*Abstract: *We survey research on institutional logics, which are
systems of cultural elements (values, beliefs, and normative
expectations) by which people, groups, and organizations make sense of
and evaluate their everyday activities, and organize those activities in
time and space.Although there were scattered mentions of this concept
before 1990, this literature really began with the publication in 1991
of a theory piece by Roger Friedland and Robert Alford.Over the past
twenty years, it has become a large and diverse area of organizational
research.Thousands of papers, book chapters, and books have been
published on this topic, addressing institutional logics in sites as
different as climate change proceedings of the United Nations, local
banks in the United States, and business groups in Taiwan. We review
this literature, beginning with a detailed explanation of the concept
and the theory surrounding it. We then evaluate several intellectual
precursors to institutional logics, to show how this literature
developed over time within the broader framework of theory and empirical
work in sociology, political science, and anthropology. We then
selectively survey empirical work on this topic since 1990 by
identifying and summarizing papers that were published in ten major
sociology and management journals in the United States and Europe to
identify trends in theory and empirical findings. After we detail these
trends, we conclude by suggesting three gentle corrections and
potentially useful extensions to this literature to guide future
research:(1) limiting the definition of institutional logic to
cultural-cognitive phenomena, rather than including material phenomena;
(2) recognizing both “cold” (purely rational) cognition and “hot”
(emotion-laden) cognition; and (3) developing and testing a theory (or
multiple related theories), meaning a logically interconnected set of
propositions concerning a delimited set of social phenomena, derived
from assumptions about essential facts (axioms), that details causal
mechanisms and yields empirically testable (falsifiable) hypotheses, by
being more consistent about how we use concepts in theoretical
statements, assessing the reliability and validity of our empirical
measures, and conducting meta-analyses of the many inductive studies to
develop deductive theory.
