ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to view institutions as they are experienced in the everyday. Most elementally, a policy is a text that is then implemented. But such a text encounters the influence of context, and in this hermeneutic process arises the institution. This notion of institutional fit will be used throughout the book. Other concepts include a weakening of strong divisions between fields of institutional life, contrasting autopoietic versus sociopoietic systems of governance. The chapter uses the example of the great recession of 2008 to illustrate the difference between autopoiesis and sociopoiesis. Other concepts include the idea of institutions not as formal rules and roles but the outcome of the working and reworking of relationships – i.e., a relational model based not on Weberian rationality but on a phenomenological relationality.
