Reframing Institutional Logics

Substance, Practice and History

Alistair Mutch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138482357
• eBook ISBN: 9781351058131
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

How are we to characterise the context in which organisations operate? The notion that organisational activity is shaped by institutional logics has been influential but it presents a number of problems. The criteria by which institutions are identified, the conflation of institutions with organisations, the enduring nature of those institutions and an exaggerated focus on change are all concerns that existing perspectives do not tackle adequately. This book uses the resources of historical work to suggest new ways of looking at institutional logics. It builds on the work of Roger Friedland who has conceived of institutional logics being animated by adherence to a core substance that is immanent in practices. Development of this idea in the context of organisation theory is supported by ideas drawn from the work of the social theorist Margaret Archer and the broader resources of the philosophical tradition of critical realism. Institutions are seen to emerge over time from the embodied relations of humans to each other and to the natural world on which they depend for material existence. Once emergent, institutions develop their own logics and endure to form the context in which agents are involuntarily placed and that conditions their activity. The approach adopted offers resources to 'bring society back in' to the study of organisations.

The book will appeal to graduate students who are engaging with institutional theory in their research. It will also be of interest to scholars of institutional theory, of the history of organisations and those seeking to apply ideas from critical realism to their research.

1

Critical Realism and Social Theory

Introduction

This chapter introduces some core concepts that underpin the subsequent discussion. Summarising what is a complex, extensive and sophisticated body of work is a challenging task, so what can be said necessarily prioritises certain aspects of the literature. In particular, I’m going to stress that critical realism is a philosophical tradition that sees itself as a conceptual underlabourer for more substantive theories. In that regard, it is strictly speaking incorrect to speak of critical realist theories of any phenomenon; rather, it is a meta-theory. For those reasons, after introducing some basic concepts from the work of Roy Bhaskar, this chapter concentrates on the work of Margaret Archer in social theory. Her work is a rich source of concepts and frameworks that can then be brought into play to look at institutional theory in general and institutional logics in particular.

Roy Bhaskar and Critical Realism

Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) was a British philosopher widely taken to be the key figure in the development of the philosophical tradition that has come to be known as critical realism. Starting in the philosophy of the natural sciences, Bhaskar (1979) sought to shift away from the study and the common room to the world of embodied practices. The method of philosophical introspection that had its origins in Cartesian doubt of anything other than that the contents of thought had, he argued, meant that philosophy had come to be almost exclusively focused on questions of epistemology rather than ontology. That is, it sought to define ways in which the world could be known rather than the nature of that world. Bhaskar sought to reinstate the importance of ontology by making his starting point the practices by which scientists came to know the world. The undoubted success of such practices, as manifest in technological artefacts such as airplanes that fly and bridges that (generally) don’t fall down, led Bhaskar (in my paraphrase) to ask ‘what must the world be like for science to be possible?’

This led to the distinction between what he termed the ‘intransitive’ and the ‘transitive’ dimensions of the world. The intransitive world is that which exists regardless of our knowledge of it. For example, in 2011, a dreadful earthquake struck the city of Christchurch in New Zealand, resulting in 185 deaths and widespread damage to buildings. Its cause was movement in a previously unknown fault whose impact was magnified by the ‘liquefaction’ of tons of silt on which the city was built. The fault had always existed, and the consequences of its existence had always contained the potential to be activated, regardless of whether that potential was ever realised or known about. In that sense, its existence was and is a brute fact, forming part of the intransitive world that exists independent of human activity, which did not call it into being, or human knowledge, which could not prevent its consequences. Once known about, the fault then became a constitutive part of the transitive domain of human knowledge. Here it became amenable to the theories of disciplines directly concerned with the nature of the earth, such as geology and seismology. It also, of course, forced its way into other theories of the world, such as town planning and engineering, to say nothing of disaster management and response. Each way of viewing the world takes a different view conditioned by the questions that it asks about the phenomena that are related to the ultimate concern that animates the inquiry. Each perspective has its own methods for engaging with its object of knowledge. The insights they produce are provisional, subject to revision as a consequence of theoretical elaboration or new means of investigation. It was consideration of these practices of understanding that led to Bhaskar’s foregrounding of ontology. His work at this stage can be broadly defined as containing three core commitments: ontological boldness, epistemological relativity and judgmental rationality.

Critical realism is a philosophy that places ontology centre stage (Collier, 1994; Lawson, 2003; Sayer, 2010). It does so derived from the history of scientific practice. This seeks to explore what lies behind the sense experiences that are a common feature of humans’ embodied engagement with the world. These sense experiences can be powerful, but mistaken. To give a simple example, it would appear to be common sense that the sun rises each morning and sets in the evening and our language is constructed round such observations, which happen so regularly as to become an obvious part of our lives. But we know that these perceptions are wrong and what we are actually witnessing is the effect of our planet orbiting the sun on a regular course, one whose patterns can be ascertained and confirmed by detailed observations that can be predicted by theoretical models. However, what the scientific enterprise is dedicated to is not the mere recording of such patterns, but the discovery of the causal mechanisms that generate the observable patterns. The philosopher of science Karl Popper (1979) famously argued that the scientific method was based on falsification. On this basis, positive knowledge of any domain lay beyond our grasp; the best we could aim at was to seek to disprove our hypotheses. Accordingly, scientists ought to set up tests that would be likely to falsify their best predictions drawn from their theoretical apparatus. However, examination of what scientists actually do has suggested that hypotheses are not easily abandoned. Rather, Imre Lakatos (1978) argued, scientists operate with a ‘programme’, which consists of core hypotheses surrounded by, as it were, a protective buffer of auxiliary hypotheses. Failure to validate hypotheses could be attributed to problems with the auxiliary buffer, thus preserving the core commitment. This tenacious adherence to a core explanatory framework suggested strongly that the scientific enterprise was a search for the real in the mechanisms that caused the effects that had been revealed through research methods.

Insights drawn from scientific practice suggested to Bhaskar a threefold division of the nature of the world that was under investigation: the empirical, the actual and the real. The familiar association of reality with the material existence of objects, as when Samuel Johnston refuted the idealist conjectures of Bishop Berkeley by kicking a stone, is thus rejected.¹ The power of scientific investigations has shown that the outward appearance of physical objects, seemingly fixed and permanent, can in fact conceal the movement of elements that are held in stasis only under a certain range of conditions. So the focus on the measurement of those aspects of the world available to our sense experience associated with forms of inquiry labelled as ‘positivism’ is roundly rejected. Behind the empirical lies what actually exists, but this does not exhaust the real but simply reflects its existence as the consequence of the mechanisms that bring such effects into being. These mechanisms are often best described as tendencies rather than laws. They operate under a certain range of conditions and while those conditions obtain, tend to produce particular outcomes. These mechanisms are a property of the world, operating regardless of our knowledge of them. It follows that they may be operating without producing discernible effects, either because their effects are negated by other contending mechanisms or because the conditions in which they can be triggered have yet to be encountered. Holding to this view of the real suggests that our investigations have to be concerned with the search for causal mechanisms that may only be inferred from the effects that they produce.

However, these investigations also have to take account of another way in which the world is stratified, which draws on the important idea of emergence. Emergence refers to the way that phenomena emerge from mechanisms that operate at one level of existence but, once emergent, cannot be reduced back to those mechanisms. Thus, at the level of physical phenomena, the discipline of physics has pointed to the complex interaction of particles governed by the mechanisms of quantum physics (Norris, 2000). These still mysterious processes, about which there remains considerable debate, have been inferred from the construction of theoretical models that posit the presence of entities that are not directly observable. Their interactions produce outcomes that then provide the basis for chemical interactions, interactions that in turn form the grounds for biological processes and sensate beings. Work in the science of the brain has indicated the complexity of processes at work at this level of existence (Rose, 1993). Studies of the brain indicate that areas are specialised for particular tasks. However, examinations of individuals who have experienced trauma in specialised areas have found that they retain capacities for the sorts of action that the specialised areas are thought to control (Damasio, 1995). In other words, the brain exhibits properties of a self-organising system, one which is capable of spreading its functions to new areas. This suggests that mechanisms operating at the biological level cannot be reduced to combinations of chemical properties. In other words, properties of one level of existence might emerge from an underlying level, but they cannot be reduced back to that level. Once combined at the new level of existence, the properties form part of a system proper to that level. Arguments that there can be a science of everything, based on the fundamental laws of physics, run onto the rocks with this recognition of the stratified nature of existence. It is not just physicists who make such claims; analysts of the social also seek to apply the lessons of quantum physics to the level of the social. In the study of technology, for example, Karen Barad (2007) has, with her ‘agential realism’, sought to argue for the ‘constitutive entanglement’ of the social and the material, as expressed in the neologism ‘sociomaterial’. I have argued that this does not help in the analysis of the specifically social dimension of existence. As the critical realist Christopher Norris has argued

it is preposterous in the strict sense of that term – an inversion of the rational order of priorities – when thinkers claim to draw far-reaching ontological or epistemological lessons from a field of thought [such as quantum mechanics] so rife with paradox and lacking (as yet) any adequate grasp of its own operative concepts.

(Norris, 2000: 5)

As I have argued elsewhere, even if matters were settled here, critical realism would suggest that it is an illicit move to jump from the level of microscopic physics to the social without taking into account the notions of stratification and emergence (Mutch, 2013). For example, Daniel Nyberg (2009) uses the example of the atomic composition of coffee mugs to argue for the mutual entanglement of the material and the social. Nyberg uses it to suggest that there are no distinct boundaries between the elements that make up a customer service interaction. However, I would suggest that this is confusing levels of analysis; what is useful and appropriate at the level of micro physics is inappropriate at the level of the social. Here the arrangement and behaviour of atoms is beside the point; it is the inter-relations between specific configurations of the material and the social, and the perceptions that these give rise to and shape them, that are the object of analysis. This assertion is based on the stratified nature of reality.

From the biological emerges the psychological and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness (Damasio, 2000). For critical realists, consciousness emerges from particular biological structures but cannot, once emergent from them, be reduced to them. A particular argument here is that against genetic determinism, the notion that it is particular genes that directly cause specific aspects of human behaviour (as in the discredited search for a ‘gay’ gene). What seems clear is that genes operate in combination, so that not only do their effects depend on the co-presence of other genes but also the activation of their properties is strongly conditioned by the context in which they operate. That context includes not only the embodied properties of the human who carries them but also that person’s interactions with others. Those interactions form the basis for the social world, a world that requires the concepts of social theory for explanation.

Much of the discussion within and drawing on critical realism has been on the elucidation of ontological questions; indeed, many interventions in substantive debates in a wide range of disciplines have been concerned with challenging and clarifying the ontological basis of existing theories. This can sometimes make critical realism seem to be a rarefied, abstract form of approach. However, the emphasis on ontological questions is designed to help clarification of the epistemological issues involved in investigating the object of inquiry. It follows from the stratified and emergent nature of reality that the questions that are asked of it and the methods used to answer them will dependent on the assumptions made about the nature of the particular slice of the world that is being examined (Sayer, 2010). Putting methods first, as in the standard division between the so-called quantitative and qualitative methods is regarded as putting the epistemological cart before the ontological horses. There is a tendency to assume a philosophical position based on the methods adopted, whereas the methods ought to be related to the nature of the question being asked of a particular slice of the world (Edwards, O’Mahoney and Vincent, 2014). Many accounts drawing on the critical realist tradition have sought to explain large-scale problems using what are termed qualitative forms of inquiry. This is not, however, because techniques based on counting and numerical analysis are thought to have no place. Rather, that place is thought to be a limited one, restricted to conditions where there are widely accepted ‘facts’ or, better, states of the matter, which are amenable to enumeration and where that enumeration, as in the case of demographic data, can be illuminating (Williams, 2014). Where there are doubts about the application of more sophisticated statistical techniques is not just a question of data availability and definition. It is more do with the rejection of the notion of causality as the constant conjunction of empirical observations. Although such regularities might be found in empirical manifestations, these can only, at best, be pointers towards the mechanisms that require investigation.

The classic means of investigation in the natural sciences is the experiment. Here, an artificial condition of closure of a selected part of the world is constructed with a view to isolating hypothesised mechanisms. The range of conditions under which mechanisms are actualised can then be tested by expanding the constraints of the experimental situation. However, whether such experimental conditions then accurately mimic the world in which the mechanisms are found under natural conditions is a problem that indicates a further commitment of critical realism: to the world as an open system. Closed systems, where mechanisms operate in isolation from other factors and regulate their own performance are extremely rare in natural circumstances. Closed systems, such as a thermostat regulating a heating system according to measurements of states of the world can be created artefactually, but in most contexts mechanisms operate in concert with others. This means that mechanisms can fail to be actualised or their effects can be negated by other contending mechanisms. This commitment to the world as an open system is also of vital importance when we move from the natural to the social domain. Here such a commitment means that our talk is of tendencies rather than laws.

The world is therefore stratified into levels where the real is the mechanisms that produce effects in an open system. This is the claim to ontological boldness; that a mind independent world exists to which we have no direct access except through our provisional and imperfect theories. The second claim is that of epistemological relativism (Sayer, 2010). The claim is that our means of investigation have to be proper to the level of the world that we are seeking to investigate and to the questions we are seeking to ask of it. Thus, attempts to understand the strange nature of basic physical elements depend on the construction of mathematical models that hypothesise the existence of bodies that cannot be directly observed, but that can be tested for by artefacts such as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. While the experimental method is valid for a large range of contexts, biological phenomena, such as the familial interactions of the chimpanzees studied by Jane Goodall, can only be studied through the careful observation of behaviour in natural settings (Rose, 1994: 49). The range of justified means of investigations means that ontological considerations are paramount. That is, it is necessary to first explicate the assumptions about the nature of the slice of the world that is to be examined before proposing the methods that will, however imperfectly, access its properties. That access cannot be direct but is always mediated by our imperfect theories, drawing our attention to the importance of conceptualisation.

That importance, however, raises important questions about the ‘truth’. In some perspectives, mostly those associated with the label of postmodernism, the attempt to search for any form of truth is doomed to failure because of the known difficulties in gaining certain knowledge. The response of the feminist philosopher of science Hilary Rose, influenced by critical realism, is that ‘Perhaps truth in the strong sense used by Rorty et al. never exists outside the certainty of “true forme”, which I get when I read a poem or a novel’ (Rose, 1993: 25). In other words, the project is better understanding of a given situation in order to furnish explanations, explanations that are always provisional and revisable. However, it is claimed that there is the possibility of better explanations. The third commitment is thus to judgmental rationality.

What, then, is the test for the better fit of our theories to the world they purport to describe and explain? Against arguments that what counts is intersubjective agreement or ut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: What’s in a Word?
• 1 Critical Realism and Social Theory
• 2 Institutions
• 3 Bodies, Persons and History
• 4 Substance
• 5 Practices
• 6 Logics
• 7 Materiality and Identity
• 8 The Limits of Logics
• Index