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History, Society, and Institutions: the Role of Collective Memory in the Emergence and Evolution of Societal Logics

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History, Society, and Institutions: the Role of Collective Memory in the Emergence and Evolution of Societal Logics Q Academy of Management Review 2016, Vol. 41, No. 4, 676–699. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amr.2014.0183 HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND INSTITUTIONS: THE ROLE OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN THE EMERGENCE AND EVOLUTION OF SOCIETAL LOGICS WILLIAM OCASIO MICHAEL MAUSKAPF Northwestern University CHRISTOPHER W. J. STEELE University of Alberta We examine the role of history in organization studies by theorizing how collective memory shapes societal institutions and the logics that govern them. We propose that, rather than transhistorical ideal types, societal logics are historically constituted cultural structures generated through the collective memory of historical events. We then develop a theoretical model to explain how the representation, storage, and retrieval of collective memory lead to the emergence of societal logics. In turn, societal logics shape memory making and the reproduction and reconstruction of history itself. To illustrate our theory, we discuss the rise of the corporate logic in the United States. We identify two sources of discontinuity that can disrupt this memory-making process and create notable disjunctures in the evolution of societal logics. We conclude by discussing how changes in collective memory and the historical trajectory of societal logics shape organizational forms and practices. History plays a critically important but often Is there any hope of bridging these worlds to underspecified role in the lives of institutions, or- provide a dynamic integration of structural and ganizations, and their members. Since at least the historical accounts of organizational life? 1990s, scholars have advocated that theories of or- Our answer to this question is an unequivocal yes. ganization take history more seriously (Clark & Although many organizational theories are implic- Rowlinson, 2004; Keiser, 1994; Zald, 1993). Yet a the- itly ahistorical or reduce history to a temporal vari- oretical and methodological divide persists be- able, some contain the raw materials to acquire an tween those who study organizations and those explicitly historical lens (Kipping & Usdiken,¨ 2014; who study history. According to historian and po- Rowlinson, Hassard, & Decker, 2014). Institutional litical scientist William Sewell, Jr.’s Logics of His- theory seems particularly well suited to this task tory, there is a logical explanation for this condition: (Suddaby, Foster, & Mills, 2014). Yet while research across the social sciences may recognize that his- While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do tory operates through institutions to constitute the not: how to think about the temporalities of social social world (Mahoney & Thelen, 2007; Thelen, 1999), life. On the other hand, while social scientists’ the details of this argument and its consequences treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their remain underdeveloped (Kipping & Usdiken,¨ 2014). theoretical sophistication and penchant for struc- We further the integration of history and orga- tural accounts of social life could offer much to historians (Sewell, 2005: back cover). nization studies by theorizing how the process of collective memory making shapes our un- derstanding of historical events and societal All authors contributed equally to this article. We thank Michael Rowlinson and two anonymous reviewers, whose institutions. To accomplish this, we employ detailed comments and suggestions made the paper better. and extend the institutional logics perspective We also thank Royston Greenwood and the participants of the (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton, Ocasio, & 2014 EGOS track on “Rethinking Responses to Institutional Lounsbury, 2012), which contends that organiza- ” Complexity for their constructive feedback on an earlier ver- tions and their activities are embedded in histor- sion of the manuscript. Finally, we thank the editorial team of the Special Topic Forum on History and Organization Studies ically situated webs of meaning and significance. for their leadership and advocacy of an organizational science These webs are structured by institutional logics— that takes history seriously. sets of organizing principles that provide actors 676 Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder’s express written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only. 2016 Ocasio, Mauskapf, and Steele 677 with vocabularies of motive and practice. Al- occurrences. Then we examine how these as- though scholars have explored the historical sorted documents are arranged and stored within contingencies of field-level logics and their archives. Patterns in the retrieval of documents implications for organizational practices and from these archives give rise to historical forms (Haveman & Rao, 1997; Scott, Ruef, Mendel, & events—episodes of societal significance that are Caronna, 2000; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999), they have similarly identified, if differently interpreted, by largely ignored the historicity of societal logics. the dispersed actors in society. As the memory of While the historical provenance of societal logics historical events develops and is reinforced (or is widely acknowledged, they are mostly theorized reinterpreted), metanarratives emerge to help as Weberian ideal types—that is, transhistorical impose order on the past and present. When these generalizations of abstract principles (Thornton metanarratives converge and stabilize, they et al., 2012). For example, when institutional generate societal logics, which, in turn, shape the scholars study the overarching principles that memory-making process. structure our understanding of “the market” or Second, we provide an illustration of our model “the corporation,” they rarely explore how these with reference to the emergence and evolution of societal logics emerge or change over time (cf. the corporate logic in the United States, shaped Lipartito & Sicilia, 2004; Polanyi, 1944). Here we by the collective memory making of historical acknowledge not only that societal logics have events. In the process, we contrast our historically “specific historical limits” (Friedland & Alford, embedded explanation of the corporate logic with 1991: 249) but that they also provide a new theory the prevailing ideal-typical approach. detailing history’s role in the generation, re- Third, we propose and discuss several sources production, and transformation of societal logics. of historical discontinuity in collective memory In contrast to the ideal-typical approach, we making. We highlight two sources of discontinu- propose that societal logics are historically con- ity in particular: (1) the confluence of events across stituted cultural structures generated through institutional fields (e.g., series of events that come collective memory making. Field-level logics tend to be seen as watershed moments or as phase to emerge from the shared experiences of inter- transitions in the evolution of society) and (2) connected groups of actors, but the origin of so- changes in the communicative infrastructure cietal logics has not been adequately theorized. In (e.g., the complex of technologies and practices large, complex societies, individuals are often too through which collective memory making takes widely dispersed, and their local contexts too place). We conclude the article by discussing how disparate, to share universal experiences (Durkheim, our model might inspire a more historically in- 1964). Absent the common ground of shared expe- formed approach to institutional logics and pro- rience, we propose that collective memory supplies posing implications for the study of organizations individuals and organizations with the informa- and organizational theory more broadly. tion and schemas required to effectively navigate society and social life. Collective memory, as a HISTORY, INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS, AND system of values, identities, and practices shaping COLLECTIVE MEMORY the commemoration and (re)interpretation of his- torical events (Schwartz, 2005; Schwartz & Kim, History, which for our purposes refers both to 2002), serves a constitutive role in the emergence the accumulation of past events and to the docu- and evolution of societal logics. In turn, societal ments, narratives, and memories attached to logics provide a historical lens through which them, has enjoyed a renaissance in organiza- memory and history are recursively shaped, tional studies since the linguistic and cultural reproduced, and reconstructed. turns of the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, most of After unpacking this argument and situating it our discipline’s theories remain relatively ahis- within existing research on institutional logics torical (Kipping & Usdiken,¨ 2014). This state of af- and collective memory, we divide the remainder fairs reflects a more general epistemological of the article into three parts. First, we develop divide between social science and history a new process model that posits societal logics (Rowlinson et al., 2014). In the words of Hayden as emerging from collective memory making of White (2010: 192), historians “deal in ‘concrete’ historical events. We begin by discussing the reality rather than ‘abstractions’; their interest representation and documentation of localized is in discovering the true story behind the events 678 Academy of Management Review October reported in the documents and telling that story for particular institutional
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