Abstract
The institutional logics perspective has been one of the most prominent theories within organization and management research. It bridges different levels of analysis and explains how culture both enables and constrains collective and individual actors. Yet, despite abundant research on institutional plurality and complexity, limited attention has been paid to the dynamics through which specific institutional logics are reproduced and evolve over time. Furthermore, even as researchers have recognized the importance of practices to institutional logics, they have often privileged beliefs, values, and discourses over practices—risking an overemphasis on abstract ideas, which Bourdieu termed the “scholastic fallacy.” In this essay, we offer a practice-centric conception of institutional logics as a novel and complementary lens. Such a perspective is particularly valuable in the era of late modernity, where polarization and fragmentation have left many domains devoid of widely shared and agreed-upon meta-narratives or guiding ideals—often considered central to institutional logics. We elaborate how an identifiable institutional logic may instead emerge from a network of interconnected practices bound together by common constitutive elements (such as meanings and material elements), practitioners, and referential linkages. We further show how such a practice-centric perspective offers insights into the broader evolution of institutional logics. Finally, we discuss how political struggles over practices can shape an institutional logic, outlining praxis as an important but often unacknowledged arena of cultural contestation.
In an era of cultural polarization and fragmentation, fundamental societal institutions are no longer taken for granted. Markets, family, and democracy are increasingly sites of contestation, each varying across different contexts (Gümüsay et al., 2020). Even seemingly cohesive institutional logics, such as the feminist logic, come in multiple versions with contradictory ideals (Zilber, 2024). These observations stand in contrast to institutional scholars’ tendency to treat institutional logics as relatively stable structures, characterized by shared narratives and coherent belief systems (Thornton et al., 2012). While this approach has been instrumental in understanding shifts between different institutional logics (Lounsbury, 2002; Rao et al., 2003; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999), it has obscured changes within a particular institutional logic itself (Ocasio et al., 2015, 2016; Quattrone, 2015). Recently, Lounsbury, Steele, et al. (2021, p. 274) have noted the need to “study logics as complex phenomena that are ever changing, making their cohesion and durability a problem to investigate.”
Practice-driven institutionalism has shown that changes within an institutional logic can arise through new and adapted practices that diffuse throughout the field, rather than shifts in shared understandings (Smets et al., 2012, 2017). Yet, even as institutional logics are commonly conceived as “historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules” (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999, p. 804), practices have been typically seen as a subservient and secondary aspect. Theoretical arguments have predominantly emphasized shared beliefs over practices (e.g., Ocasio et al., 2015, 2016), focusing on how hegemonic discourses impose relative homogeneity in values and practices. While in the early modern era, many institutional logics may have been stabilized by uncontested “meta-narratives” that actors broadly bought into (Ocasio et al., 2015), late modernity is characterized by a plurality of views and continuous contestation (Beck et al., 1994; Giddens, 1991), thus challenging explanations that privilege shared belief systems and narratives as the primary basis for institutional logics.
This essay theorizes how institutional logics are reproduced and evolve even in the absence of hegemonic discourses or belief systems. We propose a practice-centric perspective that reimagines institutional logics not as static structures, but as living constellations of interconnected practices. We build on practice theory (Smets et al., 2017) and phenomenological sociology (Berger & Luckmann, 1996), to suggest that observable societal and field-level logics often arise from commonalities in interlinked practices across organizations and individuals that are only later theorized. Such an account of institutional logics, we argue, can explain both the surprising resilience observed in institutional logics (Mutch, 2018) as well as their evolution (Mohr & Duquenne, 1997; Quattrone, 2015).
Our practice-centric perspective conceives an institutional logic as a bundle of persistently interconnected practices, tied together not only by shared meanings but also by other forms of linkages. We draw inspiration from practice theory, which conceives each practice as encompassing certain beliefs, meanings, material elements, competencies, and practitioners, with beliefs inherently tied to practices rather than existing independently from them (Schatzki et al., 2000). Building on prior work, we highlight three central forms of connections that can explain how practices become tied to relatively persistent institutional logics: (1) constitutive parts shared across practices, such as key beliefs, norms, and material elements; (2) roles and jurisdictions of practitioners shared by multiple practices; and (3) referential relationships between practices. These connections provide an empirically tractable explanation for why cultural elements belong to a specific institutional logic and persist over time (Lounsbury, Steele, et al., 2021; Weber et al., 2013; Zilber, 2016). Moreover, focusing on these practice “constellations” provides a new empirical explanation for the evolution and reproduction of logics over time. Just as interconnected texts form discourses that reproduce themselves, substantive relationships among practices create mutually reinforcing “webs of significance” (Geertz, 1973) that can be identified as distinct institutional logics.
Leveraging a practice-centric view of logics, we explain how the contextualized development and adoption of practices in organizations influences the reproduction and change within an institutional logic by strengthening or weakening linkages among salient practices. Our framework provides a novel explanation for the role of new practices and practice variations in maintenance, blurring, contraction, and potential renewal of institutional logics. Our contribution to the literature is thus twofold. First, we show that a practice-centric perspective can provide a more dynamic and local explanation for the formation, maintenance, and evolution of institutional logics, emphasizing how organizational processes can maintain a sense of coherence for field-level institutional logics even in the absence of hegemonic discourses and widely accepted meta-narratives. Second, our perspective complements established views by elaborating how shared rationalities and values can emerge from and depend on practice constellations, reversing the commonly assumed relationship between macro-level ideals and micro-level practices. This aspect of the practice-centric perspective is particularly helpful in studying contemporary cultural struggles over the content of central institutional logics in late modernity.
Towards a Practice-Centric Perspective on Institutional Logics
Institutional logics are complex historical accumulated cultural structures, deeply rooted in social contexts in which they have developed, and therefore irreducible to mere abstract belief systems or principles (Friedland & Alford, 1991). Yet, even as the literature has embraced the role of practices as a part of institutional logic from the very beginning (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Mohr & Duquenne, 1997), practices are often considered as outcomes that logics affect and shape (Haveman & Gualtieri, 2017). For example, there is a common tendency to emphasize rationalities as distinct from and logically prior to practices (e.g., Meyer et al., 2021; Thornton et al., 2012) rather than grounded in and accomplished through material practices (Cabantous & Gond, 2011).
Since practices have remained thinly theorized and somewhat peripheral in the logics literature (Lounsbury, Anderson, & Spee, 2021), an explicitly practice-centric perspective of logics can provide a valuable complementary perspective. The practice-centric view is particularly useful for the level of organizations and organizational fields that have gained prominence over “societal logics” connected to the central spheres of society, such as the bureaucratic state, family, religion, and markets affecting organizations (Friedland & Alford, 1991). While scholars have theorized field-level logics to draw on societal logics, empirical research shows that they commonly consist of practices and ideals that are specific to a bounded field (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Reay & Hinings, 2005; Smets et al., 2012).
The case for a practice-theoretical view on institutional logics
Practices bridge different levels of analysis, as they involve individual practitioners, take place in organizations, and involve meanings and competencies that are shared across society. For practice theorists, the material world and the cultural world cannot exist independently. Rather, as Mohr and Duquenne (1997, p. 309) put it, “each is built up through its immediate association with the other.” Rather than contrasting cultural meanings and individual behaviors, practice theorists understand behavior and meaning to be intrinsically related in enduring practices.
The practice-centric perspective argues that common ideals and principles do not need to be found in the conscious minds of most actors, but they are often embedded in patterns of actions and interactions. Swidler (2001, p. 74), for example, notes how empirical research in sociology has had “difficulty finding [guiding] ideas in any coherent or consensual form in the heads of particular actors or showing that these ideas really influenced action, either through logical implication or by providing the criteria for decisions among alternative lines of conduct.” Likewise, Lizardo and Strand (2010, p. 206) note that symbolic systems, such as institutional logics, are far too complex for actors to become socialized into, and suggest that symbolic systems are scaffolded in the material and social structures of practices: What actors inherit from the social environment is instead a set of heuristics, hunches and shallow (but useful because they work most of the time) practical skills that allow persons to best interface externalized structures, contexts and institutions (Swidler, 2003). This accounts for why persons are observed to act as if they had internalized detailed, highly structured cognitive and normative templates.
Bourdieu (2000) cautions against focusing on principles over practice, introducing the concept of “scholastic fallacy” to capture the ethnocentric tendency of academics to prefer explanations involving abstract generalizations and reflective reasoning. Echoing the sentiment, Bechky (2011, p. 1157) notes that organization theorists too often end up with “abstract theories that privilege structure and contradict people’s experiences” because we tend to ignore the situated praxis. Similarly, Berger and Luckmann (1996) view generalizations as ex-post rationalizations, with “sophisticated legitimations appear at particular moments of an institutional history” (p. 65). They further suggest that: Theoretical thought, ‘ideas’, Weltanschauungen are not that important in society. Although every society contains these phenomena, they are only part of the sum of what passes for ‘knowledge’. Only a very limited group of people in any society engages in theorizing, in the business of ‘ideas’, and the construction of Weltanschauungen. (p. 27)
The practice-centric view thus suggests that the continuity of logics and their evolution over time is rooted in praxis and can often be explained by observing changes in practices. By investigating “pivotal moments” of contestation and negotiations around the relevance of existing practices and the challenges posed by impactful, non-conforming practices, we can better understand how institutional logics endure and evolve over time (Zilber, 2020). In short, practice theory suggests that cultural structures, such as institutional logics, may at least in some cases be better analyzed and explained from the perspective of institutionalized practices as carriers of shared assumptions, beliefs, and values rather than their outcome. Practice theory is a rich domain that can provide a granular account of the connections that link different cultural elements into a persistent institutional logic.
We agree with Mutch (2018, p. 255) that logics should not be conceived as “composed of modular components that can be selected and combined at will,” but as “a complex relationship of elements” (see also Meyer et al., 2018). While Mutch argues that these relationships “cannot easily be teased apart,” we contend that the practice lens can begin to untangle at least some of these relationships. Practice theorists have noted diverse connections among practices that tie them together in broader complexes or constellations, including but not limited to shared constitutive parts of practices (Blue & Spurling, 2016; Shove et al., 2012). Extending Mutch’s (2018) insights, we suggest a practice-centric perspective of institutional logics can be built on the observable interconnections among practices that bind them together into recognizable domains of social life and facilitate their reproduction and diffusion. While our intention is not to dismiss the role of shared beliefs, discourses, and narratives, it is valuable to explore a practice-centric explanation of institutional logics.
Capturing an institutional logic through a constellation of interconnected practices
Drawing on practice theory, we offer a novel perspective on institutional logics as persistent “constellations” of interconnected practices that are instantiated in everyday praxis (Schatzki et al., 2000; Hui et al., 2016; Shove et al., 2012; Smets et al., 2017). Focusing on field-level logics, we suggest that, in many fields, the cultural structures that organizational researchers identify as persistent institutional logics can be effectively captured through enduring web of interconnected practices that help reproduce the beliefs, values, norms, and identities associated with the institutional logic.
This focus on practices provides a novel way to theorize how and why logics persist or change over time. Even as institutional logics denote commonalities in observable culture, historical patterns in culture do not necessarily represent an institutional logic; instead of mere co-occurrence of cultural elements, an institutional logic is a relatively coherent, distinct, and enduring structure. For institutional logics to exist, enduring connections must exist to bind some, but not other, co-occurring cultural elements together (Mutch, 2018). Researchers have offered various partial accounts of how institutional logics form and evolve that emphasize a hegemonic belief system or discourse that shapes socialization, collective memory, or shared understandings (Ocasio et al., 2015, 2016; Thornton et al., 2012). Practice constellations can offer a complementary mechanism, particularly for cultural contexts lacking a hegemonic “meta-narrative” or discourse.
At the core of practice theory is the idea that social orders are continuously constructed, maintained and changed through practice and actors’ practical work (Smets & Jarzabkowski, 2013). Accordingly, the shared norms, values, and meanings that are at the core of institutional logics (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton et al., 2012) are seen as constitutive parts shared by numerous practices, sometimes identified as “general understandings” in the practice literature (Schatzki, 2006). The enactment of practices in everyday work is central to their reproduction and eventual reconstruction (Jarzabkowski et al., 2009; Smets & Jarzabkowski, 2013; Wright et al., 2017). The practice approach thus locates the reproduction and evolution of institutional logics in “praxis” (Smets & Jarzabkowski, 2013).
Practices represent enduring patterns of human actions that involve specific meanings and material elements. Following Shove et al. (2012), we conceive practices to consist of meanings, materials, and competencies. Here, meanings include the various beliefs, values, norms, principles, and symbols that define the purpose of the practice and make it meaningful (Shove et al., 2012). Schatzki (2006) similarly conceives practical and general understandings to be part of the structures that tie patterns of activity together as practices. While Shove et al. (2012) imply the material elements of a practice to be mainly physical, we include organizational structures—including reporting structures, mandates, social ties, information systems, and policies—as “material” elements that support practices.
Practice theory has noted that broader practice constellations, conceived as “interconnected systems of practices” (Hui et al., 2016, p. 6), can help explain the binding of constitutive parts of practices persist over time (on connections among practice; see also Nicolini & Monteiro, 2017). We synthesize various writings in practice theory to draw attention to three prominent forms of connections that can help explain why culture clusters into observable and persistent institutional logics. We do not suggest that these are the only relationships that connect practices to form institutional logics, but rather argue that these specific connections offer compelling explanatory potency since there are clear reasons for organizations to reproduce them.
First, multiple practices share the same constitutive parts, involving the same meanings, norms, required competencies, and material elements, and often even the same combinations of elements (Shove et al., 2012). The field of academia helps illustrate how such shared elements turn mere organizational practices into a durable and identifiable “academic logic” (Murray, 2010; Sauermann & Stephan, 2013). For example, the practices around organizing and participating in academic seminars, conferences, and journal publishing are interconnected: they all revolve around the ability to create and assess scholarly knowledge encoded in manuscripts. Many material elements are shared widely across the central practices of academia: the cloister-like university campus, lecture rooms, and the master–apprentice relationships between professors and students (Clark, 2008). Note that instead of suggesting that commonalities in academic practices arise from “prescriptions,” a practice-centric view suggests that commonalities in institutionalized practices often precede the recognition and articulation of any “principles.”
The second form of connections is created by “practitioners”—the individuals who carry out the practices. Individual practitioners have roles and jurisdictions, as well as competencies, that make them alike and connect them to several practices. In any cultural domain, specific social groups of practitioners will tend to carry out a bundle of practices, largely because of the specialized knowledge they hold and their jurisdictional authority (Currie et al., 2012; Hui et al., 2016; Shove et al., 2012). Since Berger and Luckmann (1996), institutional theorists have emphasized that roles, identities, and social positions of actors are intrinsically connected to their institutionalized behaviors (Cardinale, 2018; Furnari, 2019; Toubiana, 2020). For example, many of the central practices in the academic logic are connected by the virtue of being carried out by professors who despite their heterogeneity inevitably impose certain commonalities to the practices they perform and the ways they approach and solve emerging issues.
Third, practices are connected by referential relationships. Often a practice takes another practice as its object or follows in a sequence where the output of one practice forms an input of another. For example, many discursive practices describe, theorize, evaluate, and legitimize other practices (Greenwood et al., 2002; Phillips et al., 2004). In modern society, organizational choices and actions tend to be both preceded and followed by discourse that rationalizes and justifies them. Diverse other sequential relationships also exist between practices, where one practice meaningfully connects to another to form a broader project or a sequence of action (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Meyer et al., 2021; Shove et al., 2012). For example, preparing a manuscript, presenting it in a seminar, and submitting it to a journal exemplify sequential practices connected by a broader project of doing research.
The connections are further infused with evaluative norms, an aspect often emphasized in both the institutional logics literature (Lounsbury, 2007; Schildt et al., 2021) and practice theories (Swidler, 2001). The evaluative norms tend to be shared across practice constellations. To take another example from the academic logic, research practices from data collection to analysis and reporting are associated with various norms that define what constitutes unacceptable, sufficient, and ideal performances of these practices. Evaluative norms are inherent to practices, constraining the constant threat of local deviations and disruptions (Shove et al., 2012) and helping reinforce faithful adoption of practices (Oakes et al., 1998). Moreover, the roles are associated with normative expectations that constrain variations to the practices undertaken by the specific kinds of actors (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Such norms work in part through external sanctions and threats of illegitimacy (Jepperson, 1991; Lounsbury, Steele, et al., 2021), but also through deeply internalized reflective monitoring of the self (Giddens, 1984; Lok & De Rond, 2013). Finally, evaluation is a central part of the referential relationship of the practices. Some of the most central practices of institutional logics are specifically “evaluation practices” (Espeland & Sauder, 2007; Lamont, 2012), such as audits and rankings that take other practices as their objects and influence the distribution of rewards among individuals and organizations.
In offering a conception of institutional logics as networks of interconnected practices, three observations can be made concerning the nature of institutional logics. First, institutional logics lack crisp boundaries that would defining unambiguously “what is in and what is out.” Rather, logics exhibit a core–periphery structure of more and less central practices, practitioners, meanings, and material resources. For example, the ideal of profit maximization lies at the core of the market logic, while practices related to consumer rights are arguably a more peripheral part of the logic. Second, there is no reason why logics would or should be internally coherent. For example, within the market logic, practices around organizing markets are designed to eliminate barriers to competition, while firms’ market strategies seek to establish those very barriers. Third, logics vary in their internal coherence and prescriptive power. When connections between practices are dense, actors are likely to experience a field of practice as its own domain of social life that organizational scholars will call an institutional logic (Steele, 2021).
We readily admit that many other connections may bind practices and their associated elements together into institutional logics. Yet, the three we focus on seem to hold more significance than the mere taken-for-grantedness and co-occurrence implied by the canonical definition of logics as “socially constructed, historical patterns” (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). In any social domain, many beliefs and practices are abandoned over time, while others remain relevant. In the following section, we examine the processes of reproduction that help turn these connections into an enduring “glue” that holds an institutional logic together and shapes its evolution over time.
Practice-Centric Account of Reproduction and Evolution of Institutional Logics
Thus far, we have introduced a practice-centric perspective on institutional logics as cultural structures that emerge from the shared constitutive parts of practices, the practitioners that perform practices, and referential relationships between practices. This view of institutional logics as interconnected practices helps address a question noted by Mutch (2018): how is it that institutional logics can endure over decades, even as specific beliefs and practices are bound to become obsolete over time? In this section, we elaborate how processes derived from the practice-centric view can account for the reproduction, growth, decline, and even revitalization of institutional logics over time. Such a practice-centric perspective is particularly valuable for explaining how institutional logics can persist in contested domains where hegemonic discourses, widely agreed-upon organizing principles, or consensus over correct forms of reasoning do not exist. For example, widely recognized ordering principles or axioms no longer exist for the family logic, the professional logic, or the academic logic, if they ever did. It seems to us, for example, that very few families are organized according to the principles which Thornton et al. (2012, p. 56) associate with the logic: “unconditional loyalty,” “patriarchal domination,” “family reputation,” and “family honor.” Yet, the family persists as a coherent domain of culture in the absence of such hegemonic ideals. This seems to be true for the academic logic as well, which we use as our primary example.
How practice constellations reproduce logics
Institutional logics are adaptive cultural structures, that can accommodate entirely new practices (Lounsbury & Crumley, 2007) but often maintain a sense of identity and historical continuity (Mutch, 2018). The fact that socially constructed and historically contingent cultural structures are reproduced over long periods of time cannot be taken for granted. Organizations face normative pressures to align their practices with changing societal norms (Haveman & Rao, 1997; Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007) and technical pressures to maintain functional utility and efficacy to remain competitive in a market economy (Oliver, 1992; Smets et al., 2012). In any social context, various social forces such as competition and social expectations create opportunities and pressures for individuals and organizations to adopt new practices and practice variations resulting from technical and cultural innovation. The key question is, how can institutional logics persist over time despite continuous change in practices and culture more broadly?
A focus on practices foregrounds several causal processes that can reproduce and renew linkages among practices that make the institutional logic appear coherent and enable it to endure over time (Hui et al., 2016; Shove et al., 2012). These processes complement previous accounts that have emphasized socialization and shared meta-narrative in justifying those practices (Ocasio et al., 2016) and provide a novel account of cultural persistence and reproduction even in the absence of any organizing principles, axioms, or consensually agreed-upon forms of reasoning. These processes of reproduction are summarized in Table 1, organized around the three forms of connections elaborated above.
Connections among practices and organizational processes that reproduce logics.
First, institutional logics can be reproduced simply because practitioners are likely to prefer familiar and legitimate meanings (Lounsbury & Crumley, 2007) and pre-existing competencies and material elements (Shove et al., 2012) implicated in multiple pre-existing practices. For example, Lok (2010) shows how, faced with strong societal pressure to adopt the enlightened shareholder value practices, management and institutional shareholders sought to preserve their autonomy and a sense of coherence, fitting the response to their pre-existing practices. Even in the absence of abstract principles known to actors, institutional logics can persist simply because actors create and adopt practices that allow them to leverage and preserve the constitutive parts of existing practices. Likewise, uncertainty avoidance and economic considerations will often compel organizations to maintain practice variants that incorporate meanings, material resources, and competencies they will anyhow need for other practices.
Second, leaders of organizations will likely favor practices that can be carried out by pre-existing members of the organization within their existing roles, jurisdictions, and identities. For example, because accounting firms employ accountants, many of their practices incorporate the kinds of artifacts, meanings, and competencies that accountants are familiar with. Over time, the established roles and identities help reinforce a family resemblance across practices that can be easily identified as parts of the professional logic. Relatedly, established divisions of labor, jurisdictions, and patterns of organizational power inevitably shape the development of organizational practices that relate to practitioner roles. Because hospital settings involve powerful social groups of administrators and physicians (Reay & Hinings, 2009), important new practices are likely to fall in the jurisdiction of one of the two groups, thus contributing to the perceived coherence of observable managerial and medical logics. Over time, practitioners have egoistic motives to police the faithful reproduction of practices within their jurisdiction, further contributing to coherence of the related logic (Raynard et al., 2021; Wright et al., 2017).
Finally, individuals and organizations have strong incentives to form referential relationships among practices through discursive elaboration and routine sequencing. The need for organizations to maintain their external legitimacy and efficacy relative to competing organizations leads them to develop discursive and coordination practices to justify their activities and evaluation practices and ensure that their actions are understandable. This dynamic is exemplified by Lounsbury (2007), who documents the rise of performance-oriented mutual funds in New York. The emerging “performance logic” contained its own vocabulary (“money managers,” “growth funds”) and new evaluation practices (“annualized returns”) that helped guide the development and instantiation of new practices (Lounsbury, 2007). Routinized sequencing of practices derives from the organizational pursuit of efficiency and predictability, creating linkages where outputs of one practice become the inputs of another (Raynard et al., 2021). These sequential linkages further create and reinforce shared meanings and material elements among practices (Shove et al., 2012). Hence, it becomes progressively more difficult for individuals and organizations to abandon practices that have become embedded in practice sequences, reflected in discursive practices, and subject to consequential evaluation practices.
These three processes of reproduction work together to “protect” institutional logics from erosion (cf. Ocasio et al., 2016). The connections among practices create commitment to a constellation of interdependent practices, as changing or abandoning any single practice can have a detrimental effect on others (Lounsbury & Crumley, 2007; Smets et al., 2017). In this vein, Swidler (2001) discusses how, amid cultural shifts, some ideas and practices appear as more “constitutive” and thus more durable than others. She theorizes the persistence of a “cultural core” and “iconic practices” to typically derive from highly interconnected practices that either rely on enduring material elements or help organize central social relationships (Swidler, 2001). Dacin and Dacin (2008, p. 348) note that even when practices are abandoned, their constitutive elements “continue in residual forms that serve as reminders of prior strategies and/or as raw material for the construction of new ones.” Shared symbols and ideals can provide organizations with internal coherence and external legitimacy, further supporting the reproduction of the practice bundles of which they are a part.
How practices shape the evolution of an institutional logic
The practice-centric perspective suggests that the evolution of an institutional logic can be explained in part by the evolving practices in a social context (Smets et al., 2012). If we recognize that the rationality and broader principles associated with an institutional logic arise, at least partially, from the prevailing practices, then processes that shape central practices in an institutional field can explain how a field-level institutional logic changes. Accordingly, a practice-driven evolution of institutional logics is fueled by the emergence of new practices and practice variations within the field. These new practices can be immediately assimilated into the existing “web of significance” of the institutional logic so that new practices appear legitimate to actors in the field (Hoffman, 1999; Wright & Zammuto, 2013) and the logic itself adapts to remain “in step with societal norms” (Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010, p. 217). Alternatively, the adoption of new divergent practices can lead to “breakdowns” in the existing institutionalized status quo (Lok & De Rond, 2013) that undermine the relevance of the established logic for practitioners. We will next examine how a practice-based approach can explain the potential expansion, blurring, renewal, and contraction of the logic over time (see Figure 1).
A practice-based perspective on reproduction of institutional logics.
Our model begins with the introduction of new practices or practice variations in an organizational field. Practice changes often originate from improvisation in organizations in the field and eventually spread to others (Smets et al., 2012). While some improvised practices result purely from human inspiration, practices change often in response to external stakeholder pressures and competitive pressure to leverage new technological inventions. Strong institutional pressures from prominent stakeholders and adjacent fields can lead to contestation of existing practices and motivate the emergence of divergent practices (e.g., Hoffman, 1999). Similarly, paradigmatic changes in technology can lead to practices with foreign material elements, roles, and referential linkages that cannot be easily embedded in the prevailing institutional arrangements (e.g., Hargadon & Douglas, 2001). In the academic field, competition between universities pushes them to develop new practices that appeal to prospective students, while information technologies enable radically different teaching practices.
New practices vary in the degree they are embedded in existing practices of the institutional logic through the three types of connection outlined earlier. Most practices are likely to be strongly integrated into the existing institutional logic because they reuse familiar meanings, tend to be carried out by existing practitioners, and hold referential linkages to pre-existing practices. However, when organizations adopt practices related to radically different stakeholder demands or a new technological paradigm, they may be far less embedded within the existing practice constellations.
Logic maintenance or expansion
When a field adopts new practices that are strongly embedded in its existing practices, they are unlikely to challenge or reshape the existing logic. In analytical terms, practices that effectively reuse constitutive parts of existing practices, fall under the control of actors who already conform to the institutional logic, and have referential linkages with existing practices are likely to be seen as naturally fitting with the existing way of doing things. These practices can either be mere “(gentle) variation on existing practice” (Smets et al., 2017, p. 376), aligning with the current meanings and practitioners’ roles and identities, or they may be genuinely innovative practices that nonetheless recombine the familiar elements of the existing logic. When new practices address opportunities or challenges previously unconnected to the logic, there is potential for the logic’s domain or “reach” to expand.
Because new practices are often malleable, powerful advocates of the established logic can contain and rebuff the adoption of radically deviant practices in the field to reinforce the logic’s reproduction. For example, many corporate leaders have embraced sustainability in their branding and external communications, co-opting potentially disruptive sustainability practices in ways that make them appear aligned with the prevailing market logic. At the same time, companies have rejected “degrowth” practices that would contradict the pursuit of profit maximization and growth expectations associated with the market logic (Banerjee et al., 2021).
Sometimes, proponents of the established logic may seek to reform new practices to align them with the existing logic. In their study of emergency specialists, Wright et al. (2017) highlight how variations in the practice of “emergency referrals” across specialists were kept at check by the normative values of the profession, in this case, prioritizing the patients’ needs. Problematic variations triggered a host of repressive actions, including advocacy or more outright sanctioning, that eventually helped maintain the values of the profession. Further, emergency specialists engaged in collective maintenance work to adapt organizational practices and routines in a way that maintained the central values and elements of the professional logic, namely, the primacy of patient care. Overall, to the extent that deviant and new practices are tamed and aligned, the logic will largely maintain its relevance. To exemplify this scenario, consider the introduction of artificial intelligence into the realm of university education. If educational practices leveraging artificial intelligence align with the familiar goals, ideals, and terminology of university, are designed and overseen by professors, and connect firmly with existing pedagogical ideals, they are likely to help maintain and even expand the scope of the academic logic.
In sum, new practices that incorporate strong connections to the constellation of practices constituting the existing logic can help maintain or expand the logic. Although the exact characteristics of new practices depend on creativity, stakeholder demands, and exogenous technical developments, powerful actors within a field can often proactively shape new practices to integrate them with established ones or prevent the adoption of divergent practices. As the proportion of practices strongly tied to an institutional logic grows, it becomes more likely that actors will conceive issues in terms of the logic, delegate decisions to practitioners associated with the logic, and adapt existing institutionalized practices to improvise solutions (Cardinale, 2018).
Logic blurring
When new practices are only loosely embedded in the practice constellation of the existing logic, they will contribute to the blurring of the logic. This can happen, for example, when technological advances or approaches borrowed from other social domains provide benefits that cannot be achieved with practices connected to the existing logic. By blurring, we refer to the decreasing density of connections among the practices and other cultural elements constituting the logic. Here, the central meanings of the logic become less evident to practitioners and their stakeholders, while the roles and identities of practitioners may become less coherent. Consequently, new issues are less likely to be conceived and resolved from the vantage point of the established logic. Overall, repeated instances of contradiction and misalignment can lead practitioners to become more aware of alternative approaches and critical towards their own ways of doing things (Smets & Jarzabkowski, 2013).
The study by Currie et al. (2012) illuminates how the adoption of new practices can blur the prevailing logic over time. The authors document how one organization was able to normalize seemingly radical changes to the medical professionalism logic. Facing pressures to save costs and improve efficacy, the English National Health Service (NHS) decided to reallocate some tasks from physicians to nurses, creating potentially problematic practice variations. Faced with threats of reduced professional jurisdiction, elite professionals adapted and recreated institutional arrangements and routines to ensure their continued professional dominance. Specifically, they co-opted the changes by expanding physicians’ role to “educating” nurses, delegating tasks and activities to them, and policing their work. While the new practices incorporated many central cultural elements, they also complicated the roles, identities, and jurisdictions of physicians. Such blurring decreased the prescriptive clarity of the medical logic regarding the authority and division of labor within the field, making it less likely that new issues will be automatically addressed by physicians using “medical” practices according to “medical” meanings and values.
In sum, when a field is compelled to adopt new practices that have limited connections to the practice constellation constituting the existing logic—fewer common elements among practices, new practitioners with distinct identities and roles, and limited referential relationships with existing practices—their institutionalization will diminish the perceived coherence and clout of the existing logic. Such a process is likely to take place when competitive pressures or stakeholder expectations push organizations to adopt seemingly “foreign” practices. For example, the academic logic can become blurred when universities hire non-academic experts to support entrepreneurship in the context of their degree programs. Alternatively, if the AI solutions for learning mentioned above are designed and overseen by engineers and ignore existing ideas of university pedagogy, they can introduce new approaches for conceiving, developing, and running educational programs that compete with rather than complement the existing academic logic. Over time, blurring could mean that the role of the academic logic in framing and resolving new issues diminishes.
Logic renewal
Connections between practices constitutive of an institutional logic can also grow over time. A logic that has become “blurred” through weak connections among its constitutive practices can regain coherence through retheorization—the development of new explicit and implicit narratives, labels, and roles or identities that capture commonalities among the otherwise loosely connected practices in the constellation. Retheorization can, for example, elaborate adaptations to identities of existing actors or involve the development of new evaluation practices that integrate and institutionalize the goals of disconnected practice variations. The pioneering study by Mohr and Duquenne (1997) illustrates the evolution of meanings around poverty relief. As poorhouses came under attack as ineffective and outdated solutions, relief efforts became increasingly structured around professional social work, state involvement, and new organizational forms. By emphasizing the value of rational methods in transforming the living conditions of the poor, the revised practices and theorizations incorporated competencies and meanings of deliberative rationality at the core of the field-level logic. This classic study can thus be interpreted as an example of logic renewal and stabilization following a phase marked by contestation and changes in both discourse and practices associated with social relief. Depending on their perspective, researchers may identify a renewed logic either as an adaptation of the existing logic or as a new competing version of the old logic.
Work in the institutional logics perspective has long noted the importance of narratives in forming and reproducing coherent shared institutional logics (Ocasio et al., 2015; Thornton et al., 2012, Ch. 4). When discursive accounts align with one another, they converge into “meta-narration,” a history of a domain that provides a naturalized account of social life (Ocasio et al., 2016). In Schatzki’s (2006) terminology, retheorizations propagate teleo-affective structures that define when and why practitioners engage in practices. Such retheorizations can counter logic blurring by recreating dense linkages among the cultural elements, thus making the focal logic seem more authoritative and applicable within a field. Domains with a low degree of specialization, such as family, may be more prone to blurring, but also include numerous actors who can articulate and engage with retheorizations, fostering a vibrant “marketplace of ideas.” Conversely, when a domain is characterized by a high degree of specialization, such as the medical domain, practitioners may be better positioned to avoid blurring in the first place, but their narrow focus may inhibit their ability to craft expansive narratives to “retheorize” the logic once it begins to blur.
In sum, actors can mitigate the blurring of an institutional logic and instead foster its renewal through “retheorizations,” where they explicate and deepen the linkages between diverse practices associated with a social domain. The trajectory from divergent practice assimilation to blurring and eventual retheorization is exemplified by Jones et al. (2012). The authors show how the emerging practices of modern architectural style came to challenge the established professional logic, and how the discourse around modern architecture ultimately helped account for the common meanings and ideals across practices. Institutional logics are thus “generative,” not only because the interconnected practices serve as the foundational elements for constructing and assimilating new practices, but also because adaptations and retheorizations can induce cycles of practice innovation. In the academic logic, a major retheorization took place in the 1960s United States, as Clark Kerr reframed universities from institutions of knowledge creation and learning to an engine of economic growth in his highly influential book The Uses of the University. This framing helped reconnect the diverse practices around technology commercialization that universities felt pressured to engage in and re-established academic practitioners’ control over the domain.
Logic contraction
When new practices cannot be assimilated into the prevailing logic, they remain outside of it or exist on its periphery. As practitioners and organizations within a particular field increasingly embrace practices that deviate from the established logic, the scope of the activities informed by that logic contract. Divergent practices can lead to the rise of an alternative, potentially competing logic, or they may remain disconnected from any institutional logic. For example, Lounsbury and Crumley (2007) explained how the rise of active money management practices in the conservative mutual fund industry led to the emergence of an alternative logic—one that incorporated new shared meanings centered on the concept of risk and a new breed of trained practitioners who apply financial theories and tools for fund management. As they articulate (p. 1004): “the creation of active money management approaches via growth funds was ultimately understood as an anomalous activity that could not be easily incorporated into existing theory, which supported extant money management practice.” When an anomalous variation becomes widely shared and accepted, it can lead to the contraction and even eventual dissolution of the prevailing institutional logic. Similarly, Dunn and Jones (2010) suggest that the initial scientific logic of medical education was unable to accommodate practices that focused on patient care, leading the scientific logic to concede ground to the emerging “care logic” in the domain of medical education.
Moreover, the erosion or abandonment of central practices can further undermine the meanings, beliefs, practices, and conceptions of practitioners that constitute the prevailing logic. For example, abortion has arguably represented a central and “iconic” practice (Swidler, 2001) in the family logic, shaping the praxis and meanings of family formation in most liberal democracies. As abortion was recently banned in a large part of the US, implications are reverberating on the connected elements of the family logic—the meaning of motherhood as a choice, the power of mothers as central “practitioners,” and the idealized sequencing of actions in family formation from the search for romantic partner and marriage to childbearing (see also Brown & Patrick, 2018). As the example illuminates, some practices are more instrumental in maintaining central meanings and values of an institutional logic than others. When such central practices fall, proponents of competing understandings of the institutional logic have a political opening to shape the explicit discourse around the institutional logic as well as its central meanings.
In sum, institutional logics may contract when established practices in a field are gradually replaced and/or complemented with new practices that lack connections with existing practices. Such change in practices may result from divergent demands of powerful stakeholders or from superior technical qualities of new practices. We can envision how the growing role of technology and artificial intelligence could marginalize academics in higher education if smart algorithms were able to refine interactive learning experiences to meet practical needs of employers. If in the future e-learning products will be developed with limited involvement of academic practitioners and irrespective of established academic practices, these activities might become disconnected from the existing practice constellations. Without connections to the key material elements or meanings of the academic profession, and with limited involvement of academic actors, the new practices would effectively exist outside the traditional academic logic and its governing principles. Consequently, the role of the academic logic, as we know it, could diminish in universities.
Cascading changes in practices
The above dynamics can be accentuated by systemic changes in the practice constellation because new divergent practices may trigger further changes. The systemic change can derive from sensemaking and theorization of changes in the practice domain (Ocasio et al., 20150, 2016) or they can be driven by distributed efforts to rationalize and optimize practices. Such a process may involve changes in organizational roles, reconfiguration of sequential chains of practices, or changes in evaluation practices that help legitimize and explain the newly important practices. Cascades become more likely when new central practices capture actors’ collective attention (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010; Thornton et al., 2012, Ch. 6) or create acute conflicts of interest among actors (Hoffman, 1999; Hoffman & Ocasio, 2001).
A cascade of cultural innovation and adaptations is exemplified by the introduction of journal impact factors in academia. The impact factor was originally invented by Eugene Garfield as a novel evaluation practice that addressed the broad interest in the productivity of universities, enabled by newly available information technology (Garfield, 1955). The evaluation practice helped bolster the external legitimacy of universities by enabling them to claim “research performance,” but led to tensions with the established practices of academic logic. As the invention of journal rankings diffused across countries and academic fields (Sahlin-Andersson & Engwall, 2002), it induced adaptations on shared understandings of academia, influencing actors’ identities and the practices they engaged in (Kodeih & Greenwood, 2014). Impact factors have been instrumental in the professionalization of academia; their introduction created tensions with the old hiring and promotion practices, triggering a cascade of changes in these practices that increasingly incorporate quantified conceptions of journal quality and article impact.
Discussion and Conclusion
Our proposed practice-centric conception of institutional logics provides an important complement to the established views of logics that often explicitly emphasize the role of belief systems and discourse over practices (Glaser et al., 2016; Haveman & Gualtieri, 2017; Haveman & Rao, 1997). Even theorists who note the centrality of structures and practices seldom theorize their role in maintaining and shaping institutional logics (e.g., Friedland & Alford, 1991). In this discussion section, we outline several paths which the practice-driven perspective creates for empirical research and theory development. We focus particularly on the study of contemporary political efforts to advocate and advance competing versions of societal and field-level institutional logics that are likely to erode the potential of hegemonic “meta-narratives” to define logics (Ocasio et al., 2016).
Towards a more dynamic and local view of institutional logics
A practice-theoretical lens provides an alternative grounding for institutional logics by emphasizing the dynamic co-construction of practices and cultural beliefs and meanings. Our approach questions the prevailing view of relatively stable societal logics and challenges the presumed causal explanations that run from societal-level logics to specific “instantiations” of professions, markets, or bureaucracy to organizational fields (Durand & Thornton, 2018; Gümüsay et al., 2020; Thornton et al., 2012). Embracing the practice-centric view compels us to conceptualize field-level logics as arising from practice constellations enacted in organizations through diverse local processes (Smets et al., 2012), several of which we elaborated above. As Smets et al. (2017, p. 387) caution us, “institutionalists have construed social norms as exogenous to and imposing upon human interaction, rather than emerging from it.” For example, a recent study by Gümüsay et al. (2025) on the first Islamic bank in Germany shows that, while the societal logic of Islam influenced the organization’s decisions, the specific compromises developed by the bank at the practice level had a defining impact on the field-level logic, even though the religious logic is commonly understood as the most “axiomatic” of all logics.
We believe that in many empirical contexts, both practice-centric bottom-up processes we elaborated in this essay co-exist with and complement discursive top-down processes of meta-narration (Ocasio et al., 2016). For example, changes in societal ideals can trigger complex cascading changes in organizational practices or, in reverse, cascading changes driven by competitiveness can lead to the emergence of new field-level ideals and norms. Simply positing observable axioms or modes of reasoning to shape practices without investigating the reverse possibility constitutes poor research practice. Assuming a broader rationality to explain practices without investigating the reverse causal path is to fall victim to “scholastic fallacy” as articulated by Bourdieu (2000)—the tendency of academics to privilege abstract ideals and theorizations for social life. Thus, whereas Thornton et al. (2012) suggest that “actors rely on institutional logics and their constituent identities, goals, and schemas to reproduce and transform organizational identities and practices” (p. 95), a practice-centric approach suggests that it is rather interconnected practices on the ground that often give rise to and maintain shared identities, goals, and schemas of actors at the field level. Taking the practice-centric perspective seriously calls for scholars to examine empirically how practice constellations arise, both through unintended processes such as those summarized in Table 1 and through deliberate theorizations.
We thus call for future research to examine how diverse aspects of institutional logics that, from afar, look like macro-level ideology and tradition with significant stability may arise from local dynamic processes. For example, even as values have traditionally been considered as an enduring societal aspect of institutional logics, they may well arise from praxis, as recently argued by Creed et al. (2022). Drawing on Sayer’s (2011) pragmatist work, Creed et al. note how empathetic observations of wellbeing and suffering shape our values. For example, in the domain of the family logic, established practices—whether traditional patriarchy or modern family arrangements—give rise to common experiences that shape individuals’ considerations of what constitutes good and bad family life. Accordingly, to the extent that families share values, these shared values may derive from their engagement with similar practices and similar experiences even in the absence of a shared hegemonic discourse on “family values.”
Last, but not least, the practice-centric perspective underlines the importance of two largely ignored questions about logics: “what exactly counts as a logic?” and “how do we draw the boundaries of an institutional logic?” As logics proliferate—from community banking logic (Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007) to the logic of digitalization (Schildt, 2022), “the Islamic logic” (Gümüşay et al., 2025), and multiple co-occurring versions of “feminist logic” (Zilber, 2024)—it becomes increasingly unclear what is not a logic. As strong hegemonic meta-narratives lose their appeal, institutional logics are likely to exhibit a core–periphery structure, constellations of interconnected practices with unclear boundaries. Consequently, there is always a degree of arbitrariness in how we identify institutional logics in an empirical setting. It is often possible to find some empirical justification for splitting an identified institutional logic into two or more logics to “explain away” a cultural change or intra-logic contradictions—such as identifying the medical professional logic as entailing distinct “science logic” and “care logic” (e.g., Dunn & Jones, 2010). In this way, the academic logic can easily be split into “professionalized” and “collegial” strands or into “research” and “pedagogy” ones. Once we acknowledge that institutional logics lack a platonic core and are instead social categories crafted by researchers, the practice-centric perspective offers a compelling basis for articulating their boundaries. For example, researchers can distinguish whether a constellation of interconnected practices at the core of a logic morphs gradually over time or whether it is challenged by new, largely separate constellations.
Practices as a key arena of cultural contestation over institutional logics in late modernity
With increasing contestation of the established world order and liberal politics (Bromley et al., 2020; Lounsbury & Wang, 2020), we believe it is increasingly important to loosen the assumptions around the existence of singular widely shared ideals or belief systems at the societal or even the field level. Religious logics come in tolerant and intolerant variants, democratic logics manifest in many forms (including populist ones), and market logics range from libertarian to state-controlled. The environmental logic manifests in a techno-optimist strand that embraces nuclear power and a traditionalist one that opposes it. While views concerning the family logic were once polarized, numerous potentially contradictory perspectives are now legitimate and vie for dominance. Similarly, while the feminist logic may have been initially coherent, it now manifests in various versions (Zilber, 2024) that exhibit opposite views on some topics, such as trans women. The previously clear “zones of meaning [. . .] possessing a certain internal coherence and consistency” (Meyer et al., 2021, p. 167) are dissolving in late modernity. The practice-centric perspective on institutional logics offers valuable theoretical tools for mapping the competing conceptions of institutional logics and the factors shaping their relative appeal among social groups.
While prior research has suggested that struggles over logics derive from and take place through different ideological discourses or symbolic resources (e.g., Zilber, 2024), the practice-centric perspective suggests a powerful alternative where the very ideologies may emerge, and gain prominence, as local practice constellations change. In many cases, most individuals have limited interest and energy for political debates on social media, and no hegemonic views exist. In such domains, the meanings and identities associated with an institutional logic can depend importantly on the practices individuals are enticed or forced into, or prevented from carrying out (Malhotra et al., 2021). Practices thus represent a major arena of contestation among different logics and between logic variants. Companies may embrace sustainability discourse and create executive positions, but unless they adopt related organizational practices that embody and instill those meanings among employees, the central ideals of sustainability are unlikely to take hold (Augustine, 2021). Likewise, the example of abortion in the US highlights how changes in practice domains are often driven by power structures that may be disconnected from shared beliefs and dominant discourse but gradually reshape what motherhood and family mean in the country. Focusing on changes in organizational practices can help explain how logics compete and co-exist, and the relative hold they have on thinking and decision-making within organizations.
Concluding remarks
In this article we built on practice-driven institutionalism (Smets et al., 2017) and the broader practice theory (Hui et al., 2016; Schatzki, 2006; Shove et al., 2012) to offer a complementary and more nuanced theorization of institutional logics (Lounsbury, Steele, 2021). We believe that a practice-centric approach can advance the study of cultural change in organizations and fields and the related political contestations. With its roots in the 1970s, institutional theory’s core assumptions of relative homogeneity and conformity may no longer fully apply in the late modernity shaped by social media and growing tribalism. In an insightful editorial, Glynn et al. (2000) noted that organization theory has tended to homogenize the phenomena it observes, hiding the plurality and variance present in human life. The institutional logics perspective has sought to account for heterogeneity by examining how different institutional logics are combined and blended in organizations. We hope our practice-centric perspective on institutional logics can inspire scholars to study contradictions, variations, and change also within a single institutional logic. Such a research program could unlock the potential of the institutional logics perspective to shed light on contemporary political struggles and the emergence of local cultural forms across geographies and social groups.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
