Guest Speaker Seminar Series: Piotr Węgorowski (Glasgow)

Organisation studies is a field which brings together various research paradigms and methods. One prominent theoretical orientation, gaining traction in recent years, has been an institutional logics perspective. Institutional logics are defined as ‘the socially constructed, historical patterns of cultural symbols and material practices, including assumptions, values, and beliefs, by which individuals and organisations provide meaning to their daily activity, organise time and space, and reproduce their lives and experience’ (Thornton and Ocasio 1999: 84). Although organisation studies scholars have paid some attention to way in which these patterns are realised linguistically, Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury (2013: 149) note that ‘the mechanisms by which language mutually constitutes practices and symbolic constructions have not been clearly articulated.’ This paper, drawing on a linguistic ethnographic project investigating language of community policing, will demonstrate how interactional sociolinguistic analysis can inform the institutional logics perspective. I will consider how logics, which are typically seen as abstract and distinct entities, do not necessarily map easily onto actual language use. Through detailed analysis of interactions between Police Community Support Officers and citizens, the tension between the profession and community logics will be explored, as particularly relevant to the context of community policing. In doing so the theoretical and analytical value of institutional logics will be appraised, suggesting the importance of discourse analysis for “tying the concept down”.

Thornton, P.H. and Ocasio, W., 1999. Institutional logics and the historical contingency of power in organisations: Executive succession in the higher education publishing industry, 1958–1990. American Journal of Sociology, 105(3), pp.801-843.

Thornton, P.H., Ocasio, W., and Lounsbury, M., 2013. The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press.