ABSTRACT
The paradigmatic breach by institutional theory into the field of organization studies, which resulted in its current domination over macro-analyses of organizations, was predicated on its reorientation of the field towards social constructivism and cultural analysis. Indeed, institutional theory’s wide recognition is based on its reading of Weber, Schutz, Goffman, Berger and Luckmann, and on recasting their claims into a series of principles that emphasize, among other ideas, the centrality of symbolic systems, cultural scripts and discourse for institutionalization. Consequently, although institutions stand on regulative, normative and cognitive pillars and are formalized into structures, practices and behaviours, institutionalists devoted less attention to the material aspects of institutions. In other words, while institutionalists study formal aspects and structuration of organizations and empirically gauge such processes by a variety of organizational artifacts, the search for patterns of meaning obscured materiality. Most insistently, Friedland (2009: 24) declares that institutions have an “absent presence,” claiming that whereas institutions are widely acknowledged as social constructs, they present themselves in material practices imbued with symbolic meanings. Friedland’s call to make the invisible institutional substance visible (2009: 49) contributed to the recent “material turn” and “visual turn” in organization studies (see e.g., Carlile et al., 2013; Meyer et al., 2013; respectively). As summarized by Jones and Massa (2013: 1127):
The cognitive bias in institutional theory casts institutions as malleable, prone to episodic fads and fashions. In contrast, materiality illuminates why some ideas persist in the face of competition and environmental shifts. Thus, the material instantiation of ideas is central not only to the durability of ideas but also to the social relations that form a community and underpin institutions. Materiality unites ideas and social actors through identification, enabling institutions to cohere and endure over time.
The “material turn” and “visual turn” in organization studies, however recent they may be, are already most prolific and rapidly gaining momentum. Still, 105although institutionalists now recognize aesthetics as one of the “nascent threads of research that hold strong potential for bringing institutional theory back to its core assumptions and objectives” (Suddaby, 2010: 14), space and spatiality often remain neglected. In this respect, the reorientation of institutional theory towards aesthetics of organizations, which enables a return of the theory to its grand concerns, regarding rationality, actorhood, and the construction and diffusion of ideas and practices, continues, on the whole, to neglect the sociability and institutional foundations of space. The aim of this chapter is to begin a dialogue between Lefebvre’s theory of space and institutional theory, in order to expand discussions of materiality and specifically of spatiality.