Institutional logic

Institutional logic is a core concept in sociological theory and organizational studies. It focuses on how broader belief systems shape the cognition and behavior of actors.

Friedland and Alford (1991) defined Institutions as "both supraorganizational patterns of 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, thereby rendering experience of time and space meaningful". Thornton and Ocasio (1999: 804) define institutional logics as "the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality".

Focusing on macro-societal phenomena, Friedland and Alford (1991: 232) identified several key Institutions: the Capitalist market, bureaucratic state, democracy, nuclear family, and Christianity that are each guided by a distinct institutional logic. Thornton (2004) revised Friedland and Alford’s (1991) inter-institutional scheme to six institutional orders, i.e., the market, the corporation, the professions, the state, the family, and religions. More recently, Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury (2012), in more fully fleshing out the institutional logic perspective, added community as another key institutional order. This revision to a theoretically abstract and analytically distinct set of ideal types makes it useful for studying multiple logics in conflict and consensus, the hybridization of logics, and institutions in other parts of society and the world. While building on Friedland and Alford’s scheme, the revision addresses the confusion created by conflating institutional sectors with ideology (democracy) and means of organization (bureaucracy), variables that can be characteristic several different institutional sectors. The institutional logic of Christianity leaves out other religions in the US and other religions that are dominant in other parts of the world. Thornton and Ocasio (2008) discuss the importance of not confusing the ideal types of the inter-institutional system with a description of the empirical observations in a study—that is to use the ideal types as meta theory and method of analysis.

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