Articles

Positive Institutional Work: Exploring Institutional Work Through the Lens of Positive Organizational Scholarship

Warren Nilsson

Warren Nilsson

University of Cape Town

Published Online:18 Dec 2014https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2013.0188

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Abstract

Despite its emancipatory ambitions and its rich portraits of agency, the institutional work literature has been criticized for its limited engagement with questions of normative social purpose. Synthesizing the literature on institutional work and on positive organizational scholarship, in this article I define positive institutional work as the creation or maintenance of institutional patterns that express mutually constitutive experiential and social goods. This synthesis expands existing theories of institutional work in three ways. It introduces the concept of experiential legitimacy and suggests that experiential surfacing may be a foundational aspect of positive institutional work. It offers collaborative inquiry as a largely overlooked solution to the paradox of embedded agency and explores such inquiry as a primary mode of positive agency. And it argues that positive institutional stability rests upon work aimed at making group boundaries and material practices more inclusive. Taken together, these three themes suggest new theoretical and practical directions for further inquiry into the relationship between institutional work and social purpose. They also contribute to the positive organizational scholarship literature’s implicit institutional ambitions by articulating a more socially embedded vision of positive organizational practices.

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Published online 18 December 2014

Published in print 1 July 2015

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I am grateful to Henry Mintzberg, Steve Maguire, Jane Dutton, Fahri Karakas, and Tana Paddock for their wise comments on previous drafts of this article. Many thanks also to Christine Quinn Trank and three anonymous reviewers for their generous and insightful guidance. The manuscript benefited greatly from the broader work of the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business. An earlier version was presented at the Academy of Management meeting in Boston.

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