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In this paper, we discuss an alternative focus for institutional studies of organization - the study of institutional work. Research on institutional work examines the practices of individual and collective actors aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions. Our focus in this paper is on the distinctiveness of institutional work as a field of study and the potential it provides for the examination of new questions. We argue that research on institutional work can contribute to bringing the individual back into institutional theory, help to re-examine the relationship between agency and institutions, and provide a bridge between critical and institutional views of organization.

Revised submission to the Academy of Management Review special issue on Language and Organization. Discourse and Institutions In this paper, we argue that the processes underlying institutionalization have not been adequately investigated and that discourse analysis provides a coherent framework for such investigation. Accordingly, we develop a discursive model of institutionalization that highlights the relationship between texts, discourse, institutions and action. Our model begins with the relationship between action and discourse, and argues that action primarily affects discourse through the production of texts that are drawn on by other actors and subsequently become embedded in broader discourses. We go on to argue that discourse affects action through the production of institutions, which are associated with self-regulating mechanisms that constrain their meaning and enforce their usage. Based on this discursive model, we propose a set of conditions under which institutionalization processes are most likely to occur and conclude the paper with an exploration of the model's implications for other areas of research.

We draw on an in-depth longitudinal analysis of conflict over harvesting practices and decision authority in the British Columbia coastal forest industry to understand the role of institutional work in the transformation of organizational fields. We examine the work of actors to create, maintain, and disrupt the practices that are considered legitimate within a field (practice work) and the boundaries between sets of individuals and groups (boundary work), and the interplay of these two forms of institutional work in effecting change. We find that actors' boundary work and practice work operate in recursive configurations that underpin cycles of institutional innovation, conflict, stability, and restabilization. We also find that transitions between these cycles are triggered by combinations of three conditions: (1) the state of the boundaries, (2) the state of practices, and (3) the existence of actors with the capacity to undertake the boundary and practice work of a different institutional process. These findings contribute to untangling the paradox of embedded agency—how those subject to the institutions in a field can effect changes in them. We also contribute to an understanding of the processes and mechanisms that drive changes in the institutional lifecycle.