“Heaven or Las Vegas”: Competing institutional logics and individual experience

Institutional logics are “the organizing principles that shape the behavior of field participants. Because they refer to a set of belief systems and associated practices, they define the content and meaning of institutions” (Reay and Hinings, 2009, p. 631). The fact that organizations are confronted with different and sometimes competing institutional logics has attracted significant scholarly attention. Many fields, perhaps most, are characterized by institutional complexity. The presence of rival logics or belief systems creates organizational tensions and contradictions potentially enacting a “sense of dissonance” for those who manage them. The theme of the competition between logics has been approached mostly at a macro level, i.e. in fields and organizations. Although some work has been conducted on the agency of individuals, how individuals experience, make sense of, and respond to conflicting institutional logics is still in need of further exploration. In fact, individual experience of competing logics, as well as how trade-offs are managed with associated emotional demands, has attracted relatively little attention. More needs to be known about how the micro-level mechanisms through which individuals, especially leaders, deal with competing logics. In this paper we address the literatures on institutional logics, paradox, and identity. Self, social and organizational identity can be nested and more research is necessary to understand how identity issues articulate levels of analysis. Organizational life, as an intersubjective experience, is a phenomenon that is emergent from the dynamic sharing of projected emotions between individuals in and around organizations: leaders and followers, bosses and workers, employees and outsiders of various kinds – customers, suppliers, communities etc. These emotions may be projected on to and by various phenomena; not only human actors but also various materialities that constitute actants in the scenes of everyday life, particularly artefacts. The research question that organizes this paper asks: how do individual actors navigate the contradiction between rival institutional logics and how do they turn contradictions into action? We provide an answer to this question by considering how specific managers and entrepreneurs act as decision makers in a given institutional setting when confronted by diverse institutional logics that define or challenge their sense of identity, namely because they incorporate a paradoxical component. The paper focuses on a celebrated case, in certain circles of appreciation, of an organization whose entrepreneurship in navigating competing institutional logics while crafting an identity around these dynamics had identity consequences that were both organizational and individual. We next explain the research setting and the methods employed to address the research question. Our contribution, first, is to discuss and make concrete the process of facing institutionally generated contradiction. Second, we highlight the role of materiality in the definition, stabilization and expression of institutional identity. Third, we address the conceptual dynamics of individual-organizational identity coevolution. We begin with an account of competing logics before moving to consideration of the organizational actor and entrepreneur at the centre of our account.