Agency in compliance with institutions: The case of professional expert-organizations and politico-ethical agency

As contemporary organizational life is increasingly rule governed, organizational actors, most notably professionals, perform their work by complying with institutional rules, stemming from regulatory bodies external and internal to organizations. This begs a question of the role of agency in compliance with institutions that is largely ignored within organization theory. A weak form of agency in compliance is found in practice theory and practice-driven institutionalism, in terms of actors mindful enactments of institutions on the basis of mastering shared practices for applying institutional rules. These are characterized as first-order practices of compliance with institutions. Extending the Wittgensteinian-inspired philosophical foundation of practice theory, modes of compliance in so-called “hard cases,” where shared practices do not apply as a basis for agreement in following institutional rules, is conceptualized as second-order compliance practices, involving a strong mode of agency. In these cases, the aim is to reach agreement on how rules are to be applied beyond established first-order practices by engaging larger frameworks of shared forms of life and more open and explorative attitudes to move institutions forward for a common good. It is argued that second-order compliance can be understood as a politico-ethical mode of agency in the Kantian tradition, supplementing prevalent notions within organizational institutionalism of agency as primarily political.

MECHANISMS FOR RISK ELIMINATION OF A COMPLIANCE TRAP IN THE BRAZILIAN TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY

ABSTRACT Purpose: This study aims to analyze how the Brazilian National Communications Agency (Agência Nacional de Telecomunicações – Anatel) and cellular operators in Brazil used ceremonial and discursive practices to build enforcement and compliance actions, adopted during a period of crisis in the cellular sector industry in 2012 when the legitimacy of the respective regulatory model and the regulatory agent were challenged, shaping a compliance trap situation. Originality/value: The work fills a theoretical gap by associating the normative-cultural perspective of regulation associated with organizational institutionalism, based on the assertion that the relationship between regulator and regulated is interactive and not unidirectional, allowing that enforcement mechanisms represent political efforts, realigning the interests of the actors within their institutional environments. Design/methodology/approach: The case study research strategy with a qualitative approach is adopted, studying the 2012 crisis in the cellular sector industry, with the collection of data from documentary sources and semi-structured interviews with participants in the process. Findings: The results show that, in the compliance trap situation, symbolic criteria can appropriate the speeches, producing texts and practices in favor of legitimizing the enforcement mechanisms and the respective compliance responses in view of the audience. Therefore, the compliance trap risk on the regulatory agent is mitigated to the extent that ceremonial and discursive practices manifest themselves responsively and gain political and cultural support, reducing social pressure on the legitimacy of the regulation model.

Institutions: Everywhere But Not Everything

Recent critiques by Alvesson, Hallett, and Spicer have characterized neo-institutional theory (NIT) specifically as confronting a mid-life crisis and institutional theory (IT) more generally as uninhibited. While offering valid points, these critiques lack a fundamental understanding of how organizational institutionalism (OI) has become distinct from NIT. In contrast to NIT’s master hypothesis of isomorphism and focus on structural determinism, OI has made remarkable progress in explaining institutional variation and change. Notably, like organization theory more generally, OI is not a coherent theory, but rather a big tent community with its own set of internal differences, and at times confusing concepts. Rather than abandoning the concept of institutions, we suggest continued progress in OI requires greater clarification. Institutions are everywhere, but not everything, so it is important for researchers to specify which institutions are being studied, distinguish between institutions and culture, and ascertain the relationship between institutions and organizations.

Corralling Organizational Institutionalism

In this essay, I respond to Alvesson, Hallett, and Spicer’s recent piece focusing on the problems stemming from organizational institutionalism’s unprecedented growth and proliferation. I focus my attention specifically on the current definitional problems in the literature and offer some suggestions for how scholars in the area might address these issues in the future.

Theorizing the ‘I’ in Institutional Theory

Recent critiques of organizational institutionalism have pointed to its increasing loss of focus and coherence. Yet, this criticism has not affected ongoing efforts to integrate insights from the literature on identity and organizations into institutional theory. In this chapter the author argues that these attempts at increased theoretical integration are unlikely to be productive, as long as institutional theory continues to be treated as one coherent theoretical perspective. Through an analysis of four fundamental shifts in the (implicit) theorization of actor-hood since the late 1970s, the author identifies five alternative institutional theories that currently coexist within organizational institutionalism. It is only when we accept this internal fragmentation of institutional theory that it becomes possible to relate different theories of identity to it more congruently.

Into the Clearing: Back to the future of constitutive institutional analysis

In the wake of recent scholarly disquiet regarding organizational institutionalism, we argue for a more focused constitutive approach to institutional analysis that concentrates attention on the socio-cultural sources of actors and their behavior. To do so, we suggest that complementarities between world society institutionalism and the institutional logics perspective provide an opportunity to develop a richer, more critical approach to contemporary transformations in economy and society. Building upon nascent empirical directions in world society scholarship, we argue that bridging these theoretical research programs can seed a generative research agenda on the variegated challenges to the established world society order that underpins the liberal capitalist-democracy model. We argue that this should include research on the multiplicity of logics that undergird liberal as well as illiberal beliefs and practices. Foregrounding issues of power and inequality that are grounded in disparate configurations of logics, we suggest that new analytical tools related to the new structuralism and multimodal analysis can help advance the constitutive institutional project for which we advocate.

Why Do We Keep Coming Back to Institutions?

The article examines contemporary philosophical and theoretical trends that lead to the dispersion and fragmentation of theories and research methodologies and even of the subject of inquiry. This process is dismantling the basic ontological distinctions that have long determined both the epistemological and the cultural characteristics of European society and science. These theoretical leanings have their own social and cultural roots in the rapidly increasing complexity of modern civilization. That civilization is relinquishing what Max Weber saw as a crucial distinguishing feature of modern society: its ability to comprehend the structure and functioning of the surrounding world. The author finds that one result is the emergence of a “new naivety” in which insurmountable difficulties in attaining rational understanding justify postulation of the ontological independence of actors, objects, etc., as well as the resurgence of various forms of metaphysics. The importance of an emotional relationship toward the world, which increasingly manifests itself as a universe of singularities, is expanding in step with the loss of a rational horizon for subjectivity in modern society. The historical perspective of the institutional approach has several epistemological advantages for dealing with these tendencies. The institutional approach maintains continuity with the project of modern historiography as such by concentrating on phenomena that have a comparable duration and sustainability and by facilitating examination of problems in the sociology of knowledge, for which a wide range of analytical techniques has been developed in order to analyze the interaction of institutions with different scales (for instance, within the framework of organizational institutionalism) among others. The historical analysis of institutions also has a significant practical value by disabusing us of a naive view of the world (including the natural world) as some kind of natural and unmediated given and by making us aware of the contingency of our historical existence. The institutional approach and modern historiography share a common mission as an emancipatory exercise in self-knowledge.

Beyond the Stable Image of Institutions: Using Institutional Analysis to Tackle Classic Questions in Institutional Theory

Although institutions are subject to constant change, we retain a stable image of them. Consequently, should they be considered as objects or processes? Notwithstanding its success, institutional theory still faces theoretical challenges to account simultaneously for change and stability, agency and structure. Following recent calls to integrate other perspectives on how we think about institutions, we draw on institutional analysis – a stream that has flourished in Europe and Latin America – to propose a radical and comprehensive conception of the institution as a locus of tension between the instituting (by which institutions are formed) and the instituted (temporarily stabilized forms). Since there is permanent tension between them, the institution itself can never be a stable object. It is constantly evolving, being either reinforced or destabilized. This research enriches the theoretical dialogue between organizational institutionalism and institutional analysis, two streams that have hitherto displayed little cross-fertilization. First, it contributes to rethinking the nature of institutions by emphasizing the role of the social imaginary, thus improving our understanding of the under-theorized role of imagination in institutionalization processes. Second, by placing the dynamic tension between the instituted and the instituting at the core of institutional theories, we answer calls to reclaim their missing critical dimension. Furthermore, this results in a methodological implication: the clinical approach of institutional analysis involving the intervention of researchers allows us to further embed institutional theories in organizational practice.