Band 3, Heft 2

Institutions remain essential units of sociological analysis, and yet they persist as conceptually fuzzy nearly five decades after the emergence of new institutionalism. In the following essay, a historical, comparative, and evolutionarily-informed framework for differentiating institutions from the individuals, organizations, and clusters of organizations that inhabit them is presented. Drawing from a diverse array of sociology, this model offers two key contributions to the study of organizations: an institutional ecological model built up from actors, organizations, and constellations of organizations and a theory of institutional culture that rests on a rehabilitated conceptualization of generalized symbolic media and its role in standardization and exchange between organizations. Implications are discussed.

The premise of this paper is that an adequate understanding of the impact the pandemic had upon society presupposes an adequate theory of society. This must include a theory of the various systems and organisations that compose society and that were impacted by the pandemic and are shaping its aftermath. This paper adopts and adapts Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory to provide a ‘frame’ for understanding key societal reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent pathways opening up, especially for organisations. In Part 1 we introduce core elements of Luhmann’s systems theory. In Part 2 we illustrate how the Pandemic crisis has accelerated a transformation in the way organisations couple with other social systems. Two aspects of this change have significant implications for how time is managed and understood. First, as formal contracts give way to partnerships (promises of later promises) ever greater emphasis is placed on a ‘future future’. Second, this constitutes a shift towards ‘potentialising organisations’ characterised by what we call ‘operational coupling’ as distinct from ‘structural coupling’. We conclude by suggesting that potentiality-seeking organisations introduce a new paradox. They pursue opportunities stemming from learning to ‘expect the unexpected’, while still calling on function systems to stabilize expectations.

This study examines how organizational decisions affect conflicts over Muslim accommodation (burkini permissions and separate women’s hours) in German swimming pools. We compare pools in similar demographic areas, representing four models of Muslim accommodation. We find that conflict dynamics and organizational management strategies differ across the cases: (1) The multicultural pool (burkini allowed, separate women’s hours offered) faces disputes over special rights claims by different groups and concerns about segregation. The organizational response involves façade-building and the allocation of additional resources. (2) The universalist pool (burkini allowed, no separate hours) has the lowest level of conflict, downplays cultural differences, and ensures that the same rules apply to all users. (3) The assimilationist pool (no burkini, no separate women’s hours) experiences conflicts over sharing limited resources with those perceived as different and adopts a laissez-faire response where the majority prevails. (4) The segregationist pool (no burkini but separate women’s hours) experiences open conflict between the majority and minority, with organizational responses focused on disciplining and controlling Muslim users.

We adopt an ethnographic approach grounded in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to examine the controversies surrounding student performance in a Brazilian State School recovering from a post-disaster scenario. By tracing the networks of actors – school staff, students, educational regulations, and community concerns – we illustrate how translation processes shape and stabilise organisational actions. The analysis reveals that controversies over project-based versus traditional learning approaches prompted continuous renegotiation of roles, interests, and goals. These renegotiations drew on output-based regulations, prior award-winning educational projects, and local socio-environmental issues to enact a provisional future that the school should achieve. Our findings suggest that contradictory interests in highly regulated public institutions do not necessarily mean a lack of success in achieving collective objectives but instead create opportunities for their creative redefinition. We demonstrate how past experiences and imagined futures influence public managers’ and employees’ decisions in negotiating these controversies, temporarily stabilising organisational practices.

In this article we argue that organizational research on competition has left the relation between organizations and consumers largely unaddressed. While marketing scholars have explored how individual organizations try to manipulate the relation with specific groups of consumers, less has been said about how competing organizations collectively form and influence their relation with consumers. This is especially the case in contexts of public services provision, such as education. To explore this relation, we examine how upper secondary schools in a quasi-market fictionalize their offerings to influence students’ desire. By analyzing 117 school descriptions from Stockholm’s (Sweden) upper secondary school market, we identify four ideal types of fictionalized offerings: The Doorman, The Role Model, The Butler, and The Gardener. These fictionalizations perpetuate two consumer fictions, namely desirable futures and identity realization. Through these fictions, prospective students are invited to realize their supposedly incomplete selves. Our research contributes to the organizational study of competition by showing that schools respond to competition by reinforcing a consumption rationality, potentially shaping students’ desire for certain educational qualities. Additionally, we contribute to critical educational research by questioning the assumption that competition fosters innovation.

This study aims to deepen our knowledge of how employees make themselves into responsible subjects when involved in sustainability initiatives in rural welfare services. The analysis was guided by the question of how employees make sense of themselves as responsible actors, capable of addressing managerial aspirations for enhanced sustainability in the public services they deliver. Data were collected through ethnographic field studies following sustainability work in a public housing company in a rural municipality in southern Sweden. The analysis draws on sensemaking theory and a Foucault-inspired conceptualization of how actors define themselves as subjects. The results identify two main modes of responding to management aspirations, linking to the emergence of two types of subjects; the habitual selves and the struggling selves. In total, the results depict four different responses as the main modes contain varieties, illustrating a wide range to make sense of responsibility. Furthermore, the analysis depicts an interplay between rural practices and the relational dimensions of responsibility (relations to management), diverging from established rural discourses as well as from a conventional Foucauldian conceptualization of managerial power as urging discipline at a distance.