Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Institutional Logics Perspective

Item

Title

The Institutional Logics Perspective

Author

Thornton, Patricia H.

Ocasio, William

Lounsbury, Michael

Research Area

Social Institutions

Topic

Complex Organizations and Bureaucracies

Abstract

This essay discusses a new approach to institutional analysis—the institutional logics perspective (ILP). This perspective is a meta‐theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of social science theories to better understand the effects of cultural institutions on individuals, organizations, and societies. We describe the history of the development of the ILP, define its core concepts and mechanisms, and review and discuss foundational and cutting‐edge research. Prior overviews emphasize the mechanisms, variety of substantive contexts, and the cross‐level effects. We take a different approach by organizing the literature review by institutional orders. This meta‐analysis reveals a pattern of institutional change—the weakening of the professions and the spread of the market logic in many domains. We discuss implications of this finding and suggest future research.

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Identifier

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extracted text

The Institutional Logics Perspective
PATRICIA H. THORNTON, WILLIAM OCASIO, and MICHAEL LOUNSBURY

Abstract
This essay discusses a new approach to institutional analysis—the institutional logics
perspective (ILP). This perspective is a meta-theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of social science theories to better understand the effects of cultural
institutions on individuals, organizations, and societies. We describe the history of
the development of the ILP, define its core concepts and mechanisms, and review
and discuss foundational and cutting-edge research. Prior overviews emphasize the
mechanisms, variety of substantive contexts, and the cross-level effects. We take a
different approach by organizing the literature review by institutional orders. This
meta-analysis reveals a pattern of institutional change—the weakening of the professions and the spread of the market logic in many domains. We discuss implications
of this finding and suggest future research.

INTRODUCTION
Conventional thinking is that social, economic, and political relations influence ideas, actions, and world views. That we can effectively demonstrate
that another view may be true—that culture shapes such relations—has
been less accepted and elusive to theorize and measure. By culture we refer
to the system of beliefs, values, norms, and symbols of social collectives.
Our aim is to define and introduce to the well-educated nonspecialist recent
advances in understanding and examining the role of culture in institutional
analysis—the institutional logics perspective (ILP).
There is long-standing debate in the social sciences on how institutions
affect individual and organizational behavior and how individuals and organizations create and change institutions (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Dobbin,
1994; Hall & Taylor, 1996; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; North, 1990; Thelen, 2004;
Weber, 1978). This entry draws on an emergent and recently influential line
of institutional theory and analysis—the ILP (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). While institutional logics research is developing in sociology and
organization and management theory, we will argue that it is a useful framework for other academic fields in the social sciences such as political science
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

(Albrekt, 2008), economics (Ellerman, 2005), information technology (Currie
& Guah, 2007), and public policy (Mullins, 2006), among others. We define
the core concepts, mechanisms, and arguments of the ILP, followed by a literature review of the foundational and cutting-edge research. This literature
review is organized by institutional orders in society, the findings of which
present implications and suggestions for future research.
DEFINITION HISTORY
Arising from sociological institutionalism, the ILP focuses on the role of
culture as central to institutional analysis. Institutional logics are defined as
the socially constructed patterns of symbols and material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals and organizations
produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space,
and provide meaning to their social reality (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999, p. 804).
Friedland and Alford (1991) developed the initial theoretical formulation
of institutional logics in a discursive chapter in an influential volume, “The
New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis,” edited by Walter Powell
and Paul DiMaggio. In their critique they argued that to understand actors’
behavior it must be located in an institutional context that both regularizes
behavior and provides opportunity for agency and change (Thornton
& Ocasio, 2008, p. 102). Friedland and Alford’s key distinction from the
reigning sociological neoinstitutional school is the nondeterministic view of
society as made up of subsectors, what they termed institutional orders of an
inter-institutional system, for example, the family, religion, market, and state.
Each institutional order includes a set of symbolic meanings and material
practices that constitute its cultural belief system and organizing principles,
that is—its “institutional content” (Friedland & Alford, 1991, p. 244).
The development of the ILP was in part a counter force to the proliferation
of institutional isomorphism and diffusion studies. Instead, ILP’s focus
is on the heterogeneity of cultural meaning and how it comparatively
varies by institutional order. To understand a rational myth, Zilber (2006)
argues that one needs to understand meaning in comparison to others, not
just to measure the spread of the myth within a social system. Friedland
and Alford’s (1991) comparative framework to theorize and measure the
institutional environment replaces bifurcated concepts juxtaposing rational
and nonrational and technical and institutional environments, opening
up observation of heterogeneous sources of the meaning and practice of
rationality. This approach draws amply on social construction (Berger &
Luckman, 1967), as any actor may be nested in a combination of institutional
orders, exposing them to conflicting and compatible symbols and practices
that are available to reinterpret, exploit, export, and change. Thus, the

The Institutional Logics Perspective

3

research on institutional logics advances neoinstitutional theory beyond
studies of isomorphism and diffusion to include the interactive translation
of institutional effects.
Conceptualizing society as constituted by different institutional orders
is not a new idea. As Thornton et al. (2012) pointed out, Weber used the
societal subsector comparative method in his work on value spheres (Gerth
& Mills, 1946, pp. 323–357; Whimster, 2004, pp. 2220–2241). However, to
Weber, contradictions between value spheres represented irreconcilable
differences for individuals because, as Friedland (2013) points out, Weber’s
typology was akin to comparative religions. In contrast, for Friedland and
Alford (1991), actors are capable of reconciling and exploiting multiple
contradictory institutional logics. This capacity enables mechanisms of
institutional change and solutions to the problem of embedded agency in
institutional theories (DiMaggio, 1988; Holm, 1995).
The logics of institutional orders are interdependent, yet also potentially
contradictory (Friedland & Alford, 1991, p. 250). In this regard, multiple
institutional logics that are available to actors can interact and compete for
influence in societal domains. As a result, the logic of one domain can be
transposed to another domain and infuse the same practice with a different
meaning.
Friedland and Alford’s (1991) idea had the potential to be disruptive
to institutional theory across the social sciences. However, to marshal
this change required formalization and empirical research to evaluate the
theoretical merit of the idea. As a broad-brush sketch, it needed integration with meso- and micro-level behavioral theories (Berger & Zelditch,
1993). For example, Thornton and Ocasio (1999) integrated the concepts of
institutional logics with Ocasio’s (1997) Carnegie School–inspired theory of
organizational attention.
Thornton and Ocasio’s (1999) integration of the meso- and macro-levels
demonstrated how institutional logics affect organizational actors’ attention
in defining a problem and recognizing a solution. They showed how a shift in
attention to different institutional logics changed the determinants of executive succession in the US higher education publishing industry. Companion articles expanded the scope conditions to other organization decisions
(Thornton, 2001, 2002). Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative
methods, this research partitioned cultural meaning from structural effects.
For example, it showed that the number of corporate acquisitions remained
the same under the era of a professional logic (editorial) as compared to
a market logic, but the meaning and consequences of acquisition activity
changed.
Thornton (2004) followed with a book that formalized a theoretical research
program around the concept of institutional logics and began to elaborate

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the relationship of logics to the interinstitutional system, defining the institutional orders as family, religion, state, market, professions, and corporation.
While Friedland and Alford (1991) argued that institutional orders are interdependent and actors can manipulate logics, they did not suggest how this
occurred. To advance theory development, this book suggested drawing on
political and cultural sociology, which assumes event sequencing (Sewell,
1992, 1996) and the strategic use of institutional logics as a tool kit (Swidler,
1986; McPherson, 2013).
Thornton and Ocasio (2008) followed with a literature review that identified the five core meta-theoretical principles of institutional logics, (i) embedded agency, (ii) society as an interinstitutional system, (iii) the material and
cultural foundations of institutions, (iv) the historical contingency of institutions, and (v) institutions at multiple levels of analysis. Friedland and Alford
(1991), however, specified three interdependent and autonomous levels of
analysis—society, organizations, and individuals. Subsequent research incorporating concepts from neoinstitutional theory includes a wider scope of
levels, such as organizational and institutional fields (Fligstein & McAdam,
2012). A number of mechanisms can activate institutional change including
institutional entrepreneurs, social movements, structural overlap, and event
sequencing (Thornton, Jones, & Kury, 2005; Schneiberg & Lounsbury, 2008).
Thornton et al. (2012) continued to foster development of the ILP. They
elaborated the typology of institutional orders to include the community and
fleshed out the micro and meso foundations, illustrating how available logics
become accessible and activated by drawing on dynamic constructivism
theory in social psychology (Hong & Mallorie, 2004; Morris & Gelfand,
2004). They further developed theory about how organizational practices
and identities within and across organizations relate to institutional logics
(Jarzabkowski, 2005; Lok, 2010; Lounsbury & Crumley 2007). The pervasive
efforts of actors to combine and recombine cultural elements within and
across institutional logics is conceptualized as cultural entrepreneurship
(DiMaggio, 1982; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). Soon to follow was a conference and forthcoming edited volume on institutional logics in action by
Lounsbury and Boxenbaum (2013).
Thornton et al. (2012) illustrated how each institutional order is made up of
categorical elements that form the building blocks of institutional content, for
example, the sources of legitimacy, norms, values, and practices, which can
be expressed in symbolic and material form. They illustrated society as an
interinstitutional system using ideal types, locating the institutional orders
on the X axis and the categorical elements, that is the institutional content,
on the Y axis.
The ILP assumes the interpretation of the Y-axis elements vary depending
on the observational lens—from which the X axis is the camera focused. In

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theory, it does not assume a priori that the number of logics that are likely to
influence behavior in a particular context or whether or not a single logic is
more dominant than another or that multiple logics are necessarily operative.
In theory, no one institutional order has causal primacy a priori, although the
origin and prevalence of orders is temporally and contextually dependent,
for example, the family is an older institution than the state. Tracey (2012,
p. 118) comments that preoccupations over limits on a range of institutional
logics is a nonissue.
The research to formalize the ILP has developed a rigorous methodology
to contrast observations anchored in the root symbols and practices of an
institutional order to identify the comparative meaning of observations. For
example, family values will differ from market values. The degree of conflict
and interdependence among the institutional orders also differs; for example,
the norms and values of the market and the family are likely more opposing,
whereas those of the state and the professions are likely more interdependent depending on whether the analysis is of Western societies. In theory, if
an individual’s or an organization’s environment is more steeped in family
values rather than market values, they are likely to interpret symbols and
enact situations differently. This has been well demonstrated at the organizational level and is beginning to be demonstrated at the individual-society
levels of analysis (Glaser, Fast, & Green, 2012).
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Prior theoretical developments in the ILP emphasize the mechanisms, variety of substantive contexts (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008), and the cross-level
effects (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010; Thornton et al., 2012). Here, we take a different approach to the analysis of the institutional logics literature by reviewing
it through the lens of the institutional orders that are invoked in the studies we review. We are interested in where the influences, interdependency,
and autonomy of institutional orders are more or less prevalent and what
meta-implications these relationships have for future research. The literature
review discussion is partitioned by institutional orders.
WITHIN-INSTITUTIONAL ORDER VARIANTS OF INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
Professional domains have been a focus in institutional logics research.
Exemplary studies focus on variants of the professions logics within different substantive contexts. Suddaby and Greenwood (2005) examined rhetoric
(vocabulary) to expose contradictory institutional logics in accounting and
law. They examined historically different understandings of professionalism,
one based on a trustee model and the other based on an expertise model. The

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

conflict between these two logics defined the different sources of legitimacy
that empowered a struggle to develop multidisciplinary partnerships, as a
new organizational form in the legal and accounting professions.
Rao, Monin, and Durand (2003) examined the rhetoric of two variants of
logics within the French culinary profession, classical and nouvelle cuisine.
In examining the rules of cooking, archetypal ingredients, the role of the
chef, and organization of the menu, they discovered several mechanisms,
culinary critics being the most important, that created an identity competition which set the stage for a shift in identities among classical and nouvelle
chefs.
Dunn and Jones (2010) identified two competing logics within the profession of medical education. They examined the relative prevalence of science
and care logics discourse over 95 years and showed how the growth of public health and medical schools, contestation among physicians over medical
education, and a curvilinear relationship with public attention to managed
care were associated with increased emphasis on the care logic relative to the
science logic in medical education.
THE PROFESSIONS, STATE, CORPORATE, AND MARKET INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
There are several studies of competing institutional logics in the health care
field in the United States and Canada. Scott, Ruef, Mendel, and Caronna
(2000), in an award winning book, examined how professional, state, and
managerial market logics shaped the transformation of the health care field,
from one dominated by professional logics to one where multiple logics coexist and no single logic dominates.
Reay and Hinings’ (2009) case study of medical professionalism and
business-like health care in the Alberta Province bears similarities in that
the struggles among the actors holding different logics resulted in power
being distributed between the physicians (professions) and the government
(state)—creating a counterbalancing effect of contentious coexistence.
Jones and Livne-Tarandach’s (2008) study of rhetorical strategies show
how architects have different vocabularies (words) that represent business,
profession, and state institutional logics. These logics focus attention on distinct competencies that appeal to different client segments, servicing clients,
building great architecture, or managing facilities. Architects pragmatically
combine word choices from distinct logics, which enable them to better
market themselves by appealing to the multiple and diverse interests of
their client audiences.

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THE PROFESSIONS AND CORPORATE INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
Townley’s (1997) case analysis of implementing performance appraisal practices in universities showed how the availability of the professional logic
allowed academics to defend to some extent against such corporate practices,
showing how institutional logics can be used as a resource and a boundary
mechanism to stem the tide of corporate logic diffusion into professionally
based settings.
THE PROFESSIONS AND MARKET INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
Thornton and Ocasio’s (1999) analysis of publishing firms demonstrates on
an individual case basis that a few firms did not instantiate the market logic.
However, the overall pattern across the entire population of firms showed a
shift in influence on organizational decision making from the editorial logic
(quasi-profession) to the market logic for organizational decisions on executive succession, acquisition (Thornton, 2001) and organizational structure
(Thornton, 2002). These studies show how institutional logics generate interaction effects, that is, X and Y are two variables affecting a third value in the
cells of the ideal types table, for example, between the main effects of institutional logics (profession or market logics as parameterized by time periods)
and the main effects of the organization variables (hierarchy, position, etc.).
Lounsbury’s (2002) research shows that in the finance industry a shift from
a professions logic to a market logic created a change in status driven by
business practice reputation to normative conformity to mathematical economics. Professional finance associations led the transformation to a market
logic in the field of finance. New professionals such as money managers and
securities analysts helped diffuse new financial theories such as portfolio and
risk management. Finance professionals gained status and position by their
reliance on financial theories as the market logic gained prominence in the
field.
Glynn and Lounsbury (2005), in a case study, examined shifts in the
focus of attention by newspaper critics of the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra
from an instantiation of an aesthetic logic before a strike to a market logic
post-strike. Pre-strike reviewers focused their attention on the virtuosity and
musical interpretation associated with the aesthetic logic and post-strike
critics increased their attention to ticket sales, production of recordings, and
audience reactions consistent with a market logic. The ascendancy of the
market logic did not imply, however, a rejection of the professional logic,
but a blending of the two.
Lounsbury (2007) showed how geography, Boston and New York, not historical time provides the comparative method of analysis in analyzing the
effects of competing professional versus market logics in the mutual fund

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

industry. The professional logic (the Boston trusteeship logic), with its main
goal of wealth preservation, competed against a New York-based market
logic focused on maximizing growth and market performance.
THE FAMILY AND PROFESSIONS LOGICS
DiMaggio (1991), in his precursor analysis of the development of US art
museums, reveals a struggle of competing models (institutional logics), one
fueled by elite upper class families and their social circle of collectors and
curators, the other by a new class of museum professionals resulting from
the expansion of higher education into the fine arts.
THE STATE AND FAMILY LOGICS
Greenwood, Díaz, Li, and Lorente (2010), in examining corporate downsizing
in the Spanish manufacturing sector between 1994 and 2000, found a significantly less tendency to respond to market pressures to decrease their labor
forces in regions of the country where the State and Family logics are stronger.
THE COMMUNITY AND CORPORATE LOGICS
Haveman and Rao (1997), in their study of the coevolution of institutions
and organizations in the California Thrift industry, examined how changes
in institutional logics at the societal level affected the formation of organizational forms at the industry level. With these changes, thrift plans that
embodied a corporate logic characterized by bureaucratic rational decision
making were more likely to thrive than those that embodied a community
logic of mutual cooperation.
Marquis and Lounsbury (2007) showed how competing institutional logics
can facilitate resistance to institutional change as in the case of the contest
between the logics of global corporate banks and local community banks.
Interestingly, the causal mechanism is not just simple market competition,
but selection pressures relative to the prevalence of societal-level institutional
logics.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
We highlight in this section and the next the mechanisms and substantive
contexts of several veins of research recently published, forthcoming, or at
the journal review stage. Nigam and Ocasio (2010) examined the cross-level
effects of how critical events make institutional logics salient and available
to actors for sense making (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010). Thornton et al. (2012)

The Institutional Logics Perspective

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illustrate how entrepreneurs discover new ideas and solve problems in legitimating and justifying their new organizations by switching and recombining institutional logics, which shifts the sources of analogies and referent
categories by which people can understand their innovation (Lounsbury &
Glynn, 2001). Almandoz (2012) found in examining the creation of banks that
founding teams that had functional backgrounds associated with a community logic, as distinct from a market logic, had higher founding rates and
lower rates of founding team dissolution. The edited volume by Lounsbury
and Boxenbaum (2013) highlights how organizations and other groups establish or alter their identities and core practices under conditions of plural
logics.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Our meta-analysis classifying literature by institutional orders shows a
notable absence of studies on the family and religion and a number of
studies on the logics of the professions and the market. The market logic,
through the mechanisms of blending and replacement, is spreading across
many substantive domains and invading territory once held by the professions. While the spread of the market logic is not a surprise, it is insightful
that this trend coincides with the weakening and corruption of professional
boundaries, particularly in light of their origins in religion and as keepers
of honest market and corporate practices (Prak, 2008; Zeff, 2003). Here, we
incorporate these insights in suggestions for future research in topic and
disciplinary areas.
MORALITY
Morality in the sense of altruism, sympathy for others, and the understanding of others goals is underdeveloped in the ILP. The ILP assumes that the
influences of morality vary across the seven institutional orders. Just as the
institutional orders of religion and family influence moral values, so does
the market logic, for example, in Hayek’s (1944) notions of individualism
and self-responsibility that underlie self-regulating free markets. The state
logic under a democratic philosophy is concerned with the redistribution
of property rights for the common good; however, not all nation-states are
democratic. While earlier ILP typologies emphasized Judeo-Christian philosophy (Friedland & Alford, 1991), later elaborations relax this scope condition
as reviewers have pointed out that the meta-theory has broader applications
such as the emerging economies in India and China. The current typology of
the ILP is a representation of the main institutions of societies (think governance systems) and it was derived from a reading of Weber’s (1978) Economy

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and Society and contemporary organization and management theory. In contrast, the work of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), the ILP is not inspired by
readings of French political philosophers with assumptions of common good
across all institutional orders, but is based on classic and contemporary social
science theory and research. This broader scope allows theorizing the varied
influences of self-interest and understanding the empirical observation that
winners of legitimacy struggles and justification contests are not always the
most moral or worthy. Given that contemporary moral thought is much less
coherent than it once was (Massengill, 2008), the ILP is well suited to theorize and measure the heterogeneity of cultural context that informs different
variants of moral thought.
Excepting Greenwood et al. (2010), which shows that corporate management practices were tempered by religion and family logics in the face of
market pressures, there is a lack of logics research invoking religion even
though it has been a foundry for individual, organizational, and collective
identity and behavior (Tracey, 2012; Tracey, Phillips, & Lounsbury, 2014).
With the exception of Western Europe, much of the world continues to
be religious (Berger, 2001). The review by Tracey (2012) highlights fruitful
micro and macro areas for elaborating the moral scope of institutional logics
through religion, connecting it to behavioral ethics, identity formation, and
change and interdependency in the interinstitutional system. For example,
Parboteeah, Hoegl, and Cullen (2009) found that the work ethic and church
membership declines when the boundaries of religion and state weaken,
for example, when the UK government regulates religion by appointing
religious leaders and collecting taxes. Pearce, Fritz, and Davis (2010) found
religion related to entrepreneurial orientation and organizational performance. Weaver and Agle (2002) found that ethical behavior is positively
related to when religious role expectations are internalized as self-identity.
Stout and Cormode’s (1998) study is of interest in its focus on how the logic
of religion is connected to other institutional orders such as the state, the
market, and the family.
JUSTIFICATION
Because the ILP assumes that what is considered legitimate changes depending on the context, it has the potential to examine how culture explains more
than motivating action—it justifies action. It can be used to understand
how legitimacy is comparatively negotiated, evaluated, and resolved.
The qualitative work on legitimacy struggles spearheaded by the French
pragmatists, Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), and research developed by US
cultural sociologists (Swidler, 1986; Vaisey, 2009) exemplify the approach
called justification. Conceptualizing the seven institutional orders, (family,

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community, religion, market, state, professions, and the corporation) to
represent different repertoires of justifications that individuals and organizations use to make sense and rationalize their choices—is a short step from
its current use as a framework for understanding the sources of legitimacy
as motivation. For example, Brandl and Bullinger (2012) compare differences
in the meaning of case vignettes by switching institutional orders which
suggests different justifications for the same behavior.
CULTURE
In “Markets from Culture … ,” Thornton (2004) treats culture as an independent variable, to interpret organizational decision making based on how different institutional logics focus attention. Institutional logics as culture can
be applied to a myriad of unexplored topics such as how objects, spaces, and
technologies shape and frame social relations. Hollerer, Jancsary, Meyer, and
Vettori (2013) show the importance of visual elements of communication in
translation. Moreover, culture can be viewed as a dependent variable. In tracing its classic roots to Weber, the ILP is at the heart of understanding how
alternative meanings of cultural symbols and material practices, as influenced by different institutional orders, wane and wax over time and context.
This brings to mind Weber’s example which Swedberg’s (2005, p. 3) paraphrases, “When the wood cutter brings down his axe on the wood, it can
be a case of wage labor, provision for one’s household, or a form of recreation, and which one it is depends on the meaning with which the action is
invested.”
POWER
The ILP view is that in order to understand power, one first needs to
understand culture, because culture governs the interpretation and tools
by which power is enacted (Stinchcombe, 2002). This has been empirically
demonstrated in large sample research with confirmatory models (Thornton
& Ocasio, 1999). In Thornton’s (2001) analysis of acquisition activity in the
publishing industry, when an editorial logic prevailed, publishers defined
the event of being acquired as an “all-in-the-family” moment, and such
acquisition events were a form of mutual survival and growth. However,
when prevailing sentiments in the industry had shifted to a market logic,
acquisition events were associated with being sold to the highest bidder with
potentially dire consequences of being busted-up based on accounting, not
good editorial principles. Thus, power is not a sufficient condition to explain
institutionalization or institutional change. The interpretation of power in
the ILP is fundamentally more Weberian, with its emphasis on comparative

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symbolic meaning, rather than Marxian, with its emphasis on redistribution
of material resources. The institutional order most relevant to questions of
distributive justice and the redistribution of assets and privileges is that of
the Western democratic or socialist state. The claim that power is culturally
contingent across the spectrum of institutional orders is an undeveloped
avenue in future research.
More recent research has highlighted the reciprocal relationship between
power and institutional logics. While particular logics shape power and
political processes, they do not fully determine them, and powerful actors
can shape how logics are elaborated. Joseph, Ocasio, and Hunter-McDonnell
(forthcoming) show how powerful CEOs elaborate the shareholder value
logic, a dominant variant of the market logic in large US corporations, by
promoting a particular form of board structure and composition, where the
CEO is the only insider in the board. This board structure ostensible promotes “board independence,” a key principle of the shareholder value logic,
while in fact helping instead to promote CEO entrenchment and interests.
COOPERATION
Beginning with Friedland and Alford (1991), the research has centered
on understanding conflicting institutional logics in at least three ways,
dominance by replacement of one logic for another (Rao et al., 2003),
resistance by standoffs and coexistence (Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007), and
resource dependence by blending logics to create hybrids (Battilana and
Dorado, 2010). However, all this discussion of conflict over shadows a
fundamental empirical observation that there must be a tremendous amount
of cooperation in the world and that cooperation does not always require
boundary weakening through hybridization of logics. We need research on
cooperation; otherwise, how would the world function? Jourdan, Thornton,
and Durand (2012) show how actors in the French film industry create
cooperation in the context of conflicting institutional logics in a way that
maintains logic boundaries by engaging in deference.
BUSINESS POLICY AND STRATEGY
One of the key strategies of corporations is various forms of diversification.
However, of the economic streams of research that examine diversification
performance, none of them is complete (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986, p. 485). This
observation motivated a managerial cognitive theory, termed the dominant
logic to better understand strategy and performance in the diversified firm.
The dominant logic refers to mental maps developed through experience in the
core business which is applied to other businesses as in the case of large firms

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13

that diversify. The dominant logic is stored via schemas, which are filters that
enable managers to efficiently categorize an event, assess its consequences,
and consider appropriate actions. However, diversification may create pressures for competing logics, which raises the question of whether and when
either a dominant logic or diversification can be sustained over time.
Durand, Szostak, Jourdan, and Thornton (2013) show how firms in the
French design industry use institutional logics as resources to leverage
their strategic choices by adding and abandoning logics. Firms with an
awareness of a larger repertoire of available logics expressed by a larger
stock of competences and a broader industrial scope and with a favorable
opportunity set as expressed by status are more likely to add a logic to their
repertoire. High-status actors can play a key role in triggering institutional
change when such change is likely to undermine the basis of their social
position and advantage.
International business, in particular multinational firm strategy, is
an important topic—one that requires policy and corporate leaders to
understand how their subsidiaries develop organizational practices
for firm–government–employment relations in the context of different
cross-country institutions (Kostova and Roth, 2002). International business
research has been influenced by both sociological neoinstitutional and
economic perspectives, with their focus on isomorphism and incentives,
respectively. The ILP, with its emphasis on culture, can broaden and augment neoinstitutional and economic perspectives by shifting researchers’
attention to the idea that there are not any objective or universal incentives
that can be understood independently of actors’ understandings and these
understandings are contingent on the institutional context. For example,
institutions exist in distinct national configurations, some countries have
state and corporate governance structures relatively more influenced by
family versus market logics (Greenwood et al., 2010), which shifts the
definitions of legitimate exchanges and strategies of action. The ILP can
enlighten how institutional heterogeneity across several domains interacts
to form distinct types of capitalism (Hall & Soskice, 2001). For example, the
ILP illustrates how institutions are at the same time material and symbolic,
which means that the logic of one domain can be transposed to another
domain and infuse the same practice with a different meaning.
THEORY AND METHODS DEVELOPMENT
As our literature review indicates, there is a rich mixture of multiple logic
studies. This points to the need for an understanding of the aggregate
and generalizable effects of the institutional logics research. Evaluations
are needed of the robustness of findings in light of the strength of research

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

designs and methods of analysis. Thornton (2004) conducted a meta-analysis
of the publishing studies, but we need a meta-analysis of a larger sample
of the institutional logics literature. Multimethod and multilevel studies including both qualitative and quantitative approaches are essential
because selection of level and method of analysis privileges researchers’
observations.
Zucker’s (1977) early experimental research showed how social conventions become institutionalized and taken for granted within individuals’ cognition. Oddly, this line of micro analysis did not take hold in neoinstitutional theory. There is renewed interest in developing experimental methods
to address the calls for formal development of micro theory—this should
be a growth area. We point to recent experimental research by Glaser et al.
(2012) that shows how individuals form cognitive schemas cued from different institutional logics. Individuals store societally prominent institutional
logics in their minds as schemas and when these schemas are primed, they
increase the likelihood that an individual will adopt motives associated with
the logic and behave in ways consistent with these motives.
DiMaggio (1991) reintroduced Weber’s comparative historical method of
ideal types in a case study of institutional change in art museum management. Following DiMaggio, Thornton and Ocasio (1999) similarly used ideal
types to formalize the analysis of their data and suggest testable hypotheses.
To be clear, the notation of X (institutional orders) and Y (elemental categories
of an institutional order) in the typological table examples in Thornton (2004)
and Thornton et al. (2012) does not necessarily suggest causal direction. Institutional logics are dynamic and contextually variable and the ideal typical
models abstract from that variation. Specific instantiations of logics, that is,
the institutional content (what is in the cells of the table), is not just macro to
micro but macro to micro to macro. But this is not well captured in the X, Y
ideal type model and we do not really have a good theory of why we have
the right elemental categories on the Y axis.
The use of ideal types is a first-order method to understand if the ILP is an
appropriate meta-theory; applying it will determine whether one can derive
analytically distinct institutional logics from qualitative and quantitative
observations. However, a method is needed, much like in network analysis
(Breiger & Mohr, 2004), to parameterize and scale institutional distance
between the ideal types and the actual data. An important untested proposition of the ILP suggests that the interdependence, autonomy, and dominance
of some institutional orders within the interinstitutional system are higher
and lower than others. For example the professions invent the categories of
new knowledge, but need the state to create laws to ratify them, enabling
them into real practices. In the United States, the resource dependence
between the professions and state is high. This is not the case necessarily

The Institutional Logics Perspective

15

for other institutional orders. Are the logics of family and religion, state
and professions, market and corporation more compatible than with other
logics such as family and market? How would these pairings change when
comparing traditional and liberal societies? Such analyses raise the question
of when any one institutional order becomes too autonomous, interdependent, or dominant relative to others, does this signal unstable institutional
conditions in society? We need methods that give us a greater understanding
of how institutional orders and their logics anchor in the interinstitutional
system. Topic models which identify the linguistic contexts that surround
social institutions and policy domains (DiMaggio, Nag, & Blei, 2013) and
descent hierarchical analysis (Daudigeos, Jaumier, & Boutinot, 2013) are two
approaches that show promise. The development of such methods could
help address questions such as the spread and dominance of the market and
the state logics in societies and the ensuing financial and budgetary crises.
CONCLUSION
The ILP is a meta-theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of
social science theories to better understand the effects of culture and institutions in many substantive domains. This entry has described the history of
the development of the ILP, defined its core concepts and mechanisms, and
conducted a review of foundational and cutting-edge literature from the view
of operant institutional orders. This meta-analytic review reveals a weakening of the professions and the spread of the market logic in many domains
and foreshadows a discussion of future research.
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PATRICIA H. THORNTON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Patricia H. Thornton is Adjunct Professor affiliated with the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Duke University Fuqua School of Business
and affiliated faculty and Visiting Professor to the Program on Organizations,
Business, and the Economy, Department of Sociology, Stanford University.
Her research focuses on institutional logics, institutional change, innovation,
and entrepreneurship. With William Ocasio she received the W. Richard Scott
award for the best scholarly research article by the OOW section of American
Sociological Association and with Nancy B. Tuma received the award for the
best scholarly paper by the Organization and Management Theory Division

The Institutional Logics Perspective

21

of the Academy of Management. She received a PhD in 1993 from Stanford
University in Sociology. Before this, she worked as a hospital program analyst
and cofounded Interim Inc.
WILLIAM OCASIO SHORT BIOGRAPHY
William Ocasio is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Distinguished Professor
of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management,
Northwestern University. He received a PhD in Organizational Behavior
from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. With Patricia Thornton
he received the W. Richard Scott award for the best scholarly research
article by the OOW section of American Sociological Association for their
joint 1999 paper on “Institutional Logics and the Historical Contingency of
Power.” His current research focuses on institutional logics, vocabularies,
and organizational and field-level attention. He is currently a Senior Editor
at Organization Science. Before becoming an academic, he served for four
years as Executive Director of the Governor’s Economic Advisory Council
for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
MICHAEL LOUNSBURY SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Professor Michael Lounsbury is the Thornton A. Graham Chair and Associate Dean of Research at the University of Alberta School of Business. He
is also a Principal Investigator at the Canadian National Institute for Nanotechnology. His research focuses on institutional logics, entrepreneurship,
and the cultural dynamics of organizations and practice. He serves on a number of editorial boards and is the Series Editor of Research in the Sociology
of Organizations, Associate Editor of Academy of Management Annals, as
well as Co-Editor of Organization Studies. He received his PhD in 1999 from
Northwestern University in Sociology and Organizational Behavior.
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Chiozza
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22

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

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Perrow



The Institutional Logics Perspective
PATRICIA H. THORNTON, WILLIAM OCASIO, and MICHAEL LOUNSBURY

Abstract
This essay discusses a new approach to institutional analysis—the institutional logics
perspective (ILP). This perspective is a meta-theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of social science theories to better understand the effects of cultural
institutions on individuals, organizations, and societies. We describe the history of
the development of the ILP, define its core concepts and mechanisms, and review
and discuss foundational and cutting-edge research. Prior overviews emphasize the
mechanisms, variety of substantive contexts, and the cross-level effects. We take a
different approach by organizing the literature review by institutional orders. This
meta-analysis reveals a pattern of institutional change—the weakening of the professions and the spread of the market logic in many domains. We discuss implications
of this finding and suggest future research.

INTRODUCTION
Conventional thinking is that social, economic, and political relations influence ideas, actions, and world views. That we can effectively demonstrate
that another view may be true—that culture shapes such relations—has
been less accepted and elusive to theorize and measure. By culture we refer
to the system of beliefs, values, norms, and symbols of social collectives.
Our aim is to define and introduce to the well-educated nonspecialist recent
advances in understanding and examining the role of culture in institutional
analysis—the institutional logics perspective (ILP).
There is long-standing debate in the social sciences on how institutions
affect individual and organizational behavior and how individuals and organizations create and change institutions (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Dobbin,
1994; Hall & Taylor, 1996; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; North, 1990; Thelen, 2004;
Weber, 1978). This entry draws on an emergent and recently influential line
of institutional theory and analysis—the ILP (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). While institutional logics research is developing in sociology and
organization and management theory, we will argue that it is a useful framework for other academic fields in the social sciences such as political science
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

(Albrekt, 2008), economics (Ellerman, 2005), information technology (Currie
& Guah, 2007), and public policy (Mullins, 2006), among others. We define
the core concepts, mechanisms, and arguments of the ILP, followed by a literature review of the foundational and cutting-edge research. This literature
review is organized by institutional orders in society, the findings of which
present implications and suggestions for future research.
DEFINITION HISTORY
Arising from sociological institutionalism, the ILP focuses on the role of
culture as central to institutional analysis. Institutional logics are defined as
the socially constructed patterns of symbols and material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals and organizations
produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space,
and provide meaning to their social reality (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999, p. 804).
Friedland and Alford (1991) developed the initial theoretical formulation
of institutional logics in a discursive chapter in an influential volume, “The
New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis,” edited by Walter Powell
and Paul DiMaggio. In their critique they argued that to understand actors’
behavior it must be located in an institutional context that both regularizes
behavior and provides opportunity for agency and change (Thornton
& Ocasio, 2008, p. 102). Friedland and Alford’s key distinction from the
reigning sociological neoinstitutional school is the nondeterministic view of
society as made up of subsectors, what they termed institutional orders of an
inter-institutional system, for example, the family, religion, market, and state.
Each institutional order includes a set of symbolic meanings and material
practices that constitute its cultural belief system and organizing principles,
that is—its “institutional content” (Friedland & Alford, 1991, p. 244).
The development of the ILP was in part a counter force to the proliferation
of institutional isomorphism and diffusion studies. Instead, ILP’s focus
is on the heterogeneity of cultural meaning and how it comparatively
varies by institutional order. To understand a rational myth, Zilber (2006)
argues that one needs to understand meaning in comparison to others, not
just to measure the spread of the myth within a social system. Friedland
and Alford’s (1991) comparative framework to theorize and measure the
institutional environment replaces bifurcated concepts juxtaposing rational
and nonrational and technical and institutional environments, opening
up observation of heterogeneous sources of the meaning and practice of
rationality. This approach draws amply on social construction (Berger &
Luckman, 1967), as any actor may be nested in a combination of institutional
orders, exposing them to conflicting and compatible symbols and practices
that are available to reinterpret, exploit, export, and change. Thus, the

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3

research on institutional logics advances neoinstitutional theory beyond
studies of isomorphism and diffusion to include the interactive translation
of institutional effects.
Conceptualizing society as constituted by different institutional orders
is not a new idea. As Thornton et al. (2012) pointed out, Weber used the
societal subsector comparative method in his work on value spheres (Gerth
& Mills, 1946, pp. 323–357; Whimster, 2004, pp. 2220–2241). However, to
Weber, contradictions between value spheres represented irreconcilable
differences for individuals because, as Friedland (2013) points out, Weber’s
typology was akin to comparative religions. In contrast, for Friedland and
Alford (1991), actors are capable of reconciling and exploiting multiple
contradictory institutional logics. This capacity enables mechanisms of
institutional change and solutions to the problem of embedded agency in
institutional theories (DiMaggio, 1988; Holm, 1995).
The logics of institutional orders are interdependent, yet also potentially
contradictory (Friedland & Alford, 1991, p. 250). In this regard, multiple
institutional logics that are available to actors can interact and compete for
influence in societal domains. As a result, the logic of one domain can be
transposed to another domain and infuse the same practice with a different
meaning.
Friedland and Alford’s (1991) idea had the potential to be disruptive
to institutional theory across the social sciences. However, to marshal
this change required formalization and empirical research to evaluate the
theoretical merit of the idea. As a broad-brush sketch, it needed integration with meso- and micro-level behavioral theories (Berger & Zelditch,
1993). For example, Thornton and Ocasio (1999) integrated the concepts of
institutional logics with Ocasio’s (1997) Carnegie School–inspired theory of
organizational attention.
Thornton and Ocasio’s (1999) integration of the meso- and macro-levels
demonstrated how institutional logics affect organizational actors’ attention
in defining a problem and recognizing a solution. They showed how a shift in
attention to different institutional logics changed the determinants of executive succession in the US higher education publishing industry. Companion articles expanded the scope conditions to other organization decisions
(Thornton, 2001, 2002). Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative
methods, this research partitioned cultural meaning from structural effects.
For example, it showed that the number of corporate acquisitions remained
the same under the era of a professional logic (editorial) as compared to
a market logic, but the meaning and consequences of acquisition activity
changed.
Thornton (2004) followed with a book that formalized a theoretical research
program around the concept of institutional logics and began to elaborate

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the relationship of logics to the interinstitutional system, defining the institutional orders as family, religion, state, market, professions, and corporation.
While Friedland and Alford (1991) argued that institutional orders are interdependent and actors can manipulate logics, they did not suggest how this
occurred. To advance theory development, this book suggested drawing on
political and cultural sociology, which assumes event sequencing (Sewell,
1992, 1996) and the strategic use of institutional logics as a tool kit (Swidler,
1986; McPherson, 2013).
Thornton and Ocasio (2008) followed with a literature review that identified the five core meta-theoretical principles of institutional logics, (i) embedded agency, (ii) society as an interinstitutional system, (iii) the material and
cultural foundations of institutions, (iv) the historical contingency of institutions, and (v) institutions at multiple levels of analysis. Friedland and Alford
(1991), however, specified three interdependent and autonomous levels of
analysis—society, organizations, and individuals. Subsequent research incorporating concepts from neoinstitutional theory includes a wider scope of
levels, such as organizational and institutional fields (Fligstein & McAdam,
2012). A number of mechanisms can activate institutional change including
institutional entrepreneurs, social movements, structural overlap, and event
sequencing (Thornton, Jones, & Kury, 2005; Schneiberg & Lounsbury, 2008).
Thornton et al. (2012) continued to foster development of the ILP. They
elaborated the typology of institutional orders to include the community and
fleshed out the micro and meso foundations, illustrating how available logics
become accessible and activated by drawing on dynamic constructivism
theory in social psychology (Hong & Mallorie, 2004; Morris & Gelfand,
2004). They further developed theory about how organizational practices
and identities within and across organizations relate to institutional logics
(Jarzabkowski, 2005; Lok, 2010; Lounsbury & Crumley 2007). The pervasive
efforts of actors to combine and recombine cultural elements within and
across institutional logics is conceptualized as cultural entrepreneurship
(DiMaggio, 1982; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). Soon to follow was a conference and forthcoming edited volume on institutional logics in action by
Lounsbury and Boxenbaum (2013).
Thornton et al. (2012) illustrated how each institutional order is made up of
categorical elements that form the building blocks of institutional content, for
example, the sources of legitimacy, norms, values, and practices, which can
be expressed in symbolic and material form. They illustrated society as an
interinstitutional system using ideal types, locating the institutional orders
on the X axis and the categorical elements, that is the institutional content,
on the Y axis.
The ILP assumes the interpretation of the Y-axis elements vary depending
on the observational lens—from which the X axis is the camera focused. In

The Institutional Logics Perspective

5

theory, it does not assume a priori that the number of logics that are likely to
influence behavior in a particular context or whether or not a single logic is
more dominant than another or that multiple logics are necessarily operative.
In theory, no one institutional order has causal primacy a priori, although the
origin and prevalence of orders is temporally and contextually dependent,
for example, the family is an older institution than the state. Tracey (2012,
p. 118) comments that preoccupations over limits on a range of institutional
logics is a nonissue.
The research to formalize the ILP has developed a rigorous methodology
to contrast observations anchored in the root symbols and practices of an
institutional order to identify the comparative meaning of observations. For
example, family values will differ from market values. The degree of conflict
and interdependence among the institutional orders also differs; for example,
the norms and values of the market and the family are likely more opposing,
whereas those of the state and the professions are likely more interdependent depending on whether the analysis is of Western societies. In theory, if
an individual’s or an organization’s environment is more steeped in family
values rather than market values, they are likely to interpret symbols and
enact situations differently. This has been well demonstrated at the organizational level and is beginning to be demonstrated at the individual-society
levels of analysis (Glaser, Fast, & Green, 2012).
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Prior theoretical developments in the ILP emphasize the mechanisms, variety of substantive contexts (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008), and the cross-level
effects (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010; Thornton et al., 2012). Here, we take a different approach to the analysis of the institutional logics literature by reviewing
it through the lens of the institutional orders that are invoked in the studies we review. We are interested in where the influences, interdependency,
and autonomy of institutional orders are more or less prevalent and what
meta-implications these relationships have for future research. The literature
review discussion is partitioned by institutional orders.
WITHIN-INSTITUTIONAL ORDER VARIANTS OF INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
Professional domains have been a focus in institutional logics research.
Exemplary studies focus on variants of the professions logics within different substantive contexts. Suddaby and Greenwood (2005) examined rhetoric
(vocabulary) to expose contradictory institutional logics in accounting and
law. They examined historically different understandings of professionalism,
one based on a trustee model and the other based on an expertise model. The

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

conflict between these two logics defined the different sources of legitimacy
that empowered a struggle to develop multidisciplinary partnerships, as a
new organizational form in the legal and accounting professions.
Rao, Monin, and Durand (2003) examined the rhetoric of two variants of
logics within the French culinary profession, classical and nouvelle cuisine.
In examining the rules of cooking, archetypal ingredients, the role of the
chef, and organization of the menu, they discovered several mechanisms,
culinary critics being the most important, that created an identity competition which set the stage for a shift in identities among classical and nouvelle
chefs.
Dunn and Jones (2010) identified two competing logics within the profession of medical education. They examined the relative prevalence of science
and care logics discourse over 95 years and showed how the growth of public health and medical schools, contestation among physicians over medical
education, and a curvilinear relationship with public attention to managed
care were associated with increased emphasis on the care logic relative to the
science logic in medical education.
THE PROFESSIONS, STATE, CORPORATE, AND MARKET INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
There are several studies of competing institutional logics in the health care
field in the United States and Canada. Scott, Ruef, Mendel, and Caronna
(2000), in an award winning book, examined how professional, state, and
managerial market logics shaped the transformation of the health care field,
from one dominated by professional logics to one where multiple logics coexist and no single logic dominates.
Reay and Hinings’ (2009) case study of medical professionalism and
business-like health care in the Alberta Province bears similarities in that
the struggles among the actors holding different logics resulted in power
being distributed between the physicians (professions) and the government
(state)—creating a counterbalancing effect of contentious coexistence.
Jones and Livne-Tarandach’s (2008) study of rhetorical strategies show
how architects have different vocabularies (words) that represent business,
profession, and state institutional logics. These logics focus attention on distinct competencies that appeal to different client segments, servicing clients,
building great architecture, or managing facilities. Architects pragmatically
combine word choices from distinct logics, which enable them to better
market themselves by appealing to the multiple and diverse interests of
their client audiences.

The Institutional Logics Perspective

7

THE PROFESSIONS AND CORPORATE INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
Townley’s (1997) case analysis of implementing performance appraisal practices in universities showed how the availability of the professional logic
allowed academics to defend to some extent against such corporate practices,
showing how institutional logics can be used as a resource and a boundary
mechanism to stem the tide of corporate logic diffusion into professionally
based settings.
THE PROFESSIONS AND MARKET INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
Thornton and Ocasio’s (1999) analysis of publishing firms demonstrates on
an individual case basis that a few firms did not instantiate the market logic.
However, the overall pattern across the entire population of firms showed a
shift in influence on organizational decision making from the editorial logic
(quasi-profession) to the market logic for organizational decisions on executive succession, acquisition (Thornton, 2001) and organizational structure
(Thornton, 2002). These studies show how institutional logics generate interaction effects, that is, X and Y are two variables affecting a third value in the
cells of the ideal types table, for example, between the main effects of institutional logics (profession or market logics as parameterized by time periods)
and the main effects of the organization variables (hierarchy, position, etc.).
Lounsbury’s (2002) research shows that in the finance industry a shift from
a professions logic to a market logic created a change in status driven by
business practice reputation to normative conformity to mathematical economics. Professional finance associations led the transformation to a market
logic in the field of finance. New professionals such as money managers and
securities analysts helped diffuse new financial theories such as portfolio and
risk management. Finance professionals gained status and position by their
reliance on financial theories as the market logic gained prominence in the
field.
Glynn and Lounsbury (2005), in a case study, examined shifts in the
focus of attention by newspaper critics of the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra
from an instantiation of an aesthetic logic before a strike to a market logic
post-strike. Pre-strike reviewers focused their attention on the virtuosity and
musical interpretation associated with the aesthetic logic and post-strike
critics increased their attention to ticket sales, production of recordings, and
audience reactions consistent with a market logic. The ascendancy of the
market logic did not imply, however, a rejection of the professional logic,
but a blending of the two.
Lounsbury (2007) showed how geography, Boston and New York, not historical time provides the comparative method of analysis in analyzing the
effects of competing professional versus market logics in the mutual fund

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

industry. The professional logic (the Boston trusteeship logic), with its main
goal of wealth preservation, competed against a New York-based market
logic focused on maximizing growth and market performance.
THE FAMILY AND PROFESSIONS LOGICS
DiMaggio (1991), in his precursor analysis of the development of US art
museums, reveals a struggle of competing models (institutional logics), one
fueled by elite upper class families and their social circle of collectors and
curators, the other by a new class of museum professionals resulting from
the expansion of higher education into the fine arts.
THE STATE AND FAMILY LOGICS
Greenwood, Díaz, Li, and Lorente (2010), in examining corporate downsizing
in the Spanish manufacturing sector between 1994 and 2000, found a significantly less tendency to respond to market pressures to decrease their labor
forces in regions of the country where the State and Family logics are stronger.
THE COMMUNITY AND CORPORATE LOGICS
Haveman and Rao (1997), in their study of the coevolution of institutions
and organizations in the California Thrift industry, examined how changes
in institutional logics at the societal level affected the formation of organizational forms at the industry level. With these changes, thrift plans that
embodied a corporate logic characterized by bureaucratic rational decision
making were more likely to thrive than those that embodied a community
logic of mutual cooperation.
Marquis and Lounsbury (2007) showed how competing institutional logics
can facilitate resistance to institutional change as in the case of the contest
between the logics of global corporate banks and local community banks.
Interestingly, the causal mechanism is not just simple market competition,
but selection pressures relative to the prevalence of societal-level institutional
logics.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
We highlight in this section and the next the mechanisms and substantive
contexts of several veins of research recently published, forthcoming, or at
the journal review stage. Nigam and Ocasio (2010) examined the cross-level
effects of how critical events make institutional logics salient and available
to actors for sense making (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010). Thornton et al. (2012)

The Institutional Logics Perspective

9

illustrate how entrepreneurs discover new ideas and solve problems in legitimating and justifying their new organizations by switching and recombining institutional logics, which shifts the sources of analogies and referent
categories by which people can understand their innovation (Lounsbury &
Glynn, 2001). Almandoz (2012) found in examining the creation of banks that
founding teams that had functional backgrounds associated with a community logic, as distinct from a market logic, had higher founding rates and
lower rates of founding team dissolution. The edited volume by Lounsbury
and Boxenbaum (2013) highlights how organizations and other groups establish or alter their identities and core practices under conditions of plural
logics.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Our meta-analysis classifying literature by institutional orders shows a
notable absence of studies on the family and religion and a number of
studies on the logics of the professions and the market. The market logic,
through the mechanisms of blending and replacement, is spreading across
many substantive domains and invading territory once held by the professions. While the spread of the market logic is not a surprise, it is insightful
that this trend coincides with the weakening and corruption of professional
boundaries, particularly in light of their origins in religion and as keepers
of honest market and corporate practices (Prak, 2008; Zeff, 2003). Here, we
incorporate these insights in suggestions for future research in topic and
disciplinary areas.
MORALITY
Morality in the sense of altruism, sympathy for others, and the understanding of others goals is underdeveloped in the ILP. The ILP assumes that the
influences of morality vary across the seven institutional orders. Just as the
institutional orders of religion and family influence moral values, so does
the market logic, for example, in Hayek’s (1944) notions of individualism
and self-responsibility that underlie self-regulating free markets. The state
logic under a democratic philosophy is concerned with the redistribution
of property rights for the common good; however, not all nation-states are
democratic. While earlier ILP typologies emphasized Judeo-Christian philosophy (Friedland & Alford, 1991), later elaborations relax this scope condition
as reviewers have pointed out that the meta-theory has broader applications
such as the emerging economies in India and China. The current typology of
the ILP is a representation of the main institutions of societies (think governance systems) and it was derived from a reading of Weber’s (1978) Economy

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and Society and contemporary organization and management theory. In contrast, the work of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), the ILP is not inspired by
readings of French political philosophers with assumptions of common good
across all institutional orders, but is based on classic and contemporary social
science theory and research. This broader scope allows theorizing the varied
influences of self-interest and understanding the empirical observation that
winners of legitimacy struggles and justification contests are not always the
most moral or worthy. Given that contemporary moral thought is much less
coherent than it once was (Massengill, 2008), the ILP is well suited to theorize and measure the heterogeneity of cultural context that informs different
variants of moral thought.
Excepting Greenwood et al. (2010), which shows that corporate management practices were tempered by religion and family logics in the face of
market pressures, there is a lack of logics research invoking religion even
though it has been a foundry for individual, organizational, and collective
identity and behavior (Tracey, 2012; Tracey, Phillips, & Lounsbury, 2014).
With the exception of Western Europe, much of the world continues to
be religious (Berger, 2001). The review by Tracey (2012) highlights fruitful
micro and macro areas for elaborating the moral scope of institutional logics
through religion, connecting it to behavioral ethics, identity formation, and
change and interdependency in the interinstitutional system. For example,
Parboteeah, Hoegl, and Cullen (2009) found that the work ethic and church
membership declines when the boundaries of religion and state weaken,
for example, when the UK government regulates religion by appointing
religious leaders and collecting taxes. Pearce, Fritz, and Davis (2010) found
religion related to entrepreneurial orientation and organizational performance. Weaver and Agle (2002) found that ethical behavior is positively
related to when religious role expectations are internalized as self-identity.
Stout and Cormode’s (1998) study is of interest in its focus on how the logic
of religion is connected to other institutional orders such as the state, the
market, and the family.
JUSTIFICATION
Because the ILP assumes that what is considered legitimate changes depending on the context, it has the potential to examine how culture explains more
than motivating action—it justifies action. It can be used to understand
how legitimacy is comparatively negotiated, evaluated, and resolved.
The qualitative work on legitimacy struggles spearheaded by the French
pragmatists, Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), and research developed by US
cultural sociologists (Swidler, 1986; Vaisey, 2009) exemplify the approach
called justification. Conceptualizing the seven institutional orders, (family,

The Institutional Logics Perspective

11

community, religion, market, state, professions, and the corporation) to
represent different repertoires of justifications that individuals and organizations use to make sense and rationalize their choices—is a short step from
its current use as a framework for understanding the sources of legitimacy
as motivation. For example, Brandl and Bullinger (2012) compare differences
in the meaning of case vignettes by switching institutional orders which
suggests different justifications for the same behavior.
CULTURE
In “Markets from Culture … ,” Thornton (2004) treats culture as an independent variable, to interpret organizational decision making based on how different institutional logics focus attention. Institutional logics as culture can
be applied to a myriad of unexplored topics such as how objects, spaces, and
technologies shape and frame social relations. Hollerer, Jancsary, Meyer, and
Vettori (2013) show the importance of visual elements of communication in
translation. Moreover, culture can be viewed as a dependent variable. In tracing its classic roots to Weber, the ILP is at the heart of understanding how
alternative meanings of cultural symbols and material practices, as influenced by different institutional orders, wane and wax over time and context.
This brings to mind Weber’s example which Swedberg’s (2005, p. 3) paraphrases, “When the wood cutter brings down his axe on the wood, it can
be a case of wage labor, provision for one’s household, or a form of recreation, and which one it is depends on the meaning with which the action is
invested.”
POWER
The ILP view is that in order to understand power, one first needs to
understand culture, because culture governs the interpretation and tools
by which power is enacted (Stinchcombe, 2002). This has been empirically
demonstrated in large sample research with confirmatory models (Thornton
& Ocasio, 1999). In Thornton’s (2001) analysis of acquisition activity in the
publishing industry, when an editorial logic prevailed, publishers defined
the event of being acquired as an “all-in-the-family” moment, and such
acquisition events were a form of mutual survival and growth. However,
when prevailing sentiments in the industry had shifted to a market logic,
acquisition events were associated with being sold to the highest bidder with
potentially dire consequences of being busted-up based on accounting, not
good editorial principles. Thus, power is not a sufficient condition to explain
institutionalization or institutional change. The interpretation of power in
the ILP is fundamentally more Weberian, with its emphasis on comparative

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

symbolic meaning, rather than Marxian, with its emphasis on redistribution
of material resources. The institutional order most relevant to questions of
distributive justice and the redistribution of assets and privileges is that of
the Western democratic or socialist state. The claim that power is culturally
contingent across the spectrum of institutional orders is an undeveloped
avenue in future research.
More recent research has highlighted the reciprocal relationship between
power and institutional logics. While particular logics shape power and
political processes, they do not fully determine them, and powerful actors
can shape how logics are elaborated. Joseph, Ocasio, and Hunter-McDonnell
(forthcoming) show how powerful CEOs elaborate the shareholder value
logic, a dominant variant of the market logic in large US corporations, by
promoting a particular form of board structure and composition, where the
CEO is the only insider in the board. This board structure ostensible promotes “board independence,” a key principle of the shareholder value logic,
while in fact helping instead to promote CEO entrenchment and interests.
COOPERATION
Beginning with Friedland and Alford (1991), the research has centered
on understanding conflicting institutional logics in at least three ways,
dominance by replacement of one logic for another (Rao et al., 2003),
resistance by standoffs and coexistence (Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007), and
resource dependence by blending logics to create hybrids (Battilana and
Dorado, 2010). However, all this discussion of conflict over shadows a
fundamental empirical observation that there must be a tremendous amount
of cooperation in the world and that cooperation does not always require
boundary weakening through hybridization of logics. We need research on
cooperation; otherwise, how would the world function? Jourdan, Thornton,
and Durand (2012) show how actors in the French film industry create
cooperation in the context of conflicting institutional logics in a way that
maintains logic boundaries by engaging in deference.
BUSINESS POLICY AND STRATEGY
One of the key strategies of corporations is various forms of diversification.
However, of the economic streams of research that examine diversification
performance, none of them is complete (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986, p. 485). This
observation motivated a managerial cognitive theory, termed the dominant
logic to better understand strategy and performance in the diversified firm.
The dominant logic refers to mental maps developed through experience in the
core business which is applied to other businesses as in the case of large firms

The Institutional Logics Perspective

13

that diversify. The dominant logic is stored via schemas, which are filters that
enable managers to efficiently categorize an event, assess its consequences,
and consider appropriate actions. However, diversification may create pressures for competing logics, which raises the question of whether and when
either a dominant logic or diversification can be sustained over time.
Durand, Szostak, Jourdan, and Thornton (2013) show how firms in the
French design industry use institutional logics as resources to leverage
their strategic choices by adding and abandoning logics. Firms with an
awareness of a larger repertoire of available logics expressed by a larger
stock of competences and a broader industrial scope and with a favorable
opportunity set as expressed by status are more likely to add a logic to their
repertoire. High-status actors can play a key role in triggering institutional
change when such change is likely to undermine the basis of their social
position and advantage.
International business, in particular multinational firm strategy, is
an important topic—one that requires policy and corporate leaders to
understand how their subsidiaries develop organizational practices
for firm–government–employment relations in the context of different
cross-country institutions (Kostova and Roth, 2002). International business
research has been influenced by both sociological neoinstitutional and
economic perspectives, with their focus on isomorphism and incentives,
respectively. The ILP, with its emphasis on culture, can broaden and augment neoinstitutional and economic perspectives by shifting researchers’
attention to the idea that there are not any objective or universal incentives
that can be understood independently of actors’ understandings and these
understandings are contingent on the institutional context. For example,
institutions exist in distinct national configurations, some countries have
state and corporate governance structures relatively more influenced by
family versus market logics (Greenwood et al., 2010), which shifts the
definitions of legitimate exchanges and strategies of action. The ILP can
enlighten how institutional heterogeneity across several domains interacts
to form distinct types of capitalism (Hall & Soskice, 2001). For example, the
ILP illustrates how institutions are at the same time material and symbolic,
which means that the logic of one domain can be transposed to another
domain and infuse the same practice with a different meaning.
THEORY AND METHODS DEVELOPMENT
As our literature review indicates, there is a rich mixture of multiple logic
studies. This points to the need for an understanding of the aggregate
and generalizable effects of the institutional logics research. Evaluations
are needed of the robustness of findings in light of the strength of research

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

designs and methods of analysis. Thornton (2004) conducted a meta-analysis
of the publishing studies, but we need a meta-analysis of a larger sample
of the institutional logics literature. Multimethod and multilevel studies including both qualitative and quantitative approaches are essential
because selection of level and method of analysis privileges researchers’
observations.
Zucker’s (1977) early experimental research showed how social conventions become institutionalized and taken for granted within individuals’ cognition. Oddly, this line of micro analysis did not take hold in neoinstitutional theory. There is renewed interest in developing experimental methods
to address the calls for formal development of micro theory—this should
be a growth area. We point to recent experimental research by Glaser et al.
(2012) that shows how individuals form cognitive schemas cued from different institutional logics. Individuals store societally prominent institutional
logics in their minds as schemas and when these schemas are primed, they
increase the likelihood that an individual will adopt motives associated with
the logic and behave in ways consistent with these motives.
DiMaggio (1991) reintroduced Weber’s comparative historical method of
ideal types in a case study of institutional change in art museum management. Following DiMaggio, Thornton and Ocasio (1999) similarly used ideal
types to formalize the analysis of their data and suggest testable hypotheses.
To be clear, the notation of X (institutional orders) and Y (elemental categories
of an institutional order) in the typological table examples in Thornton (2004)
and Thornton et al. (2012) does not necessarily suggest causal direction. Institutional logics are dynamic and contextually variable and the ideal typical
models abstract from that variation. Specific instantiations of logics, that is,
the institutional content (what is in the cells of the table), is not just macro to
micro but macro to micro to macro. But this is not well captured in the X, Y
ideal type model and we do not really have a good theory of why we have
the right elemental categories on the Y axis.
The use of ideal types is a first-order method to understand if the ILP is an
appropriate meta-theory; applying it will determine whether one can derive
analytically distinct institutional logics from qualitative and quantitative
observations. However, a method is needed, much like in network analysis
(Breiger & Mohr, 2004), to parameterize and scale institutional distance
between the ideal types and the actual data. An important untested proposition of the ILP suggests that the interdependence, autonomy, and dominance
of some institutional orders within the interinstitutional system are higher
and lower than others. For example the professions invent the categories of
new knowledge, but need the state to create laws to ratify them, enabling
them into real practices. In the United States, the resource dependence
between the professions and state is high. This is not the case necessarily

The Institutional Logics Perspective

15

for other institutional orders. Are the logics of family and religion, state
and professions, market and corporation more compatible than with other
logics such as family and market? How would these pairings change when
comparing traditional and liberal societies? Such analyses raise the question
of when any one institutional order becomes too autonomous, interdependent, or dominant relative to others, does this signal unstable institutional
conditions in society? We need methods that give us a greater understanding
of how institutional orders and their logics anchor in the interinstitutional
system. Topic models which identify the linguistic contexts that surround
social institutions and policy domains (DiMaggio, Nag, & Blei, 2013) and
descent hierarchical analysis (Daudigeos, Jaumier, & Boutinot, 2013) are two
approaches that show promise. The development of such methods could
help address questions such as the spread and dominance of the market and
the state logics in societies and the ensuing financial and budgetary crises.
CONCLUSION
The ILP is a meta-theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of
social science theories to better understand the effects of culture and institutions in many substantive domains. This entry has described the history of
the development of the ILP, defined its core concepts and mechanisms, and
conducted a review of foundational and cutting-edge literature from the view
of operant institutional orders. This meta-analytic review reveals a weakening of the professions and the spread of the market logic in many domains
and foreshadows a discussion of future research.
REFERENCES
Albrekt, L. C. (2008). The institutional logic of welfare studies: How welfare regimes
influence public support. Comparative Political Studies, 41, 145–168.
Almandoz, J. (2012). Arriving at the starting line: The impact of community and financial
logics on new banking ventures. Academy of Management Journal, 55(6), 1381–1406.
Battilana, J., & Dorado, S. (2010). Building sustainable hybrid organizations: The
case of commercial microfinance organizations. Academy of Management Journal,
53, 1419–1440.
Berger, P. L. (2001). Reflections on the sociology of religion today. Sociology of Religion,
62, 425–429.
Berger, P., & Luckman, T. (1967). The social construction of reality. New York, NY: Doubleday Anchor.
Berger, J., & Zelditch, M. (1993). Theoretical research programs: Studies in the growth of
theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1991). On justification: The economies of worth. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Brandl, J. & Bullinger, B. (2012). Possibilities and restrictions for switching institutional logics. Paper presented at the Conference on Organizing Institutions:
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PATRICIA H. THORNTON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Patricia H. Thornton is Adjunct Professor affiliated with the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Duke University Fuqua School of Business
and affiliated faculty and Visiting Professor to the Program on Organizations,
Business, and the Economy, Department of Sociology, Stanford University.
Her research focuses on institutional logics, institutional change, innovation,
and entrepreneurship. With William Ocasio she received the W. Richard Scott
award for the best scholarly research article by the OOW section of American
Sociological Association and with Nancy B. Tuma received the award for the
best scholarly paper by the Organization and Management Theory Division

The Institutional Logics Perspective

21

of the Academy of Management. She received a PhD in 1993 from Stanford
University in Sociology. Before this, she worked as a hospital program analyst
and cofounded Interim Inc.
WILLIAM OCASIO SHORT BIOGRAPHY
William Ocasio is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Distinguished Professor
of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management,
Northwestern University. He received a PhD in Organizational Behavior
from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. With Patricia Thornton
he received the W. Richard Scott award for the best scholarly research
article by the OOW section of American Sociological Association for their
joint 1999 paper on “Institutional Logics and the Historical Contingency of
Power.” His current research focuses on institutional logics, vocabularies,
and organizational and field-level attention. He is currently a Senior Editor
at Organization Science. Before becoming an academic, he served for four
years as Executive Director of the Governor’s Economic Advisory Council
for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
MICHAEL LOUNSBURY SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Professor Michael Lounsbury is the Thornton A. Graham Chair and Associate Dean of Research at the University of Alberta School of Business. He
is also a Principal Investigator at the Canadian National Institute for Nanotechnology. His research focuses on institutional logics, entrepreneurship,
and the cultural dynamics of organizations and practice. He serves on a number of editorial boards and is the Series Editor of Research in the Sociology
of Organizations, Associate Editor of Academy of Management Annals, as
well as Co-Editor of Organization Studies. He received his PhD in 1999 from
Northwestern University in Sociology and Organizational Behavior.
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Aldrich and Jeffrey D. Grynaviski
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Domestic Institutions and International Conflict (Political Science), Giacomo
Chiozza
Stability and Change in Corporate Governance (Sociology), Gerald F. Davis
and Johan S. G. Chu
Institutions and the Economy (Sociology), Carl Gershenson and Frank
Dobbin

22

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Interdependence, Development, and Interstate Conflict (Political Science),
Erik Gartzke
Distributive Politics: Federal Outlays (Political Science), Sanford C. Gordon
and Woo Chang Kang
Organizational Populations and Fields (Sociology), Heather A. Haveman and
Daniel N. Kluttz
Modeling Coal and Natural Gas Markets (Economics), Franziska Holz
Search and Learning in Markets (Economics), Philipp Kircher
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Chiozza
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Organizations and the Production of Systemic Risk (Sociology), Charles
Perrow


The Institutional Logics Perspective
PATRICIA H. THORNTON, WILLIAM OCASIO, and MICHAEL LOUNSBURY

Abstract
This essay discusses a new approach to institutional analysis—the institutional logics
perspective (ILP). This perspective is a meta-theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of social science theories to better understand the effects of cultural
institutions on individuals, organizations, and societies. We describe the history of
the development of the ILP, define its core concepts and mechanisms, and review
and discuss foundational and cutting-edge research. Prior overviews emphasize the
mechanisms, variety of substantive contexts, and the cross-level effects. We take a
different approach by organizing the literature review by institutional orders. This
meta-analysis reveals a pattern of institutional change—the weakening of the professions and the spread of the market logic in many domains. We discuss implications
of this finding and suggest future research.

INTRODUCTION
Conventional thinking is that social, economic, and political relations influence ideas, actions, and world views. That we can effectively demonstrate
that another view may be true—that culture shapes such relations—has
been less accepted and elusive to theorize and measure. By culture we refer
to the system of beliefs, values, norms, and symbols of social collectives.
Our aim is to define and introduce to the well-educated nonspecialist recent
advances in understanding and examining the role of culture in institutional
analysis—the institutional logics perspective (ILP).
There is long-standing debate in the social sciences on how institutions
affect individual and organizational behavior and how individuals and organizations create and change institutions (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Dobbin,
1994; Hall & Taylor, 1996; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; North, 1990; Thelen, 2004;
Weber, 1978). This entry draws on an emergent and recently influential line
of institutional theory and analysis—the ILP (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). While institutional logics research is developing in sociology and
organization and management theory, we will argue that it is a useful framework for other academic fields in the social sciences such as political science
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

(Albrekt, 2008), economics (Ellerman, 2005), information technology (Currie
& Guah, 2007), and public policy (Mullins, 2006), among others. We define
the core concepts, mechanisms, and arguments of the ILP, followed by a literature review of the foundational and cutting-edge research. This literature
review is organized by institutional orders in society, the findings of which
present implications and suggestions for future research.
DEFINITION HISTORY
Arising from sociological institutionalism, the ILP focuses on the role of
culture as central to institutional analysis. Institutional logics are defined as
the socially constructed patterns of symbols and material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals and organizations
produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space,
and provide meaning to their social reality (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999, p. 804).
Friedland and Alford (1991) developed the initial theoretical formulation
of institutional logics in a discursive chapter in an influential volume, “The
New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis,” edited by Walter Powell
and Paul DiMaggio. In their critique they argued that to understand actors’
behavior it must be located in an institutional context that both regularizes
behavior and provides opportunity for agency and change (Thornton
& Ocasio, 2008, p. 102). Friedland and Alford’s key distinction from the
reigning sociological neoinstitutional school is the nondeterministic view of
society as made up of subsectors, what they termed institutional orders of an
inter-institutional system, for example, the family, religion, market, and state.
Each institutional order includes a set of symbolic meanings and material
practices that constitute its cultural belief system and organizing principles,
that is—its “institutional content” (Friedland & Alford, 1991, p. 244).
The development of the ILP was in part a counter force to the proliferation
of institutional isomorphism and diffusion studies. Instead, ILP’s focus
is on the heterogeneity of cultural meaning and how it comparatively
varies by institutional order. To understand a rational myth, Zilber (2006)
argues that one needs to understand meaning in comparison to others, not
just to measure the spread of the myth within a social system. Friedland
and Alford’s (1991) comparative framework to theorize and measure the
institutional environment replaces bifurcated concepts juxtaposing rational
and nonrational and technical and institutional environments, opening
up observation of heterogeneous sources of the meaning and practice of
rationality. This approach draws amply on social construction (Berger &
Luckman, 1967), as any actor may be nested in a combination of institutional
orders, exposing them to conflicting and compatible symbols and practices
that are available to reinterpret, exploit, export, and change. Thus, the

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research on institutional logics advances neoinstitutional theory beyond
studies of isomorphism and diffusion to include the interactive translation
of institutional effects.
Conceptualizing society as constituted by different institutional orders
is not a new idea. As Thornton et al. (2012) pointed out, Weber used the
societal subsector comparative method in his work on value spheres (Gerth
& Mills, 1946, pp. 323–357; Whimster, 2004, pp. 2220–2241). However, to
Weber, contradictions between value spheres represented irreconcilable
differences for individuals because, as Friedland (2013) points out, Weber’s
typology was akin to comparative religions. In contrast, for Friedland and
Alford (1991), actors are capable of reconciling and exploiting multiple
contradictory institutional logics. This capacity enables mechanisms of
institutional change and solutions to the problem of embedded agency in
institutional theories (DiMaggio, 1988; Holm, 1995).
The logics of institutional orders are interdependent, yet also potentially
contradictory (Friedland & Alford, 1991, p. 250). In this regard, multiple
institutional logics that are available to actors can interact and compete for
influence in societal domains. As a result, the logic of one domain can be
transposed to another domain and infuse the same practice with a different
meaning.
Friedland and Alford’s (1991) idea had the potential to be disruptive
to institutional theory across the social sciences. However, to marshal
this change required formalization and empirical research to evaluate the
theoretical merit of the idea. As a broad-brush sketch, it needed integration with meso- and micro-level behavioral theories (Berger & Zelditch,
1993). For example, Thornton and Ocasio (1999) integrated the concepts of
institutional logics with Ocasio’s (1997) Carnegie School–inspired theory of
organizational attention.
Thornton and Ocasio’s (1999) integration of the meso- and macro-levels
demonstrated how institutional logics affect organizational actors’ attention
in defining a problem and recognizing a solution. They showed how a shift in
attention to different institutional logics changed the determinants of executive succession in the US higher education publishing industry. Companion articles expanded the scope conditions to other organization decisions
(Thornton, 2001, 2002). Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative
methods, this research partitioned cultural meaning from structural effects.
For example, it showed that the number of corporate acquisitions remained
the same under the era of a professional logic (editorial) as compared to
a market logic, but the meaning and consequences of acquisition activity
changed.
Thornton (2004) followed with a book that formalized a theoretical research
program around the concept of institutional logics and began to elaborate

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the relationship of logics to the interinstitutional system, defining the institutional orders as family, religion, state, market, professions, and corporation.
While Friedland and Alford (1991) argued that institutional orders are interdependent and actors can manipulate logics, they did not suggest how this
occurred. To advance theory development, this book suggested drawing on
political and cultural sociology, which assumes event sequencing (Sewell,
1992, 1996) and the strategic use of institutional logics as a tool kit (Swidler,
1986; McPherson, 2013).
Thornton and Ocasio (2008) followed with a literature review that identified the five core meta-theoretical principles of institutional logics, (i) embedded agency, (ii) society as an interinstitutional system, (iii) the material and
cultural foundations of institutions, (iv) the historical contingency of institutions, and (v) institutions at multiple levels of analysis. Friedland and Alford
(1991), however, specified three interdependent and autonomous levels of
analysis—society, organizations, and individuals. Subsequent research incorporating concepts from neoinstitutional theory includes a wider scope of
levels, such as organizational and institutional fields (Fligstein & McAdam,
2012). A number of mechanisms can activate institutional change including
institutional entrepreneurs, social movements, structural overlap, and event
sequencing (Thornton, Jones, & Kury, 2005; Schneiberg & Lounsbury, 2008).
Thornton et al. (2012) continued to foster development of the ILP. They
elaborated the typology of institutional orders to include the community and
fleshed out the micro and meso foundations, illustrating how available logics
become accessible and activated by drawing on dynamic constructivism
theory in social psychology (Hong & Mallorie, 2004; Morris & Gelfand,
2004). They further developed theory about how organizational practices
and identities within and across organizations relate to institutional logics
(Jarzabkowski, 2005; Lok, 2010; Lounsbury & Crumley 2007). The pervasive
efforts of actors to combine and recombine cultural elements within and
across institutional logics is conceptualized as cultural entrepreneurship
(DiMaggio, 1982; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). Soon to follow was a conference and forthcoming edited volume on institutional logics in action by
Lounsbury and Boxenbaum (2013).
Thornton et al. (2012) illustrated how each institutional order is made up of
categorical elements that form the building blocks of institutional content, for
example, the sources of legitimacy, norms, values, and practices, which can
be expressed in symbolic and material form. They illustrated society as an
interinstitutional system using ideal types, locating the institutional orders
on the X axis and the categorical elements, that is the institutional content,
on the Y axis.
The ILP assumes the interpretation of the Y-axis elements vary depending
on the observational lens—from which the X axis is the camera focused. In

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5

theory, it does not assume a priori that the number of logics that are likely to
influence behavior in a particular context or whether or not a single logic is
more dominant than another or that multiple logics are necessarily operative.
In theory, no one institutional order has causal primacy a priori, although the
origin and prevalence of orders is temporally and contextually dependent,
for example, the family is an older institution than the state. Tracey (2012,
p. 118) comments that preoccupations over limits on a range of institutional
logics is a nonissue.
The research to formalize the ILP has developed a rigorous methodology
to contrast observations anchored in the root symbols and practices of an
institutional order to identify the comparative meaning of observations. For
example, family values will differ from market values. The degree of conflict
and interdependence among the institutional orders also differs; for example,
the norms and values of the market and the family are likely more opposing,
whereas those of the state and the professions are likely more interdependent depending on whether the analysis is of Western societies. In theory, if
an individual’s or an organization’s environment is more steeped in family
values rather than market values, they are likely to interpret symbols and
enact situations differently. This has been well demonstrated at the organizational level and is beginning to be demonstrated at the individual-society
levels of analysis (Glaser, Fast, & Green, 2012).
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Prior theoretical developments in the ILP emphasize the mechanisms, variety of substantive contexts (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008), and the cross-level
effects (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010; Thornton et al., 2012). Here, we take a different approach to the analysis of the institutional logics literature by reviewing
it through the lens of the institutional orders that are invoked in the studies we review. We are interested in where the influences, interdependency,
and autonomy of institutional orders are more or less prevalent and what
meta-implications these relationships have for future research. The literature
review discussion is partitioned by institutional orders.
WITHIN-INSTITUTIONAL ORDER VARIANTS OF INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
Professional domains have been a focus in institutional logics research.
Exemplary studies focus on variants of the professions logics within different substantive contexts. Suddaby and Greenwood (2005) examined rhetoric
(vocabulary) to expose contradictory institutional logics in accounting and
law. They examined historically different understandings of professionalism,
one based on a trustee model and the other based on an expertise model. The

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

conflict between these two logics defined the different sources of legitimacy
that empowered a struggle to develop multidisciplinary partnerships, as a
new organizational form in the legal and accounting professions.
Rao, Monin, and Durand (2003) examined the rhetoric of two variants of
logics within the French culinary profession, classical and nouvelle cuisine.
In examining the rules of cooking, archetypal ingredients, the role of the
chef, and organization of the menu, they discovered several mechanisms,
culinary critics being the most important, that created an identity competition which set the stage for a shift in identities among classical and nouvelle
chefs.
Dunn and Jones (2010) identified two competing logics within the profession of medical education. They examined the relative prevalence of science
and care logics discourse over 95 years and showed how the growth of public health and medical schools, contestation among physicians over medical
education, and a curvilinear relationship with public attention to managed
care were associated with increased emphasis on the care logic relative to the
science logic in medical education.
THE PROFESSIONS, STATE, CORPORATE, AND MARKET INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
There are several studies of competing institutional logics in the health care
field in the United States and Canada. Scott, Ruef, Mendel, and Caronna
(2000), in an award winning book, examined how professional, state, and
managerial market logics shaped the transformation of the health care field,
from one dominated by professional logics to one where multiple logics coexist and no single logic dominates.
Reay and Hinings’ (2009) case study of medical professionalism and
business-like health care in the Alberta Province bears similarities in that
the struggles among the actors holding different logics resulted in power
being distributed between the physicians (professions) and the government
(state)—creating a counterbalancing effect of contentious coexistence.
Jones and Livne-Tarandach’s (2008) study of rhetorical strategies show
how architects have different vocabularies (words) that represent business,
profession, and state institutional logics. These logics focus attention on distinct competencies that appeal to different client segments, servicing clients,
building great architecture, or managing facilities. Architects pragmatically
combine word choices from distinct logics, which enable them to better
market themselves by appealing to the multiple and diverse interests of
their client audiences.

The Institutional Logics Perspective

7

THE PROFESSIONS AND CORPORATE INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
Townley’s (1997) case analysis of implementing performance appraisal practices in universities showed how the availability of the professional logic
allowed academics to defend to some extent against such corporate practices,
showing how institutional logics can be used as a resource and a boundary
mechanism to stem the tide of corporate logic diffusion into professionally
based settings.
THE PROFESSIONS AND MARKET INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
Thornton and Ocasio’s (1999) analysis of publishing firms demonstrates on
an individual case basis that a few firms did not instantiate the market logic.
However, the overall pattern across the entire population of firms showed a
shift in influence on organizational decision making from the editorial logic
(quasi-profession) to the market logic for organizational decisions on executive succession, acquisition (Thornton, 2001) and organizational structure
(Thornton, 2002). These studies show how institutional logics generate interaction effects, that is, X and Y are two variables affecting a third value in the
cells of the ideal types table, for example, between the main effects of institutional logics (profession or market logics as parameterized by time periods)
and the main effects of the organization variables (hierarchy, position, etc.).
Lounsbury’s (2002) research shows that in the finance industry a shift from
a professions logic to a market logic created a change in status driven by
business practice reputation to normative conformity to mathematical economics. Professional finance associations led the transformation to a market
logic in the field of finance. New professionals such as money managers and
securities analysts helped diffuse new financial theories such as portfolio and
risk management. Finance professionals gained status and position by their
reliance on financial theories as the market logic gained prominence in the
field.
Glynn and Lounsbury (2005), in a case study, examined shifts in the
focus of attention by newspaper critics of the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra
from an instantiation of an aesthetic logic before a strike to a market logic
post-strike. Pre-strike reviewers focused their attention on the virtuosity and
musical interpretation associated with the aesthetic logic and post-strike
critics increased their attention to ticket sales, production of recordings, and
audience reactions consistent with a market logic. The ascendancy of the
market logic did not imply, however, a rejection of the professional logic,
but a blending of the two.
Lounsbury (2007) showed how geography, Boston and New York, not historical time provides the comparative method of analysis in analyzing the
effects of competing professional versus market logics in the mutual fund

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

industry. The professional logic (the Boston trusteeship logic), with its main
goal of wealth preservation, competed against a New York-based market
logic focused on maximizing growth and market performance.
THE FAMILY AND PROFESSIONS LOGICS
DiMaggio (1991), in his precursor analysis of the development of US art
museums, reveals a struggle of competing models (institutional logics), one
fueled by elite upper class families and their social circle of collectors and
curators, the other by a new class of museum professionals resulting from
the expansion of higher education into the fine arts.
THE STATE AND FAMILY LOGICS
Greenwood, Díaz, Li, and Lorente (2010), in examining corporate downsizing
in the Spanish manufacturing sector between 1994 and 2000, found a significantly less tendency to respond to market pressures to decrease their labor
forces in regions of the country where the State and Family logics are stronger.
THE COMMUNITY AND CORPORATE LOGICS
Haveman and Rao (1997), in their study of the coevolution of institutions
and organizations in the California Thrift industry, examined how changes
in institutional logics at the societal level affected the formation of organizational forms at the industry level. With these changes, thrift plans that
embodied a corporate logic characterized by bureaucratic rational decision
making were more likely to thrive than those that embodied a community
logic of mutual cooperation.
Marquis and Lounsbury (2007) showed how competing institutional logics
can facilitate resistance to institutional change as in the case of the contest
between the logics of global corporate banks and local community banks.
Interestingly, the causal mechanism is not just simple market competition,
but selection pressures relative to the prevalence of societal-level institutional
logics.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
We highlight in this section and the next the mechanisms and substantive
contexts of several veins of research recently published, forthcoming, or at
the journal review stage. Nigam and Ocasio (2010) examined the cross-level
effects of how critical events make institutional logics salient and available
to actors for sense making (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010). Thornton et al. (2012)

The Institutional Logics Perspective

9

illustrate how entrepreneurs discover new ideas and solve problems in legitimating and justifying their new organizations by switching and recombining institutional logics, which shifts the sources of analogies and referent
categories by which people can understand their innovation (Lounsbury &
Glynn, 2001). Almandoz (2012) found in examining the creation of banks that
founding teams that had functional backgrounds associated with a community logic, as distinct from a market logic, had higher founding rates and
lower rates of founding team dissolution. The edited volume by Lounsbury
and Boxenbaum (2013) highlights how organizations and other groups establish or alter their identities and core practices under conditions of plural
logics.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Our meta-analysis classifying literature by institutional orders shows a
notable absence of studies on the family and religion and a number of
studies on the logics of the professions and the market. The market logic,
through the mechanisms of blending and replacement, is spreading across
many substantive domains and invading territory once held by the professions. While the spread of the market logic is not a surprise, it is insightful
that this trend coincides with the weakening and corruption of professional
boundaries, particularly in light of their origins in religion and as keepers
of honest market and corporate practices (Prak, 2008; Zeff, 2003). Here, we
incorporate these insights in suggestions for future research in topic and
disciplinary areas.
MORALITY
Morality in the sense of altruism, sympathy for others, and the understanding of others goals is underdeveloped in the ILP. The ILP assumes that the
influences of morality vary across the seven institutional orders. Just as the
institutional orders of religion and family influence moral values, so does
the market logic, for example, in Hayek’s (1944) notions of individualism
and self-responsibility that underlie self-regulating free markets. The state
logic under a democratic philosophy is concerned with the redistribution
of property rights for the common good; however, not all nation-states are
democratic. While earlier ILP typologies emphasized Judeo-Christian philosophy (Friedland & Alford, 1991), later elaborations relax this scope condition
as reviewers have pointed out that the meta-theory has broader applications
such as the emerging economies in India and China. The current typology of
the ILP is a representation of the main institutions of societies (think governance systems) and it was derived from a reading of Weber’s (1978) Economy

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and Society and contemporary organization and management theory. In contrast, the work of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), the ILP is not inspired by
readings of French political philosophers with assumptions of common good
across all institutional orders, but is based on classic and contemporary social
science theory and research. This broader scope allows theorizing the varied
influences of self-interest and understanding the empirical observation that
winners of legitimacy struggles and justification contests are not always the
most moral or worthy. Given that contemporary moral thought is much less
coherent than it once was (Massengill, 2008), the ILP is well suited to theorize and measure the heterogeneity of cultural context that informs different
variants of moral thought.
Excepting Greenwood et al. (2010), which shows that corporate management practices were tempered by religion and family logics in the face of
market pressures, there is a lack of logics research invoking religion even
though it has been a foundry for individual, organizational, and collective
identity and behavior (Tracey, 2012; Tracey, Phillips, & Lounsbury, 2014).
With the exception of Western Europe, much of the world continues to
be religious (Berger, 2001). The review by Tracey (2012) highlights fruitful
micro and macro areas for elaborating the moral scope of institutional logics
through religion, connecting it to behavioral ethics, identity formation, and
change and interdependency in the interinstitutional system. For example,
Parboteeah, Hoegl, and Cullen (2009) found that the work ethic and church
membership declines when the boundaries of religion and state weaken,
for example, when the UK government regulates religion by appointing
religious leaders and collecting taxes. Pearce, Fritz, and Davis (2010) found
religion related to entrepreneurial orientation and organizational performance. Weaver and Agle (2002) found that ethical behavior is positively
related to when religious role expectations are internalized as self-identity.
Stout and Cormode’s (1998) study is of interest in its focus on how the logic
of religion is connected to other institutional orders such as the state, the
market, and the family.
JUSTIFICATION
Because the ILP assumes that what is considered legitimate changes depending on the context, it has the potential to examine how culture explains more
than motivating action—it justifies action. It can be used to understand
how legitimacy is comparatively negotiated, evaluated, and resolved.
The qualitative work on legitimacy struggles spearheaded by the French
pragmatists, Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), and research developed by US
cultural sociologists (Swidler, 1986; Vaisey, 2009) exemplify the approach
called justification. Conceptualizing the seven institutional orders, (family,

The Institutional Logics Perspective

11

community, religion, market, state, professions, and the corporation) to
represent different repertoires of justifications that individuals and organizations use to make sense and rationalize their choices—is a short step from
its current use as a framework for understanding the sources of legitimacy
as motivation. For example, Brandl and Bullinger (2012) compare differences
in the meaning of case vignettes by switching institutional orders which
suggests different justifications for the same behavior.
CULTURE
In “Markets from Culture … ,” Thornton (2004) treats culture as an independent variable, to interpret organizational decision making based on how different institutional logics focus attention. Institutional logics as culture can
be applied to a myriad of unexplored topics such as how objects, spaces, and
technologies shape and frame social relations. Hollerer, Jancsary, Meyer, and
Vettori (2013) show the importance of visual elements of communication in
translation. Moreover, culture can be viewed as a dependent variable. In tracing its classic roots to Weber, the ILP is at the heart of understanding how
alternative meanings of cultural symbols and material practices, as influenced by different institutional orders, wane and wax over time and context.
This brings to mind Weber’s example which Swedberg’s (2005, p. 3) paraphrases, “When the wood cutter brings down his axe on the wood, it can
be a case of wage labor, provision for one’s household, or a form of recreation, and which one it is depends on the meaning with which the action is
invested.”
POWER
The ILP view is that in order to understand power, one first needs to
understand culture, because culture governs the interpretation and tools
by which power is enacted (Stinchcombe, 2002). This has been empirically
demonstrated in large sample research with confirmatory models (Thornton
& Ocasio, 1999). In Thornton’s (2001) analysis of acquisition activity in the
publishing industry, when an editorial logic prevailed, publishers defined
the event of being acquired as an “all-in-the-family” moment, and such
acquisition events were a form of mutual survival and growth. However,
when prevailing sentiments in the industry had shifted to a market logic,
acquisition events were associated with being sold to the highest bidder with
potentially dire consequences of being busted-up based on accounting, not
good editorial principles. Thus, power is not a sufficient condition to explain
institutionalization or institutional change. The interpretation of power in
the ILP is fundamentally more Weberian, with its emphasis on comparative

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

symbolic meaning, rather than Marxian, with its emphasis on redistribution
of material resources. The institutional order most relevant to questions of
distributive justice and the redistribution of assets and privileges is that of
the Western democratic or socialist state. The claim that power is culturally
contingent across the spectrum of institutional orders is an undeveloped
avenue in future research.
More recent research has highlighted the reciprocal relationship between
power and institutional logics. While particular logics shape power and
political processes, they do not fully determine them, and powerful actors
can shape how logics are elaborated. Joseph, Ocasio, and Hunter-McDonnell
(forthcoming) show how powerful CEOs elaborate the shareholder value
logic, a dominant variant of the market logic in large US corporations, by
promoting a particular form of board structure and composition, where the
CEO is the only insider in the board. This board structure ostensible promotes “board independence,” a key principle of the shareholder value logic,
while in fact helping instead to promote CEO entrenchment and interests.
COOPERATION
Beginning with Friedland and Alford (1991), the research has centered
on understanding conflicting institutional logics in at least three ways,
dominance by replacement of one logic for another (Rao et al., 2003),
resistance by standoffs and coexistence (Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007), and
resource dependence by blending logics to create hybrids (Battilana and
Dorado, 2010). However, all this discussion of conflict over shadows a
fundamental empirical observation that there must be a tremendous amount
of cooperation in the world and that cooperation does not always require
boundary weakening through hybridization of logics. We need research on
cooperation; otherwise, how would the world function? Jourdan, Thornton,
and Durand (2012) show how actors in the French film industry create
cooperation in the context of conflicting institutional logics in a way that
maintains logic boundaries by engaging in deference.
BUSINESS POLICY AND STRATEGY
One of the key strategies of corporations is various forms of diversification.
However, of the economic streams of research that examine diversification
performance, none of them is complete (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986, p. 485). This
observation motivated a managerial cognitive theory, termed the dominant
logic to better understand strategy and performance in the diversified firm.
The dominant logic refers to mental maps developed through experience in the
core business which is applied to other businesses as in the case of large firms

The Institutional Logics Perspective

13

that diversify. The dominant logic is stored via schemas, which are filters that
enable managers to efficiently categorize an event, assess its consequences,
and consider appropriate actions. However, diversification may create pressures for competing logics, which raises the question of whether and when
either a dominant logic or diversification can be sustained over time.
Durand, Szostak, Jourdan, and Thornton (2013) show how firms in the
French design industry use institutional logics as resources to leverage
their strategic choices by adding and abandoning logics. Firms with an
awareness of a larger repertoire of available logics expressed by a larger
stock of competences and a broader industrial scope and with a favorable
opportunity set as expressed by status are more likely to add a logic to their
repertoire. High-status actors can play a key role in triggering institutional
change when such change is likely to undermine the basis of their social
position and advantage.
International business, in particular multinational firm strategy, is
an important topic—one that requires policy and corporate leaders to
understand how their subsidiaries develop organizational practices
for firm–government–employment relations in the context of different
cross-country institutions (Kostova and Roth, 2002). International business
research has been influenced by both sociological neoinstitutional and
economic perspectives, with their focus on isomorphism and incentives,
respectively. The ILP, with its emphasis on culture, can broaden and augment neoinstitutional and economic perspectives by shifting researchers’
attention to the idea that there are not any objective or universal incentives
that can be understood independently of actors’ understandings and these
understandings are contingent on the institutional context. For example,
institutions exist in distinct national configurations, some countries have
state and corporate governance structures relatively more influenced by
family versus market logics (Greenwood et al., 2010), which shifts the
definitions of legitimate exchanges and strategies of action. The ILP can
enlighten how institutional heterogeneity across several domains interacts
to form distinct types of capitalism (Hall & Soskice, 2001). For example, the
ILP illustrates how institutions are at the same time material and symbolic,
which means that the logic of one domain can be transposed to another
domain and infuse the same practice with a different meaning.
THEORY AND METHODS DEVELOPMENT
As our literature review indicates, there is a rich mixture of multiple logic
studies. This points to the need for an understanding of the aggregate
and generalizable effects of the institutional logics research. Evaluations
are needed of the robustness of findings in light of the strength of research

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

designs and methods of analysis. Thornton (2004) conducted a meta-analysis
of the publishing studies, but we need a meta-analysis of a larger sample
of the institutional logics literature. Multimethod and multilevel studies including both qualitative and quantitative approaches are essential
because selection of level and method of analysis privileges researchers’
observations.
Zucker’s (1977) early experimental research showed how social conventions become institutionalized and taken for granted within individuals’ cognition. Oddly, this line of micro analysis did not take hold in neoinstitutional theory. There is renewed interest in developing experimental methods
to address the calls for formal development of micro theory—this should
be a growth area. We point to recent experimental research by Glaser et al.
(2012) that shows how individuals form cognitive schemas cued from different institutional logics. Individuals store societally prominent institutional
logics in their minds as schemas and when these schemas are primed, they
increase the likelihood that an individual will adopt motives associated with
the logic and behave in ways consistent with these motives.
DiMaggio (1991) reintroduced Weber’s comparative historical method of
ideal types in a case study of institutional change in art museum management. Following DiMaggio, Thornton and Ocasio (1999) similarly used ideal
types to formalize the analysis of their data and suggest testable hypotheses.
To be clear, the notation of X (institutional orders) and Y (elemental categories
of an institutional order) in the typological table examples in Thornton (2004)
and Thornton et al. (2012) does not necessarily suggest causal direction. Institutional logics are dynamic and contextually variable and the ideal typical
models abstract from that variation. Specific instantiations of logics, that is,
the institutional content (what is in the cells of the table), is not just macro to
micro but macro to micro to macro. But this is not well captured in the X, Y
ideal type model and we do not really have a good theory of why we have
the right elemental categories on the Y axis.
The use of ideal types is a first-order method to understand if the ILP is an
appropriate meta-theory; applying it will determine whether one can derive
analytically distinct institutional logics from qualitative and quantitative
observations. However, a method is needed, much like in network analysis
(Breiger & Mohr, 2004), to parameterize and scale institutional distance
between the ideal types and the actual data. An important untested proposition of the ILP suggests that the interdependence, autonomy, and dominance
of some institutional orders within the interinstitutional system are higher
and lower than others. For example the professions invent the categories of
new knowledge, but need the state to create laws to ratify them, enabling
them into real practices. In the United States, the resource dependence
between the professions and state is high. This is not the case necessarily

The Institutional Logics Perspective

15

for other institutional orders. Are the logics of family and religion, state
and professions, market and corporation more compatible than with other
logics such as family and market? How would these pairings change when
comparing traditional and liberal societies? Such analyses raise the question
of when any one institutional order becomes too autonomous, interdependent, or dominant relative to others, does this signal unstable institutional
conditions in society? We need methods that give us a greater understanding
of how institutional orders and their logics anchor in the interinstitutional
system. Topic models which identify the linguistic contexts that surround
social institutions and policy domains (DiMaggio, Nag, & Blei, 2013) and
descent hierarchical analysis (Daudigeos, Jaumier, & Boutinot, 2013) are two
approaches that show promise. The development of such methods could
help address questions such as the spread and dominance of the market and
the state logics in societies and the ensuing financial and budgetary crises.
CONCLUSION
The ILP is a meta-theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of
social science theories to better understand the effects of culture and institutions in many substantive domains. This entry has described the history of
the development of the ILP, defined its core concepts and mechanisms, and
conducted a review of foundational and cutting-edge literature from the view
of operant institutional orders. This meta-analytic review reveals a weakening of the professions and the spread of the market logic in many domains
and foreshadows a discussion of future research.
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PATRICIA H. THORNTON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Patricia H. Thornton is Adjunct Professor affiliated with the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Duke University Fuqua School of Business
and affiliated faculty and Visiting Professor to the Program on Organizations,
Business, and the Economy, Department of Sociology, Stanford University.
Her research focuses on institutional logics, institutional change, innovation,
and entrepreneurship. With William Ocasio she received the W. Richard Scott
award for the best scholarly research article by the OOW section of American
Sociological Association and with Nancy B. Tuma received the award for the
best scholarly paper by the Organization and Management Theory Division

The Institutional Logics Perspective

21

of the Academy of Management. She received a PhD in 1993 from Stanford
University in Sociology. Before this, she worked as a hospital program analyst
and cofounded Interim Inc.
WILLIAM OCASIO SHORT BIOGRAPHY
William Ocasio is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Distinguished Professor
of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management,
Northwestern University. He received a PhD in Organizational Behavior
from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. With Patricia Thornton
he received the W. Richard Scott award for the best scholarly research
article by the OOW section of American Sociological Association for their
joint 1999 paper on “Institutional Logics and the Historical Contingency of
Power.” His current research focuses on institutional logics, vocabularies,
and organizational and field-level attention. He is currently a Senior Editor
at Organization Science. Before becoming an academic, he served for four
years as Executive Director of the Governor’s Economic Advisory Council
for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
MICHAEL LOUNSBURY SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Professor Michael Lounsbury is the Thornton A. Graham Chair and Associate Dean of Research at the University of Alberta School of Business. He
is also a Principal Investigator at the Canadian National Institute for Nanotechnology. His research focuses on institutional logics, entrepreneurship,
and the cultural dynamics of organizations and practice. He serves on a number of editorial boards and is the Series Editor of Research in the Sociology
of Organizations, Associate Editor of Academy of Management Annals, as
well as Co-Editor of Organization Studies. He received his PhD in 1999 from
Northwestern University in Sociology and Organizational Behavior.
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