The Valuable, the Constitutive, and the Energetic: Exploring the impact and importance of studying emotions and institutions

Abstract

Emotions shape our lives and experiences as institutional actors, yet neo-institutional theorizing has paid scant attention to them until recently. In this introduction to the Special Themed Section, we explore why this blind spot has existed in past theorizing and aim to push scholarship further to elucidate the role that emotions play in institutional life. Drawing insights from the emerging literature and the four papers in this issue, we emphasize specific themes of interest for research on emotions and institutions. Specifically, we highlight the need for a focus on the role of emotions as: value-laden, constitutive of institutions, and energetic. We argue that foregrounding emotions promises a myriad of opportunities for future work and promises rich theoretical rewards. Keywords agency, emotional energy, emotions, institutional theory, structure, valuesEmotions are not abstractions far from our experience, rather they are key components of our everyday lives. We care about, and are invested in, our professions, our families, and many other aspects of our social world. We know how to express and hide emotions for benefit or safety, and we know what it is to be inspired in pursuit of goals, dreams, and objectives that fulfill us and our roles as institutional actors. None of us need to think long or hard to see how emotions affect our existence. Yet, given that emotions are a ubiquitous part of social life, why have we paid scant

Collective Emotions in Institutional Creation Work

“…With these observations in mind, our central argument is that effective post-disaster community recovery needs social practices that mobilize shared emotional responses into the creation of new institutions (Moisander, Hirsto, & Fahy, 2016;Voronov & Vince, 2012). To demonstrate this we build on theorizations of "social practices in the elicitation of collective emotions" (von Scheve & Ismer, 2013: 412) and thereby integrate collective emotions into recent advances on emotions in institutional work (Lok, Creed, DeJordy, & Voronov, 2017;Voronov, 2014;Zietsma & Toubiana, 2018). Accordingly, we define collective emotions as emotions that are shared by individuals in a certain group or community (Bar-Tal, Halperin, & de Rivera, 2007;de Rivera & Páez, 2007;Salmela & Nagatsu, 2016): they are visible in gatherings, crowds or widely salient events where there is congruence in people's affective responding (von Scheve & Ismer, 2013;von Scheve & Salmela, 2014).…”

“…Expanding on the current conceptual work that seeks to move beyond the emotions of key individual institutional agents (Lok et al, 2017;Zietsma & Toubiana, 2018), and research focusing on shared emotions shaping fields or discursive political spaces (Moisander et al, 2016;Voronov & Vince, 2012), we examine the collective emotions among community members which underpin their local institutional work.…”

“…Institutions are more or less enduring social arrangements founded by social practices (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006;Smets et al, 2015;Vaara & Whittington, 2012). They guide everyday social life and provide important templates for individual and collective behavior, cognitions, and emotions (Lawrence et al, 2011;Lok et al, 2017;Zietsma & Toubiana, 2018). Institutional theory has argued that social practices forming institutions are driven by agents' cognitive rational interests (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006;Scott, 2014).…”

“…They are connected to everyday behavior and influence and are shaped by the social situations within which they occur (Fan & Zietsma, 2017;Grodal & Granqvist, 2014;Lok et al, 2017). Emotions tie us to institutions, and institutions, in turn, shape the way we feel (Friedland, 2018;Zietsma & Toubiana, 2018). As such, the emotional experiences of actors play a role in creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions, i.e.…”

“…practicing institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006;Lawrence et al, 2009;Scott, 2014). Voronov and Vince's (2012) theoretical work and its recent development by Moisander et al (2016) are the most significant advances in our current understanding of shared emotions in institutional work (Zietsma & Toubiana, 2018). Voronov and Vince (2012) combine psychoanalytical theory with Bourdieu's (2000) concepts of capital and habitus to theorize on how shared emotional investments in the institutional order enable the change of field-level arrangements.…”