"The Heart of Institutions: Values, Emotions, Identity, Logics & Work, Finding the Ties that Bind Us"

Recently there has been a growing acknowledgment that institutions are inhabited by actors who constitute, and are constituted by, institutional activity (Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2014; Hallett & Ventresca, 2006). The notion of inhabited institutions has given rise to a broad range of perspectives within institutional theory that collectively have been referred to as exploring the “microfoundations” of institutions. These include the institutional approaches of institutional work, institutional logics, identity, emotions and values. While clearly these diverse institutional approaches have made progress in outlining the microfoundations of institutions, surprisingly there has been limited engagement across and between these perspectives. Accordingly, in this symposium we seek to explore what binds and brings these institutional approaches together as possible mechanisms for understanding the microfoundations of institutions. To do so we bring together renowned scholars from each of these institutional domains who will speak to their approach and then reflect on the possibilities and potential for scholarly inquiry connecting their lens to the others brought up in the panel.