Managing Unstable Institutional Contradictions: The Work of Becoming

Abstract

An institution is often considered to be a stable, taken-for-granted ‘being’. The consequence is that agency is primarily associated with the rather exceptional creation or disruption of a relatively stable structure. In this article, we suggest an alternative ontology for understanding an institution as something unstable and always ‘becoming’. This opens a range of new and distinct opportunities for theorizing and researching institutional work involved in the everyday practice of managing institutional complexity. It allows us, in this study, to contribute with a new form of agency in terms of the continuous, active work of managing novel contradictions. Further, it induces us to take a more fine-grained look at the accompanying dynamics of work, in addition to work itself, whereby we provide a novel way of accounting for whether work effort is amplifying or subsiding, and whether it is likely to result in greater or lesser volatility within – on the surface – an otherwise seemingly stable institution. The argumentation is supported by an ethnographic field study of the work of managing novel contradictions within a single South Korean credit card company in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis in 1997.