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Putting Things in Place: Institutional Objects and Institutional Logics

On Practice and Institution: New Empirical Directions

ISBN: 978-1-80043-417-2, eISBN: 978-1-80043-416-5

Publication date: 12 January 2021

Abstract

This paper explores the role of institutional objects in the constitution of institutional logics. Institutional objects depend for their objectivity on the goods produced through those objects, such as economic models, passports, or sacred texts. The authors theorize institutional logics as grammars of valuation that institutionalize goods through institutional objects. The authors identify four value moments through which goods are objectified: institution, the instituting of a good, a belief and an imagination of its objective goodness; production, how the good is produced, what practices are productive of the good; evaluation, how good is the good, the practices and objects through which worth in terms of that good is determined, and territorialization, the domain of reference of the good, to what objects and practices a good can and does refer in its instantiations. The authors assess the adequacy of our model through an institutional object based on the good of “market value” – i.e., an options pricing model. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for institutional logical theory and the sociology of valuation.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to our anonymous reviewers who provided incisive substantive and organizational critique and suggestions, pushing us to re-examine the role of objects in French pragmatism and think through the specificity of our approach to the institutional object. We are particularly grateful to our friend Daniel Gabay, a mathematical economist, who has done pioneering work on organizational algorithms in the formative period of financial economics who amplified and corrected our understanding of the Black–Scholes–Merton model (Gabay, 1982; Gabay & Mercier, 1976). Serious criticism is an unrequited gift in our line of work. We are especially grateful to Paolo Quattrone and Fabian Muniesa for their incisive critiques. We would also like to thank Neil Fligstein, Heather Haveman, John Levi Martin and Steve Vaisey for the bracing seminar they hosted on “Fields, Logics, Framing, and Cognition” at UC Berkeley in April, 2017, from whence some of the provocations and the primary texts considered here derived. We also thank Shaz Ansari, Marion Fourcade, Donald MacKenzie, Afshin Mehrpouya, Yuval Millo, John Mohr, Fabian Muniesa, Alistair Mutch, Mike Lounsbury, Mike Power, and David Stark for their helpful comments and suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge contributions from the participants of the research seminar “The Value of Institutional Logics” and the accounting reading group that took place at HEC Paris from January to March 2014 and the Research Seminars of ESSEC Business School (November 2014), SNO/HEC Paris and Ecole des Mines (Paris) (February 2015).

Citation

Friedland, R. and Arjaliès, D.-L. (2021), "Putting Things in Place: Institutional Objects and Institutional Logics", Lounsbury, M., Anderson, D.A. and Spee, P. (Ed.) On Practice and Institution: New Empirical Directions (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 71), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 45-86. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20200000071003

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited