Macrofoundations: Exploring the Institutionally Situated Nature of Activity

In recent years, institutionalists have devoted increasing attention to the so-called “microfoundations” of institutions: that is, to the everyday activities and dynamics through which institutions are constituted, exert their influence, and decline into obscurity (Haack, Sieweke, & Wessel, 2019; Powell & Colyvas, 2008; Powell & Rerup, 2017). While the value of such work is both substantial and self-evident, several authors have expressed concern that the imagery of “microfoundations” smuggles in an inappropriate ascription of causal primacy to “the micro,” or even to atomistic individuals, and thus casts into shadow some critically important facets of institutions and institutional theory (Boxenbaum, 2019; Hwang & Colyvas, 2019; Jepperson & Meyer, 2011). Most notably, a focus on microfoundations risks obscuring the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions (Gehman, Lounsbury, & Greenwood, 2016; Lounsbury & Wang, 2020; Meyer, 2010; Wooten & Hoffman, 2017). Constitutively, institutional arrangements are inscribed into the symbolic frameworks, bodies, emotional registers, and sensory apparatuses through which people experience world and self (Bitektine, Haack, Bothello, & Mair, 2020; Meyer & Vaara, 2020; Toubiana, in press; Voronov & Weber, 2020); as well as being inscribed into the forms and workings of organizations and other social actors (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013; Meyer, 2010; Tracey, Phillips, & Jarvis, 2011; Waeger & Weber, 2019). Institutional arrangements also play a complex and intricate contextualizing role: furnishing settings, materials, and infrastructures for local episodes of individual, interactional, and organizational cognition, emotion, and action (Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2014; Hinings, Logue, & Zietsma, 2017; Lawrence & Graham, 2015; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2019; Ocasio, Thornton, & Lounsbury, 2017; Sadeh & Zilber, 2019; Steele, in press). Both of these themes sit oddly with any explanatory privileging of “the micro” – indeed, at first glance, they would seem to support a precisely inverted prioritization of “the macro.” With such thoughts in mind, the 2018 Alberta Institutions Conference invited participants to articulate the “macrofoundations of institutions”; using this impish terminology (Fine, 1991) in a purposefully provocative call.