Speaking for Human Being: Institutional Logics, Dragons, and the Supra-Human

1 First Critique: Institutional Logics Theory is Tautological

Several critics have pointed to what they understand as the tautological nature of the neo-institutional and the institutional logical approach. They claim the institutional term is too “overpackaged,” including multiple concepts like institutions, orders, and logics (Alvesson, Hallett, and Spicer 2019, 122). With a multiplicity of sites and mechanisms at different levels of analysis, including cultural concepts and material practices, organizations and persons, space and time, not only is it challenging to determine what is non-institutional, but it is only able to produce a “tautological grammar” (Alvesson and Spicer 2019; Alvesson, Hallett, and Spicer 2019, 123). “As so much is included inside of the definition of an institutional logic, there is little left beyond the logic for the logic to explain. That is, the logic cannot explain what it already is” (Alvesson, Hallett, and Spicer 2019, 122). Three decades out, the primary focus of many of us studying institutional logics is still on what they are and whether they are.

The tautology is not located in the definition, but in the world, in the relational, systemic, and non-phenomenal way the institutional operates. Institutional logics do not refer to entities (like institutions or institutional orders), spheres, fields, groups, or organizations, although all of these are potential sites in which they transpire and can potentially be observed. They refer to recurrent, good-dependent chains of practice that are understood to produce or exemplify that good. This implies that much of the social world is not institutional per se but may contain and depend on institutional elements. Institutional logics theorize an observable phenomenon, complex, replicable networks of practice grounded in what cannot be observed, an absent presence, a teleo-ontology, simultaneously good and real (Friedland 2021, 2023).^[3] Up to this point, the primary focus has been on whether institutional logics are there or not, their differences and their combinations. The first step has been to identify constellations of recurrent and diffuse practices which depend on a belief in an unobservable, but real, good to be produced or enacted, to be actualized. In an institutional logical approach, individuals and organizations are still primary levels of observation but subordinate to the organization of practice as levels of analysis. Much of their variation is nonetheless independent of the institutional, bound by parameters and constraints specific to their level of analysis. The empirical and logical questions are whether institutional logics constitute the rationalities and regularities of constellations of practices independently of the attributes of the agents who execute them and reciprocally whether the capacities and dynamics specific to individuals, groups and organizations differentially afford different institutional logics. Future thinkers need to craft a multi-level theoretical capacity to examine how different levels articulate and under what conditions their interrelations may emergently generate new institutional, organizational, or individual forms.

Institutional logics require a relational approach to the pathways of practice that join persons, concepts, and objects to each other. They are not composed of autonomous, interactive agents like individuals, groups, and organizations but intra-active constellations of persons, practices, and objects whose regular productivity depends on their co-constitution and meanings they cannot secure but are essential to that coherence and productivity. The coherence of an institutional logic cannot be adequately explained by the attributes of the elements additively netted out in a general linear model but as relational wholes, not unlike, but more than, the way Martin describes the elements of fields as “nodes in sets of relations,” “defined by their reciprocal positions” (Martin 2011, 241). The figuration that appears to have a kinship with an institutional logic is the concept of agencement forwarded by French realist philosopher Deleuze and psychoanalyst Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). The French word agencement refers to an arrangement, construction, or layout reductively translated into English as an arrangement. An agencement is a material-semiotic construction of a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements that do not form an organic unity with an essential being but are intra-actively constructed and nonetheless form a system (DeLanda 2013, 5; Deleuze and Guattari 1980; Nail 2017, 22).^[4] Agencements are not grounded in the traits of its elements; it is not a natural unity of its heterogeneous elements; rather, for Deleuze, it is morphogenesis, the processes that form the constellation, or “multiplicities structure the space of possibilities, spaces which, in turn, explain the regularities exhibited by morphogenetic processes” (DeLanda 2013, 2–3). An agencement is a contingent and historical construction, not something already there whose form and function are pre-established and regular.

Institutional logics are relational in three senses. First, institutional logics make practice, not practitioners, the center of their analysis. Practices are actual purposeful relations between subjects and objects, composed of sequences of events. Second, institutional logic’s analytic objects and subjects are observable, intersubjectively understood, and conceptually constituted. Their reality inheres in the co-constitutive relations between their heterogeneous elements, not on the net effects of variable attributes of entities – individuals and objects, organizations, and groups. Logics are complex and processual duality structures (Breiger and Mohr 2004; Mohr and Duquenne 1997). They are constantly moving and morphing. Third, institutional logics operate through symbolization, a joining of a phenomenal practice and a non-phenomenal concept that informs that practice, a practice that makes it present. The institutional logical approach has a consonance with Karen Barad’s agential realism which is very much grounded in her engagement with quantum physics (Barad 1996). Of Nils Bohr’s understanding of why science works, she writes:

Crucial to Bohr’s analysis of the subject-object distinction is his insistence that concepts are materially embodied in the apparatus. In particular that only concepts defined by their specific embodiment as part of the physical arrangement – which includes instrumentation (e.g. photographic plates, pointers, or digital readout devices) that marks definite values of the specific definite values of the specifically defined properties and can be read by a human observed – are meaningful. That is, the larger material arrangement enacts a cut that resolves the inherent ontic-semantic indeterminacy through which the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ emerge. Apparatuses are the conditions of possibility for determinate boundaries and properties and meanings of embodied concepts within the phenomenon (Barad 1996, 143).

We might even conceptualize an institutional logic as an apparatus or agencement. In their proposed “practice institutionalism,” Friedland and Schatzki put it this way:

An institutional logic involves co-constitutive processes of objectification and subjectification, of effect and affect. It depends on non-phenomenal premises, teleo-ontologies, fusions of value and fact upon which they rest (Friedland and Schatzki In preparation).

This is the kind of “uninhibited overpackaging of institutional concepts” that critical management thinkers find so objectionable. Alvesson, Hallet and Spicer write:

As so much is included inside of the definition of an institutional logic, there is little left beyond the logic for the logic to explain. That is, the logic cannot explain what it already is, because so much is endogenous to the definition. The result of this kind of tautology is an expansive “relabeling” but not “explaining.” (Liska 1969, 444) By subsuming so much the concept explains less, not more (2019, 122).

A logic “cannot explain what it already is,” Alvesson, Hallett and Spicer say. Just so. The first question is whether it is at all. We are at the point when we ask whether meaningful constellations of practice can be identified empirically, not what explains them or what they explain. We suggest that relational, not linear, models are most consonant with our approach (Friedland, Roose, and Mohr 2024).^[5] Working with models, aspirationally with a multi-level, practice-constituting engine, delimiting endogeneity and exogeneity does become a vexed issue. We have used Multiple Correspondence Analysis, the same technique used by Bourdieu throughout his career, to demonstrate the field-specific powers of different kinds of capital, which he identified as the empirical criterion for demarcating a field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 101). There is no reason not to join this with more traditional linear techniques to find out, for example, whether individual access to particular resources is empirically associated with one’s position in a practical-discursive space (which we have done and yes, sometimes it is) or whether and the way individuals or organizations move or don’t move through different grammars (not only do we not have the data to do this, we have not yet thought it through). What has not been done is not a determinate indicator of what cannot be done. We agree with the critics that the institutional has become a synonym for collective regularity and that articles continue to appear under a moniker they may not need. Most practical regularities do not follow an institutional logic in the sense that they do not compose interlocking constellations of practice which depend on non-phenomenal goods. Thinking through not only the territorial limits of the institutional but the ways in which other levels of analysis articulate with it is a major project. But just on its face, the scope of the institutional must be bounded.

On the one hand, hunger, scarcity, intelligence, love, envy, birth, death, pleasure, and gravity can explain quite a lot. These conditions, overwhelmingly phenomenal, are intelligible with a culturally naked eye. They generate social forms designed to adapt to their presence, quantity, and distribution. They often can be understood in a functional, materialist manner. However, the ways in which different societies respond to them and which ontological mechanisms they depend on to execute those responses vary dramatically based in part on which institutional imaginaries are dominant. On the other hand, every social order, including the institutional, faces inexorable structural, material, and mechanical constraints, as, for example, the necessity to develop social controls between groups who are not co-present, the differentiation and compositional variability of practice, the pliability of signs in their referentiality, the autonomization of practices and categories. These issues need not entail institutional considerations.

Institutional logics are neither entities, spheres, or orders, nor structures of power-seeking organizations and groups. They refer to the principles by which constellations of practices are informed, a meaningful morphogenesis through co-constitutive relations between persons and objects grounded in an institutional substance which affords a production function for a particular good. Neither persons, whether Kant’s rational faculties of the individual nor the subjective commitments that define the neo-Kantian Max Weber’s value rationality, nor structural positions in the field theories of Bourdieu and Levi Martin, have primacy. Practices do.

Institutional logics constitute the grammar of good-dependent practices and practice-dependent goods. An institution is not an entity, like banks or governments; an entitative understanding is a reification of constellations of practices both informed by and productive of specific goods (Friedland, Roose, and Mohr 2024). Friedland uses the term “grammar” to denote the regularities and rules by which the doings and sayings of different practices combine to produce, enact, or effect meaningful goods. Such goods are conceptualized as teleo-ontologies, a fusion of the good and the real. Grammars describe modalities of practice and how they combine and differentiate to fashion intelligible and desirable worlds (Friedland, Roose, and Mohr 2024). The institutional logical approach is largely consonant with calls for a practice-driven institutionalism (Friedland 2018a; Friedland and Arjaliès 2021; Friedland and Schatzki In preparation; Lounsbury, Anderson, and Spee 2021; Lounsbury et al. 2021; Schatzki 2016; Smets, Aristidou, and Whittington 2017). These constellations of material practices are grounded in teleo-ontologies, co-constitutive objectives and objectivities, values and facts. We term them institutional substances, drawing on Aristotle’s later conceptualization in his Metaphysics, not the Categories (Aristotle 2004; Friedland 2023), but extending their constitutive power to practices. For Aristotle, a substance is a “principle” that sustains a kind of determinate being over time, without which it would not continue to exist, “that by virtue of which the matter Is in the state that It is in” (Aristotle 2004, 229, 1041b). Aristotle identified that principle as “the primary cause of being” of a thing or a being (Aristotle 2004, 227). Institutional substances are collectively recognized goods, named and narrated, heterogeneous and incommensurable. Goods like love, market value, scientific knowledge, information, nature, or sovereignty are both ontological, an “isness” or “thisness,” and teleological, a good towards which the constellation of persons, practices, and objects are productively oriented, a kind of “oughtness.”

Institutional substances are not values. Although Friedland’s turn towards a religious institutionalism was inspired by Max Weber’s approach to value spheres ruled by rival gods, his formulation of the concept of an institutional substance involved a rejection and reconstruction of Weber’s separation of instrumental rationality and value rationality. Friedland glosses Weber’s distinction this way:

Instrumental and value rationality: In the former, actors are instrumentally and cognitively oriented to observable external objects and persons through which they seek to serve their own ends or purposes. In the latter they are passionately and expressively oriented to unobservable values they have internalized and in whose unconditional requirements they believe. In the former actors are oriented to observable and determinate consequences, to causal relations; in the latter to a value from which “practical stands” can “be derived with inner consistency” (Weber 1958, 151) or “a way of life” which actors presuppose has an inherent relationship to the possession of that value (Weber 1958, 153–54). The one aligns purpose and consequences, the other value and acts: Weber thereby splits the rational pursuit of consequences without respect to value from the realization of value without regard to consequences. (Friedland 2014, 222).

For Weber, values refer to “ultimate standards of value,” the idea of which appears to be “valid” to those who conduct their conduct according to them and to whose life they give “meaning and significance” (Weber 1949, 153–54). Value rationality is ultimately a subjective affair. Its validity ultimately depends on faith. Norms depend on value, but values cannot be derived from norms or practices. Indeed, Weber espied a tendency for values to break free and become autonomous from normative practices, to become like gods, and value rationality an intense inner commitment, possession, or disposition. This approach led Weber to develop the notion of value spheres, each governed by necessarily warring gods. Friedland argued:

The notion of institutional logic suggests that value rationality is ordinary, not as Weber thought, extraordinary, not because institutions have value beyond their effects, but because these effects depend on primordial valuations (Friedland 2014, 248).

In an institutional logic, instrumental and value rationality are co-constitutive.

The teleo-ontologies that ground an institutional logic are not phenomenal; they are, like beauty or God in Kant’s philosophy, transcendental ideas that can never be experienced nor adequately known. Nor are they stand-ins for Kant’s noumena, the thing in itself, its essence. They are institutional a prioris, through which networks and trajectories of practices and the subjects and objects through which they are executed are informed, becoming visible, actionable, and desirable (or undesirable). Institutional objects and subjects’ nature, properties and capacities depend on their changing relationship to linguistic and non-linguistic practices. Human being is institutional and cannot be reduced to human beings, as Heidegger always warned us. However, he was operating with a different understanding of transcendence than we do (Heidegger 1962). Institutional substances cannot be represented but are the basis of representation. Like gods, we know them best by what they do, not what they are. Indeed, they only are what they do.

Democratic sovereignty provides an example of ontology and teleology that oriented and animated the practice of the American revolutionaries and the British king and parliament. The American Revolution was made possible by and aimed at a transformation of sovereignty, taken for granted as unitary by King George III, who could not accommodate the American colonists’ proposal to remain his loyal subjects but no longer subject to parliamentary sovereignty, and during and after the war for independence, struggled among themselves whether that sovereignty should be located in individuals, the people, what kind of people, the state legislatures, or the elected representatives of the nation-state (Ellis 2008). Struggles over the locus and nature of sovereignty were bound up with the practices through which collective organization took place – that a war took place, the fact and nature of mobilization, military tactics, and the instituting of different practices of collective representation once the war was won.

These teleo-ontologies are conceptualized not as values but as institutional substances (Friedland 2018a). Institutional substances are concept-principles materialized and materializable in practice (Friedland and Schatzki In preparation). When joined to practice they render institutional practice a symbolization, a figuration that owes much to Cassirer (R. E. Meyer et al. 2024; Vandenberghe 2001). Institutional substances operate less as independent variables that explain variation and more as inherences in the pathways of practice constitutive of the constellation, its coherence, durability, and its expansion. Institutional substances are predicated by and predicate practices – which carry them and make them both objective and subjective through their effects and affects. Although the institutional logical approach has not been historically associated with pragmatism, it accords with the American philosopher-founder of pragmatism, Charles Peirce’s position that the meaning of a concept is located in its effects on conduct, with the proviso that the determination runs both ways (Pape 2014, 114–15). It also shows similarities in its (recent) desire to have productive effects on the world, notably addressing the so-called grand challenges (Gümüsay, Claus, and Amis 2020). Kraatz also shared this approach in his response to the critics of institutional theory. He explained, “Dewey observed that philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers for dealing with the problems of men.” (Dewey 1917, 45). If one substitutes “institutional theory” for “philosophy” in this well-known quote, it instantiates Selznick’s vision for institutional scholarship (Kraatz 2020, 258–59). As a non-phenomenal ground of practice, institutional substances are marked and made by language, concepts and categories, models and theories, material practices that produce the good, affects, identities and all kinds of cognitions that afford participation or being in the good. There is a cultural phenomenology afforded by and affording material practice. The relation between practice and institutional substance is interior, not exterior; symbol, not sign; performative, not representative; productive, not signifying.

The practices maintaining the Ethereum blockchain’s distributed machinery as a non-proprietary commons is a pertinent example. Ethereum, with its non-hierarchical organization, is based upon open-source, as opposed to proprietary, software which affords cooperative, experimental and socially inclusive production of goods where individuals believe they can trust each other because of the ways in which transactions are validated, accessible immutable records maintained through a community of users who are joined by a belief that concentrated power is inherently corrupt and corrupting (Dylan-Ennis 2024; Dylan-Ennis, Kavanagh, and Araujo 2023; Swartz 2017, 85). It is not an alternative to capitalism, but through a combination of new cryptographically-based monetary and accounting practices, it seeks to produce another institutional logic of capitalism based on a teleo-ontology of what Swartz dubs an “infrastructural mutualism.” The central practical nexuses of an institutional logic symbolize the non-phenomenal goods on which their existence and effects depend (Friedland 2023; Friedland and Schatzki In preparation). Institutional substances provide the energy and directionality of institutional life. They are not the illusio, investments in an agonistic game and its presuppositions, that is sustained and sustains the struggle between occupants of positions in a field, as in Bourdieu (1990, 1996. Institutional substances are rather collectively recognized goods, named and narrated, heterogeneous and incommensurable. Nor are they just principles of evaluation that sustain legitimate political order as in Boltanski and Thévenot’s cities of worth, in which common goods form the cognitive bases of legitimate evaluation, primarily of persons (Boltanski 2012; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). In Thévenot’s subsequent regimes of engagement, goods – common goods, individual autonomy and agency of plan, and the ease of familiarity – remain bases of evaluation upon which coordination depends (Thévenot 2013). An institutional substance is rather the groundless ground and actual outcome of practical production functions.

The grammar of an institutional logic has four “value” moments: institution, the instituting of a good tied to a belief in or an understanding of its objective goodness; production, how the good is produced, what practices are presumed productive of the good; evaluation, how good is the good, the practices and objects through which worth in terms of that good is determined; and territorialization, the domain of reference of the good, to what objects, persons and practices a good can and does refer in its instantiations (Friedland 2018a; Friedland and Arjaliès 2021). These moments – institution, production, evaluation, and reference – phenomenalize the good in practice; they substantiate the substance.

The practical formations that conform to an institutional logic may be analogous to the coherent bases of argument in propositional logic. That, however, is different from the central point in that institutional logics refer first to modes of doing, not knowing. The primary criterion of their validity is not truth but effect, not epistemological, but ontological, moral, and practical. It is not that statements must be either true or false, but whether practices work or fail, whether they do what they mean and mean what they do. Substance here supplants the subjective value category. An institutional substance is not a value that one celebrates independent of its consequences, as in Max Weber’s value rationality, but an efficacy, a practical force that opens doors, forms families, feeds and teaches children, balances the books, precludes or punishes evil, defends a border in an institutional logical world. The efficacy of practical meaning, not the categorical truth of common properties, has primacy. The truth of teleo-ontology is validated by its productivity and power to produce a world that makes teleo-ontology actionable and desirable. This is not to instrumentalize knowledge, in that the goods that are optimized are not simply given by the universal facts of human existence but are co-constituted by their relation to what constitutes validity and its non-arbitrary link to what is taken a priori to be real and good.^[6]

Institutional logics theory is a religious sociology of practice.^[7] Institutional substances function like transcendent gods who are immanent in practice, verbs treated by participants as nouns as if they exist someplace or other. But institutional substances are not entities; they are not the highest beings. They are the ungrounded bases of institutional modes of being. Theorists may be social constructionists; the people we study are not. They are realists. An institutional substance is like a non-theistic deity, which, in mystical theology, is understood not as a cause but a cause beyond causes, as a transcendent ground of immanence. This immanence can never be separated from its creator, a creator whose nature can never be fully apprehended through the senses. Institutional logics depend on the one hand on implicit faith and the other on implicit violence, credit and fear, heaven and apocalypse, the two faces of non-realist institutionalism. The end of life is stitched into the operations of an institutional logic – for and by what life one lives and the fearful powers that can end it.

This religious institutionalism will be, for many, an irrelevant or uncomfortable provocation. This is an anti-institutional moment when rulers seek to crush courts and lock up enemies; it is a period of retreat to the apotheosis of power and meanness as opposed to law and its equity, of reasserting primal divisions between sexes, races, nations, of believing that nefarious forces are operating out of view. We cannot see what we are doing or should do as the institutional logics we take for granted seem to be crumbling, carrying us toward disaster. For many, our work will appear as an appropriation of reactionary terms, a retreat from the hard realities into the same mystical forms that accompanied the rise of racialized fascism in the inter-war years (Skidelsky 2009). In their practice, we suggest these enemies often understand institutional powers better than we do. They know the vulnerability of our real fictions in a way we do not.

2 Second Critique: Everything is Institutional

In their tirade against neo-institutional theory, Alvesson and Spicer argue that the meaning of institution has become “vague” and that there is “seldom any clear hint what is meant by institution.” They complain that the research, identifying itself as institutional, “presents a sprawling picture. It seems to be a study of almost anything – from Japanese housewives (Leung, Zietsma, and Peredo 2014) to the Holocaust (Martí and Fernández 2013)” (Alvesson and Spicer 2019, 205).

To put the institutional in its proper place, Alvesson and Spicer even go so far as to suggest we, as they declare in bold letters, “Put a ban on ‘institution’” (a “moratorium” in Alvesson, Hallett, and Spicer 2019; Alvesson and Spicer 2019, 212). In 2022, institution became to them a “hembig” – an acronym for hegemonic, ambiguous, and big concept: “Ambiguity refers to vagueness and uncertainty associated with multiple incoherent meanings attributed to the phenomena in question. Big concerns the unhelpful broad application and usage of the concept, simply covering ‘too much’” (Alvesson and Blom 2022, 59). The implication is that the thousands of articles that reference the institutional have said nothing; the institutional is just a legitimation signal in pursuit of publication, the same kind of early institutionalist arguments they claim add nothing after the initial adopters have passed from the scene. In other words, they have nothing to say about nothing, including their apparent something. They do not provide empirical evidence of the something that other theories – behaviorism, rational choice, population ecology, materialism, and resource dependency, field theory, cognitivism, neo-classical economics – have added to our knowledge, against which the “novelty,” their suggested criterion by which publishability should be permissible, would be gauged. By what standard might we judge? Variance explained, intersubjective validity, parsimony, consistency, adequate mechanism? The institutional has no clothes, or it is just clothes. Underneath the verbiage there is no there. Putting a category like that over the data or the story signals that you belong to a group, that your work is legitimate, and that your references point to something. Their argument is a performative contradiction.

Conceptual cacophony is not a sign of degeneracy. The institutional re-opens a new discursive space, a different level of social reality. And so, there is an ongoing, many-sided conflict over the ontology and architecture of the institutional among those who recognize it as real. In the normative and empirical understandings of the history of science, theories die when they name nothing. They do not work when committees of elites, the professions, or the Prussian authorities decide, as they did for Immanuel Kant’s later work on religion, for example, that it led people astray and what it implied about divine design and presence was blasphemous and wrong. Instituting “a ban on the signifier ‘institution’ at least for a time period” so that researchers can “no longer hide under this overused signifier” worked out well in the history of science. Perhaps we might do that for rationality, the individual, utility, class, public interest, preference, or exploitation. Just for a while, mind you. Their gentlemanly proposal of force suggests their interpretation of the world cannot count on persuasion and must rely on billy clubs. According to his critics, the pushback from scholars against the “ban of institution” is because “career investments and habits stop us from questioning the usefulness of the relevance of a particular concept. […] Repeating the same symbolically loaded vocabulary becomes a part of who one is.” (Alvesson and Blom 2022, 72–73). This leads to “intellectual social amnesia, the inclination to (collectively) forget or neglect work previous to or outside the hembig one relates to.” (Alvesson and Blom 2022, 74)

The institutional has a long and variegated history, from the entitative understanding of organizational entities like the Church or the state to the extra-technical taken-for-granted as in Selznick’s foundational account of the institutional as what was valued for its own sake, or “infuse[d] with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand” (Selznick 1957, 57). Institutions were identified with the taken-for-granted, what everybody knows, forms and conventions that need not or cannot be derived from the task at hand. Institution was a kind of exterior, extra-organizational supplemental ideality, variably floating free from material constraints or interests. As neo-institutionalism evolved, institutions moved from value-added as rationalization or legitimation of what one did deriving from conformity to normative expectations in a field to conceptual understandings, cognitive frames, and rules that constituted the very nature of the doing that was part of the production function of rationality itself (Fligstein 2001; J. W. Meyer 2008; Scott 1995).

So, the critics are correct; the institutional lineage has a complex skein of filiations. The failure of realist, rationalist, mechanical and materialist models of the social world, the recognition of the contingent heterology of the social, the profusion of political programs and dynamics that the logic of capital could not explain, the analytic emptiness of power, the erasure of final causes, the exhaustion of the progressive arrow of time, the absence of value in actor networks, the rise of relational techniques in modeling – all these and more point to and afford an opening to another space through which we might understand the ordering and the contradictions of our world. Precisely because it was indeterminate and marginal in the intellectual landscape, the institutional appeared as a possible alternative portal to enter the high-stakes game of representing the social world. It is now an increasingly crowded space, but in this it is no different from the individual claimed by transcendental idealism, rational choice, cognitivism, phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, and countless others. The institutional domain refers to regularities that cannot adequately be explained by theories below or above that level of analysis. With the adoption of practice theory, conventions of worth and the adaptation of field theory, the claimants to this domain are multiplex, and their relations can be contentious.

The critiques can be potentially devastating, not just because one can be wrong, but because the realities with which one operates are either incommensurable or no longer seem to exist. For example, with its emphasis on fields that generate their enjeu, the field theorist John Levi Martin does not argue that the institutional concept is ambiguous; he claims it needs a sociological referent worth studying (Martin 2011). Fashioning social aesthetics, Martin argues that the objective qualities of positions that emerge from social relations where participants are aligned with each other are experienced as a requiredness of action, a vector-like force that “something is called for,” an oughtness (Martin 2011, 243, 277, 288, 304–7; Martin and Merriman 2015). In Martin’s approach, value and institution are derivative folk understandings, a sociological false consciousness, more rationalizations than reasons. A value is just a “folk theory” of our experience of that oughtness, of our motivation, which we attach to objects (Martin 2011, 253, 308). Martin argues that an institution is an “intersubjectively valid representation of the patterning of…regularized conduct.” (Martin 2011, 303) If a value is our folk retrospective response to why we do something, invoking an institution serves the same function as what we are doing.

We welcome productive contestation, disciplined battles over concepts, logic, models, ontology, epistemology, and evidence, not exclusionary, political, or dogmatic calls. The current discussion between practice theory and institutional logics, notably how institutional logics might be mediated through the teleological organization of practice, is an example of attempting to specify the pathways to an accommodation (Friedland 2018a; Friedland and Schatzki In preparation; Schatzki 2019). In contrast, the relationships between conventions of worth with its metaphysical goods deployed in justification, and field theory with its structured positions organizing contests in space, on the one side, and institutional logics on the other, with its grammars of good-dependent practices, are particularly fraught (Fligstein and McAdam 2012; Friedland 2018a; Friedland and Arjaliès 2021).^[8] Incommensurable concepts at different levels of analysis premised on different mechanisms suggest that either one side will win the intelligibility stakes because their theory works better or they are just specifying other realities. Centered on relations of domination field theory, following Bourdieu, operates – by design – with a substantively thin understanding of social action and the perceived valences that animate and direct it – typically homophily and hierarchy, for example (see Martin 2011, 317). Martin’s brilliant reconstruction of field theory centers on action mediated through disposition conditioned by one’s position in the field. Yet actions, what people do – buy, court, birth, invade, expropriate, account, pray, vote, discover or invent, and the material equipment through which they are accomplished – are marginal in Martin’s analysis.

Another criticism of the institutional logics approach is its failure to engage alternative theoretical formulations. The domain of intimate pair bonding, for example, has been analyzed by field theorists and the cultural sociological “tool-kit” approach (Green 2013; Swidler 2001). When institutional logics obtain, the organization of action lies less in the differential action potentials of positions than in the observable differential logics of practice. For example, Martin uses dating as an exemplar of qualities of women as social objects condensing the competitive relation between heterosexual men. From an institutional logics perspective, this looks different. In a study of the field of intimacy among sexually active students using the relational technique that Martin endorses for the empirical evaluation of the dual relationship between positions and objects (Martin 2011, 318–19), Friedland et al. (2014) used Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to analyze the duality of practices and persons from which they inferred the presence of institutional logics. They find that inter-subjectively valid logics of love – of words, affects, and physical gestures (Martin 2011, 283) – organize actions much more than the positions of individuals based on their class, sexual capital, gender, or sexual orientation. For example, the grammar of love is relatively unaffected by a person’s relative attractiveness, typically considered an index of sexual market power.

Whether and how university students love is not much grounded in social position in the competitive relationships over mates. And belief in love, in a non-phenomenal idea, significantly affects how one loves. Swidler has argued that the culture of romantic love serves as toolkit to facilitate one’s decision to marry and to make a mate choice. She writes: “The culture of love flourishes in the gap between the expectation of enduring relationships and the free, individual choice upon which marriage” is based (Swidler 2001, 156). Lizardo glosses Swidler: “The myth of love is descriptively sterile but pragmatically useful.” (Lizardo and Strand 2010, 214)

On the contrary, love is not descriptively sterile in organizing students’ intimate lives (Friedland et al. 2014). Conscious commitments to values do not appear to be just misrecognized social relations. Institutional logics lay out the qualitatively different mechanisms for valences and the ground of positions; they do not derive from them. In an institutional logic, qualities of particular social relations and objects are also dual (in this case, bodily persons). Still, it is not institutionally independent logical operators, nor positional locations or the formation of a group that have primacy, but the grammar of practices dependent on different non-phenomenal goods; the relations that constitute groups are not only relations of power, formal and transposable, but relations of purposive practices, particular and substantive.

If we understand institutional logics as the grammars of practices available to practitioners, one of the empirical tasks is to assess the relative autonomy of these grammars of practice from the determination of positions in social relations, whether in terms of capital endowments, individual preferences, networks, group memberships, and organizational strategies (Friedland, Roose, and Mohr 2024). This work should be done; model specifications are not always self-evident. The future is in our questions, not our denunciations. The question for us is not binary – which is correct, but when and why they are, and how might we know? Is, for example, an institutional logic a mechanism of the organization of the valences in a field that works better than potential differential payoffs to positions (Martin 2011, 279)? Is it more a way to think about the substantial nature of the productive relations that constitute valued social objects in a field as opposed to positions which specify distributional imperatives for action and expected payoffs for differential positions? Is field theory best for studying distributional strivings, while institutional logics are more consonant with thinking about heterogeneous modes of production of different kinds of goods? At the moment, institutional logics is more an approach, less a theory. It identifies relational phenomena; it does not account for their variation. It is not a set of propositions or, as Reed and Burrell incredibly claim, “a unified, general science grounded in a universal social ontology” (Reed and Burrell 2019, 46). Indeed, based on the vast variation of those who identify their work with its name, it is not even remotely institutional, except as a practice of social analysis that centers on practice refusing individual, group, and organization as primordial levels of analysis. It is material without being materialist, semiotic without being idealist, just a system of signs, a frame, or a hegemonic idea. Yet, we still believe it a potentially useful conceptual frame by which to understand and act upon the world.

3 Third Critique: Absent Power

The critics correctly point to the absence, or marginality, of power as a constituent of institutional meanings, and those institutional meanings and practical conventions as instruments of power, of the dispossession of agency, the conversion of humans into cheap instruments of production or reproduction, as muffled sufferers without choice (Munir 2015, 2019; Willmott 2015). In this view, institutional theory is just as bad as the efficient market hypothesis, where grotesque asymmetries in material well-being are treated as facts of nature, and organizational hierarchies associated with them go unquestioned (Willmott 2015, 105). Institutional theory, in short, is power blind. For example, Willmott scores the works of Meyer (2008) for neglecting how institutions are “media of domination,” shot through with asymmetries of power, and are instituted and institutionalized by deploying unexamined means of domination. “Their focus is on processes of institutionalization per se, and not on these processes as a medium, and outcome of historically specific forms of domination, oppression, and resistance” (Willmott 2015, 109). Institutional logics are charged as the “most recent incantation” of the same “conservative pedigree” (Willmott 2015, 108, 2019, 350).

Having spent years trying to specify the different forms of power – situational, structural, and systemic – in political sociology (Alford and Friedland 1985), it is a little unnerving to be flayed for its alleged erasure in the institutional logics perspective. The institutional logics approach was designed to specify modalities of systemic power, not decisions, group relations, or organizational forms (Hirsch and Lounsbury 2015, 97). The original model for systemic power in Powers of Theory was based on Marx’s understanding of the capitalist mode of production and the contradictory logic of commodification and capital accumulation. Marxist theory was given an analytically privileged purchase on systemic power. Marx offered a theory that pointed to the co-constitution of value and power, signification and domination. Power is interior and exterior to institutional objects like property or commodities, essential to their constitution as well as an effect of their operations. The theory posited inter-objective mechanisms of property, class and labor power, a class struggle animated by the internal contradiction between use and exchange value, productive forces and relations of production, human flourishing and capital accumulation. It was, however, seriously wanting as a theory of democratic politics or the bureaucratic state, among other domains. Powers of Theory pluralized capitalism’s internal constitutions and contradictions to its external co-constitutions and contradictions with democratic political culture and the bureaucratic state (Alford and Friedland 1985, 421–22, 428). The institutional logics approach was a non-materialist outworking of a post-Marxist understanding of the capitalist state. It was intended to get at the variable content and mechanism of power, not to erase it. There is nothing in an institutional logics perspective that precludes the study of the contradictory logics of capitalism, how the forms of class struggle shape these conditions, how capitalists and workers draw on different logics that inform their political programme, their tactical repertoire, and their capacity to politically challenge the hegemony of private property, profit maximization, financialization and the model of the efficient market. Indeed, the variety of systemic powers and their configurations locate points and languages of leverage to challenge the hegemony of capital.

The red thread did get lost in the outworking of institutional logics, in part because of the way it was appropriated, which likely has something to do with the institutional locus of its carriers who seek to make capitalism both more efficient and more humane. But part of power’s occlusion concerns the institutional logics project itself. Once power becomes institutionally constituted as well as constitutive, once what power is and how power does is interior to the constitution of legitimate resources in distributive struggles and productive contests, not only the worth but the qualities of value, then we are in a vexatious circle if we would like to develop a more political institutionalism, particularly one that seeks to explain changing institutional configurations, including the transformation of capitalism. If economists, after all these centuries, cannot explain the changing boundaries of the market except through the distortions of rent-seeking and the accommodations to negative externalities, to the outer or inner limits of the tautologous world they have helped to build, expecting an institutional logics theory with those capabilities is not particularly realistic either.

To explain the outcome of the war of the worlds, you need more than an inventory of guns and dragon fire. Critical theory is less likely to specify the conditions of critique, the cartography of possible institutional trajectories, and the conditions of its efficacy than something that might develop out of an institutional logical position. Willmott, in contrast, argues that “the ethico-political commitment inscribed within IT’s [institutional theory’s] ‘conservative pedigree’” is a “daunting obstacle” to making institutional theory critical (Willmott 2019, 350). The same could easily be said of the Marxist pedigree, whose problematic is more relevant than ever but whose theoretical and political impotence and perverse effects cannot be underestimated. It is not the absence of the right politics in institutional theory, as Wilmott suggests, but the lack of an adequate theory of possible politics that is missing today. What it is possible to wish and fight for is not apparent, nor who will fight for it. Now, the field of critique appears to belong to the politically pious. Courage and commitment to pursue a just world are essential; its determinants are still unknown but hardly sufficient.

The conditional ways in which power operates at the structural and decisional level within situations, groups, and organizations, not to mention fields in which different institutional logics and their configurations are operative, is a valuable and potentially tractable research project and necessary too, as it is a mechanism of the reproduction and transformation of those logics. Lee and Lounsbury, for example, found that American petroleum and petrochemical companies located in communities characterized by different levels of investment in the logic of environmentalism and political conservatism had very different rates of benzene internalization and responded differently to variance in the cost of toxic waste emissions (Lee and Lounsbury 2015). Greenwood et al. (2010) found that controlling for firm performance, geographical variations in institutional configurations in Spain – the extent of firms’ regional concentration, the existence of regional representation, and the importance of family firms as indicated by family ownership – led to lower levels of firm downsizing in the 1990s. They interpret this as an effect of regionalist politics and Church-based family values. Institutional power here is measured by the net effects of indicators of different institutional actors and corporate behaviors that diverge from what one would expect based on norms of profit maximization or market mimesis.

The marginalization of power is also related to the immateriality of much institutional work (Friedland and Arjaliès 2021), objects, apparatuses, material techniques, layouts and architectures, instruments, and artifacts afford or are afforded by different meanings (Biernacki 1995). Power’s absence is also likely partly due to its positing practice as the primary level of analysis. Political powers in most traditions attach to groups or organizations. The institutional logics perspective treats both as derivative sites; groups and organizations derive from relations of practice, not the reverse. This was also Marx’s approach; one began with the practical relation of capital from which capitalists and corporations derived. In much political research, power is registered as a distributional outcome – land, status, money, health, voting and office, material goods, and power itself. Who gets the job, the income, the disease, the spouse, the degree, the prime time, and the honor? In an institutional logics view, this is not the first move.

In contrast to Boltanski and Thévenot’s conventions of worth, for example, hierarchical distributions and the contests over evaluation with which they are associated are treated in the institutional logics perspective as secondary to the instituting and production of the goods that are distributed to those justified as most worthy (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Friedland and Arjaliès 2021). Assessing the different distributional consequences of different institutional logics and how these distributions, and whether or not they are politicized in issues or group formation, may or may not be part of the trajectories of these logics, the way they contract or expand, morph into new logics as they are reproduced, and provide openings by which advantaged or disadvantaged groups defend or challenge their very operation, is a potentially productive research agenda. But by agreeing on the need to thematize power, we do not want to follow post-materialist social theories in which power has become the preeminent medium through which social relations and practices are made commensurable, by which the cultural content of social relations is stripped away.

Bourdieu is exemplary in this regard. Displacing the exploitations of the class by domination by the dominant, Bourdieu posited culture as a medium of power, as a position-taking that reflected the habitus of a position, as a taste that legitimates dominant groups or the basis of often certified access to higher positions in the most powerful hierarchies – like the state, the university or corporation or the choice of mates that accord with the logic of alliance and class reproduction. Bourdieu homogenized all capitals into powers, indeed arguing that there is a meta-field of power where contests over the relative returns to different forms of capital are conducted, “the determination of the relative value and magnitude of the different forms of power that can be wielded in the different fields, or, if you will, power over the different forms of power or the capital granting power over capital” (Bourdieu 1996, 265). Bourdieu made power the hermeneutic and misrecognized explanatory key to every social field.

In his critique, Willmott more than chides institutionalists for our neglect of Foucault and the constituted and constituting role of power in his theory. He writes: “A careful reading of Foucault would, I believe, upend almost every assumption and truism of institutional theory” (Cooper, Ezzamel, and Willmott 2008). However, because Foucault’s thinking is rendered close to unintelligible when placed and read within the frame of institutional theory, the risk of such a misadventure is … minimal (Willmott 2015, 107). Lok, who affirms institutional theory’s critical possibilities, appears to agree with his assessment (Lok 2017, 8).

We wouldn’t miss this adventure. In fact, we didn’t (Friedland and Alford 1991, 253–54). The genesis of the institutional logics approach is an unmarked dialog with Foucault. Foucault turned towards the subject of sexuality, not as a natural, but as a socio-historical fact, a discourse like any other. In the three volumes of his History of Sexuality, Foucault refuses the natural body with its psychic hydraulics, where variations in the interdiction of repression account for variations in sexuality. Rejecting what he called the “repressive hypothesis,” he argued instead that psychoanalysis, for example, was part of the invention of this universal substance called sex, this “most speculative, most ideal” “fictitious unity.” (Foucault 1980, 155)

For Foucault, power is not the will of a dominant group; it is carried by the installation of consonant practices that form subjects and discipline bodies, grounded in and grounding specific ontologies and teleologies visible in the languages coincident with their deployment and operation. People talk about what they are doing. An integral part of what they are doing is their talk about it. Power positively, productively organizes, and indeed incites sexuality through discourse. Through his studies of classical Greece, Foucault developed an alternative theoretical object to studying moral codes and the erotic body: the ethical practices of self-formation. He historically differentiates the dominant practices of self-formation not by the behaviors they forbid or promote but by the ontological substances upon which they operate, “that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice” and by the modes of subjectification through which that operation takes place. For free Greek men, the practice of sexual austerity was premised on a particular ontology, or what Foucault calls an “ethical substance,” “the prime material of his moral conduct” (Foucault 1990, 1:26). That substance is aphrodisia, a natural sequential force of desire-act-pleasure, not the devilish desire rooted in man’s Fall that dominates Christian sexual morality. One sought to govern or dominate the force of aphrodisia, not to eliminate desire nor prevent particular sexual acts (Foucault 1990, 1:136–37).

The autoregulation of the Greek man’s erotic body was not organized through the universal prohibition of acts but via a self-disciplined stylization of behavior, a mastery and moderation requisite to living a beautiful existence and being an ideal citizen. Social practice, subject formation and ontology are interdependent phenomena. As in Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural practice, stylization, and distance from animal necessity manifest distinction, naturalize privilege, and love of beauty are the prerogative and distinguishing capacities of the free man. But unlike Bourdieu, there is a cultural content, an ontological substance, through and on which stylization operates. Power has a cultural ground or content.

Foucault analyzes a set of practices – dietetics regarding the body, economics regarding one’s wife in the household, erotics regarding young men – through which this sexual order operated isomorphically across institutions as a unitary ethical order, an order of self-government. Foucault interprets the meaning of sexual ascesis around the axis of legitimate domination, of male authority, the governance of one’s own natural forces being the homolog for the governance of all other forces – whether one’s wife in the household, one’s slaves or the people over which one ruled. Like the demos, desire was not to be extirpated but controlled, kept from rebellion and riot. Erotics was part of an ontology of power, an organization of violence, and the economics of life’s force. Only the ethical self who controlled the violence of his passions could be entrusted to control those social forces incapable of controlling themselves.

Foucault locates erotics not in the heterosexual relationship between husband and wife but in the homoerotic tie between the mature male citizen and the unbearded, pubescent youth, the man-boy on the boundary of the polis. This homoerotic love, this eroticized discipleship, was the arena for passion, the highest type of love, the medium through which free men were produced and reproduced. Sexuality, unlike sex, is organized by discourse, pleasure by the techniques of the self, techniques that can only be understood by their ability to produce and reproduce male power, a power whose source is located not in the body of the man, but the institutions of the public sphere. Foucault is not writing a history of sexuality; he is writing a history of the technologies of subjectification within which sexuality is deployed.

Although Foucault interprets the Greek’s appropriation of sexuality through the power and the citizen ideal, he refuses the state as the locus of power. The impact of state prohibitions on sexual practice has never been Foucault’s concern. Consequently, Foucault neglects how power’s more prosaically political content shaped Greek sexuality. Foucault gives power to cultural content but does not provide a politics of culture. It is not just that Foucault takes ideology for reality, not analyzing Greek bodily practices themselves; he is selective in using the texts that serve as evidence of Greek discourse. Homosexuality was a subject of considerable political controversy. We learn from the same Plato, who dominates Foucault’s text, that while some city-states endorsed its practice, others opposed it. Indeed, Plato himself, in the last period of his life, came to see homoerotics as an “unnatural sexual intercourse” in which “the human race is deliberately murdered.” Plato’s opposition to homosexuality appears, consistent with Foucault’s reading of erotics through power, to have everything to do with what he saw as its erosive implications for state power. Because Foucault gives us power without politics, we cannot relate the politics that constitute state power with those that constitute sexuality. And because he gives us a discursively constituted sexuality without sex, we can neither grasp sex’s autonomous reign nor understand why its semiotics have such constancy across time and civilizations. It is likely because of the way he thinks – or doesn’t think – about family, state, parliament, and religion, and the kinds of power each might afford that Foucault celebrated Khomeini’s Islamic revolution before it attained power and remained for the most part silent after they deployed terror, torture and death to silence women, homosexuals, lovers, secularists, socialists and democrats (Afary and Anderson 2010).

The institutional logics perspective has sought to put heterogeneous, incommensurable meanings carried within perduring patterns of material practice at the center of the analysis. It was not that the approach did not speak power; it did not know how to say its name. An institutional logic is a materially and culturally specific organization of systemic power. Power is its inside, not its outside. It is not, as Willmott puts it, that institutions are “embedded in and reproductive of, relations of domination and oppression” (Willmott 2015, 109). Institutional logics, as Foucault argues, are themselves powers. The institutional logics view is, in fact, all about power, not as decision nor structure, but as a systemic grammar of practice. It consequently poses vexing problems for how we conceptualize and measure power.

4 Fourth Critique: Institutional Logics Theory is Not Critical

Institutional theory, it is alleged, now pretends to intellectual sovereignty as the “normal science of organization studies” (Reed and Burrell 2019, 45). It claims to offer a “cathedral” of a “unified, general science grounded in a universal social ontology and a rejection of the ideological biases which have bedeviled the field from its beginnings.” (Reed and Burrell 2019, 46) Munir (2019, 1) explains that most institutional studies “privilege agentic power over hegemonic” and “overlook larger structures of domination” rendering institutional theorists “complicit” in the “reification and legitimation” of those structures. Choosing method over meta-theory, institutional theory, according to its critics, either has not, will not, or cannot take up the mantle of a critical theory, one motivated by and oriented to a critique of how our societies not only impose needless suffering but block the possibility of alternative architectures that would afford our flourishing. Institutional theory is identified as part of a scientistic hegemonic order that deflects or absorbs the critical project of critical theory, crowding out the polyphonous voices, bleeding out the potentially transformative powers of imagination that might move us and mechanisms that might show us the way to another kind of world.^[9] If we continue to cleave to the institutional path, our future is apocalyptic, “ruination and collapse” (Reed and Burrell 2019, 49). Hellfire awaits the institutionalists; we will be punished. Crushed by our edifices, we presume.

According to Willmott, institutional theory’s key indicator and fatal defect is the alluring pose of value neutrality and objectivity. Munir (2019, 5) pursues the point: “There is no moral compass within it. It is eschewed in favor of a ‘scientific,’ ‘objective’ stance which willingly if not deliberately overlooks various dimensions of oppression while retaining its focus on questions that are not about oppression but are nevertheless interesting in other ways.” This posture signals “the defective, value contaminated status of alternative, heterodox forms of analysis.” Willmott writes: “I define critical analysis by reference to its emancipatory interest and effects, and not by its ontological or epistemological assumptions… I do believe, nonetheless, that ethico-political commitments are key – because it is they, rather than Reality or Method, that inform and justify such assumptions about reality and knowledge that underpin and warrant forms of analyses.” (Willmott 2019, 352)

Willmott cites radical feminism as the exemplar of a critical theory. Just a quick look at Judith Butler’s renowned Bodies That Matter suggests that critique and value commitments are insufficient to develop a theory of institutional transformation (Butler 2003). For Butler, sexed positions are citational practices. Reimagining our morphologies is contingent upon breaking the citational logic of the patriarchal law, the coercive, performative process by which subjects are sexed as they are named. After cutting away the shriveled referent, she reproduces its tyranny by asserting the lesbian phallus as a revolutionary sword to upend heterosexist morphology. One would think that after deconstructing the sexed nature of materiality, one would want to dephallicize authority, but no, Butler wants to change its sign. Rather than move out of gender, specifically out of the primal family scene, to move out of sexism, rather than desexualize authority, Butler works the sexual binary.

Unlike most deconstructive theorists, Butler has a sociological conception of power. But, unfortunately, citationality is simply institutionalized practice, convention, and reiterated performative naming. Not only is the power relation not sexed, but it is also essentialized and exogenous to sexing. If Lacan displaced the locus from the penis to the phallus, Butler displaced it from the phallus to power. Given this approach to power, when combined with the fact that almost no actual citational practices and their variations are ever observed, it is no wonder that Butler does not provide us with an analysis of those conditions under which acting can be reiterated, where renaming, resignification, can be materialized. We must engage the co-constitutive relationship between meaning and power to enable theory to be effectively critical. We are in desperate need of a politicized institutional theory, not one that stands on its ethical commitments but one that stands on an adequate theory of the politics of institutional transformation.

We must think carefully about which meanings we seek space and mechanisms to empower (Drori 2019). What are the conditions of the possibility of “emancipatory engagement,” and which “human capabilities” can be promoted (Willmott 2015, 106)? We are living through an exceedingly complex institutional moment, a traumatic and fearful moment, when institutional practices are being assaulted and eroded, whether law, office and representation of the liberal state, the material supports of social democracy, the universal de-racialized memberships of the nation, the procedurally secured status of facts of science, the competitive order of capitalist markets, and the secular states unhinged from the revealed laws of monotheistic religion and the beneficent agency of the earth itself.

Critical theory has always sought the long game of challenging the dehumanization, the suffering, and the inequalities they espied in the operations of capitalism. Critiques must draw on institutional locations, practices, and languages to be effective (Drori 2019). So, which critique are we talking about? Where do they stand? Which critique should, or can, have primacy in the political challenges to capitalism: the requirements of reproduction or the care of families, the equalities, and fiduciary relations of citizens of a democratic republic, the efficiencies of bureaucratic administrations, the coercive geo-political powers of the nation-state, the ecological and generative logic of the earth, the beauty and representational pleasures of art, the salvation and charity of revealed religion? Critical theory tells us nothing about which critique and how critiques do and do not cohere. Our most essential politics are institutional. Yet critical theory tells us little about what is to be done, as Lenin put it. In this institutional logics are just as wanting.

Turning away from the institutional level is the last thing critical theory should do. Indeed, if the genealogy of critique shows us anything, it is where critical theorists go when traditional materialisms fail them and when metaphysical goods cannot do without power. Boltanski, for example, in his move to recapture the critical stance on domination that was missing in the coordinative emphasis on justification in the conventions of worth approach famously exposited with Laurent Thévenot in On Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006), posited the institution as a “bodiless being” that allows groups to dominate through their semantic and coercive powers that specify and guard the whatness of what is and sustain test formats that build distributive asymmetries into their operation (Boltanski 2011, 75). He was not the first to make an institutional move. More than a decade before that, Laclau and Mouffe’s much-celebrated post-Marxist analysis of the prospects of the emancipatory socialist project likewise turned to institutional cartography and homology (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Laclau and Mouffe sought to explain the failure of class to organize the equivalences of subordination and to locate the institutional sources of its possibility (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; see also Lok 2017). They ground its reality not in the substantive logic of capital but, reminiscent of Bourdieu before them, in the equivalences of domination. They deployed their post-structuralism to pulverize the culturally specific contradictions of class, replacing them with the linguistic universals of difference joined to power. In their view, democracy enables the articulation of struggles against subordination. “Our thesis is that it is only from the moment when the democratic discourse becomes available to articulate the different forms of resistance to subordination that the conditions will exist to make possible the struggle against different types of equality” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 154). The different forms of inequality now can appear as equivalents, as so many forms of oppression, as de-legitimated subordination. Democracy is the liberatory language of equivalence, the “nodal point,” the “discursive formation” which becomes the new “mode of institution of the social,” which “would provide the discursive conditions which made it possible to propose the different forms of inequality as illegitimate and natural, and thus make them equivalent as forms of oppression.” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 154–55, 182)

Bruno Latour does not follow in their homogenizing and homologizing path. He is contemptuous of those for whom it is “much too tempting to use power instead of explaining it.” For Latour, this invisible power is an “archaic and magical ghost.” (Latour 2005, 85–86) According to Latour, a leading critical theorist, it is necessary to re-register as terrestrials, not modern humans living on and off an external natural world, progressives driving an emancipatory modernization of and through the globe. In the new geologic age of the Anthropocene, when it is indisputable that human activity is reshaping the earth, nature and culture, known objects and knowing subjects are finally seen to be internal to each other; there is no outside (Latour 2013, 92). Regarding the Critical Zone, or Gaia, the terrestrial, thin biofilm Latour is a political agent. The local-global axis of space that long constituted the temporal politics of modernization, the basis of the right-left imaginary where class politics were bound to the global horizon, is coming undone (Latour 2018, 82–83, 87–88). Latour lays out a new contradiction, a political front-line, between global production using resources to produce goods for humans and terrestrial engendering (Latour 2018, 82–83, 87–88). The terrestrial is not an institution, but he would like it to be.

In his shock at the rising disbelief in scientific facts combined with the increasing unsustainability of the earth, Latour, too, has made an institutional turn. It was, he realized, “infinitely safer to rely on the institution of science than on indisputable certainty” (Latour 2013, 4). In his early work positing a democracy of things, an inter-subjectivity interlaced with inter-objectivity, Latour (1987, 1992, 2005 was interested in the ties and mediating instruments actants could use to reassemble the social, on instituting, not on the institutional. The focus was on the nodes of the networks where translation occurred – the transformational moments. There was no interest in studying persistence, let alone institutions, nor a belief that they could affect overall outcomes. Latour explained: “So, network was a novelty that could help elicit a contrast with ‘Society, ‘institution,’ ‘culture,’ ‘fields,’ etc., which were often conceived as surfaces, floods of causal transfers, and real matters of fact. But nowadays, networks have become the rule and surfaces the exception.” (Latour 2005, 132).

Using Spinoza’s term of the modes of existence of a substance, God in Spinoza’s case, Latour in his Modes of Existence, makes a radical move towards institutions, which he argues “harbor” values, values that “emanate” from situations that are part of their “essence,” that circulate in a network from which they cannot be derived, and must complement the network of beings that compose them (Latour 2013, 36, 41, 44–45). The text resonates strongly with Boltanski and Thévenot’s worlds of worth, which Latour has often applauded (Latour 1993, 43–46, 2005, 23). For Latour, the variable relationship between institutions and the values they harbor is now at the center of the analysis (Latour 2013, 46). Latour’s institutions are self-referential modes of existence, modes of “[m]aintaining one in existence,” organized around particular values, a teleology tied to an ontology and specific practices of verdication – an “order of practice” through which truth-telling is accomplished (Latour 2013, 56–60). These are not pure domains or spheres but hybrid and heterogeneous networks of practices (Latour 2013, 29–31). The consonances with an institutional logics position are manifold.

Latour, the prolific polymath is mindful of the political look of his move. Latour recognizes that his flatland actor-network theory was, not unlike Anonymous’ bots, part of the anti-institutional takedown, creating intellectual mayhem as well as serious intellectual progress (O’Mahony 2019). He bravely asks for forgiveness for his analytic deeds, his disdain towards habit and the pleasure he got from his anti-institutional reduction to the assemblage of actor networks.

The appraisal of institutional logics and its critical potential, notably through its plurality of values, has also been recently proposed by institutional and critical scholars (Gümüsay, Claus, and Amis 2020; Kraatz 2020; Kraatz, Flores, and Chandler 2020; Lounsbury et al. 2021). The perpetuation of an imperial institutional logic celebrating the Enlightenment ideals by nation-states, relayed through capitalist structures, has notably played a key role in climate change and systemic racism (Banerjee and Arjaliès 2021; Meziane 2024). The institutional logical approach could prove useful to illuminate such practices. However, there is a paucity of research on the role of land and nature(s) in the unfolding of institutional logics. There has been some discussion about the place of community – notably through its geographic anchorage, in the unfolding of institutional practices. Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury (2012) argue that community constitutes an institutional logic per se. Mutch (2021) disagrees on the basis that the community lacks a joint “substance,” unlike the law as an institutional order that is characterized by a shared attachment to the substance “justice.” According to Mutch (2021), community, including in its geographic dimension, provides a site to study the local context of action but mostly acts as pervasive rhetoric. What is lacking in both conversations is a theoretical engagement with the role of land, often approached through the notion of “place,” in the institutional production (and destruction) of social and natural facts. We suspect that bringing land, water, and sky to the forefront of our institutional theorizing will better enable us to unleash the critical power of the institutional logical approach. This requires bringing the natural and the social together, as encouraged by Latour, but also the physical and the metaphysical (Meziane 2024).

Defending institutions has become the new watchword. Latour writes of “delicate negotiations” and calls for “diplomacy” based on his “metaphysics” that, he claims, will “allow each mode to enter into resonance with all the others” (Latour 2013, 480, 2018, 51). But his attribution of capitalist and “super-rich” interest in promoting anti-terrestrialism, because they understood well before the rest of us that the benefits of modernization cannot be shared on a planetary scale, is not only belied by Trump’s complete failure to garner support from Wall Street, it sets up an anti-capitalist struggle that recalls Trotsky’s ultra-leftism and a battle that Gaia will likely lose (Latour 2018, 21–22). Even if some of us might be willing to die for Gaia, we certainly want to avoid mass slaughter on the road to its defense. In this otherwise much more irenic ground plan for institutional federalism, there is no account of the actual politics of institutional boundaries, of religious fundamentalisms and capitalist financialization, of the articulations or the settlements by which the ontologies and the values of frogs, gods, ancestors, scientific facts, and efficient prices are to going to maintain themselves without more than insults, including jail, torture, expulsion, starvation, war, and death. Like photographs of modernist architecture, there are no people in Latour’s account, neither ordinary folks nor the super-rich in gated communities. There is no evidence of how all this signifies to them.^[10] Latour writes as if value plurality and “ontological pluralism” are the best set of options to overcome our “ontological anemia,” necessary for new respect and relationship with non-Western and indigenous cultures and our species’ survival (Latour 2013, 21, 163). Latour is right that it is time to work towards a theory of the truce, an institutional multi-culturalism, an institutional Westphalia, and divided sovereignty. To do so, we must re-think power, value and institution beyond comparative grammars, values and truth tests into the political ways these form, deform and reform as habitable constellations. At the same time, we must think about conducting institutional wars, perhaps drawing on Gramsci, who sought to theorize a war of maneuver and position (Anderson 1976).

These are dark times. So, we give Latour the last word. The institutional foundations of our modern anthropology are shaking. “While we wait for Gaia, it isn’t the sense of the absurd that threatens us now, but rather our lack of adequate preparation for the civilization to come. Our inquiry seeks to praise civilization in advance, to ward off the worst” (Latour 2013, 486).

To prepare, we must both seek peace and prepare for war. That is an institutional project. We are not ready. And the dragons are not necessarily on our side.