Structure, Content and Meaning of Organizational Networks

Extending Network Thinking

Peter Groenewegen, Julie E. Ferguson, Christine Moser, John Mohr, Stephen P. Borgatti, Peter Groenewegen, Julie E. Ferguson, Christine Moser, John Mohr, Stephen P. Borgatti

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787144347
• eBook ISBN: 9781787149298
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

To better understand how structure, content and meaning are interrelated, there is great potential in conceptualizing mixed structure linkages, where social relations, events, actions and text-based information intersect. This potential is all the more salient in view of the large data flows and analytical tools that researchers can draw on. However, the increasing availability of tools and data seem to outpace theory development. In response to these trends, this volume aims to advance theoretical understanding of how structure, content and meaning are dynamically intertwined, in both online and offline domains. We also explain the methodological implications of such investigations. This volume therefore responds to the need for in-depth analyses studying the theoretical and methodological implications of the assumed unity of network approaches at the intersections of structure, content and meaning. With these analyses, we show promising approaches, provoke debates in the field, and suggest potential future directions.

BECOMING A BUDDHIST: THE DUALITY OF RITUAL AND BELIEF

José A. Rodríguez, John W. Mohr and Laura Halcomb

ABSTRACT

Drawing on insights from a yearlong ethnography and in-depth survey of the members of a Buddhist monastery located in the heart of modern Europe, we examine how members of the organization come to be more or less involved in the organization and in its core institutional logic. Here we present an exploratory analysis of how individuals’ beliefs about Buddhism and its relationship to everyday life are deeply intertwined with and articulated into different regimes of organizational activities, rituals, and religious practices. Borrowing from institutional logics theory, we use methods for illustrating the relational structure that articulates dualities linking beliefs and practices together. We show that dually ordered assemblages can reveal different types of logics embraced by different members of an organization. Our principal contention is that the greater the structural alignment between an individual’s belief structure, their repertoire of practices, and the institutional logic of the organization, the more well integrated that individual will likely be within the organization, the higher the probability of transformational changes of personal identity, as well as the greater probability of overall success in organizational membership recruitment and retention.

Keywords: Institutional logics; practice theory; religious conversion; membership organization; network analysis; Buddhism; Formal Studies of Culture

FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL BEINGS

Starting out primarily as a religion within the foreign merchant communities in the larger cities, Buddhism gradually gained a following among native Chinese. Some were attracted by the new philosophical ideas found in the Buddhist scriptures then being translated into Chinese – concepts such as impermanence and non-substantiality … others were drawn to the religious side of Buddhism, with its impressive rituals, its promise of rebirth in a glorious heaven, its talk of return to this world at some future time and, above all, its mystical incantations and rites that were believed capable of averting all conceivable disasters (Stanley Weinstein, Buddhism Under the T’ang, 1987, p. 3).

We report here on our study of a small community organization, a Buddhist monastery, located a short but remote distance from the center of a major European city. This organization has a charismatic leader, a core of professional staff, a group of semi-professional workers, and an extended network of locals who come to the monastery for a variety of different reasons. Some of the locals are episodic visitors, others are regulars. Of the latter, many participate in multiple types of rituals and collective activities that occur at the monastery. These might include taking part in chanting circles, focused meditation in Dharma study groups, silent pacing around the stupa,¹ tantric rituals (including initiations, empowerment ceremonies, or daily Pujas), the delicate painting of rose-water across sacred scrolls, the joining of group retreats, the preparation of group meals, and many other roles that carry responsibilities for managing the flow of tourists through the monastery or helping with the enrollment and training of students through the monastery’s educational curriculum.

Over time, some participants move from being at the periphery of the group toward becoming core members of the monastery community. While some of these more engaged followers eventually fall away, others “go all in,” they come to the monastery daily, they volunteer their time, they convert to Buddhism, and they anchor the institution more deeply into the local community. We ask, how does this happen at the level of the individual? How is it that some people “go all in” when they come to be involved with the monastery? And, what does “going all in” actually mean? Is it primarily a change in belief or more of a shift in commitment to a community, to a network, an organization, or a practice or some critical combination or sequencing of these? In short, what does a process of personal transformation look like, how does it proceed, and what explains its occurrence? Beyond this we ask how these events reflect the linkages that connect an organization and its members? What sort of alignment occurs between individuals and organizations that leads to the greater engagement (and deepening of the dual constitution) of the two. And, finally, we ask how can we study this process with data and a formal analysis and can the concept of institutional logics help us do that?²

Our approach draws upon a long lineage of scholarly work that has studied institutional logics at the organizational field level where they have been treated as empirical phenomena, operating above the heads of individuals and organizations, but amenable to measurement and formal analysis (e.g., Casasnovas & Ventresca, 2016; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Haveman & Rao, 1997; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Lomi, Tasselli, & Zappa, 2017; Lounsbury, 2002; Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007; Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992; Meyer, Egger-Peitler, Höllerer, & Hammerschmid, 2014; Mohr & Duquenne, 1997; Mohr & White, 2008; Oberg, Korff, & Powell, 2017; Padgett & Powell, 2012; Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2003; Ruef, 2000; Scott, Ruef, Mendel, & Caronna, 2000; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012; Washington & Ventresca, 2004). In this paper our goal is to carry this line of analytic thinking forward but to do so, as many institutionalists have begun to do, by narrowing our observational lens down to one local setting. Specifically, we will study how specific individuals in that community come to enter into a focal organization’s institutional sphere of influence and what happens to them once they enter therein? In our view, the monastery acts as a localized center of gravity (an oppositional force within the field of forces) that offers a counter-framing to the dominant institutional logic of spirituality that anchors and orders the religious arena in this predominantly Catholic region of Europe (Martin, 2003, 2011).

Surveys were administered to members of the monastery community both at the beginning of the project and then again after more than a year of ethnographic study by the first author. In this paper we examine data from the first of those surveys to help us investigate these many questions (questions that resonate with the concerns of many membership organizations) of how voluntary participants come to be embedded in the life of the organization. Others before us have pursued this topic successfully with ethnographic research and survey data of religious communities (e.g. Davidman, 1991; Froese, 2001; Sherkat, 1991). We differ in that we use institutional logic theory as our guide as to what to look for and how to look for it.

We begin the paper with a short discussion of the problem of membership organizations, religious conversion, and the more general question of how to think about institutional logics. We then turn to our case, emphasizing the question of how deep-level engagement operates so that individuals from the community come to commit themselves to the monastery and to the ensemble of lifestyle and cosmological changes that such a commitment entails. We use the survey data to search for configurations of beliefs and practices, a search that we pursue graphically with the use of network models that allow us to visually explore the kinds of institutional connections that tie this organizational community together. In short, we use these models to examine how beliefs, identities, and practices form into ensembles that resonate more or less strongly with the institutional logic that defines the organizational life of the monastery.

RELIGIOUS CONVERSION

As Buddhism expands to the West, to predominantly Christian countries, new converts are often recruited as adults. However, to take on the practice of Dharma later in one’s life means (inevitably) one must embrace radical changes in both one’s cosmological/moral belief systems and also in one’s (material) everyday life practices (including everything from one’s daily rituals to the ongoing connectedness one has with a community of fellow practitioners who are sharing community rituals in time and space). It is, in other words, a fundamental change in lifestyle and it is this phenomenon that we set out to better understand.

The broader question of how organizations gather and create commitment, engagement, and presence among their members has been the subject of management theory at least as far back as Elton Mayo’s (1933) Human Relations school. It is a matter of particular interest for voluntary organizations such as religious congregations and, as in the current case, it is often described and theorized in terms of religious conversion (Snow & Machalek, 1984). Theories of conversion developed in the 1960s with the process model (Lofland & Stark, 1965), where explanations of conversion moved beyond the individual to include social networks and personal ties.³ Within the religious economy framework, institutional features explain the growth and decline of religious denominations through supply-side theories of religious change (Stark & Finke, 2000). More recently, contextual social and cultural factors have been used to explain religious conversion, examining how the globalization of the religious market and macro-level factors shape dramatic changes in conversion (Yang, 2005).

In our paper we build on this tradition by adding a different conceptualization to the study of religious conversion – in this case conversion to Buddhism – that is grounded in the theory of institutional logics. Following the lead of institutional logic theorists (Friedland, 2009, 2011; 2017a, 2017b; Friedland et al., 2014; Thornton et al., 2012), we explore the idea that members of the monastery community would accomplish this kind of religious transformation by throwing over one institutional logic to embrace another.

INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS

Roger Friedland and Robert Alford introduced the concept of an institutional logic a quarter of a century ago in a famous essay entitled “Bringing Society Back In” (1991). They sought to push back against dominant theoretical programs in the social sciences that privileged either individuals (as in rational choice theories) or organizations (as in state centered theories, like those presented in Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, 1985) in developing sociological explanations. Against these trends, Friedland and Alford sought to resuscitate a robust theory of the social, a theory that emphasized how individuals and organizations (as well as interests, power and identities) were products of institutional orders. Their intention was to “bring society back in” by calling attention to how social institutions provide the foundation for and, indeed, the very conditions for the existence of other levels and forms of social agency. They defined institutions as, “supraorganizational patterns of human activity by which individuals and organizations produce and reproduce their material subsistence and organize time and space. They are also symbolic systems, ways of ordering reality, and thereby rendering experience of time and space meaningful” (1991, p. 243).

The key to understanding an institutional order, according to Friedland and Alford, is to trace out its logic. In a famous passage, they give a definition of an institutional logic and they offer a series of examples:

Each of the most important institutional orders of contemporary Western societies has a central logic – a set of material practices and symbolic constructions – which constitutes its organizing principles and which is available to organizations and individuals to elaborate. The institutional logic of capitalism is accumulation and the commodification of human activity. That of the state is rationalization and the regulation of human activity by legal and bureaucratic hierarchies […] That of religion, or science for that matter, is truth, whether mundane or transcendental, and the symbolic construction of reality within which all human activity takes place. These institutional logics are symbolically grounded, organizationally structured, politically defended, and technically and materially constrained, and hence have specific historical limits (Friedland & Alford, 1991, pp. 248–249).

So, an institutional logic consists of “a set of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Structure, Content, and Meaning of Organizational Networks: Extending Network Thinking, Introduction
• Culture and Connectivity Intertwined: Visualizing Organizational Fields as Relational Structures and Meaning Systems
• Being Apart together: Convergence and Divergence in the Field of Dutch Politics
• The Network Structure of Organizational Vocabularies
• Duality beyond Dyads: Multiplex Patterning of Social Ties and Cultural Meanings
• Semantic Networks and the Market Interface: Lessons from Luxury Watchmaking
• Becoming a Buddhist: The Duality of Ritual and Belief
• The Duality of Philosophers’ Social Relations and Ideas
• Meaning in organizational networks – from social to digital and back
• About the Authors
• Index