Institutional Spheres and Organizational Sociology: Considering the Ecological and Cultural Dynamics of the Macro Realm

2.1 Autonomy and Ecology

The focus on entrepreneurs suggests that not all organizational fields in a given institutional sphere are created equally. Some are disproportionately filled with entrepreneurs or those roles and organizations who function as support systems, while others are filled with other types of actors. In Shils’ (1975) now-forgotten text, he argued that societies are always characterized by centers and peripheries. Drawing on an implicit Durkheimian (1912 [1995]) insight about a religious center, something inherent in nearly every religion and their hierophanies (Caillois 1959; Eliade 1958 [1996]), Shils conceptualized a physical and symbolic anchor that oriented action, drew attention, shaped movement, and was the seat of power, moral authority, and embodied values.^[3] Borrowing this, we can argue that autonomous institutions have a core or several cores. In many cases, these are physical. Washington D.C. or Jerusalem are literal political and religious centers. Other institutional spheres, like the U.S. economy, are much more decentralized, yet Wall Street serves as a symbolic center when people talk about the economy, which is perhaps why the 9/11 terrorists targeted the World Trade Center. Both of these symbols are, in fact, real places where people do economic things all day, but so are malls, Amazon, and eBay. Because these institutional spheres operate across vast geographic terrain, smaller cores dot the landscape. Most big cities have federal offices and courthouses, while synagogues or parishes connect religious communities with distal centers. The center matters, as we will see, for structural and cultural reasons, not least of which is that it houses the elites of a given institutional sphere and they are responsible for maintaining the sphere’s autonomy vis-à-vis other sphere’s entrepreneurs, and therefore, the degree to which organizations in one sphere are differentiated from those in other spheres. Though oversimplified, we offer Figure 1 as an example of how we might represent an institutional sphere that has achieved some level of autonomy.

Figure 1:

Legal autonomy.

The most important outcome of an ecological model is what we call the principle of proximity, which is the primary explanatory dynamic for both the pervasive nature of convergent isomorphism and the reality that individuals, organizations, and clusters of individuals and organizations diverge in important ways. The principle predicts that the greater the autonomy of the center (vis-à-vis other institutional centers), the greater is the pressure actors and/or clusters of actors will feel to conform to institutional standards (Abrutyn 2014a). Proximity can be physical or it can be cognitive; it can also vary in time. For instance, many cities have legal zones in which courthouses are surrounded, physically, by support organizations that take physical root in these zones. For instance, bail bondsmen, law offices, police stations, and so forth fill the geographic landscape which, in turn, creates the conditions for other types of organizations to support all of these actors – e.g., coffee shops, bodegas, copy stores, and other economic organizations. Though it is a hypothesis, we suggest that these non-institutional organizations are shaped as much or more by the legal core’s physical, temporal, social, and symbolic force than the economic. These shops are open during legal hours, while the clientele are mostly legal actors who shape the cultural aesthetics of these spaces. For legal actors, whether individuals or organizations, being located in a core means spending disproportionate amounts of time doing law such that we would expect these individuals and organizations to most closely embody the structure and culture of the legal institution. More so than, say, legal professors who spend inordinate amounts of cognitive time in the legal core, but far less time doing law in frequent, recurring encounters. Others, like a citizen being called to jury duty, may rarely if ever deal directly with the core and, thus, be inclined to conform because of the threat of real sanctions or because of moral commitments.

The principle of proximity, then, offers up some predictions that we list in propositional form:

1. The closer an individual, organization, or constellation of organizations are to the core, the more alignment between their goals, decisions, and actions as well as their structural form and cultural commitments and that of the institutional core. This alignment is a positive function of:

   1. Structural formations, like extensive network ties or embedding, drawing actors or clusters closer physically and cognitively to the core;

   2. The increasing likelihood that rules and regulations are enforced, which, in turn, increases the degree to which actors of clusters of actors are subject to formalization and standardization;

   3. Closeness to the center of resource production and distribution increases the visibility of resources, which, in turn, incentivizes, motivates, and homogenizes feelings, thoughts, and actions;

   4. Prestige and privilege drawn from proximity to the core further incentivizes conformity.

2. The converse is true: the further away from the core an individual, organization, or constellation of organizations is, the less likely their actions, decisions, or goals will be governed by the institutional culture.

3. An additional corollary refers to the unique situation those individuals, organizations, or constellations of organizations inside the core reveal: the privileged position the core affords provides both the freedom to innovate, be creative, and violate norms or rules with fewer consequences and the incentive or motivation to innovative, create, and break rules to sustain and enhance privilege.

4. Individuals or organizations that find themselves in the overlapping spaces between institutional spheres are the most likely to innovate given their unique structural freedom and capacity to combine multiple institutional cultures together in creative ways.

This last prediction refers to a special group of individuals or organizational actors: liaisons, or actors who live in the overlapping spaces between spheres and who often function as a go-between (see Figure 2). Again, legal entrepreneurs serve as a good example. As Luhmann (2004) argued, legal entrepreneurs function to translate conflicts that occur in other spheres, like kin, religious, economic, or political conflicts, into legal conflicts where the core can process them for the sake of producing and distributing conflict resolution. While the legal core benefits from these things, the decisions rendered are re-translated into the language of the sphere from which they derived, also changing the core of that institutional sphere. In some cases, liaisons are truly located in the interstitial regions of institutional spheres, while in other cases they cognitively occupy those spaces. For example, as new institutionalists show, government regulation leads to the creation of legal departments in economic organizations (Sutton et al. 1994). In this sense, in-house legal actors – either those on retainer from an independent corporate law firm or those hired by and embedded in the corporate structure – bring the norms of the legal sphere into the organization (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). However, they do not serve the legal core, but rather are hired to protect the economic organization’s interests. They work to translate legal language into economic language and vice versa, creating fascinating interdependencies and, we would hypothesize, interesting empirical variations with very real consequences for economic and legal spheres alike.

Figure 2:

Institutional liaisons.

An additional form of liaison that may be even more dynamic, historically, are liaisons that find themselves located not only in the interstitial space between two institutions but are oriented to both spheres equally. For instance, universities are both organizational actors devoted to education and science, with individuals, corporate units like departments, and, of course, fields like Ivy League universities continually shifting orientations back and forth. The capacity to meld different elements of culture from two overlapping spheres affords a significant amount of creativity that legal entrepreneurs who, no matter how dependent on an economic organization, are professionalized within a specific set of knowledge and practices. Having outlined how institutional cores influence individuals, organizations, or constellations of organizations to align their goals, decisions, and actions with the core, and the significance of liaisons in bridging the gap between the, we now follow tradition in offering a list of institutions to shed light on what distinguishes them as unique entitites.

2.2 A Tentative List

Functionalist institutionalism has always provided lists of institutions. It is fair to criticize the criteria for inclusion (see, for instance, Roth and Schütz 2015), but it seems difficult to argue that institutional spheres are neither real nor have impact on organizations. Indeed, a simple examination of the Western legal institution throughout the 20th century and the former Soviet Union’s counterpart (Berman 1955) challenges the critique of institutionalism. As such, the six most common are kinship, polity, economy, law, religion, and education. We prefer polity and kinship over the State and the family because, ultimately, States and families are organization or organizational units found in institutional spheres but only under certain historical circumstances encompassing the institutional sphere en toto. They may be the primary organizational units in most polities or kinship spheres, but polities include a broader swath of corporate and individual actors who are not necessarily the State (Weber 1946). Political parties, for instance, are distinct bureaucratic organizations that operate within the political sphere but cannot be conflated on empirical or theoretical grounds with the State besides exceptions like China today or the former Soviet Union. In any case, it seems as though the most pressing human concerns revolve around biological and cultural reproduction; power and collective decision-making; the production and distribution of goods and services; conflict resolution and justice; communication with the supernatural; and, the production and distribution of cultural knowledge – broadly defined. If autonomy is our main institutional criteria, one might add a few more to this list including medicine (health/mortality) and science (production of knowledge and the pursuit of truth), and a host of debatably autonomous spheres like art, media, sport, or entertainment.

What makes the initial six so important, and what makes us confident they are in fact ubiquitous, is that ethnographic, archaeological, historical, and sociological evidence overwhelmingly supports their existence. Malinowski (1959), for instance, notes that law is not autonomous among the Trobrianders, but they did in fact have a word for extra-kin transgressions and processes to deal with them. In Weberian (1967) terms, the paucity of conflicts that rose above the kinship level constrained the need for full-time legal actors or processes.

The other candidates for institutional spheres are more complicated. Health and mortality have likely always been a concern of human societies, and some form of proto-medical entrepreneurs have been discernible since history has been recorded (Sigerist 1951–61), so medicine seems reasonable even if autonomy was rather recent (Starr 1982). Science, too, seems plausible, as astrology and astronomy are quite ancient, as are other forms of proto-science (Lindberg 2007). But, the autonomy of science as a sphere is, like medicine, recent having taken centuries of gestation in Europe (Gaukroger 2006) before the research university and scientific communities achieved some degree of structural and cultural independence. Indeed, when looked at from an historical perspective, most spheres have been slow to become autonomous, with some, like education, being incompletely autonomous because they are often arenas of struggle between organizations in institutional spheres of every stripe. Other spheres, like sport or art, are debatably deserving of being called spheres, but are notably important because they have achieved varying levels of physical, temporal, and social differentiation. What seems fair to say, though, is that there are a limited number of universal concerns that become salient enough to carve out a discrete cultural and structural shell around organizational efforts to deal with the concrete problems related to the concern.

3.1 The Circulation of Media

Generalized symbolic media make Ocasio’s (2023) organized systems of roles and interactions possible. Impersonal relationships demand some cultural mediating force, and media supply it while also explaining the important variation we might find in a given doctor or mother, law firm or university. In the former case, the pursuit, acquisition, and use of media has a generalizing or isomorphic effect through the standardized exchanges, patterned texts and themes coordinating discourse and interaction, and shared evaluative frames for orienting ourselves in an encounter. What this means is that as the number and frequency of exchanges between people or groups that do not know each other grows, media reduce social and cultural distances by replacing particular relational qualities (e.g. shared history) with a standardized go-between. Money, as Simmel (1907) observed, is portable, durable, and transposable, regardless of the person’s national or ethnic background. Consequently, cultural, social, and geographic distances are compressed in ways that increasingly homogenize economic attitudes and behavior. The same can be said of power and polity. Likewise, the more political exchange by power, the more predictable political attitudes and behavior presumably become.

Furthermore, as economic spheres become thematicized around money, with texts, discourse, myths, and other representations emerging around the idea of money itself, the more we should expect conversations, books, mission statements, and the cultural discourse surrounding everyday life in economic organizations to revolve around money.^[4] All of us know economic behavior when we see it because of how generalized it is. No one would mistake the decision-making of a hedge fund manager with that of a father playing with his children. It is for these reasons that a work of art, like the television show Succession, can play with these well-worn themes by depicting a father treating his children transactionally or in putting his economic life in front of his familial responsibilities. The incongruence is judged, by the audience, based on kinship criteria of love, though this is balanced by themes of loyalty that can translate into economic discourse more readily. Indeed, thematicization is central to autonomy, as Luhmann (2004) keenly recognized. One of the most powerful moves an entrepreneur can make is the differentiation of time and space to devote to discourse, texts, interactions, and exchanges that become oriented towards a specific concern. The law schools that first appeared in Bologna, Salerno, and Paris featured legal entrepreneurs who were intentionally writing and thinking about the law as an object distinct from power, piety, or loyalty (Abrutyn 2009; Berman 1983). Consequently, we come to expect, for instance, that legal actors are not persuaded by power or money – even if, intuitively we are suspicious that they are, which explains why we are shocked when a judge is bribed or when a judge draws nakedly from political ideology.

Finally, media are capable of becoming externalized representations, sometimes in physical, social, and abstract objects (Abrutyn 2015). To be sure, while power or truth or competition may never be like paper money, they certainly adhere in objects as Bourdieu (1986) has similarly argued with regards to forms of capital. However, we can diverge from Bourdieu on both the communicative and evaluative functions of media. In terms of the latter, then, media provide standardized ways of assessing people and organizations. They can be quantified and made divisible, like money. For Trump, counting the number of votes is like Scrooge McDuck swimming in and counting his money, while for athletes, “magic” numbers like 3,000 career hits or 50 goals scored in a hockey season signal elite competition. They allow people and groups to compare themselves to each other, which further homogenizes the clusters of organizations, organizations, and role players as well. Counting publications or H-Index may feel “neo-liberal,” but in impersonal, diverse institutional spheres, it becomes essential to ensuring action remains consistent and predictable. Of course, as previously noted, this also affords the opportunity for deviance. Citation or publication counting encourages extrinsically motivated action and, potentially, fraudulent behavior. But, these exceptions to most people’s idealized expectations indicate the moral fault lines that most people believe exist, paving the way for some degree of shared moral accounting.

Quantification, however, is not the only means of measurement. Subjective forms persist, too. Sports teams and players are not just measured by numbers, but also by elusive qualities like domination, dynastic capacity, clutch performance, and so on. This aspect of media speaks even more to its evaluative function. One cannot literally trade their graduate degree like they can a coin, but the tangible nature of media can be something we respond to tactilely or visually. We place a degree in a frame, place it on a wall, and can look at it fondly, as Durkheim imagined any totem could elicit memories and feelings that generate or renew moral commitments. It also signals to others the level of knowledge and truth we have accumulated, with some degrees being “worth” more than others. Consequently, the act of pursuing, obtaining, using, hoarding, investing, desiring, looking at, touching, or imagining the externalized forms of media produce an affective-moral relationship to the institutional sphere. And, because an affective-moral facet saturates media, they become evaluative tools for understanding one’s position in the sphere compared to others. As such, they are motivational, in this regard, as much as well-worn meaning-making heuristics. In short, then, generalized symbolic media are the cultural mechanisms by which exchanges, communication, and evaluation are patterned and made relatively homogeneous. But, because they circulate within institutional spheres that reveal ecological dynamics, media neither circulate equitably nor resist refraction and particularization in any given role, organization, or cluster of organizations. Harvard or Berkeley, for instance, sit at the center of producing and distributing cultural knowledge. These media circulate throughout Ivy League and prestigious public fields, as well as into other educational fields like small liberal arts colleges or land grant teaching schools. In some ways, these places come to reflect the core of the institution. For one thing, professors are more likely to be hired from these core organizations than less prestigious places, thereby physically carrying the media with them and putting it into circulation locally. However, mimetic isomorphic forces also travel through structural linkages, causing these schools to trust the elite schools in the face of some uncertainties. Not surprisingly, these schools use media differently as well. Not only are they not in the privileged place of producing knowledge in the same ways, but they operate in distinct resource niches which causes their cultural milieus to reflect the sorts of pressures and strategies they’ve enacted to survive (Hannan and Freeman 1977). Even as professors come from Harvard or Berkeley, they are not immune to the enculturating forces of local political, historical, and cultural contexts. The media they carry cannot help but be altered as a result. Thus, media are never coherent, systemic things. All universities and actors within those universities may see Harvard as paradigmatic, or one key role in the transmission of cultural knowledge, but we would expect contestation, adaptation, and innovation to be normal processes within a given cluster of corporate actors or within a given corporate actor.

3.2 Macro-Micro Bridge

As exchange, communicative, and evaluative mechanisms, we might think of media as “conveyer belts” tying individuals to organizations and organizations to institutional spheres or, at least, their cores (Vandenberghe 2007). This theoretical maneuver makes media something more than just beliefs and practices, but motivational. We pursue money, in the tangible and symbolic sense, because it is rewarding, not just because we internalize values about pursuing money. It has value in itself that is rewarding. That media adhere in things we can touch means we need not get lofty or suggestive in arguing that that media link people to the groups, organizations, and institutional spheres they inhabit. These things embody the cultural core, even when they acquire localized meanings that diverge from the official meanings. Thus, money might have social meanings unique to a given family or community, but the pursuit of money implies a degree of buy-in to the institutional sphere and, therefore, the ability of impersonal others to coordinate their feelings, thoughts, and actions with our own.

Moreover, because media circulate in real time and space, we also are not beholden to the classic top-down cybernetic models that oversocialize agents (Wrong 1961). Scientists are driven, in part, by the pursuit of truth and knowledge, but truth and knowledge are always refracted through the scientific communities in which people pursue these abstract and objectified things (Merton 1979). Any sports fan understands that competition rests at the center of their favorite sports, and also understands that what competition means varies depending on the sport. Baseball is qualitatively and quantitatively different from soccer, not simply because the sports reflect different types of activities, but because the cultural realities are distinct enough to create unique slices of competition.

3.3 Media Dynamics

One final set of points are worth making: media have different dynamics worth highlighting. Most of which have to do with the “temperature” of media. Some media are “cooler” – or more impersonal and generalizable – than others, thereby making them more easily fungible across institutional boundaries. In other spheres, media tend to be “hot” – local, particular, and personal – insofar as they have less value beyond the situations, groups, organizations, and communities in which they are exchanged, facilitate communication, and contribute to evaluative assessment, such as kinship or religious organizations. Loyalty in kinship, for example, is truly anchored in concrete relationships. Of course, loyalty can be cooled a bit to build extra-kin commitments such as those sometimes romanticized in mafia organizations and are present wherever patrimonial organization appear (Weber 1978, 231–40). Put differently, hot media are more morally and affectually loaded than cooler media, like money and power, for instance, which tend to be relatively cool media, capable of circulating in myriad other institutional spheres without fully corrupting the integrity of the sphere. This is perhaps why meta-ideologies, or those that transcend institutional boundaries, rest on themes and action patterns that are transactional, rational, and strategic despite the affective nature of most social life (Abrutyn and Turner 2011). For instance, in sports an apparent paradox that has parallels to many other spheres in modern life exists (Goffman 1961): teams and leagues are businesses but sports are contests and games, and thus are thematicized around the medium of competition. Nevertheless, money necessarily circulates as a means of paying salaries. To manage the potential damage money does, as sport, like all games, is only worth caring about if the outcome remains uncertain to the end, money only circulates saliently at certain times and places. Teams, players, and the league becomes visibly economic during the offseason when free agency, trades, salary negotiations, and the like are prescribed activities and conversations in self-referential sportswriter’s discourse (Abrutyn 2018). That is not to say that somehow sports accomplish the trick of fully blocking money, but it certainly labors to prevent the dangers of money, in the form of gambling for instance, from presaging the outcome of the event. Notably, media are not inherently hot or cold. Money becomes cooler than most media when market economies emerge, but even as a relatively cool medium, it can become hot in specific contexts and organizations (Zelizer 1989), such as during movements fused to financial inequity, amid recessions with widespread layoffs, or when tied to family inheritance. Likewise, loyalty is often hot, but when fused with power in, say, an authoritarian regime like the Soviet Union, loyalty can become cooler as it circulates across institutional boundaries.

A second dynamic related to generalized symbolic media and their temperature has to do with how institutional spheres and generalized media are impacted by ecological dynamics. This depends on an empirical observation. In the modern world, polities exist on multiple levels like the federal, provincial/state, and municipal. Each of these levels are afforded a degree of freedom that varies depending on the State. For instance, polity and law may be relatively autonomous at the national level, say in the federal government, but in a small town, the lines may be blurrier. A president or prime minister understands politics differently because power as an exchange, communicative, and evaluative mechanism is qualitatively distinct from a local mayor or council member. Similarly, we would expect appellate judges or high-ranking civil bureaucrats to understand justice or power in cooler terms than their small-town counterparts who likely struggle to tease out the various roles a judge or county clerk plays in other spheres of the town’s life. Indeed, even the geographic compression of these institutional spheres creates tenuous boundaries. In a typical small town, where city hall, the police station and jail, chamber of commerce, and, perhaps, central church reside near each on main street, media often fuse together in a cauldron of personal relationships that are enacted frequently and across institutional settings. The warming of otherwise cool media has consequences for the structure, culture, and phenomenology of local actors and their relationships. Of course, a second way to think about ecological dynamics is less geographical, and more in terms of structural embedding. At the level of an organization, these ecological dynamics likely replicate. At the upper echelon of a university, truth and applied knowledge are relatively cool, but within departments and work groups, the media heat up as exchanges, interactions, and ritualized encounters become increasingly personal and local. Third, media may circulate besides each other, such as the case of money and competition circulating within the sport sphere, but as alluded to earlier, there is no assumption that institutional spheres will succeed in preventing their fusion or, worse, the usurpation of “indigenous” media by “foreign,” cooler media. Sports, politics, or law can certainly become about money or they can successfully bracket money, within reason, for certain accepted times and places. Some organizations in sports are known for their owner’s intense commitment to making money off of the team instead of winning while other owners are as intensely committed to winning as the average fan. This commitment has downstream effects on how teams are managed, their performance on the field, and the way players, fans, and sportswriters understand the organization. Athletes are not immune, as generalized role players, either. When an athlete is presumed to be extrinsically motivated, e.g. playing only for the money, fans, sportswriters, and likely other athletes cast aspersions on them and their motives. The same, to be sure, is true of academics. Universities are stuck between having to sustain themselves, fiscally, but are also committed in the ideal to knowledge and truth. Some are nakedly economic, like for-profit universities, while others try to balance the way media circulates by insulating academic departments from the sort of fiscal decisions administrations deal in.

Fourth and finally, the ways in which media circulate deserve some attention. One of the reasons hot media are not easily transposable is that mobility between institutions, clusters of organizations, or within organizations themselves are not regularized. Universities, for instance, are terminal organizations for most actors, leading to human capital flows that become crystallized. For instance, certain prestigious universities produce a disproportionate share of PhD’s that will secure assistant professorships in the U.S. Not only do they tend to circulate their best neophytes as Berkeley hires from Harvard who hires from Chicago who hires from Berkeley, but these elites carry tangible and intangible aspects of media into other fields. Undergraduates also carry the media of education into their own professions. In so doing, media flows easily from one sphere to another. This basic pattern becomes even more powerful when the flows become routinized in other spheres. Certain law schools disproportionately produce both political and legal entrepreneurs. Supreme Court clerkships and plum political campaign positions are dominated by actors carrying certain types of media. This all makes sense, but less observed are how organizations carry media from one sphere to another in routinized ways. Sport presents, again, an obvious example. As a means of both legitimizing the extraordinary wealth-producing and hoarding aspects of sports and spreading the media to ensure fans and future athletes, leagues, teams, and players routinely carry their media into other spheres. It is common for leagues to support the medical sphere, for example, in cancer awareness promotions. Wearing pink during breast cancer month or visiting cancer patients in children’s hospitals are visible efforts, but the tip of the iceberg. Social movements, of course, reflect another avenue of empirical investigation from this theoretical perspective, as do non-profit organizations, which have become increasingly interesting to organizational scholars (Will, Roth, and Valentinov 2018).

It is important to understand the temperature of institutional boundaries and generalized media because of its fluidity. Shifting temperatures and interactions between opposing media temperatures can have consequences for local actors, especially as media shift spheres. Not only does this circulation bridge macro-micro levels within organizations, such as from one university to another, but also between organizations and institutions, such as medicine and sports. As such, media makes for a more sophisticated theory of institutional systems that, when combined with ecological dynamics, provides a clearer sense of the structural and cultural forces shaping organizations and constellations of organizations.