This study presents new insights into the explanatory power of the institutional logics perspective. With outset in a discussion of seminal theory texts, we identify two fundamental topics that frame institutional logics: overarching institutional orders guided by institutional logics, as well as change and agency generated by friction between logics. We use these topics as basis for an analysis of selected empirical papers, with the aim of understanding how institutional logics contribute to institutional theory at large, and which social matters institutional logics can and cannot explore and explain.

In this article, we explore the affective dimension of human temporality. Drawing on the work of Michael Theunissen in his Negative Theologie der Zeit (Negative Theology of Time), we suggest that understanding time as affect may help shed light on how people in organizational settings are influenced by and react toward time, once it comes to appear as an obstacle, rather than a resource to the unfolding of life. To capture such situations, we introduce the notion of ‘chronopathic experience’ and proceed to explore such experiences empirically among men incarcerated in Helsinki Prison. Here, we identify chronotelic behavior as a modality of activities directed toward dealing with the affective pressure exerted by time, as it comes to appear given, external, and meaningless. We argue that the affective dimension of human temporality can be drawn upon in other organizational contexts to clarify the notion of time pressure and to better understand temporality-related institutional pathologies like stress, boredom, and depression.

This study presents new insights into the explanatory power of the institutional logics perspective. With outset in a discussion of seminal theory texts, we identify two fundamental topics that frame institutional logics: overarching institutional orders guided by institutional logics, as well as change and agency generated by friction between logics. We use these topics as basis for an analysis of selected empirical papers, with the aim of understanding how institutional logics contribute to institutional theory at large, and which social matters institutional logics can and cannot explore and explain.

Our paper deals with how elite corporate actors in a Western capitalist-democratic society conceive of and prepare for the future. Paying attention to how senior officers of ten important Danish companies make sense of the future will help us to identify how particular temporal narratives are ideologically marked. This ideological dimension offers a common sense frame that is structured around a perceived inevitability of capitalism, a market economy as the basic organizational structure of the social and economic order, and an assumption of confident access to the future. Managers envisage their organization's future and make plans for organizational action in a space where 'business as usual' reigns, and there is little engagement with the future as fundamentally open; as a time-yet-to-come. In using a conceptual lens inspired by the work of Fredric Jameson, we first explore the details of this presentism and a particular colonization of the future, and then linger over small disruptions in the narratives of our interviewees which point to what escapes or jars their common sense frame, explore the implicit meanings they assign to their agency, and also find clues and traces of temporal actions and strategies in their narratives that point to a subtly different engagement with time.