The Valuable,the Constitutive,and the Energetic: Exploring the impact and importance of studying emotions and institutions

Abstract

Emotions shape our lives and experiences as institutional actors, yet neo-institutional theorizing has paid scant attention to them until recently. In this introduction to the Special Themed Section, we explore why this blind spot has existed in past theorizing and aim to push scholarship further to elucidate the role that emotions play in institutional life. Drawing insights from the emerging literature and the four papers in this issue, we emphasize specific themes of interest for research on emotions and institutions. Specifically, we highlight the need for a focus on the role of emotions as: value-laden, constitutive of institutions, and energetic. We argue that foregrounding emotions promises a myriad of opportunities for future work and promises rich theoretical rewards.

Keywords

agency emotional energy emotions institutional theory structure values

Emotions are not abstractions far from our experience, rather they are key components of our everyday lives. We care about, and are invested in, our professions, our families, and many other aspects of our social world. We know how to express and hide emotions for benefit or safety, and we know what it is to be inspired in pursuit of goals, dreams, and objectives that fulfill us and our roles as institutional actors. None of us need to think long or hard to see how emotions affect our existence. Yet, given that emotions are a ubiquitous part of social life, why have we paid scant attention to them in most neo-institutional theorizing? In this special themed section of Organization Studies, we consider emotions and their involvement in institutions and institutional dynamics. In this introductory essay, we overview the backdrop of emotions in social theorizing and discuss why the theorizing of emotions, long absent in institutional theorizing, has recently emerged in a growing number of articles. We review the four papers in the special issue, then reach across these papers, and the growing literature, to begin to outline a research agenda for studying the role that emotions play in institutional dynamics.

Backdrop: Emotions in Organizational Theorizing

As Friedland traces in this issue, emotions have always been part of sociological theory. Readings of classic sociological or critical theory all tie the affective to key constructs—albeit at times more implicitly—from Marx’s alienated labour, Durkheim’s solidarity to Bourdieu’s habitus (Friedland, 2018; Illouz, 2007; Lok, Creed, DeJordy, & Voronov, 2017). Revisiting work in this light highlights the myriad of important roles emotions play in social life. In fact, as has been noted elsewhere (Friedland, 2018; Kraatz, 2015; Kraatz & Flores, 2015; Lok et al., 2017), the relational and social as affective and value-laden also had a significant place in early institutional theory with Berger and Luckmann (1967) and Selznick (Jaeger & Selznick, 1964; Selznick, 1951; 1957). Yet new institutionalism in organizational theory shifted away from values and emotion towards the cognitive in attempts to understand processes of institutionalization, and later, change, agency and contestation. Foregrounding the cognitive resulted in backgrounding the emotive.

While institutional theory was exploring the cognitive, explicit work on emotions in management was focusing primarily on individual-level experiences and the expression of emotions (Coupland, Brown, Daniels, & Humphreys, 2008; Fineman, 2000). As Fineman (2000, p. 3) has suggested, “emotion research has been imbued with biological and psychological determinism.” This development led emotions research away from an understanding of contextual influences (Gooty, Gavin, & Ashkanasy, 2009) and “the social and relational context of emotion” (Fineman, 2000, p. 3). Such work usually assumed emotions were physiological and universal responses to external stimuli (Elfenbein, 2007; Frijda, 1988), rather than institutionally conditioned and evaluated. This work did not fit comfortably with the assumptions of institutional theory, which emphasizes “supra-individual units of analysis that cannot be reduced to aggregations or direct consequences of individuals’ attributes or motives” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991 p. 8). Thus, later work on emotions as strategically deployed for protest and mobilization (Goodwin & Jasper, 2006; Jasper, 2011), and as a type of “labour” (Hochschild, 1979; Hochschild, 1983) or “intelligence” (Huy, 1999) had little impact on institutional theory even as institutional theorizing began to focus away from isomorphism toward institutional change. This was likely because, as Barley (2008, p. 511) speculated, until relatively recently, institutionalists were not “actually interested in micro-social dynamics.”

In the last decade, interest has grown in the microfoundations of institutions, with a focus on the people who inhabit institutions (Hallett, 2010; Hallett & Ventresca, 2006; Powell & Colyvas, 2008), their inter-subjective, collective and relational experiences (Battilana & D’Aunno, 2009), and what they do to affect institutions (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Instead of situating action at the level of the individual and ignoring contextual or institutional factors at the macro level, micro-foundational work emphasizes how macro-level structures are constituted and changed by people’s actions and interactions, which are at the same time affected by these macro-level structures. This focus on the lived provides a means by which to consider all that has been left out of existing cognitive accounts; it means inviting bodily experience into the conversation. While there is much to consider within this broader agenda, considering people more seriously in institutional theory involves thinking about “the emotions, social bonds and commitments” (Lok et al., 2017, p. 2), that tie them to institutions, which “not only shape the resources available to them, but also make their lives meaningful and prime how they think and feel” (Voronov & Yorks, 2015, p. 579). It is to this opportunity we turn in this special themed section.

Exploring the Impact and Importance of Emotions in Institutions

Before going further we believe it to be appropriate to specify and clarify what we mean when we speak of emotions and institutions. We suggest that while individuals experience emotions, their experience of those emotions, and their expression of their emotions, are conditioned by the norms, beliefs, values, and conventions (their institutional programming; Bourdieu, 2000; Voronov & Vince, 2012) that are dictated by their institutional affiliations (Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2014). What we feel, how we feel it, and how we express it are socially conditioned, although our feelings are individually experienced. In this, we are consistent with a sociological approach to emotions (Bericat, 2016; Stets & Trettevik, 2014), which conceptualizes emotions as “not simply individual, psychological reactions but intersubjective, collective experiences” (Goodwin & Pfaff, 2001, p. 283). The experience and expression of emotions may be “intimately connected to the body” (Turner & Stets, 2005, p. 3), but emotions are also inherently social since they are experienced in a world of relations “connecting human beings to each other and the world around them” (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001, p. 10). We focus on the experience and expression of emotion, although these two elements are not necessarily tightly coupled as people can regulate their felt emotions to fit the conventions of their context (Hochschild, 1979). We follow previous work in the sociological tradition and include in our conceptualization of emotion both the shorter- and longer-term experience of emotions (reactive vs affective emotions) and those tightly connected to a social or cultural object, being, or construction (Goodwin et al., 2001; Jasper, 1998).¹ Specifically, this means that how I feel about (affect, i.e., love or respect) and how I feel in response to (reaction, i.e., angry, happy) some object or relation in the social world are central to our view. While emotion can also be experienced unrelated to any particular stimulus (often conceptualized as moods) we see this as less relevant for our sociological account and study of emotions.

When we originally issued the call for papers for this special themed section, we framed the call as a need to move “beyond the gap” to explore some of the many dynamics and points of interest that failing to consider emotions in our institutional theorizing has concealed. Yet since the call, there have been a number of articles published or in press that have begun to fill the gap (see Lok et al., 2017, for a recent review). See Figure 1 for a representation of a broad overview of existing work on emotions and institutions.

Figure 1.

Relative Structural or Agentic Focus of Existing Studies on Emotions and Institutions.

Based on this work, what can we say consideration of emotions brings to an institutional view? Emotions connect people to the institutional structures they inhabit, and are part and parcel of the institutionalization process: institutions come to be valued beyond their technical usefulness (Selznick, 1957) by people who care about them, and feel a visceral, emotional connection to them (Bourdieu, 2000; Friedland, 2018). Emotions animate moral judgments of what “feels right” and is thus legitimate (Lok et al., 2017), and they energize the bonds we feel to the social groups whose institutionalized norms we espouse, and the solidarity we feel with group members (Creed et al., 2014; Wright, Zammuto, & Liesch, 2017). Thus emotions constitute institutions, and institutions in turn constitute people through their emotional commitment to institutions.

Emotions also animate institutional work (Gray, Purdy, & Ansari, 2015; Voronov & Vince, 2012). If the institutional norms, meanings, values, and groups with which we are emotionally committed are threatened, we can be inspired to action (Gill & Burrow, 2018; Toubiana & Zietsma, 2017), prompting institutional maintenance work when important values are violated (Wright et al., 2017). Emotions energize institutional creation and disruption work (Gray et al., 2015; Grodal & Granqvist, 2014; Lawrence, 2017; Massa, Helms, Voronov, & Wang, 2016), and provide glue to bond us to institutions and social groups. Emotions can also serve as a mechanism of institutional control (Dejordy & Barrett, 2014). Yet they can also help us to be more reflexive about our institutional programming, and bond to new social groups, enabling new kinds of action (Fan & Zietsma, 2017; Ruebottom & Auster, 2018). As such, emotions represent a critical way that we can understand the cross-level influences of institutions, individual persons, and social groups.

As Jasper has suggested, “emotions accompany all social actions, providing both motivation and goals”, (1998, p. 397) and “all the cultural models and concepts in use (e.g. frames, identities, narratives) are misspecified if they do not include explicit emotional causal mechanisms” (Jasper, 2011, p. 286). To what extent is this true for institutional theory? If emotions are the heart of institutions (Voronov & Weber, 2015), it may demand that we rethink past work which did not explicitly theorize emotion. Consider the important work that has highlighted the significant conflicts between holders of different logics as they protect and defend their own logic (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007), and studies that have shown actors not defending certain logics but rather using them flexibly and switching among them (Jarzabkowski, Smets, Bednarek, Burke, & Spee, 2013; Jay, 2013; McPherson & Sauder, 2013). It is possible that the depth of emotional commitment to different logics, both to the institutional values and goods they produce and to the people who hold them, explains the relative flexibility with which people can use or change logics (Fan & Zietsma, 2017). Indeed, in Glynn’s (2000; Glynn & Lounsbury, 2005) studies of conflicts between holders of artistic/aesthetic logics and holders of financial stewardship logics in a symphony orchestra, actors’ feelings about these distinct logics were clearly evident in her data, while not explicitly theorized. However, to determine whether emotional commitment to logics influences actors’ type of engagement with logics, this relationship needs to be studied (and theorized) explicitly alongside that of actors’ relative use and cognitive commitment to a logic. In their review, Lok et al., (2017) give several additional examples of published articles in institutional theory where emotions seem to be playing a role implicitly, but are not explicitly theorized. They suggest that emotions in past studies appear to underlie and animate the creation of new proto-institutions (Lawrence, Hardy, & Phillips, 2002), changes in meanings associated with institutions (Zilber, 2002), and more generally, “processes of institutional structuration, reproduction and change” (Lawrence, 2004; Lok et al., 2017, p. 8). In this way, while emotions may appear to be new to the institutional scene, they were never completely absent.

Given this breadth of documented and potential influence, we argue that emotions do not belong in one particular theoretical camp of institutionalism. They are just as relevant to institutional work (Creed, Dejordy, & Lok, 2010; Gill & Burrow, 2018; Moisander, Hirsto, & Fahy, 2016; Voronov & Vince, 2012) and inhabited institutionalism (Creed et al., 2014; Voronov & Weber, 2015; Voronov & Yorks, 2015), as they are to institutional logics (Friedland, 2018; Friedland, Mohr, Roose, & Gardinali, 2014; Jarvis, 2017; Toubiana, Greenwood, & Zietsma, 2017; Toubiana & Zietsma, 2017) and legitimacy (Haack, Pfarrer, & Scherer, 2014). Indeed, the papers in this special themed section reinforce this view.

Exploring Emotions and Institutions: Papers in this Special Themed Section

The four pieces that follow this introduction and comprise the special themed section make apparent the potential of emotions to advance institutional theory. These four papers tackle both core institutional concepts like institutional work and logics, and also concepts that are more nascent or implicit in institutional theorizing, such as emotional energy, values, and emotional investment. They also make clear that emotions are relevant as structural and agentic elements of institutions. Friedland (2018) shows how actors are emotionally invested in and viscerally committed (Bourdieu, 2000) to institutionalized structures and that they form their identity and fantasize their futures (Voronov & Vince, 2012) with respect to these structures and the “goods” they deliver (Friedland, 2018). Protecting institutionalized structures may be a means of protecting ourselves²: our identities and our futures. Emotions can shape what is appropriate to feel in a given professional role (Gill & Burrow, 2018). Gill and Burrow show that these emotions can tie actors to the institution and stimulate them to agency in the protection of valued institutional goods. However, embeddedness and emotional investment in institutions does not always stimulate protective agency. Wijaya and Heugens (2018) show that even if actors become morally perturbed with the actions of institutional leaders, they may not be able to mobilize to change them because of their emotional ties. As Ruebottom and Auster (2018) illustrate, change agents who want to animate and energize change efforts may need to appeal to emotions to help disembed actors from the status quo, and to re-embed them in new ideas. Thus, individually, and collectively, we believe these papers help us outline a more complex and thorough understanding of emotions and institutions.

The first paper in the special themed section is Gill and Burrow’s compelling account of the role fear plays in institutional dynamics. Specifically, their work highlights how fear sustained institutional values, directing and encouraging specific behaviors. Chefs feared criticism or violence if they failed to meet the high standards associated with haute cuisine. “Fear work” was a form of discipline and control that aimed to influence and shape the emotions of employees. Yet fear was not only used strategically by chefs to actively maintain these standards and practices, but it also seemed to be an inherent part of the set of standards and practices of haute cuisine. In many treatments of emotion, fear is considered a “primary emotion”, universally and physiologically experienced, rather than socially and culturally interpreted (Bericat, 2016). Yet Gill and Burrow’s work challenges this traditional definition. Fear in their study seemed to be tightly linked to the production of haute cuisine: institutional inhabitants (chefs, sous-chefs, and other kitchen workers) seemed to accept abuse in this context because they saw it as a necessary part of producing the highest quality food and thus maintaining the key values of haute cuisine, values in which they were emotionally invested. Thus, in this piece, Gill and Burrow highlight how emotions can be structurally embedded within the institution and also used as a form and force of agency.

A question to consider based on their findings is whether fear is specifically tied to the institutional regime of haute cuisine, or is it simply a part of patriarchal systems of discipline generally, part of a “power toolkit”?³ Is fear “a mechanism of subjectification” or “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” (Friedland, 2018)? These types of questions push us to consider the ways in which certain emotions may, or may not, be integral to some institutional systems.

Ruebottom and Auster (2018) also show how emotions can be sources of agency. Specifically, they show how emotions can be used to disembed and re-embed people in social groups and institutional meaning structures. In their rich account of “We-Day” events (“rock-concerts for social change”) that were organized by a non-profit to stimulate agency among youth, they demonstrate the process by which emotions can be used to generate reflexive awareness of one’s social position. They show how personal narratives told by “everyday heroes” and marginalized others helped to dis-embed youth from their privileged social positions and taken-for-granted social programming to generate reflexivity with respect to the reproduction of social order. Organizers strategically generated emotional energy and affective solidarity among the youth through multisensory experiences and constant emphasis on social bonds. In doing so, they helped to re-embed these youth into a new community of social change-makers. Youth felt empowered by the social skills of relatable others with whom they were now in a community. Older participants, who found it more difficult to relate to the everyday heroes and marginalized others, did not become embedded within the change community and did not experience the same empowerment. Given the proposed importance of reflexivity for institutional work, these findings are of critical importance in understanding how embedded actors can become agentic and engaged in work and change-making activities.

In both of these studies emotions were manipulated strategically by some to generate desired behavior in others: active institutional maintenance of the key values of haute cuisine on the one hand, and readiness to make institutional change on the other. Yet even when emotions are strategically used by some, they can become naturalized and typified as taken-for-granted institutional norms, part of the emotional register of the logics in these settings (Jarvis, 2017; Toubiana & Zietsma, 2017). In this way the papers also highlight how violence and fear are “natural” reactions in the kitchen, and solidarity and emotional energy are “natural” to the community of change-makers that Free the Children creates.

The third paper in our special themed section, by Wijaya and Heugens, highlights an alternate role for emotions. While Ruebottom and Auster focus on how emotions stimulate agency, Wijaya and Heugens show the limits of emotions as mobilizers of institutional work. They highlight the role of systemic power and the emotional struggles people go through to avoid its negative effects. In their study, moral perturbation and emotions stimulated Pentecostal congregation members and church employees to ask questions about the morality of their spiritual leaders. When those leaders applied power to quell the questions, followers felt helpless and gave up their attempts to disrupt institutional arrangements they perceived to be immoral. Congregation members and church employees addressed their helplessness by changing the anchor of their investment in religious institutions, shifting from a focus on the notion of an idealized church to a focus on their relationship with their God. While the moral authority of church leaders could be questionable, the moral authority of their God remained absolute, and they could then defer moral judgment of church leaders to a Higher Power. This shift in the anchor of their investment allowed them to manage their emotional discomfort without mobilizing and undertaking institutional work. Their work highlights how embeddedness and investment in an institution can be used against actors as a “disciplinary tool”⁴ that prevents and limits agency. In response, however, while actors may not be able (or want) to detach themselves from the institution or these ties as a result of fear, they do find ways to cope with contradiction and the pain it causes them.

Despite their differences, in each of these three papers, embeddedness in institutional contexts is critical. Embeddedness in haute cuisine made fear and abuse tolerable, even at times desirable, as a legitimate way to ensure faithful enactment and maintenance of institutionalized values (Gill & Burrow, 2018). For the youth in Ruebottom and Auster’s (2018) study, the chance to relate to everyday heroes through their involvement in social change enabled them to look beyond institutional constraints to see themselves as potentially more—as powerful agents embedded in a community of change-makers. In the paper by Wijaya and Heugens (2018), people who were morally perturbed about governance practices within the church changed the anchor of their emotional investment, but remained embedded within the institution nonetheless. In all cases, questions of the identity and embeddedness of the actor were highly charged emotionally, both in institutional maintenance and in change.

In the final piece of the special themed section, Friedland pushes these ideas and begins to consider the emotional core of institutions. As Friedland says about institutions: “we are the way they make us feel” (2018; emphasis added). He suggests that institutions are ways of being. In his essay, Friedland suggests that we need to consider the conditions under which emotions are more than reactions to institutions—we need to identify when they are inseparable from institutions, when they are “institutionally constituted and constitutive” (Friedland, 2018, pp. 12–13), and whether actors must inhabit emotions to inhabit the institutions.

Specifically, Friedland suggests that emotions may be observable in three ways. Emotions may be “transversal” and applicable across institutional domains, such as shame, which may be found and used anywhere. Other emotions may show “institutional affinity,” in that they are more likely in some institutional domains than in others, such as individual possessiveness and capitalism, or love and the family. Finally, some emotions may have “institutional specificity,” being yoked to particular institutional goods, such as romantic love (to the lover), and patriotism (to the country).⁵ As Friedland says, institutionally specific emotions are part of the production function of particular institutional goods—a church without piety does not have the same institutional force as a church that is constituted and reconstituted by the piety of its adherents. Nursing without care is possible, but lacks both motivational force for nurses and judgments of appropriateness by patients. In describing these relationships between emotions and institutions, Friedland is bringing attention to how emotions tie us to institutions, not just how we react to them (Goodwin et al., 2001; Jasper, 1998). Institutional logics obtain when they are inscribed in the subjects affected by them—“to feel the doing itself as a desirable form of aliveness,” a means of being oneself (Friedland, 2018, p. 25)—subjectification, to use Foucault’s word (1980).

When people are embedded in an institution, the substance of the institution is deeply enmeshed with the identity of the person. Emotional investment is a “visceral commitment” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 98–99). In this view, to change the institution means to change oneself, and that is a highly emotionally charged endeavor. Friedland, thus, in his essay brings attention to the more structural elements of emotions, an area we believe calls for further study.

Overall, the four papers in this special themed section bring our attention to the complexity of the affective in institutional domains. Emotions are completely tied up in what it means to be in an institutional setting (identity and embeddedness) and what is right to do in an institutional setting (moral judgments and legitimacy). Specific emotions stimulate and energize work and they are intimately associated with one’s tendency to faithfully perform institutions in some instances, and one’s ability to be reflexive about institutions in others. Collectively, they highlight that emotions are intimately tied to the institutional, affecting investment, agency, moral values, sense of self, and connection to others.

In an excellent review of the emerging literature on emotions and institutional theory in The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (2017), Lok and colleagues divide research perspectives on emotions into structuralist perspectives (how emotions are constituted in social structures), people-centered perspectives (how people respond emotionally to institutions and institutional dynamics), and strategic perspectives (how emotions are used as tools to affect others), differentiating between those focused on change and reproduction. We believe the papers in this special themed section highlight related but different themes—pushing us into new trajectories for development. We describe three themes for future research: (1) the valuable—explorations of the link between values and emotions in institutional dynamics; (2) the constitutive—work that seeks to build on structuralist perspectives and examine the ways in which emotions are constituted in institutions (as per Lok et al., 2017), and also how they are constitutive of institutions (as per Friedland, 2018); and (3) the energetic—examinations that explore what fosters, maintains, fuels, defines, and diminishes emotional energy. Table 1 outlines a summary of our proposed research agenda, and Figure 2 presents a visualization of the ways in which we see the valuable, the constitutive, and the energetic as related to the traditional recursive relationship between structure and agency.

Table 1.

Outlining a Research Agenda for studying the Valuable, Constitutive, and Energetic Components of Emotions and Institutions.

	The valuable	The constitutive	The energetic
Ultimate objective	Explorations of the link between values and emotions in institutional dynamics	Explorations of ways in which emotions are constituted in institutions and also constitutive of institutions	Examinations of what fosters, maintains, fuels, defines and diminishes emotional energy
Example questions for study	To what extent are values inextricably linked to emotions? Are institutions defined by valuing certain emotions? Can values be emotion-free? How, and do, institutions condition what is valuable, and how might this influence emotional investment in said institutions?	How do certain emotions distinguish and define institutions? To what extent are emotions a necessary component of institutions? Does changing the emotional register of a logic entail changing the logic itself? What are the emotional hierarchies within an institution, and what impact do these hierarchies have on issues of social justice and equity?	What generates emotional energy in given institutional settings? Is co-presence required to generate emotional energy in modern institutions? What are the limits to emotional energy? What diminishes emotional energy? Is emotional energy based in ethos, values, emotions, and/or interactions?
Exemplary studies	Wright et al., 2017 De Rond & Lok, 2016	Friedland, 2018 Gill & Burrow, 2018	Fan & Zietsma, 2017 Ruebottom & Auster, 2018

Figure 2.

Pushing Studies of Emotions and Institutions Further Through Examination of the Valuable, Constitutive, and Energetic.

The valuable

Institutions become institutions because they are infused with value (Selznick, 1957). We become viscerally committed to institutions (Bourdieu, 2000) and they are inscribed in our being (Foucault, 1980; Friedland, 2018). We ask, to what extent are values inextricably linked to emotions? Are institutions defined by valuing certain emotions, like Gill and Burrow (2018) show of fear and haute cuisine, and/or are they defined by being valued, like the belief in the goodness of their institutional purpose (de Rond & Lok, 2016; Wright et al., 2017) or substance (Friedland, 2018)? What overlap or shared purpose might “values” and “emotion” work have in shaping institutional processes (Gehman, Trevino, & Garud, 2013; Hochschild, 1979; Toubiana, 2014)? Can the valued be separated from the emotive—do we value both rationally and emotionally? In line with Friedland (2018), and Creed and colleagues (2014), we argue that emotions can connect people to institutions: we are committed to the institutions and perform them because we believe they are good, right, or appropriate, and because we are connected to valued others who believe this way as well.

When Swidler (1986, p. 275) outlined her critique of a value-based view of culture, institutional theory along with cultural sociology seemed to shift away from a focus on values. However, her view was never that values did not matter, but rather that social structure and “strategies of action” were significant as well as values: “action and values are organized to take advantage of cultural competences.” It was never just a cognitive cultural toolkit. Can we return to some of the early institutionalists and our sociological roots to reinvigorate the importance of values?

We see exciting opportunities for research that explores the ways in which institutions condition the experience of emotions and our understanding of what to value. This line of inquiry allows us to explore emotions not only as engines of activity, but as reflectors and indicators of certain types of institutional values. What emotions might be “specified” as Friedland (2018) put it, rather than affinitive or transversal? How might institutions and institutional logics have emotional hierarchies (Illouz, 2007) embedded in design that impact the ways in which certain people, practices, and ideas are evaluated? For example, when greed and aggressiveness are prized and empathy is seen as a weakness, what implications does that have for corporate leadership, the funding of universal healthcare, and gender equality? How is social innovation stalled or fueled by the valuable and emotive that constitute a given institutional field or context?

The constitutive

As we and other scholars have pointed out, research on emotions and institutions has been closely connected to an inhabited view of institutions, bringing attention to the micro-foundations of institutions. In many ways, the goal of this scholarship has been to “people” institutions—giving people their proper place in the institutions and the processes we study, with emotions being an important part of this objective (Hallett, Shulman, & Fine, 2009, p. 1). We agree that this is an admirable aim—one in which we continue to take part. However, we also think it is imperative to understand and situate emotions “beyond the individual in institutional processes,” challenging “the assumption that persons and contexts are separable” (Lok et al., 2017, p. 46). These authors argue that emotions should be seen as “intersubjective, as residing in transpersonal exchanges that are double embedded in systems of relationships and in institutionalized systems of meanings” (Lok et al., 2017, p. 42). Studies of emotions do not have to be confined to the individual—on the contrary, we can shift up the level of analysis and consider interactions in social groups, the organization, the field, and the institution itself, since any given person’s emotional experience necessarily is affected by (and may affect) other actors and institutions.

Institutions trigger emotions via investment, values, and threat but—as Friedland has outlined—they are also constituted by emotions. That is, an institutional view of emotions requires us to consider emotions as more than physiological responses to various stimuli or the product of contagion and demands for emotional display. Emotions connect us to institutions, but they are often also what distinguishes and defines institutions. While display rules and elements of an emotional register may become typified and, through practice, become associated with an institution or its governing logic (cf. Jarvis, 2017), thinking of emotions only as display rules that become associated with a logic over time suggests that at one point logics were without emotion. Is this so? We suggest that logics may not only demand emotional displays by competent actors but may be defined by particular emotions as part of their very design and meaning. Consider the famous quote about greed made by the character Gordon Gecko in the 1987 movie Wall Street:

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

This may be one of the most marked and taken-for-granted aspects of a Wall Street trader’s market logic, one that guides morally legitimate action in that domain. What is a market logic without these emotional underpinnings—would it be the same logic?⁶ In a similar vein, could a care logic be disentangled from emotion since it is premised and designed based on valuing the emotive, and caring with empathy? Can a religious logic be separated from faith? Is haute cuisine the same institution if fear is replaced by love?

As Illouz (2007) has outlined, the discourse of modern therapy⁷ does not just prescribe emotional behaviors but is constituted by an ontological view of emotions: emotions are a means to self-realization. There are indeed distinct forms of cultural knowledge about emotions, since “societies create a background of customs that constitute an emotional culture” (de Rivera, 2014, p. 2; O’Neill & Rothbard, 2017) or an emotional field (Illouz, 2007). It is, thus, not just important to understand that institutions, or institutional logics, outline how an actor can be emotionally competent (Voronov & Weber, 2015), but also that they define what is valuable, what are appropriate goals to pursue, and what we understand to be right and wrong. Emotions, thus, are not only the “how” of institutions (Jarvis, 2017, p. 315), they also can be the why and what of institutions. Emotions are structured into the meaning(s) attached to institutions. This, we argue, is worthy of further examination.⁸

Reflecting this, how can we better account for the structural and constitutive elements of emotions in institutional theorizing? We might consider in what ways “working” on institutions involves the legitimation or delegitimation of certain emotions. Considering Gill and Burrow’s (2018) paper, would working to combat fear and violence actually transform the institutions of haute cuisine? Can we change institutions by affecting emotions? Or would such efforts be seen as violations of the institutional logic? Such questions point us to consider contingencies. Gouldner’s (1954) work, discussed by both Friedland (2018) and Hallett and Ventresca (2006), showed how the more positive emotions of friendship, solidarity, and love were significant components of the institutional context of a mine, and when a new manager was tone deaf to these emotions, workers responded quite negatively to this violation of their expectations. Would the perception of violation be different if managers stopped using negative emotions like fear in contexts where they were institutionalized, rather than positive emotions like those that were stopped in the mine context? We call, accordingly, for more scholarship to dig into and explore emotions as constitutive of institutions to complement the work that highlights how emotions move us to respond to them.

The energetic

Recent work has also highlighted how emotions motivate and energize (Collins, 2004; Fan & Zietsma, 2017; Lawrence, 2017; Massa et al., 2016), and studies have shown how emotions play a significant role in institutional work (Moisander et al., 2016; Voronov & Vince, 2012). We still know relatively little, however, about emotions and the energetic. Illouz (2007, p. 3) defines emotions “as the ‘energy-laden’ side of action.” What does emotional energy look like in institutional dynamics? What may foster or stall its generation? While Collins’ (1993, 2004) early work on interaction rituals first set out a theory of how emotional energy was generated, there has been little work that has tested or expanded his predictions for emotional energy (Turner & Stets, 2005). He saw emotional energy as “the positive and energizing feeling that comes from participating in a high-intensity interaction ritual,” the result of when “copresent individuals become caught up in a common emotional rhythm” (Collins, 1993, p. 208). Ruebottom and Auster’s rock concert for social change is a good example of when Collins might have predicted energy to be generated. However, Collins (1993, 2004) predicted that energy would only be generated with co-presence, suggesting that the collection of physical bodies is the ultimate source of emotional energy. If we consider the ways in which institutions bond groups of people together without, necessarily, a common physical location, is this condition still necessary for the energetic?

Perhaps the key to emotional energy in institutions is not merely co-present bodies, but something else. In what ways would inviting notions of spirit, substance—what some have called ethos (see Lok et al., 2017; Voronov & Weber, 2015 for an elaboration of these ideas and concepts)—lead us to the core of emotions and their source? How can we better examine institutional substance and the meanings it holds for members of a social group, and the energizing potential that substance provides? Perhaps energy is connected to the valuable—and valuing collectively generates energy. Indeed, we have seen that enactment of valued institutions is a source of pride while deviating from them is a source of shame (Creed et al., 2014; Wright et al., 2015). Friedland’s essay reminds us that performing institutions in this way can be energizing because it means being who we believe we should be. If valued institutions are threatened, negative emotions can energize response and defense, even in online settings (Toubiana & Zietsma, 2017). Possibly this suggests that core to emotional energy, and its link to institutions, may be some substance, ethos, or value that binds us to the institution. Yet, to date, we have no systematic evaluation of these possible relationships.

We need also to consider how emotional energy might influence institutional dynamics. In Ruebottom and Auster’s paper (2018), joyous celebrations of solidarity, with lights and sounds, all symbolizing togetherness, created unforgettable experiences that opened new possibilities for agency to the youth, creating powerfully charged positive associations with social change. The emotional energy generated was key to engendering reflexivity and helping to embed youth into a community of social change agents. Similarly, Fan and Zietsma (2017) found that the emotional energy associated with positive social and moral emotional attachments to a new group and purpose helped people to become more reflexive, dually embedded in a new logic, and excitedly enacting the new logic. The energetic may indeed be powerful, but Wijaya and Heugen’s work (2018) pushes us to ask: What are the limits or bounds of emotional energy? What diminishes it?

In sum, we call for further work to disentangle what “animates” institutions: specifically, from where emotional energy comes and with what effects. Can we better outline the distinctions between the observable (logics, emotional registers, people) and unobservable (substance, ethos) and the ways in which they may energize or manifest attachment and investment? We need coherent theorizing that can make sense of these elements productively and in concert. What are the ways in which we can foster conversation rather than stifle it? The energetic is an important area of inquiry if we are truly to take seriously the role of emotions in institutions.

Considering all of these arguments together, we contend that emotions are a key link between structure and agency and are heavily implicated in both. While past work had largely highlighted emotions as sources of action and agency—as responses to and strategies for various institutional dynamics—work has also shown emotions as key to structure (see Figure 1 for visual representation of past work’s relative focus). We propose to push existing scholarship further by considering the ways in which: the valuable bonds us emotionally to institutions and drives desires for agency; the structural implications of emotions are both constituting and constitutive of institutions; and what generates emotional energy that can influence both institutions and actors’ actions. Let us complicate our visualizations of structure and agency driving institutional dynamics (see Figure 2).

To close, we argue that backgrounding emotions in institutional theorizing has limited our understanding of important aspects of institutional life. Foregrounding emotions instead invites a myriad of opportunities for future work and promises rich theoretical rewards—especially as we consider the valuable, the constitutive, and the energetic, and their links to the dynamics of structure and agency in institutions. We look forward to a burgeoning of scholarship in this area.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the authors of the special themed section (Roger Friedland, Pursey Heugens, Hendra Wijaya, Michael Gill, Robin Burrow, Trish Ruebottom and Ellen Auster) for the contributions they made to this issue as well as our own thinking, and for their feedback on the introduction. We also want to thank Doug Creed, Royston Greenwood, Christopher Steele, Maxim Voronov and our anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of the introduction and Frank den Hond for his very helpful editorial guidance and support.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

ORCID iD

Charlene Zietsma

Notes

Author biographies

Charlene Zietsma is Associate Professor, Management and Organization at the Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University. Charlene studies emotions and institutions, institutional change processes, field theory and entrepreneurship, usually in the context of social and ecological issues and social movements. She is a senior editor at Organization Studies and serves on several other editorial boards. Her work has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and other journals. In 2016, she was awarded the ASQ Scholarly Contribution Award for the paper published in 2010 that has had the most significant impact on the field of organization studies.

Madeline Toubiana is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management and Organization at the Alberta School of Business at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on the role that emotions, complexity, and stigmatization play in processes of social change. To understand the dynamics of social change, she examines the intersection and interaction between individuals and institutional systems. She examines these questions in a variety of contexts including the non-profit sector, the Canadian prison system, the sex trade, social entrepreneurship, social media, and in other complex organizations. Her research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Journal of Management History, Journal of Management Learning, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.

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