The Long Walk to Aleppo

On December 26, 2016, several hundred people left a disused Berlin airport to walk some 2,100 miles to Aleppo as an expression of solidarity with civilians suffering in Syria while calling for an end to the war. Some would stay the course for the nearly eight months it ultimately took, whereas others joined the Civil March for Aleppo for short periods. In this chapter, we explore what the march can tell us about the relation between processes and institutions by focusing on a contentious episode. When the marchers realized they might not be able to continue walking upon reaching Turkey, they had to confront a question that had never collectively been settled: Was this ultimately a march for or to Aleppo? Drawing from old, new, and inhabited institutionalism, we explore the causes and consequences of this episode and re-examine assumptions of loose and tight coupling in organizations.

The Interpretation of Design-Based Cues

We advance current understandings about the nature of interpretative processes unique to design-based cues—elements in the organizational environment, such as colors or textures—that affect institutional processes by shaping behaviors and emotions. The implicit assumption in extant work is that because these cues are salient, they are tightly coupled with distinct meanings. We argue, however, that interpretation in the context of these cues is processual rather than linear or finite. We explain this argument by exploring the interpretation of design-based cues given tensions along three planes: tensions between individual and intersubjective levels of interpretations; tensions among the multiple cues that co-exist in organizational workspaces, whose interpretations may reinforce or contradict each other; and tensions emanating from the ways the design-based cues themselves transform over time due to deliberate and natural change. On the basis of these arguments, we reveal the inherent complexity and dynamism of interpreting these cues.

Bringing Process into Structure

A review of the organizational literature on field-level institutional processes and the literature on interorganizational networks shows very limited cross-references. Thus, studies on institutional processes do not benefit from the potential contribution of process-related network research. In this chapter, Oliver reviews studies of field-level institutional process and field evolution and related structural concepts in network research. She then offers an initial contribution toward an integration of these two theoretical domains and proposes ways in which empirical research can help to develop this integration. She shows that organizational fields emerge from various interrelations between actors and they change over time as these relations change, new actors enter the field, and others leave. Thus, the ability to follow changes in the network structure of the field over time, coupled with qualitative analysis of actors’ activities, can depict the process of field evolution and changes over time as process and structure are interrelated.

A Processual View on Institutions

In this chapter, ‘A Processual View on Institutions: A Note from a Phenomenological Institutional Perspective’, Renate E. Meyer argues that institutions and processes are inextricably intertwined phenomena. She maintains that separating them impoverishes both theoretical traditions. Renate E. Mayer elaborates this argument from a phenomenological institutionalist perspective, highlighting in particular the action-based and type-based definition and the collective and expressive character of institutions. As well as this, Mayer points to the strongly processual notion of a phenomenological perspective. She concludes the chapter by arguing that such a perspective and its inherent fluidity can help to prevent the reification of institutions.

Data as Process

Adopting a strong process perspective, this chapter seeks to problematize the way in which data are typically conceived in the information sciences and in contemporary organizational discourse. Drawing on evidence from an ongoing multidisciplinary study of data reuse in acute healthcare we argue that, contrary to the prevalent conception of data as a fundamental, natural resource that exists “out there” in the world, data are constituted through complex activities and transactions. They are a contingent record of a contingent selection of what is paid attention to in the world. Not all data that are recorded, moreover, may be looked for, and of these not all may be found or be accessible. Much of what gets described as data are therefore “data in principle” only, with just a proportion becoming “data in practice,” able to contribute to organizational processes. Some implications of this process view of data are explored.

Making and Regulating Business Judgment

Chapter 11 is about judicial practice in litigation brought against directors of a company, Continental Assurance of London (Continental). The chapter utilizes the “judgment,” a contemporaneous text of the legal ruling in which the judge explains the reasoning behind his decision. By drawing on a judge’s narrative account, and combining it with social, organizational, and legal theorizing, the chapter demonstrates how individual action is connected to societal order through mechanisms of practice and logics. This processual analysis of judicial practice is valuable for the development of practice theorizing that has been criticized for an inability to handle big topics, as well as the development of micro-foundations of institutional theory.

Processes, Life, and the Practice Plenum

Process approaches form a minoritarian vocation in contemporary social thought. The concept of process is regularly used in unconsidered ways that are continuous with untutored uses outside academic texts. But there is relatively little detailed engagement with, or focused conceptual development centered on, the concept—despite a recent burst of process analyses, above all in organization studies and in corners of sociology and geography that engage with pragmatism, Bergson, or Deleuze. Chapter 6 examines whether lives, practices, and the practice plenum embrace or are themselves processes. To explore this issue, Schatzki draws on a slew of prominent notions of process and work with Heidegger’s and Mead’s ideas about action and life as well as his own conception of practices.

Systematic Heterogeneity in the Adaptation Process of Management Innovations

In this chapter, the authors investigate how the best practices approach “diffused” in the Italian public sector. They show that despite the lack of a clear original model or a strong brokering agency—and the considerable changes this management innovation went through in its arrival in Italy—the result was not complete idiosyncrasy. Rather, clear adaptation patterns and systematic heterogeneity emerged. They argue that the bottom-up emergence of such patterns can be explained by paying attention to the very nature of the public-sector field. They use these findings to develop a framework that accounts for the convergence/divergence of adaptation patterns in the “diffusion” of management innovations based on power relations between innovation brokers and adopters.

The Discourse of Risk and Processes of Institutional Change

In this chapter the authors explore the role that the dominant discourse of risk has played in the processes of institutional change that have taken place in the field of chemistry as a result of the emergence and expansion of “green” chemistry. The aim of green chemistry is to replace hazardous substances with benign ones so as to eliminate chemical risks to human health and the environment. They show how significant institutional changes have occurred through two forms of “risk translation” that have changed the discursive landscape by constructing new kinds of “knowing subjects” who are able to act on different “known” objects.

Stories of (and Instead of) Process

Policy makers are well aware that the categories and standards they use to combat inequality are blunt tools, flattening differences within groups and fixing relations in time; they draw on stories of the categories’ past and purpose as a way to justify their use. However, the stories that come naturally are ill-equipped to capture the processual dimensions of inequality. Polletta makes this argument by analyzing two efforts to combat inequality, one in medical research and one in employment. In the first, reformers’ account of racial and ethnic categories as the proud legacy of the civil rights movement and as only temporary ended up legitimating a view of inequalities in health as genetic in origin. In the second, women were able to prove employment discrimination only when they told a story in which their job aspirations were unaffected by their experiences in the labor market. In both cases, familiar stories made it difficult to recognize processes rather than people as the drivers of action, and to recognize that people’s aspirations are shaped by the institutions in which they participate.