10 - Institutional “dirty” work: preserving institutions through strategic decoupling

Summary

[The field has paid] insufficient attention to those actors who are able somehow to compromise, avoid or defy systems of institutional control or episodes of interested agency.

(Lawrence, 2008: 189)

Draw attention to behind the scenes, to the actors, writers, and stage-hands that produce them.

(Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006: 249)

Introduction

Two key aspects of institutional work are the entrepreneurship which accompanies the rise of new institutions and the decline which occurs as they move toward deinstitutionalization. As Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) note, studies of each are often separated from each other, as well as from studies of institutions that are in place and being maintained. Their important insight, in calling for a greater integration of work on the creation, maintenance, and decline of institutions is significant, for empirically the creation of new institutions often intersects with existing institutions which are still powerful, as well as those already on their way out. Integrating them in our studies expands the organizational fields to examine, opening up more networks of organizations and purposive actors working to preserve, alter, or replace an institution. These dynamics and the mechanisms they entail focus more attention on the processes and actions involved as institutions undergo changes throughout their life cycles.

In this chapter, we highlight two important areas of institutional study. First, we build upon Lawrence and Suddaby's framework, highlighting the work of institutional preservation, a distinct component of institutional work that is most pertinent in the stage between the disruption of incumbent institutions and the creation of nascent institutions.