the workers knew each other personally, interactions were informal. As a result, “everybody’s sociable” and Gouldner describes “friendly and highly egalitarian relationships between supervisors and workers.” As Gouldner remarks, quoted by the authors: “For a man cannot easily behave in an impersonal, sternly rule-prescribed fashion towards his kinsmen, or for that matter, toward his old friends” (Gouldner, 1954, p. 56; Hallett & Ventresca, 2006, p. 223).

Bureaucratic form comes to the mine as a new structure of feeling, “made felt through changing interactions between the workers and the management” (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006, p. 224). The new manager was “ignorant of the magic words of condolence and congratulation.” Trust was grounded in feelings of love, friendship and solidarity, of the conventions and feelings of family tied to craft versus the objectified impersonality of business tied to industry. There is an institutional phenomenology to be developed, an emotional register which is part and parcel of its operability, an emotional link between who we are and what we do.

Scholars have recently called for affect and emotion to be added to Thornton et al.’s “y-axis” in delineating attributes of an institutional logic or as necessary to account for field emergence (Grodal & Granqvist, 2014; Toubiana, Thornton, Creed, & Zietsma, 2014; Voronov, 2014). That presumes that they were not always already there.

Emotion is a constituent of social life in classical and post-structural social theory, as well as in continental philosophy. “The hallmark of moral authority,” wrote Émile Durkheim, “is that its psychic properties alone give it power” (Durkheim, 1995, p. 210). Moral authority is an emotion we feel, an emotion thought through collective representation, both of these sustained through the sensuous excitement generated by movement around the totem, the “group incarnated” (Durkheim, 1995, pp. 209, 212, 222, 239). ¹ “It is the nature of moral forces expressed merely by images that they cannot affect the human mind with any forcefulness without putting it outside itself, and plunging it in a state describable as ‘ecstatic’” (Durkheim, 1995, p. 228). Totemic representations both bring forth and recall the emotions of moral authority, an authority that is both outside and inside the individual, transcendent and immanent. It is through these external objects that people “comprehend those feelings” of collective force (Durkheim, 1995, p. 221). Contra Kant, Durkheim derives our very capacities for causal thought, our capacity to impose our categories on nature, to dare explain the ways in which one thing “participates” in another, from these emotions, from this “mental effervescence” (Durkheim, 1995, p. 238). Indeed, it is that emotion, “that energy alone,” understood as a manifestation of an impersonal force immanent in the world, that is the “real object of the cult” (Durkheim, 1995, p. 191).

Max Weber analysed value rationality as an emotional state. Value rationality has a conceptual affinity to “affectual” action, action determined by “the actor’s specific affects and feeling states” (Weber, 1978, p. 25), one of Weber’s four types of social action. Each—value and affect—is done “for its own sake,” the difference between them located in the former’s “self-conscious formulation” and its “planned orientation” (Weber, 1978, p. 25). For Weber values are not simply valid ideas, but “value feelings” (Weber, 1975, p. 182). ² Indeed, in his catalogue of religious states associated with the quest for salvation, Weber argued that they were all “sought for the “sake of emotional value,” transitory, subjective states of “psychic extraordinariness,” actions to which are “imputed” “metaphysical meaning” (Weber, 1958a, p. 278). And in his analysis of Calvinism, he made “anxiety” over divine election the driver of its followers’ ascetic and methodical rationalism (Weber, 1958b, p. 112). Although he excluded the “emotional contents” of value as a basis for defining a value, for making a causal interpretation, or even as an individual’s basis for engaging in social action, he recognized that feelings are an essential basis of valuation (Weber, 1975, p. 183). ³

Turning to continental philosophy, Martin Heidegger, who sought to upend the explanatory power of instrumental rationality, argued that the affectual is the primordial register in which Dasein—literally “there being,” Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of human being—is in the world, and by implication, that worldhood, as a structure of significance, is also affective, the way things “matter.” “Dasein’s openness to the world is constituted existentially by the attunement of a state-of-mind” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 177). Dasein’s being in the world, its “there,” is not primordially cognitive and discursive, but practical and affectual, based on a projective understanding of the affordances, the possible purposes, of an equipped world on the one side, and on what Heidegger calls “states of mind,” or “moods,” affective states on the other (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 174–175). “Mood,” Heidegger writes, is “prior to all cognition and volition, and “beyond” their range of disclosure” (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 173, 175). Purpose and affect are essential to worldhood. One brings things near in the way that they matter, out of “becoming affected in some way” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 176). Affect here is a way in which we submit ourselves to the significant world, a world that shows itself by our being “affected” by it. Understanding of possible projects of an equipped world and states of mind, or mood, are equiprimordial and interlocked. “A state-of-mind always has its understanding… Understanding always has its mood” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 182). These affective states simultaneously maintain the “Being of the ‘there’” and “cover up” our own Being, our “thrownness” into that equipped world (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 173–175, 182). In this phenomenology the objective and the affective are co-implicated.

Institutions and Emotions

These thinkers all question the bracketing of emotion from institutional category, valuation and significance. But in what sense is emotion institutional? The dominant approaches treat emotions as the individual “raw materials” out of which institutions, or social movements seeking to transform them, are made (Jasper, 2011; Voronov, 2014). Those who study the role of emotions in social organization largely treat them as natural media, individual attributes whose expression is regulated in conformity with institutional or organizational expectations, what Hochschild has termed “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1979, 1983), or which are mobilized and evoked in order to create or sustain institutions or the social movements targeting them (Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2014). Emotion, in these approaches, offers an energetic mechanism for institutionalization.

In the dominant understanding emotions are human resources or social media—such as the tendency of structurally subordinate women to convert “feelings” into resources and to be differentially charged with the task of “emotional work” (Hochschild, 1983); Lewin’s positing of anxiety induced by the inadequacies of ordinary modes of behavior as a psychological source of readiness for organizational change (Golsorkhi, 2015, p. 189); Creed and his co-authors’ analysis of the way that shame sustains institutional forms through self-regulation based on “systemic” understandings of what constitutes shameful deviations from norms or prescriptions and “episodic shaming” of deviations from those norms (Creed et al., 2014); Quattrone’s account of Jesuit “self-accountability” operating through inculcation of confusion, pain and shame (Quattrone, 2015); Taylor’s account of moral outrage, love and identity formation in the sustenance of self-help social movements seeking to normalize stigmatized identities (Taylor, 1996; Taylor & Leitz, 2010); Jasper’s account of how hope, anger and “affective loyalties” are both means and ends of social movements (Jasper, 2011, see also Collins, 2001, 2004) ⁴ ; Grodal and Granqvist’s analysis of the ways in which affect mediates the behavioral effects of expectations generated by discourse in the emergence of the nanotechnology field (Grodal & Granqvist, 2014); or a scarce source of investment in Goodwin’s study of the affective trade-offs between family and political mobilization in the Huk rebellion (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001).

For Pierre Bourdieu all fields depend not just on their own principles of classification, but on an emotional investment, a “visceral commitment,” an embodied “interest” in the stake within them (Bourdieu, 2000, pp. 98–99, 101–102). This is the energy of habitus, a “desire to be” (Bourdieu, 2000: 150). If the internalized and incorporated classifications, the “practical taxonomies” that co-constitute the reality of a field derive from the transposition of position vis a vis the field’s dominant form of capital into disposition, they are “grounded in a prereflexive belief in the indisputed value of the instruments of construction and of the objects thus constructed” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 25; 1990, p. 146; 2000, pp. 99–100). Habitus, a manner of being “there” in the world, equips individuals with a capacity to enter, invest and act in a field, generating competition for the dominant form of capital thereby sustaining the illusio, “the unjustifiable investment,” that what is at stake in a field actually has value (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 250; Bourdieu,1998; Bourdieu, 2000, p. 102; Friedland, 2009). For Bourdieu emotion is a medium for the incorporation of the world, for being able and wanting to be inhabited by it. As in Heidegger’s pairing of understanding and state of mind, the objective possibilities immanent in practice, le sens pratique, and the affects they afford and depend upon are twinned. The making of habitat into habitus, he argues, is affective, on the one side a body “exposed and endangered in the world, faced with the risk of emotion, lesion, suffering, sometimes death,” and on the other, characterized by a “love,” a “visceral attachment of a socialized body to the social body that has made it” (Bourdieu, 2000, pp. 140, 143, 145). For Bourdieu emotion is paradigmatically a medium for domination. Sexuality and love are mediations of gendered domination, one’s “investment in the domestic space” being the “initial form of the illusio,” the familial order a sexed structure of domination in which women accede to the symbolic violence of men (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 166). Love is the first illusio. A child learns to invest in “the social game” by becoming an object for familial others, by being valued through the value with which he identifies himself (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 166). Likewise in romantic love, a person falls in love with a partner whose habitus is harmonious with his or her own. “Two people can give each other no better proof of the affinity of their tastes than the taste they have for each other… Love is… a way of loving one’s own destiny in someone else and so of feeling loved in one’s own destiny” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 243). Sexual desire is an eroticization of domination (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 21). Love is then a de-politicization of erotics, known by its difference from the power relations habitually inscribed in sex. Love between adults is a “miraculous truce,” an almost mystical suspension of the sexual domination standing as the foundation of all forms of domination in which masculine social reproduction trumps feminine physiological reproduction (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 112; Friedland, 2009). Love is constituted through renunciation of mutual objectification, not its affordance of mutual subjectification.

In the conventions of worth approach, Boltanski and Thévenot understand actors’ critical capacities to agree about the goodness of common goods, to establish relations of equivalence through “things that count,” as a “cognitive ability” or competence (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p. 32; Boltanski, 2012, pp. 55, 92). Even the discernment of hidden “passions” lurking behind virtuous intentions that would otherwise qualify civic worth is a cognitive capacity (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p 114). Emotion is localized in one world of worth, that of inspiration with its relations of creation: “Evidence takes the form of an affective state, a feeling that is spontaneous, involuntary, and fleeting…” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, pp. 162–163). Emotion has a greater presence in their later works. In Boltanski’s understanding of the polities, critique is driven by the “anxiety” of injustice, justice itself is a “feeling”: “the incessant murmur attesting to the indignation, pain and anxiety triggered by the feeling of injustice” (Boltanski, 2012, p. 28). And in his elaboration of modes of action beyond justice—fairness, violence and love—Boltanski sources emotion at the interface between regimes of action, as a manifestation of the failure of equivalence or a trace of what cannot be recognized, the element of love in justice, for example (Boltanski, 2012, pp. 76, 162, 292; see Friedland & Arjaliès, 2017). And in Thévenot’s subsequent theorization of modes of engagement—project and attachment for example—emotions play a more manifest role both as constituents of “cognitive formats” as “ease and “self-confidence,” and as signals of “trying moments”—anxiety, dis-ease, humiliation—in modes of engagement that cannot be sustained, called into doubt by other modes, revealing “the engagement from the starting point of a moved and emotional body” (Thévenot, 2007, p. 414; Thévenot, 2012; Thévenot, 2013, pp. 166–167).

Questions of identification and investment, as well as the solidarities of practice, and hence the formation of groups through the institutional logics these sustain, are all trans-institutional ways in which passions can be institutionally positioned (Friedland, 2017; Voronov & Vince, 2012). In Selznick’s institutionalism, identification with an institutional value is an emotional basis of identity (Kraatz & Flores, 2015). Zietsma, likewise, has shown the ways in which emotional investments in institutional values generate the energies out of which institutions are both maintained and transformed (Zietsma, 2014). Zietsma compares a Canadian advocacy group for a degenerative disease in which there was a highly emotive tension between the logic of care and science, and a Japanese social enterprise organized by socialists and housewives into cooperatives and workers’ collectives. In both it was the emotional energies invested in values that drove the development of organizational forms. The first led to a structural differentiation of the two elements; the second adapted contradictory elements—entrepreneurship and democratic representation—to make them consistent with the organization’s core values. In both, an emotional investment in values enables resistance, reproduction and recombination.

An affective “human nature” plays a mediating and animating role in a number of Boltanski and Thévenot’s “worlds of worth.” For example, although the market world depends on an “emotional distance between the situation and oneself, control with respect to one’s own emotions,” they argue that it is love that powers interest, the market’s engine. “Interest is thus their real motivation, the property of their self that makes them be themselves by wanting to obtain satisfaction. One succeeds through the strength of this desire, because one loves. Real life is what people want to acquire” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, pp. 197, 200). ⁵ The goods of the market are things “toward which competing desires for possession converge.” Because market objects register the desire of others through conventions of priced competition, one also desires others’ desires. Market worth is a vehicle for coordination around a common good, a good registering the commonness of our “love” of “real life.” This casting of the market suggests cognitive competences are affectively charged, that cognition is effective because it is affective.

Where emotion mediates the development of institutional logics, an exogenous invariance of emotions as feelings is often assumed. Where basic emotions (like anger, fear and disgust, for example), their physiology, including their physiognomy, as facial signals or signifiers, are universal, approaching emotions as institutional intermediaries—as conveyors, signs, resources or instruments—seems appropriate (Ekman, 1993; Ekman & Friesen, 1975; Weigel, 2012). Such emotions can be instruments through which institutions are sustained or disrupted even if, indeed especially because, the emotion has no meaningful interior relation to the conventional practices of an institution or the values at play in its operations. Affects prior to and independent of representation and cognition, and hence of intention, can best function as institutional intermediaries. They do not constitute meaning; they validate and mark it. On the one side their universality and independence of intentional objects are compelling evidence of the reality of the domain of socially constructed goods. On the other their corporeality converts spoken goods into our human singularity.

But many emotions are hardly basic—greed, loyalty, patriotism, acquisitiveness, possessiveness, bravery, reverence, piety, objectivity, romantic love—but rather part of institutional formations involving complex material, cognitive, practical, evaluative and affective elements. Such emotions may not only mediate the elaboration and reproduction of an institutional logic; they are institutionally constituted and constitutive. The commitment to a value, engagement in the practices by which it is produced, can entail a way of being that is constitutive of their coherence and actionability, essential to both the subjectivity and objectivity an institutional logic entails. This is not just an emotional state triggered by that value’s violation or realization, such as shame, anxiety or pride, ancillary pains and pleasures of practice. Specific emotions may be afforded or given by that value and its normative and practical equipment.

Ways of doing and being may be co-implicated both within and between institutions. Romantic love, for example, not only has its own institutional architecture; it is an integral part of modernity’s larger configuration. “Intimacy is an institution rather than a measure of a mature psyche,” writes Eva Illouz (2012, p. 71). In several works Illouz points to the ways in which the affectivity of love is tied up with the constitution of modern selfhood, its agency through willful and passionate choice, its worth through recognition based on the sharing of an independent “emotionally naked and intimate” self (Illouz, 1997; 2007; 2012, p. 39).

There is, too, an historical intimacy between the passions of love and the instrumental strategy of capitalism. Illouz elaborates the emotional co-constitution of romantic love and capitalist commodity consumption, which conjointly evoke, elaborate and sustain specific forms of affectivity. It is not just that the phenomenology of romantic love and certain forms of commodity consumption parallel each other in their freely chosen, liminal, evanescent, hedonistic and episodic intensities. The historical formation and cross-class diffusion of the rites of romantic love over the course of the twentieth century were on the one hand tied to new forms of leisure consumption outside the family and the social group, and on the other hand, commodities, particularly ego-expressive and leisure goods (cars, dining out, movies, travel), were marketed by drawing on the templates of erotic romance such that the goods themselves became “objects of desire” (Illouz, 1997, pp. 35–37, 47, 82). Advertising cut beauty from character and soldered it to sexuality. “Consumer culture put desire at the center of subjectivity, and sexuality became a sort of generalized metaphor of desire” (Illouz, 2012, p. 43). Love morphed into an invisible consumption good and consumption an occasion and an expression of romantic desire. Illouz writes:

Consumption and romantic emotions have progressively merged, each shrouding the other in a mystical halo. Commodities have now penetrated the romantic bond so deeply that they have become the invisible and unacknowledged spirit reigning over romantic encounters. (Illouz: 1997, p. 11)

Romantic love is today based on the ontology of the authentic, essentialized and sexualized self. Illouz shows how the rise of a therapeutic style in the United States was associated with a particular understanding of the emotions of personhood as a “true self” who endures a “psychic suffering.” The modalities by which these emotions are accessed, communicated, measured and made into individual capacities bear on economic productivity, the mode of coordination within the corporation, the vehicles through which marriages are managed and pre-marital sexual encounters achieved, and political identities are formed and affirmed through “recognition” (Illouz, 2007, 2012). ⁶ “Therapeutic” practices are premised on a belief in something like a substance—here, the normative, realized self—which is “never given a clear positive content” (Illouz, 2007, p. 48).

Emotion’s nature, its production and productivity form a particular constellation in modern marriage. The emotional, “authentic” and ever-developing, sexualized self is the ontological ground of modern marriages based on romantic love, an autonomous self expressed, revealed, formed and recognized in interactions sustained by introspective choice in its name (Illouz, 2012, pp. 38–39, 91, 99). In this order, emotion is the cause, not the consequence, of commitment, a willful manifestation of an “authentic” self; sexuality—unlinked from marital morality—becomes a central element of personhood, an autonomous pleasure and a primary visual criterion of mate selection; love becomes a basis of social mobility played out in large, anonymous, socially unregulated marriage markets in which players trade mate attributes including the new criteria of sexiness and personality, the outcome of which reflects one’s inner value (Illouz, 2012, p. 53). Men, not women, are inclined to emotional disinterest as a manifestation and instrument of their masculinity, their market power and their attempts to counter the devaluation inherent in female abundance (Illouz, 2012, pp. 85, 102–104). In the absence of group regulation and closure of mating and mate pools, market dispositions provide the template for choosing. Illouz writes:

The triumph of love and sexual freedom marked the penetration of economics into the machine of desire. One of the main transformations of sexual relationships in modernity consists in the tight intertwinement of desire with economics and the question of value and one’s worth. In its very essence, it is economics that now come to haunt desire. (Illouz, 2012, p. 58)

This ground is very different from early modern Western marriage where two individuals who know their value by objective social statuses engage in a publicly visible and socially regulated, ritualized courtship among a small number of socially stratified potential mates issuing in mutual promises—like sexual abstinence and fidelity—understood as issuing from interior moral characters, commitments whose consequence is the full affectivity of love (Illouz, 2012, pp. 30–31). In this regime it was men, not women, who had to first resolutely manifest their feelings (Illouz, 2012, p. 63). Emotion was here part of one’s moral equipment, tied to acts, not personalities, an affect of practice. In Foucauldian spirit joining ontology, practice and telos, Illouz presents us with a probing synthetic analysis of the inter-institutional ordering power of an episteme and the migration of its techniques. How and what we feel are given by and give us the institutional domains that affect us.

Institutions may have an emotional specificity, not just as vehicles or instruments of institutionalization, but as constituted through the practices characteristic of an institution. And reciprocally what we do, our practice, may itself be animated by a regime of feeling, such that our emotions are part of an institution’s production functions, the regimes of practice in which we engage and by which we are engaged in a particular way. ⁷ These emotions may not only bring us to work; they may be part of our work, part of what makes that work work.

Institutional affect and effect are likely co-implicated. Emotional “work,” including the work necessary not to have or reveal emotions, so central to the Enlightenment vision of the modern subject, is ubiquitous. What we do, what we value and how we feel are bound up one with the other in ways we do not yet understand. Rather than just “feeling rules,” we should consider the possibility that the rule, or regime, of specific emotions is part of the constitution of an institutional logic. Rather than just considering the ways in which emotions condition institutionalization, we should also probe the ways in which emotions are institutionally constituted and constitutive. We cleave to institutional ways of doing because of the way they make us feel; indeed, we are the way they make us feel. Institutions are ways not only of doing, but of being. We are moved and move by and through them, not just as grades, but kinds, of fuel. Affects ground the good in specific ways; the practices through which those goods are produced and circulate in society may depend on them. ⁸

Shame, Shame, Shame

“We all swim in a sea of shame, all day, every day,” Creed and his co-authors remind us (Creed et al., 2014, p. 283). I can pose the difficulty of thinking the relation of emotion and institution through Creed et al.’s exquisitely crafted essay on shame as a source of institutional reproduction and change (Creed et al., 2014). Creed and his co-authors posit shame as a social emotion through which individuals are motivated to sustain “standards of behavior” independently of coercive sanctions and material rewards. The model works through anticipation of emotional sanctioning by self and others of deviations from the “law”—norms, prescriptions, driven by one’s emotional attachment to a social group who live by those norms, “preserving valued social bonds” being its primary engine. ⁹ Working from social phenomenological premises, the cognitive meanings of things derive from social interaction, so then one can argue that cognitions are rooted in social affect for the group from which the meaning is derived in the first place. ¹⁰ Social emotion is here a medium through which interaction is soldered to the meaning of things.

Shame, as an institutional mechanism, operates evaluatively through reductions in social standing within a group (Creed et al., 2014, p. 279). “People maintain social bonds principally through ongoing reciprocal ratifications of their standing as valued persons within a social group” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 281). Their evaluative framing has a kinship with the evaluative reality “test” in Boltanski and Thévenot’s orders of worth approach in which “beings” are qualified as more or less worthy by the requisites of a regionalized justice and the requirements of qualification necessary to coordination (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). But here it is the “valued community,” or the “value of bonds,” not the value grounding the community, that has primacy. Affective commitments to “institutional elements” are commitments to groups (Creed et al., 2014, p. 288). ¹¹

The value of social bonds is their ability to satisfy individuals’ “need for recognition,” not their ability to produce, realize, incarnate or enact a particular value (Creed et al., 2014, p. 282). The actual content of systemic shame—what is shameful—is a medium for group membership, for being a “valued person” within it (Creed et al., 2014, p. 31). Institutional prescriptions are compelling, they argue, “because they are rooted in social bonds” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 283). It is the affect of the valued social bond, not the value as affect that animates the practices around which the social group is formed, that powers the system in this model. The cultural is reduced to the social.

The authors identify systemic shame as a Foucauldian disciplinary power, a “technology of subjectification,” quoting Foucault, that “imposes a law of truth on him” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 282). Foucault’s history of sexuality, which tackled the guilt and shame associated with Western sexuality, hinged on the ontological specificity of that sexuality—as aphrodisia for classical Greek or flesh for the early Christian, for example, as well as on the practices through which the self was formed and the teloi towards which those practices were oriented (Foucault, 1980). Foucault did not separate cognition and emotion, as Creed et al. do, in which cognitions “set the stage for social control” through prescription, while emotion provides the “impetus for compliance” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 283). As Foucault pointed out in the case of classical Greek homoeroticism, it was the difficulty of controlling the force of aphrodisia that was a source of anxiety for the free male citizen, not the homosexual acts themselves (Foucault, 1990). The stylization of erotic desire was part and parcel of subject formation, of the constitution of free personhood. Emotion was not external to cognition. Likewise in the case of American same-sex desire and practice, wouldn’t one expect different emotional registers to be variably associated with this sex depending on whether it was constituted as immorality, mortal sin, congenital disease, family pathology, mutual pleasure, citizenship right, or love? ¹² The causal status of the ontology and its co-implication with emotion is implicated where Creed et al. point to ontological contest through “sensemaking” as the critical site through which resistance to institutional prescription is effected. Foucault also pointed to the ways in which pleasure and desire were not exterior to modes of disciplinarity, the way in which power itself constituted pleasure, specifically a disciplinary knowing of pleasure that is constitutive of the pleasure itself, the pleasure of a specific way of its knowing, and of the power that constitutes it via the eroticization of power that ensues (Foucault, 1978, pp. 44, 78). A Foucauldian would likely object to Creed and his co-authors’ universalization of systemic shame as a mechanism of subjectification and their marginalization of ontology and purpose in the constitution of and operation of social emotion. Shame may be an institutionally specific emotional register tied to particular types of value and the practices they undergird, to the nature of the subjectivity it affords and the social bond that depends on it. ¹³ In their analysis, social bonds tend to be exterior—the way, for example, shame is weaker where social bonds are weaker (Creed et al., 2014, p. 290). The ways in which affect conditions and constitutes the nature of that sociality is not addressed.

It is not that their approach is “wrong”, but if affect has an institutional specificity, this gets complicated. Sexual subjectification in Foucault’s analysis is tied to the ontology and telos around which it is organized. The Foucauldian would presume the same for “social emotions.” Creed et al. are well aware that we need to investigate other social emotions, like pride or contempt for instance, and their role in the “evaluation and preservation of valued social bonds” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 297). The connection between shame and recognition suggests a particular subjectivity and sociality, unlike that which one would expect to find in ascetic Protestantism, for example, where the ontology of grace made the judgement of others ultimately irrelevant. We are confronted by a daunting task if it is not just the feeling of the social that matters, but the social construction of feelings and the ways in which particular social forms are constituted through those feelings and vice versa. Institutions may operate in specific emotional registers, emotions that have become so conventional that we take them for granted, whether the possessive individualism and acquisitive greed integral to the market, the prideful aggressiveness associated with the nation-state, the relentless curiosity and objectivity of the scientist (Macpherson, 2011; Voronov, 2014). If particular affects, or affective regimes, are afforded by particular values or practices, an institutional logic obtains where we are affected by the affects it affords, and where those affects are part of the effects effected through its practices.

My argument is not that value and group commitments are unrelated. But starting with substantive values, I suspect, is more likely to take one towards institutional specificity and the co-constitution of emotion and institution; starting with the social group, towards trans-institutional emotional mechanism. Creed et al. remind us (citing Hallett & Ventresca, 2006, p. 216) that in institutionalization it is not simply what people ‘do’ that matters, but what they do ‘together’” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 277). Every single element—what, do, together, as well as affect, is at stake and potentially in play in an adequate theorization of the role of emotion in institution. The specification of the relations between them is yet to come.

The ways in which affect, social bonds, ontology, telos, practice and institution are co-implicated, and with respect to the same domain (sexuality) and the same affect (shame) around which Creed and his co-authors center their work, are suggested by Amy Schalet’s comparative ethnography of teenage sexuality in the United States and the Netherlands (Schalet, 2011). Schalet contrasts the ways in which Dutch middle-class parents “normalize” this sexuality by allowing their adolescent children to have sex in their homes, whereas American parents “dramatize” it by forbidding it. She lays out the divergent “cultural logics” grounded in two models of individualism—interdependent and antagonistic—within which these divergent behaviors make sense (Schalet, 2011, p. 83). If the Dutch emphasize self-regulation of their children and put primary value on gezelligheid, “togetherness,” which they also use as a mechanism of control, the Americans use coercive and rule-bound regulation and put primary value on autonomy (Schalet, 2011, p. 16). These are tied to specific parental sexual ontologies, one based on the consensual pleasures of love in which there is no shame and little gender differentiation, and the other on sex as the operation of uncontrollable hormones which have nothing to do with love, are freighted with bodily shame, gender antagonism, and excluded from the family home (on shame, see Schalet, 2011, p. 34). For Dutch parents their teenage children’s erotic love is a vehicle for the exercise of self-regulation, whereas for Americans it is a manipulative danger to their developmental autonomy. Subjectification in the first is based on self-regulation in the context of a familial social bond, in the second in a rebellious breaking-away from parental authority in part through the secret sex itself. These differences are tied to the institutions that have hegemony in the two societies: family and state in the first, market and religion in the second. The emotional content of sexuality not only diverges in the two societies, it is tied to particular discourses, forms of sociality and institutional contexts, which cohere in what Schalet terms a “cultural logic.” Emotion, ontology and practice, including the very practice of individuality and sociality, are co-implicated.

Emotion and Institutional Logics

To locate emotions in institutional logics, I need to say what I think they are. Institutional logics are orders of meaningful material practice with persistent forms and visible effects. Institutional logics are manifest in persistent interlocked constellations of subjects, practices and objects. The materiality of that practice is located in the corporeality of subjects and in the obdurate quality of things (Figure 1). ¹⁴ The meaning of that practice is located in a language of goods. Institutional logics practically join goods and objects with specific effects or productivities, as well as goods and subjects endowed with and animated by specific identifications, emotional investments and ways of being, affording capacities to be particularly affected. ¹⁵ They join what we do and who were are. Institutional logics are simultaneously orders of objectification and subjectification, that is, orders of material practice that depend on and afford the particular subjectivity of subjects and objectivity of objects, which in turn depend on these same orders of practice (see Figure 1). ¹⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Institutional Logics and their Constitutive Elements.

I conceptualize the goods grounding an institutional logic as institutional substances. The kinds of goods I have in mind are market value, property, God, salvation, nation, sovereignty, security, information, scientific knowledge, artistic beauty, popular representation, nature, accountability, health, romantic love.

Institutional goods are unobservable, non-phenomenal, ontologically subjective. Although institutional logics are orders of valuation, a substance is not a value. The value term typically refers to a subjective relation to the world, valorization a value ascribed by a subject, as in Selznick’s classic notion of institutionalizing as “to infuse with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand,” a “prizing of the device for its own sake” (Selznick, 1984 [1957], p. 17). A substance, unlike a value, cannot be reduced to something subjectively imprinted on an exterior object or device, and certainly not just for its own sake.

The ways in which the effects and affects condition and are conditioned by institutional goods is an empirical question. I hypothesize a parallel ordering of object effects and bodily affects. As a first crude and very provisional approximation I would suggest a tripartite classification: transversality, affinity and institutional specificity. The institutionally specificity of objects and emotions, with the corresponding problem of the relation between internalist and constructionist theoretical stances, affords parallel classifications (Arjaliès & Friedland, 2014).

Some objects and emotions—software and shame—are transversal in their affordances. Their significance and effects do not depend on a particular good and can be found anywhere. And reciprocally perhaps the production of a particular good does not cease for want of them. Their function has no institutional specificity: we can use them to help us do almost anything. Others—anti-ballistic missiles, cribs, microscopes, bonds and balance sheets, genitals, on the one side, and possessive individualism and collective hatred and aggression on the other—afford particular goods, their use and legitimacy tied to the fact that they are its instruments or means of production. You rarely find a crib in a military base or a church, guns in a classroom or a laboratory. The association of individual possessiveness and the capitalist market, collective hatred and the nation-state, love and the family all seem to be cases of institutional affinity. Although these have a functional delimitation and the production of the good depends on them, their effects do not depend on their yoking to that good. And still others—sacred centers, altars, money, property, corporations, equities, brands, accounts, marital beds, heirs, art works, ballot boxes, borders, battlefields, the Eucharist, scientific reports in the case of objects, and romantic love, patriotism and piety in the case of emotions—have an institutional specificity: their effects depend on the goods to which they are yoked and are the occasion for their existence and deployment. The use, effects and legitimacy of these objects depend on their symbolization of an institutional good. These have a functional specificity and are part of a good’s production function. The good cannot be produced without them; the object is not effective and the subject not affective without the good. These kinds of objectivities and subjectivities call out to us. They move us and in our being moved by them, by being affected and interested, we testify to their being. These are institutional objects and emotions.

With its co-implication of the teleological and the affective an institutional substance has a kinship with Schatzki’s “teleoaffective structure” ¹⁷ —combinations of ends and “allied” emotions, which “link” the “organized nexus” of doings and sayings, the primary elements of practice in his theory (Schatzki, 2002, pp. 77, 80; 2012, p. 15; Nicolini, 2013,pp. 164–166). ¹⁸ Emotions here are sources of “enjoy[ment],” or pain, one can or ought to experience while engaged in the practice (Schatzki, 2002, p. 80). These emotions are “embodied understandings” of practice (Everts, Lahr-Kurten, & Watson, 2011). Ends are that for the “sake of which” persons act; activities are organized hierarchically, “top[ping] off” in activities not pursuant to further activities: these are the ends of practice (Schatzki, 2012, p. 15).

The link between practice and ends/emotions, the teleoaffective structure, is normative: one should or may pursue them in practice (Schatzki, 2002, p. 80; 2012, p. 16). Schatzki’s approach to emotion largely aligns with “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1979). Practices “reflect” or “express” the teleoaffective structures, the directionality of practice, its purposes and passions (Schatzki, 2012, p. 15; Schatzki, 2002, p. 80). Teleoaffective structure is not a production function. Neither emotion nor end has a necessary relationship to practice. Unlike institutional substances Schatzki’s ends, whether activities or “states of existence,” are neither necessary to the conduct of the practice, nor are practices necessary to the realization of the ends: “advancing career prospects, living the good life” in his cited case of coursework, for example. The teleoaffective structure affords the intelligibility of practice, the mutual practical understanding of what is going on and, hence, what makes sense to do. It does not “govern” activity, nor determine what people do, but what make sense for them to do (Schatzki, 2002, p. 81). Teleology appears to be subordinate to ontology, the project or purpose to the nature of the doing. By contrast, an institutional substance is both a good and a real, uncomfortably spanning the teleological and the ontological, not just giving sense to or animating a practice, but rendering it real and actionable, effective and affective.

Institutional logics obtain where the effectivity and affectivity of material practice depend on the good. ¹⁹ Subjects and objects are institutional to the extent that their subjectification and objectification depend upon that good. Institutional logics are objective in a double sense. On the one hand, institutional logics operate through specific objects or constellations of objects whose practical affordances produce particular effects. On the other, their operation depends on the inscription of objectives in the subjects affected by them, not just desire for the actionable, to want what can be done, but to feel the doing itself as a desirable form of aliveness, the tie between the doing and the being. Objectivity depends upon our being affected, to feel the things that matter. Affectivity is part of an object’s effects; its effects are part of the subjects’ affects. If effectivity is critical to distinguishing rite and ideology from reality, affectivity is critical not only in sustaining the object as an objective, in making the actionable both into an act and an object of desire, but in affording a subjectivity not only capable of that action, but whose particular and singular subjectivity in part substantiates the reality of the realizable good. The specificity of one’s way of being is testament to the substantive reason at stake in the game. ²⁰ It is, and must be, because I am.

Effectivity and affectivity both substantiate the good. Both of these—the materiality of objects and the affectivity of subjects—have been neglected by those seeking to forward the institutional logical approach (Jones, Boxenbaum, & Anthony, 2013). Although it is the latter that concerns us here, it is reasonable to suppose that emotion would be particularly important where an institutional logic cannot be materialized in the object world, whether not yet or ever. This accords with Boltanski and Thévenot’s treatment of the bodily authority dominant in the cité of inspiration where formatting objects are absent. Inspired worth is “manifested by feelings and passion,” uncontrollable and unmeasurable, a passion that instills a “desire to create… along with anxiety or doubt, love for the object pursued, and suffering” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, pp. 159–160). Emotion is itself a form of evidence for inspired worth. Denunciations of the very world to be tested in a situation incline toward “inspired” worth “for want of objects belonging to a different nature” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, pp. 229–230).

For want of objects on which to rely, the being who seeks to reverse the situation all by himself has to collect in his person the nature in which he wants the test to shift, and by his very act has to make the higher common principle present… The worth of reference is then confused with the worth of the person who presents himself as the measure of all things; this “madness of worth” may constitute the ultimate way of unsettling a situation that holds together.

And reciprocally it should also be the case that materialization is critical where institutional logics do not have an emotional specificity, where, in terms of a certain tradition in the philosophy of emotion, emotions are not institutionally individuated (Teroni, 2007, pp. 398–399).

In positing an institutional substance I use the Aristotelian category which points to an immanent form of being, as its “essence,” “cause,” or principle (Aristotle, 1998, p. 229) Aristotle’s concept of substance is not the Cartesian category of substance based on material extension. For Aristotle, substance is not matter, but what makes matter a “this”, “that by virtue of which the matter is in the state it is in” (Aristotle, 1998, pp. 167, 229). A substance is a unity of form and matter. Unlike Platonic and Augustinian traditions that understand the soul as a substance separate from the body and ground cognition in universal concepts or revealed truth, Aristotelian form cannot be accessed except through the sensible manifestations of material entities. But substance cannot be reduced to that materiality either. Unlike Kantianism, in Aristotelian epistemology and ontology a subject does not impose his categories on inert matter; it is not a schema of representation imposed on external objects, not objects commanded by signs. Sensibility and intelligibility coincide, operating through the identity of the human soul and the sensible object. In the act of sensation or knowing, two potentialities—on the side of the human and the things sensed or known—become actual (Bjerke, 2012, pp. 32, 63–64, 72–73). While all this is epistemologically problematic, its presumption that the unity of experience is located in the object paralleled by a consonant nature of the subject at least approaches the concertation of subjectification and objectification that I think characterizes an institutional logic.

An institutional substance is an unobservable, beyond sense and reason. It is not and cannot be phenomenal, nor is it just an idea. It is rather a virtual entity—neither a valorized object nor the evaluative will of a disembodied subject—which can never be present. An institutional substance is the unobservable ground and animating principle such that subjects and objects in practice can appear in its name, as its image or representative, its consubstantial avatars and agents. The relation between substance and material practice is not a semiology, but a material symbolization, an interpenetration of transcendental and earthly worlds, the absent presence that drives substantiation. Substantiation operates through excess, that both affords and requires the profusions of words, the movement of emotions, and the productive assemblage of things. Institutional substances are a significant basis of our being and our doing. Institutional substances are not reducible to attributes of objects, subjects, situations or fields, but are the basis, or the ground, upon which the practices that organize those situations and fields stand. We can only know them in their particular constellations.

An institutional substance does not fit our Humean division of fact and value, of what and why. It is both an ontological assertion of what is or can be and a valuation, a good toward or around which one can organize some segment of one’s life, both object and objective. An institutional substance bounds the ontological and the teleological, its reality as well as its orienting quality, its goodness. An institutional substance is both the basis of things and their value, the ground of both fact and desire. Like Aristotle’s unmoved mover, institutional substances are like gods: they do not move, but move us by being “objects of desire,” or love, for them (Aristotle, 1998, p. 373). An institutional substance presumes an ability to build a material world of bodies and things based on it, as its phenomenal manifestations, to make the substance real, to enact it in an object world, a realizable state. It points to what Aristotle dubbed the “final cause,” the good or significance immanent in its materialization, as an object worthy of enactment, and hence the ground of desire and care, that provides the energy of attachment which comes before and remains after any mere “having” or “doing,” an essential driver in anything we label as institution. An institutional substance is the transcendent ground of the immanent observable. It is the transom of an inexhaustible desire and of an endless objectification, exceeding any action, lying before and beyond any array of things. Institutional substance makes the social world historical, ever hungering forward, ever constructing formats in and by which to have or make it.

An institutional substance is a no-body and a no-thing. The goodness and the realness of these goods can neither be grounded in the senses nor in reason. Because they are grounded in unobservables, because the categorical orders that parse objects and persons have a conventional relation to them, because the scope of their reference is contingent, institutional logics depend on substantiation, on material and discursive processes that establish both the reality and reference of this real, as well as the goodness of this good.

Those things that affect us that we do not appear to control are ideally placed to perform that function: the external world of objects and the internal world of subjects, domains entailing physics and physiology respectively. It is precisely because these appear to operate independently of individual belief and will that makes them effective instruments for converting the constructed into the really real. It is these that sensualize the extra-human and give it sense. Objects, in their obdurate thereness, in their objective capabilities, their affordances, serve not only as markers of settings in which particular values are pertinent, but as “material formats” by which a particular value can be produced or enacted, and the “evidence” by which evaluation is legitimately executed (Arjaliès, 2014; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Yoked to a particular logic, objects in their objectivity and productivity sustain the believability, the naturalness of that institutional logic. It is in part because the affordances of objects often go without saying as they sustain action that belief need not be articulated, that it can remain immanent to action, sedimented in interlocked routines.

Subjects, in their interiority, the way they feel, their inaccessible and sometimes uncontrollable, physiologically mediated experiences, their emotional and affective investments in institutional fields, also sustain an institutional logic’s realness located both in its ability to move us and the particular way we are moved by it, in its affordance of a way of being. ²¹ Institutional life operates through what Kathleen Stewart has termed “ordinary affects,” “the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergences” (Stewart, 2007, p. 1). Stewart argues that affects do “not work through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds” (Stewart, 2007, p. 3). Affectivity is a sensuous element in institutional practice, the feelings inside and outside the institutionally ordinary repeated and recognized ways of thinking and acting, of the happening that attends “social worlding.” It is not just via our will and our ease (Thévenot, 2013), let alone our reason, but through culturally sensuous being that we engage and are engaged by our institutional landscapes, that their meanings literally make sense.

In my account, not only is the affective component critical to the substantiation of an institutional logic, its occasion and its effects hinge on representation and meaning, and on their conjunction with other material practices. I am not versed in the voluminous empirical, theoretical and philosophical scholarship on emotion, affect and feeling. Because I do not differentiate affect and emotion, bodily affects and their representation, this puts me at variance with those who argue that affect refers to a corporeal domain both before and outside of reason, meaning and intent. ²² For those following in the tracks of Massumi, affects, unlike emotions, are non-signifying, non-intentional, pre-conscious and pre-individual autonomic experiences of intensities (Clough, 2009; Leys, 2011, 2015; Massumi, 2002). ²³ Emotion, in contrast, is an individual’s narration of bodily affect, feeling fearful as opposed to fearful feeling (Clough, 2009, p. 49). For Massumi, affect as intensity is a pre-personal bodily experience, a quantitative shift in bodily excitation, that conditions the capacity to act; it is a potential that precedes, and need not eventuate in, action, signification or critique.

I rather understand emotion as a meaningful material—embodied—practice, a meaning and materiality that are linked to each other in practical patterns or forms. Institutional logics are productive, intentional practices. This is consistent with Wetherell who posits affect as social practice in which there are ongoing feedback loops between interpretation and affect, discourse and bodily states, in specific social contexts (Wetherell, 2015). ²⁴ Wetherell argues:

Social actors engaged in affective practice are embodied beings for sure, but are also usually sentient, bathed in cultural practice like fish in water, usually reflexive, engaged with others in negotiating their worlds, and constantly talking and making sense. There are no neat and easy dividing lines between physical affect and discourse, or between discursive capture and affective capture, or between discursive enlistment and affective enlistment. (Wetherell, 2015, p. 152)

Relatedly, see also the practice specificity of emotion in Nicolini’s practice theory (Nicolini, 2013, p. 5).

Indeed the regular bundling of affect, discourse and material practice is what constitutes an institutional logic in my view. Take the case of romantic love, on which I have been doing empirical work, where the good is unobservable, ontologically subjective, affectively charged, tied to our bodily equipment, and draped with multiple institutional dramas against which one judges one’s own experience and expectations. I came to affect through emotion because I have been working on romantic love as an institutional logic, an affective order of material practice. Unlike much empirical work on institutional logics which centers on their observation, diffusion or consequences at the level of organizational activity—whether as a sphere or an entity, neglecting the role of individuals and their interactions—this work studies the ordering of individual interactions, from which I infer institutional logics, rather than take them as pre-given (Zilber, 2017; see also Powell & Colyvas, 2008). ²⁵ Irrespective of its specific hormonal and attachment mechanisms, it is not so easy in this case to cleave affect and meaning, feeling and cognition, emotion and belief. Based on survey research we have been analysing romantic love as a kind of emotional, discursive and bodily practice in intimate dyadic situations among American college students (Friedland, Mohr, & Roose, 2014a; Friedland et al., 2014b). As befits an institutional logic approach, we seek to analyse practices of love, not persons in love, and so have turned to multiple correspondence analysis (MCA)—familiar to readers for its iconic status as a graphical representation of the cultural regionalization of class habitus in Distinction—which seeks to capture the patterned distributions of practices rather than the net effects of an individual attribute as a causal determinant of another.

The graphic MCA representation of the first dominant dimension organizing the intimate, sexually active field is shown in Figure 2 (Friedland et al., 2014b).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Multiple Correspondence Analysis of the Intimate Practices of Sexually Active College Students.

Romantic love, we found in the MCA, does have an affective order among the sexually active, an order which is also categorical, discursive, emotional and practical. Love is distinguished first by words: by each telling the other that one is in love with her/him, by the categories one uses to describe the relationship in which sexual intimacy took place, and by intimate talk. Love also has an affective specificity: those who describe themselves as loving their partners not only told their partners they loved them, they felt their bodies responding, they felt jealous, they wanted their partners to know them, they felt depressed if things were going badly between them, and they would feel despair if the person left them. Love also has a bodily practical specificity. Intimate sexual encounters of those who are not in love are characterized by a lack of sobriety, by an absence of holding hands and intimate conversation. What love does not have is a sexual specificity: loving one’s partner is not associated with a particular profile of sexual practices. In a world where sexual acts and emotional intentions are increasingly differentiated (Illouz, 2012, p. 49), those who “make love” experience a distinctive bodily responsiveness to their partners that is independent of the nature of the sexual acts in which they engage. It is also independent of their moral evaluation of sex, which is—in the second dimension—associated with the sexual acts in which they engage. ²⁶ It is not different kinds of sexual practices that order the passion of students’ intimate lives, but whether or not an encounter is categorized, practiced and affectively experienced as love.

Romantic love is a meaningful feeling, a state of being, a kind of personhood; it is also an institutional fact, like sovereignty or scientific truth, an unobservable substance, a potentiality that founds practices that depend on the belief that they actualize or enact it. The “making” of love depends on the belief that the good is and can be real. Niklas Luhmann, the systems theorist, wrote that “one loves loving, and, therefore somebody whom one can love” (Luhmann, 2010, p. 32). Roland Barthes, the literary theorist, writing of “affirmation” in love, of the “intractable lover,” writes: “Against and in spite of everything, the subject affirms love as value” (Barthes, 1978, p. 22).

Belief matters: we found that American college students’ belief in and about love conditioned their affective experiences. Using regression techniques this time, we modeled what attributes matter most in conditioning the probability that a person experienced erotic passion, specifically whether one had had an orgasm with a person that one loved in one’s last intimate encounter (Friedland et al., 2014a). Passion here fuses two things: the category of love and a corporeal response. We controlled for the kind of sexual acts in which one engaged during the last encounter including whether one had had one’s genitals stimulated manually or orally, whether one had had vaginal intercourse. We also included a non-genital measure of activity during the encounter: whether one had spoken intimately with that partner. Every physical act dramatically increased the odds that a student had had an orgasm with a partner they loved: talking intimately, being the recipient of manual and oral stimulation and vaginal intercourse. The act with the greatest effect was talking intimately, which increased the odds of sexual passion by 500%. But even controlling for all these variables, including their self-reported attractiveness, a measure of their “sexual capital” (given the eroticization of beauty) and their attachment style, a student’s institutional investments in love affected the probability that he or she had experienced erotic passion. Students who did not want to marry for life were significantly less likely to have experienced it; so were students who thought romantic love a sexist construct contributing to the subordination of women; and so were students who thought there was nothing morally wrong about having sex without love. The findings were similar when we looked at affects alone—for example, feeling one’s body respond to the touch of one’s partner. ²⁷ As Durkheim showed for the most private act of suicide, sexual passion, too, has institutional determinants.

Affect responds to culture because it is itself culturally formed. My argument has a kinship with that of John Levi Martin who argues for the consubstantiality of our subjective dispositions and a world of intentional social objects (Martin, 2011). Sustained by habit, we are dispositionally able to make aesthetic judgements about the qualities of social objects, about the “requiredness” or “oughtness” of action they entail (Martin, 2011, pp. 243, 264). Intentions are immanent to social objects paired with our own world-dependent, and hence object-dependent, dispositions enabling us to respond to their affordances (Martin, 2011, pp. 236–237). Motivation is the qualitative experience of social objects, the experience of our habitual response to these objects (Martin, 2011, pp. 264–265). Our experience of the qualities of a field, Martin writes, are affective, calling forth in us “often visceral reactions” (Martin, 2011, p. 167). As Martin reads Dewey, we experience the qualities of social objects as both “affectional and volitional,” neither determinately in us nor in the objects, but in the relationship between the two (Martin, 2011, pp. 184–185). In that qualities depend on our being affected by them, this suggests that affects are in part interiorizations, or incorporations, of the objective world, that our affects respond to a material-cultural world in part because they are themselves formed by the same cultural materiality, that affects are effects, that being is part and parcel of doing and having. It suggests that in an institutional logic subjectification and objectification are co-constitutive.

If our subjectivity is afforded by that which has value, here a substance, value cannot be securely located in the subject, a subjectivity afforded in part by the substance itself. ²⁸ Because institutional objectification affords an institutional subjectification, because particular institutional objects enable and require particular forms of subjectivity, capacities and inclinations to valuation, to invest and judge, we can easily slide from one side to the other, locating value in subjects or objects, when neither alone will be adequate. Because it addresses a practical world whose constitution is located in neither subjects nor objects, but in the incessant movement between them, a movement set in motion by the conjoint subjectification and objectification of something that exceeds both, the category of substance, rather than value, seems necessary to the task.

Institutional logics are organized around represented goods which cannot themselves be perceived, joined to an order of material practice organized around specific complexes of objects. There is here a felicitous alignment with the perceptual philosophy of emotion. In perceptual philosophies emotions are bodily, or affective, experiences of a world represented according to a particular value (Todd, 2014). ²⁹ Emotions visibly articulate non-intentional bodily affects and values as intentional objects, sadness and loss for example. It is this conjunction of a non-intentional affect and intentional “object” that is consonant with my institutional casting of emotion. In the phenomenology of the emotion it is not a knowing of the value, the intentional or “formal” object, which cognitively grounds the emotion, but the specific object to which a person responds (Todd, 2014, p. 705). Emotions do not operate as reactions to values imposed on facts; their mechanism cannot be directly assimilated to forms of value rationality, practical derivations from subjective value commitments. Rather emotions are themselves “modes of access” to value (Teroni, 2007, p. 405). One apprehends danger through fear, for example (Teroni, 2007, p. 413). It is emotion’s joining of affect, represented value, and object—of bodily expression, semiosis, and material format—that suggests emotion as a potent aspect of institutional subjectification, subjective phenomena which both substantiate and activate the represented materiality of institution. On the one side, the value appears to inhere in the object world itself; we justify our emotions and our evaluations based upon its non-evaluative attributes (Todd, 2014, p. 706). On the other hand it must be real because I, and indeed we, feel it, because people like me in situations like these are affected by it.

The virtual reality of value is substantiated through our affective engagement in bodily practices in an object world. It is as affected beings that institutions make sense, that codes become comprehensible by being alive, felt in our bodies. Affect’s excess to language and code makes it an outside inside institutional signification, provides it its supplemental power in institutional subjectification, as a complement to and/or a substitute for belief. The ways in which affect and emotion exceed representation make them potent instruments for substantializing a meaning precisely through that excess, by the way in which we are affected beyond or below language, an excess that stands not necessarily in opposition to culture, but as part of its workings. Through its effects within me, affect counters the external contingency of reference and signification in the world outside me. In either event the performativity of an institution depends on the subjectivities it affords, the ways in which we are subjectified by it, the way it affects us.

Institutional logics are observable as patterned movements, in that institutional practices are recognized, modal movements between bodies and objects, bodies that are affected and objects that are effective. As Sarah Friedland has pointed out, affects not only move us but are integral to our moving (S. Friedland, 2016). In these patterned movements we see represented the logic of institution itself, a what we are doing and who and how we are in its doing. Indeed we are in some sense their doing. Institutional logics operate through materially formatted, ordered gestures which are relational—between persons and things, shared by other participants. ³⁰ These bodily, materially formatted gestures are affective and meaningful movements (S. Friedland, 2016). ³¹ As participants, members and observers, we apprehend an institution’s bodily gestures through our own bodies, a kinesthetic and affective knowing that is part of the gestures’ signification. ³² We understand what is going in our own bodies.

Institutional logics mean in part through the specific ways in which we are moved. Take sovereign power: the bodies of citizens and non-citizens apprehend the gestures of soldiers and police kinesthetically, bodily movements which produce and are produced by affect, the circulation of fear and respect, by feelings that attend and animate offence. This is part of the pacification of populations, the management of uncertainty of law-breaking and the feelings of peace that one can expect to be protected from those broken laws. The affect produced by and in bodies in particular motion is the operation of sovereignty itself. Take capitalist property: bodies of buyers and sellers and those who attend to the market offer and receipt of both bodies and things in gestures of signature and hand-offs, in giving and taking, gestures of possession that produce and are produced by the affects of mine-ness, of the passionate identifications of possession, of possession as taking and being taken. This is part of commodification, of market expansion, of capital accumulation. The affects of these shared, choreographed gestures are part and parcel of their effects; in their conjointness, they are institutions themselves. Institutional logics involve identifications with and desire for a substance—here national sovereignty and capitalist property—that are related to, but cannot be reduced to, instrumental interests. They may entail emotional specificities that animate their movements.

New institutional logics, particularly those entailing shifts in the non-phenomenal substances upon which their practices are based, also entail changes in affective register. I will give two examples. In their analysis of the tension between two institutional logics of medical education in the United States, one giving primacy to scientific inquiry, and the other to optimizing the care of patients, Dunn and Jones found they were each centered around different practice sets (managed care, the physician–patient relationship and preventative public health, for example) (Dunn & Jones, 2010). Scientific knowledge and care are institutional substances, only knowable through how they are done and evaluated. The thing to notice is that they also involve specific emotional regimes, a dispassionate objectivity and a desire to contribute to the objective of knowledge on the one hand, and a compassionate concern for human thriving on the other. It is noteworthy that the rise of care logic coincided historically with the entry of women into the medical profession.

The connection between institutional logic and emotional specificity is there—although unmarked in the analysis—in the historical transformation of US money management explored by Lounsbury and Crumley from the cost-sensitive Boston-based trustee form oriented to the conservation of family wealth through efficient, passive investment towards professional firms seeking to maximize annualized returns of assets based on the models of financial economics that took off in the 1950s (Lounsbury, 2007; Lounsbury Crumley, 2007). ³³ For economists, this could be analysed as entailing changing, exogenous socially differentiated risk preferences coupled with the rise of economic models that afforded rational ways to hedge risk. An institutional logical analysis would point to the ways in which the changing logic of money management is co-implicated with the defusing of money value and family, from one in which dominant households’ duty is to conserve their wealth, a wealth identified with and the basis of their family’s identity, cohesion, status and inter-generational reproduction, where money capital is understood in the manner of a landed estate, as the other material body of the household, to one in which money has been objectively autonomized as a medium of a competitive market and dissociated from the logic of family solidarities, solidarities that have themselves increasingly dissolved into individualities, or at least into fissiparous bits. ³⁴ In the first model, it is the substance of wealth as a property of the family who must be protected from the market; in the second, money is a partible asset whose value is to be maximized in the market. As Lounsbury points out, the financiers who developed the originary Boston “trustee” model not only identified with the “pedigree and propriety” of the Boston Brahmins, they exhibited “an almost religious disgust for the more exuberant display of wealth” associated with New York financiers (Lounsbury, 2007, pp. 3–4). They sought to minimize risk for their clients.

The change in institutional logic from “trustee” to “performance” money management involved changes in the owners’ emotions based on the substances—here wealth and assets, tied to family and market—that animate their preferences from identification with and loyalty towards a collective house, the desire to protect its honor and assure its longevity, and towards a desire to generate increasingly individualized income streams, and the pleasure and comfort they afford, over the course of a lifetime. Shifts in the primacy of feelings of honor, loyalty, collective identification, individualism and the present pleasure of current consumption were likely involved. Forms of money management both reflected and mediated that change, which now have become objectified in mutual fund products. This would suggest that the incentives, the costs and benefits, that are at the center of micro-economic analysis are tied up with different institutional objects that have their own forms of emotional investment. Incentives and emotions reinforce each other, their corresponding movements, grounded in and grounding the institutional logics of which they are a part.

Because institutional logics are grounded in goods effected through specific regimes of practice, there is a pleasure, a sense of aliveness and purpose, in the doing of the practice. But it is not just a competent knowing, nor a generic, transposable emotional energy generated through ritual interaction (Collins, 2004); these energies can have a substantive content, a meaning, an intent. Institutional logics are animated by desire for the good—to be, to do, to have it—and of fear and/or hatred for the evils that might violate or block that good. Institutional logics are moralizing pathways, implying uncertain movement that cannot be taken for granted, potentially endangered or destroyed (Quattrone, 2015). Institutional logics consequently imply a storied practice. One’s goodness, aliveness, being in the world, comes from doing or having the good, often misrecognized as just subjective intention, whether cognitive rationality or irrational value commitment.

Desire is inherent in institutional life, not only in the excess of substance to material actuality, but in the way we love the principle of our animation, that givenness that has given us to ourselves. Institutional codes and conventions are often treated as vehicles by which we coordinate activity, as devices that reduce uncertainty or opportunism, as ways of saving energy (Thévenot, 1984). This is, of course, true, but it is also the case that institutional logics generate energies, not just those that drive individual instrumental struggles for gain, power and recognition within a particular domain, but the specific energies that make us feel alive, by giving us forms of personhood, place and purpose rooted in the good that grounds them. The material practices at the core of an institutional logic are affectively energized, particularly those organized through its institutional objects.

This is evident in the writings of Noam Yuran, a Marxist economic philosopher, who situates desire as the “substance” of money in a capitalist economy (Yuran, 2014). In capitalism money, he argues, the supposed neutral media for establishing equivalence among things, is constituted by its absenting itself from equivalence, a “thing that surpasses its equivalents” (Yuran, 2014, p. 67), by on the one hand not being a thing and on the other hand by having no utility in and of itself. Money’s role is not given just by its material properties, as objects are understood to do in actor network theory in their role as mediators, nor by its function as a sign, a materiality marked as language. Money’s role is given by the mystery that is constitutive of it, its status as a sacred object, a sacrality that inheres in our desire for it beyond the uses to which it can be put (Yuran, 2014, p. 68). Money’s is a material symbol of value, a signification that depends on its simultaneous signification and enactment of dispossession immanent in ownership constitutive of money itself. Money’s ability to function as a metric of value rests on our inability to ever possess it as a symbol; our desire for money is hence a desire for its social authority, for that which is beyond thingness and use (Yuran, 2014, p. 65). Money, more than a neutral medium for the realization of desires for things, is constituted by a desire for value beyond things and their use, “the desire for what money cannot buy” (Yuran, 2014, p. 192). Money is constituted by a desire for what money cannot buy, a desire grounded not in the subject, but in the social object of money itself, in the gap between signifier and the signified. In its social objectification, it is money that desires to circulate and thereby expand. This is the answer to the question in the title of Yuran’s book, What Money Wants. The production and consumption of goods are, in some sense, effects of money’s expansionary intent. Money, in that it cannot have any substantial aim other than this, is an “empty negative desire (Yuran, 2014, p. 71).

Grounded in goods, institutional logics are inherently evaluative, not only positing the goodness of a good, but tied to mechanisms to determine how good, or bad, it is (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Institutional logics hinge primordially on what Dewey called prizing, “holding precious” as a condition for the operability of evaluation (Dewey, 1939, p. 5, cited in Muniesa, 2012, p. 26). Prizing, Dewey argued, “falls upon something having definite personal reference, which…has an aspectual quality called emotional” as opposed to the “intellectual aspect” of the “relational property of objects” involved in appraisal.

This distinction does not hold: both prizing and appraisal are emotional. Emotion and affect, understood as irrational, non-intentional and sometimes unconscious, were, until advances in behavioral economics, shunted aside in our rational, bodiless explanatory accounts of individual action. Psychological theorists like Kahneman and Twersky demonstrated the centrality of emotion, often substituting for attitudes, in the evaluation of gains and losses. The intensity of emotion is a register or natural metric of evaluation. Emotion, as the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio has argued, is a somatic marker of images of valued outcomes essential to efficient cognitive decision-making in complex situations (Damasio, 2005). Emotion here is an adaptive signaling mechanism, a “dispositional representation” of an outcome that contributes to its choosing, or a bodily expression of our “cumulative preferences” necessary to rank sequences of options (Damasio, 2005, pp. 180, 199).

Emotion is part of what affords the actionability of the good, the basis of its recurrent choosing. But it does not just mark value or unconsciously express preference; it sometimes “is” the value, integral to the option itself. If emotion is a pathway to value it is a condition of possibility not only of evaluation, but the institution of value itself. As a mode of being, a genre of aliveness, emotion can be part of the reason for action, not just our bodily accounting of possible options, but the content of what counts, why we repeatedly engage in particular forms of practice, for the kind of aliveness they afford. In economic analyses, emotions are non-neutral instruments for registering individual preference, evaluating costs and benefits, supplements for making quick, intuitive choices in complex situations, typically hardwired constraints to our cognitive rationality, as in the discovery of asymmetrical evaluations of gain and loss, such that we minimize regret rather than maximize gain. If emotions are part of the constitution of value, if they are essential to the accounting of our lives, then we should expect that they are not just constraints on our rational calculation of costs and benefits, but part of the benefits, essential elements of the reason for our action. Emotions are elements of institutional logics as proofs, markers of preference and modes of being.

Institutional substances are ontologically subjective: collective belief in the substance is integral to the appearance of institutional objects, even if—indeed especially if—that belief is only tacit. But that belief is never sufficient. They cannot appear if we only believe in belief, if we believe that they exist only because of our belief. Substances, useless in themselves, and while never delimited by, nor coterminous with, materiality, are known through the practical ways in which they constitute objects and the uses they afford, in the way they allow individuals to use objects, to deploy forces, to do things. Substances are known through their objectifications, the practices through which those objects are used, thereby enabling construction of our worlds. A substance points to an externality, to an apparent entity, which appears as a non-phenomenal thing, a “virtual object” in which one must believe, an apparent conversion of metaphysics into physics. ³⁵ It points to the retention of the old sense of value as a noun, against valuation as an effacement of the noun, as David Stark puts, it by the verb (Stark, 2015). Substances afford institutional objects—money, contracts, titles, corporations, balance sheets, territorial borders, passports, laws, parliaments, ballot boxes, sacred centers, revealed texts, ritual objects, scientific reports, art works, love songs, wedding rings and marriage licenses, joint bank accounts, family homes and double beds—which are only known by their uses, by the practices they afford. These are objects whose objectivity does not inhere just in their thingness, but cannot be separated from that thingness either. They enable people to think of an institutional substance as if it were an object, consonant with the objectivity through which it operates. ³⁶ But a substance cannot be located just in the material object world, whose value is grounded in its attributes as a material object to which we naturally respond.

But neither can an institutional substance be located just in the preferences or disposition of subjects exterior to the world of entities to which value is added or affixed, in the will, reason or subjective commitments of the individual subject. A substance is a no-one as well as a no-thing. Not surprisingly people also think of it as if it were a subject, an intention that implies a being, a self-standing, living idea, a kind of will independent of its material instances and equipment. God, capital, sovereignty, knowledge, justice, representation, nature, for instance, are understood to make demands, to want things, as though they were personified forces or spirits. The apparent intentionality, this reification, is not just an outworking of our subjective commitments, a social refraction of our subjectivity, a projection of our intent. Nor is it just a projection of our subjective relation to an external world of objects, as qualities we add to things, such that we naturally think of things as though they were people, that through things, as Heidegger reminded us, we confront ourselves. Institutional substances are doubly objective: as much objects with intentions, objects that are themselves ends, as they are intentional objects. We do not, and probably cannot, live as nominalists. Institutional substances are not just prostheses; they transform both our subjective competences and our affective being (see also Nicolini, 2013, pp. 107, 166). We subjectivize substances because they subjectivize us; they affect us, provide our intentions, and our final causes, the energizing basis of our worldhood. Substances phenomenalize conjointly through subjects and objects, each of which sustain the other. That conjunction is the basis of both their and our appearance. Their apparent subjectivity derives from their subjectification in parallel with, and in concertation with, the way in which their objectivity derives from their objectification. I suspect we also subjectivize and objectivize institutional substances because of the perdurance of institutional logics that seem to reproduce themselves without deliberate social construction (Clemens & Cook, 1999). How else—either as objectivities or subjectivities, as an inanimate materiality, a constellation of things, to which we must conform, or as a subjective principle, a social being, which has intention and makes demands—can we seek to grasp a perdurance without collective agency and beyond individual will?

Institutional Logics Move Us

Substances are the “god” terms of social life that authorize us, and in authoring take the place of a who, a living principle, a principle of life, that appear as virtual subjects to which we are not simply subjected, but which afford our subjectivity, calling us, creating us, constraining us, and loving us in their way into being (Friedland, 2016). Institutional substances only exist through our being affected, both through our desire for them and through the constellation of affects they afford. Institutional substances are substantialized in our person, in our very bodies, in what moves us, what makes us lean forward and strain and yearn and mourn. The emotional specificity and generality of institutional logics remain to be explored. As scholars they call us out of our own unreason, in the relentless desire to unearth the truth, to objectively master the world’s movements, in the lust of our curiosity and our awe at its unexpected regularity. We can feel the truth of institutions. We already know it; it is time to start thinking it in earnest.