The Emergence of Institutions: An Aesthetic-Affective Perspective 3030898946, 9783030898946

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Elke Weik

The Emergence of Institutions An Aesthetic-Affective Perspective

The Emergence of Institutions

Elke Weik

The Emergence of Institutions An Aesthetic-Affective Perspective

Elke Weik University of Southern Denmark Odense, Denmark

ISBN 978-3-030-89894-6 ISBN 978-3-030-89895-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89895-3

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Prologue

When, on a sunny May day in 919, Henry I, Germany’s first king, left Fritzlar cathedral, where the nobles of Franconia and Saxony had just elected him king, the Archbishop of Mainz, mightiest among the peers of the Church, stepped in his way. The archbishop presented him with a diadem, bowed and asked Henry for permission to anoint him. Henry declined both crown and offer saying he felt unworthy of such an honour and was content to have been elected king. On hearing this, the crowd erupted in cheers and praised his name. This little vignette captures the problem of the emergence of institutions quite nicely. For centuries, historians have debated why Henry refused to be anointed. Medieval chroniclers saw it as testimony to his modesty and religious sincerity. Historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth century have alternatively suggested that he wanted to remain independent of the Church, that he held a personal grudge against the Church, or that he did not want to elevate himself too highly above the other nobles, thus incurring their wrath in what was politically an extremely unstable time. It has only been in recent decades that historians have come to the conclusion that the event not only did not happen as portrayed, but that it did not happen at all. Henry, most likely, neither sought nor was offered anointment. It were the scribes at the court of his son, Otto the Great, that invented the story. For Otto the Great had not only been anointed king but crowned Roman emperor by the pope, thus resuming the tradition of Charlemagne. To these scribes, seeing Otto’s sire, a successful and well-liked king, crowned without proper ritual constituted a stigma, a historical error that they intended to put right. The institution of the German monarchy, though only born in their days, started stretching out into the past, and Henry got at last a chance to be anointed, which he then piously refused. There is, however, more. The mere statement that Henry I was the first German king is fervently disputed. First, if anything, he was not king of Germany but of the Germans, as documents from that time prove. Thiudisk was an adjective describing, first of all, a group of vernacular dialects, and second their speakers. Around the time of the beginning of Henry’s reign people started to self-identify as speakers of this v

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Prologue

common language rather than as members of the traditional tribes (Franconians, Saxons, Bavarians etc.). We can, however, not point to a specific date or event. For many years, the old Carolingian name of East Francia still was used in parallel to denote the realm over which Henry ruled. So Henry was a king, but not anointed, of a realm with fluctuating borders, ruler of a people that only just started to feel they were a people. Small wonder he is difficult to fit into the institutional conceptual toolkit we are used to operating with. So we rather make up stories that contain institutions and actors with strategies and motives. We still do today. It is probably the single most important thing preventing us from studying the emergence of institutions.

About the Book

How and why do institutions emerge? Given that we have an institutional substance or logics on one hand and a number of objects, persons and activities manifesting the substance or logics on the other, this seems to be a hen-egg-problem. For how can university professors exist without a university, and a university without professors? Police cars without a police? Marriage without husbands and wives? The virtual order needs to become manifest for us to see, yet it cannot produce manifestations if it does not exist. And why is it then we can only recognise institutions years after they have come into being? Why can we not study institutions that failed to emerge? These two problems mark the point of departure for my inquiry. They have become problems because organizational institutionalism is dominated by a positivist-empirical research paradigm that is unable to tackle them. I therefore follow an aesthetic-affective approach that centres on the pre-reflexive, non-cognitive aspects of human life and sensemaking. This aesthetic-affective approach draws together institutionalist research on values and feelings and combines it with a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective. Out of this, institutions arise as aesthetic-affective configurations with “notyets, the didn’t quite-make-its, the not quite respectable, the unremarked and the openly ‘anti’ goings-on”, configurations whose dynamics allows them to be largely independent of individual human action and design. A quick guide through the book I will first present the historical case study I use for the purpose of illustration throughout the book (Chap. 2). I then discuss my preliminary conceptualisation of institutions in relation to culture (Chap. 3). Chapter 4 outlines my ontological and epistemological assumptions by introducing strong process theory and conceptualising institutions as strong processes. The twin Chaps. 5 and 6 form the core of my argument by discussing how institutions presence and what this means for their constitution. Chapter 7 discusses a methodology for the study of the presencing of institutions. Chapter 8, finally, embeds my argument in current discussions in organizational institutionalism. vii

Contents

1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 7

2

The Case Study: Military Monasticism and the Order of the Knights Templar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Historical Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 What Is a Miles? A Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Ideas Encounter Other Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Holy War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 The Foundation and Rise of the Knights Templar . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9 9 11 13 15 16 18 19

3

4

Institutions Between Culture and Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Relationship Between Institutions and Culture . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 Six Candidates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 The Fallacy of Conflation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.3 Institutions and Organisations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.4 Agency Versus Decision-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.5 The Missing Core: Values and Concerns . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.6 The Expression of Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Human Agency and Wirksamkeit in Institutional Emergence . . . . 3.2.1 Independence from Strategic Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 Significance and Semantics: Weber and the Cultural Meaning of an Idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21 21 22 23 25 26 27 31 33 34

Strong Process Theory: An Ontology for Institutions . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Key Concepts from Whitehead’s “Process and Reality” . . . . . . . 4.1.1 The Basic Elements of Whitehead’s System . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.2 Enduring Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

43 43 45 47

. . . .

36 40 41

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Contents

4.1.3 Causality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.4 Ensuring Continuity in Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 From Whitehead to Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 How Can Institutions Be Processual Orderings? . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Are Institutions Real or Nominal? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3 How Do Agency and Wirksamkeit Differ? . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.4 Emergence from a Process Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

48 49 50 50 53 53 54 54

5

Presencing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Perception as Presencing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Presencing as “Seeing as” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.1 A Note on “Experience” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 Presencing in Phenomenological Philosophy . . . . . . . . . 5.2.3 The Common Element . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Multiplicity in Unity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Holism and Increase in Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

57 57 59 59 60 61 62 63 65 66

6

Institutions as Dynamic Forms of Aesthetic-Affective Experience . . 6.1 Enter Intensity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Insights from Neurobiology: Feelings and Evaluations . . . . . . . 6.3 Insights from the Philosophy of Mind: Feelings, Intensities and Dynamic Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 Critical Pitch and Vagueness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 Feelings as Expressions: An Invitation from the Arts . . . 6.4 Harmony and Rhythm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.1 The Generative Function: Harmony and Rhythm as Impressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.2 Harmony and Rhythm as Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.3 Dynamic Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Institutions as Impressions and Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5.1 Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5.2 Feelings and Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.6 Experiencing Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.6.1 Templar Values and Emotions: An Illustration . . . . . . . . 6.6.2 Institutional Entrepreneurship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . .

69 69 71

. . . .

74 74 76 79

. . . . . . . . . .

81 82 83 84 85 92 95 97 102 103

Methodological Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 How to Study Emergence from an Aesthetic-Affective Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Goethe’s Method of Studying Ideas as Dynamic Forms . . . . . . . . 7.2.1 Ideas as Dynamic Essences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.2 Delicate Empirics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

109

7

109 110 111 113

Contents

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7.3

Shotter’s Method of Studying a Living Human World . . . . . . . . . 7.3.1 Relationally-Responsive Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.2 Withness-Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Hennion’s Method of Studying Taste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.1 Taste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.2 Studying Taste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 The Study of Institutions from an Aesthetic-Affective Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5.1 Common Points of Departure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5.2 Studying Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

118 118 119 121 121 123

Contributions and Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 My Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Connections to Recent Discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.1 Sensemaking and Multimodality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.2 Institutional Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.3 Macro and Micro Foundations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.4 Phenomenology and Symbolic Interactionism . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

135 135 136 137 138 140 141 144

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

147

8

124 124 126 131

About the Author

Dr. rer. pol. habil. Elke Weik is Associate Professor at the Department of Business and Management of the University of Southern Denmark. She is rather selfconscious of her lifelong professional affiliation with academic management departments (that by cruel fate always were turned into business schools at some point in time), as she has noticed that most lay people mentally take a step back when she mentions it and get a “oh, one of those” look on their face. Clearly, organizational restructuring and hapless consultants have left a scar on the collective psyche. Therefore she prefers to self-identify as organizational sociologist or even organizational philosopher, which leaves people baffled rather than wary. This labelling is facilitated by the fact that her research does in fact lie at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, management and whatever is organised. Institutions are one of those sweet spots where it all comes together. In consequence, they have taken pride of place in her research for more than a decade. She has (also) written about philosophers like Leibniz, Whitehead and Husserl, sociologists like Bourdieu and Weber, the wine market, birth practices, the history of the university and teflon academics. This goes to show that she loves research, as long as it is not on the same topic for too long or on something that battalions of scholars have already written about. She has also ticked the boxes publishing in The Academy of Management Review, Organization, The Sociological Review and Management Learning, among others.

xiii

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3

Developments of institutional arrangements .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . The bison of Altamira . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mona Lisa by da Vinci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Left half of the portrait of the Dukes of Urbino by Piero . . . . . . . . . . . .

52 77 78 78

xv

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 6.1 Table 6.2

Causality-based and non-causality-based systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concepts of war and the social category of miles—read as rainbow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Logic-based and value-based systems . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . .. . . .. . Differences between emotions and feelings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Levels of homeostatic regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27 29 31 72 72

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Chapter 1

Introduction

How can we conceptualise the emergence of institutions? How can we study this emergence? These are questions that have fascinated me for quite some time. Institutions, to me, say something essential about human life and human beings. They are woven deep into the fabric of social life and into the understanding of ourselves. They can be found in all cultures at all times; one of the rare regularities of social life. And yet, at the same time they present an inconceivable variation and a hard to grasp quality that turn any scholarly engagement with them into a challenge. Scholars often refer to institutional beginnings as the “emergence” of the institution. Although they rarely spend time on defining the term, it is an interesting choice for they could alternatively have talked about the “creation”, “design”, “establishment” or “foundation” of an institution. In contrast, “emergence” suggests a process that is, at least in parts, removed from the intention and efforts of human actors. It is also a process whose initial stages have gone unnoticed up to the point when the institution manifests itself. Most explicitly, Ahrne et al. (2016) talk about emergence as a distinctive feature of institutions. They juxtapose it to an organisation’s foundation by the decision of its founders. In a similar vein, Czarniawska (2009, p. 424) formulates that human actors are able to institute but not institutionalise, implying that institutional entrepreneurs can attempt to promote or block the emergence of certain institutions, but that the outcome lies beyond their sphere of influence. Czarniawska’s tenet, in turn, is an echo of Jepperson’s often-quoted distinction that “one enacts institutions; one takes action by departing from them, not by participating in them” (Jepperson 1991, p. 145). Earlier in the article, Jepperson defines: Institutions are those social patterns that, when chronically reproduced, owe their survival to relatively self-activating social processes. Their persistence is not dependent, notably, upon recurrent collective mobilization, mobilization repetitively reengineered and reactivated in order to secure the reproduction of a pattern. That is, institutions are not reproduced by ‘action,’ in this strict sense of collective intervention in a social convention (Jepperson 1991, p. 145).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Weik, The Emergence of Institutions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89895-3_1

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1 Introduction

In the same way as Jepperson refers to “self-activating” processes here, Douglas talks about “self-policing” conventions (Douglas 1986, p. 46), and Phillips et al. of “self-regulating” mechanisms (Phillips et al. 2004, p. 637). As I have argued elsewhere (Weik 2015), the prefix “self” in each case refers to an autopoietic process that is not powered by the intentions and designs of human actors.1 In contrast to this understanding of institutions, the turn towards institutionalist agency (Hwang and Colyvas 2011), proposed as early as 1988 (DiMaggio 1988) but in full swing since the new millennium (see, for example, the literature on institutional entrepreneurship), has introduced a new understanding of institutions as cognitive sensemaking frameworks. As agents are conceptualised as cognitive entities that act strategically to improve their subject positions in the field (for example, Battilana 2006) or as creatures seeking to make sense of their lifeworlds (among others, Hallett and Ventresca 2006; Zilber 2008), institutions withdraw into the background to provide the foils against which these actors reflect (Weber and Glynn 2006). Worse for my project, grounding social activity predominantly on purposive behaviour makes it difficult to account for emergence at all, as Meyer et al. (1987) argue. Thus, for example, Lawrence, et al. define institutions as “those (more or less) enduring elements of social life that affect the behavior and beliefs of individuals and collective actors by providing templates for action, cognition, and emotion, nonconformity with which is associated with some kind of costs” (Lawrence et al., quoted in Hwang and Colyvas 2011, p. 64). Suddaby and Greenwood (2009, p. 176), however, keep the prefix even in this understanding when they define institutions as “more or less taken for granted repetitive social behaviour that is underpinned by normative systems and cognitive understandings that give meaning to social exchange and thus enable self reproducing social order”. I will discuss this new understanding of institutions in more depth in Chap. 3. Let me at this time just note that the emphasis in the understanding of institutions has shifted from a—not well understood—autopoietic process to an actor-centred process, which is better understood but, in my view, misses important aspects of reality. Current (neo-)institutionalist thinking has a problem with emergence exactly because, I would argue, it is so focused on the cognitive prowess of human agents (as they make sense, pursue their interests, mobilise, negotiate etc.) that it cannot conceive of a social process outside of human construction. To the extent that institutions become mere “projects” of institutional entrepreneurs (Colomy 1998), we lose sight of them as phenomena in their own right. This removes the chance of understanding non-actorial processes like emergence. Let me give a few examples for this actor-centeredness from the literature on institutional emergence. Starting from Jepperson’s above definition, Lawrence et al. (2002) show how the collaboration of various actors produces what they call protoinstitutions. These proto-institutions can then become institutions if they diffuse

1

The definitions of Czarniawska, Jepperson and Douglas have the existing, rather than the emerging, institution in mind, but I would argue that the self-dynamics they propose finds its first expression in the emergence of institutions.

1 Introduction

3

sufficiently through adoption by other organisations. The authors argue that diffusion is more likely if there is a high involvement of the various participants—which facilitates knowledge transmission between the partners, and high embeddedness of the collaboration in broader interorganisational relations, facilitating the communication between various organisations. These two dimensions paint a picture of a proto-institution diffusing because other organisational actors learn of it, find it useful and adopt it. The authors, however, qualify this straightforward reasoning by using probability terms like “can” and “may” when linking embeddedness/ involvement and diffusion in a causal2 manner. They also, quite carefully, talk about diffusion being “associated” with high embeddedness or involvement. While part of this caution may spring from a reluctance to generalise from seven cases, I would argue that the authors recognise that there is also an element of indeterminism in the transition from proto-institutions to institutions. In other words, even if there is high involvement and embeddedness, the institution may not take off, or conversely, even if there is low involvement and embeddedness, an institution may emerge. In a more instrumental way, Maguire and Hardy (2006) show how actors use discourses as raw materials to fix, shape and justify global institutional arrangements that suit their interests. Texts produced by actors challenge, reconcile and invoke other discourses. This results in new discourses that in turn facilitate different practices, objects and subject positions, which together form a new institution. While the description is accurate with regard to the new institution chosen by the authors, it would be a big step to assume that this mechanism works universally and in a deterministic way; a step that the authors rightly refrain from taking. Guérard et al. (2013) apply a similarly political framework in which institutionalisation is understood as the temporary settlement of political conflicts. The authors show how actors—incumbents and activists—struggle over cultural frames of interpretation in order to pursue their interests. Both groups of actors need to diagnose existing problems, prognosticate solutions and motivate others to support their cause. Since these interests share little common ideological ground, a “proper” negotiated consensus cannot be established. Instead, the actors reach temporary and locally limited agreements on which they build their next move. While these insights into the beginnings of institutions are very helpful, they remain quiet with regard to events outside the agents’ control. Pursuit of interests through strategic action and power politics, learning and communication, all are important explanatory factors, but they cannot say much about the contingency involved in institutional emergence. In other words, they cannot explain the “notyets, the didn’t quite-make-its, the not quite respectable, the unremarked and the openly ‘anti’ goings-on” (Hughes 1971, p. 53) that hover around institutional emergence.

I use the term “causal” as an overarching term to denote physical (efficient) causality as well as finality or teleology. If I talk about the kind of causality that people normally associate with the word, I use “physical causality”.

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Not only is there a gap in the description of the process of institutional emergence, but the authors also fail to explain why institutional emergence is something that becomes only visible in the rear view mirror, so to speak, something that can only be described ex post facto. It is this particular—and endlessly fascinating—feature of institutions that this book is concerned with. Gaps and voids in the explanation of emergence are not limited to neo-institutionalist sociology. In all disciplines that use the term, there is something inexplicable about emergence. In sociology, the term refers to the fact that social groups have properties that cannot be found in the individuals that make up those groups. Methodological individualists deny emergence claiming that these properties can be reduced to the properties of the individuals and their relationships with one another. A recent, powerful example of this is White’s network theory (White 2008). Methodological collectivists accept emergence as an irreducible phenomenon, but may differ in whether they think the emergent properties are real and can produce causal effects autonomously (Sociological Realism) or are just analytic properties (Individual Realism) (Sawyer 2001). As I will explain in more depth in Chap. 3, my own stance is methodological collectivist and sociological realist, although I do not share the philosophical assumptions that Bhaskar’s Critical Realism (Bhaskar 1975) is based on. Instead, I draw on the phenomenological tradition to make my case.3 In employing phenomenology to solve the problem of institutional emergence, I take my cue from several “perennial” problems in academia that have been resolved once a second-level change, or change of paradigm, took place. Different paradigms, as Burrell and Morgan (1993, p. 24) remind us, identify quite separate social realities. If one element of reality cannot be discussed meaningfully within one paradigm, it may hence be a good idea to re-examine it in a different paradigm.4 Phenomenology, in its sociological and even more its philosophical versions, is, as Suddaby and Greenwood (2009) have observed correctly, not very popular in organisational institutionalism and at best something that is paid lip-service to (see also Creed et al. 2014). This is largely due to a dominance of quantitative methods, to which phenomenology does not lend itself, but also a problem-driven (rather than theory-driven) approach echoing the demands of a business school constituency (Weik 2020). I therefore suggest changing the frame of reference from a positivist-empirical, weak-process conception of institutions, in which human actors are responsible for institutionalisation and de-institutionalisation, to a phenomenological frame of reference in which institutions presence. Presencing is a specific manner of emergence. I will say more about this concept in a moment; let me just get the old stuff out of the way. What do I mean by “positivist-empirical”? I refer to the set of assumptions

3

I will specify authors and works as I proceed. I am well aware that, as Burrell and Morgan also point out, a change of paradigm requires a change of faith for a scholar. I hope I can provide some good reasons for such a big step.

4

1 Introduction

5

implying that central elements of an institution can be seen (less frequently: heard), recorded and, very often, counted. The latter also suggests that elements, or occurrences of elements, are similar enough to be aggregated through quantitative methods of analysis. The “seeing” denotes a kind of observation that is detached from the object of study and does not interfere with its behaviour. Nor does, conversely, the object affect the observer. Suddaby and colleagues have pointed out that this assumption leads to an overproportionate amount of research being conducted on the effects, rather than the causes, of institutions (Suddaby and Greenwood 2009); being problem-driven rather than theory-driven (Suddaby and Greenwood 2009); being essentialist (Suddaby et al. 2010) and cognitively orientated (Suddaby 2010). What do I mean by “weak-process conception”? With this distinction, I refer to Chia and Langley’s (2004) typology of “weak” and “strong” process approaches. Weak process theory takes processes to be important but ultimately reducible to the intervention of “things”, for example institutional maintenance as a process produced by the intervention of actors (“things”). Strong process theory, in contrast, presupposes that everything is ultimately, and ontologically, reducible to processes. Actors are therefore an effect rather than a cause of processes (Weik 2019). I will say more about strong process theory in Chap. 4. As far as institutionalist theory is concerned, Scott (2010) reflects on a trend towards process approaches (as opposed to structural accounts) since the adoption of Giddens’ structuration theory into the theoretical template set. With them, he argues, comes a focus on institutional emergence and change as well as on sequences of events or histories. Rather than having an objection to these foci, I want to push them further by grounding them in a proper process ontology, and thus into strong process theory. More on that in Chap. 4. Generally speaking, however, neo-institutional accounts have mostly employed the weak-process conception. In their overview chapter, Surachaikulwattana and Phillips (2017, p. 372) show that although “institutional theory is, and always has been, a process theory”, this rests more on the idea of an institution (as state or thing) undergoing changes due to the intervention of human actors. I will discuss in Chap. 4 what a strong process conception of institutions could look like. What do I mean by human actors being responsible for institutional processes? The “agentic turn” (Hwang and Colyvas 2011, p. 62) in organisational institutionalism has brought a focus on institutional entrepreneurs and other actors doing institutional work. Strang and Sine (2002) based on Berger and Luckmann (1967), juxtapose this line of research to an earlier “naturalistic” line in which institutionalisation is portrayed as a natural and undirected process of sedimentation and objectification lasting generations. It seems that the agentic turn went partly hand in hand with the growing process orientation, as structuration models were adopted to explain how actors were enabled/constrained by structures while at the same time perpetuating or changing them. Other theoretical templates, like Bourdieu’s or Schatzki’s (for an overview of their use in neo-institutionalism, see Smets et al. 2017), point to a similar action-structure duality. As a consequence, human beings have become the essential carriers and drivers of institutional

6

1 Introduction

processes. From the easily visible social movements, professions and institutional entrepreneurs to more subtle forms of agential intervention like networks or inhabitants of inhabited institutions, it seems inconceivable that institutions can do anything without actors, or more precisely, can be active or evolve in their own right. While this may align with an intuitive understanding of the social world, it is not strong process theory. If processes are an ontological first, then actors are outcomes of processes, not their drivers. This does not apply to all processes— riding a bike is still a thoroughly human achievement—but there are, must be, processes that proceed without the intervention of actors. My argument is that institutions are partly made up of such processes and that they, in consequence, in parts emerge and develop without human actors playing a role. The frame of reference for questions in the league of emergence has traditionally been the philosophical sub-discipline of ontology, or in our case, the philosophy of social sciences.5 My study is therefore a study in the ontology of institutions. Basing my argument on a strong process theory, I will argue, first, that presencing is a concept that can explain the emergence of institutions, and will explore, second, how institutions must be (ontologically speaking) in order to presence. The second question probably deserves some more explanation, especially for those not so well-versed in the ethnomethods of ontology. The classic approach to ontology is to think about what kinds of entities there are, how they differ and how they relate. The next step is then to think, in terms of epistemology, how we can or cannot know about them based on the qualities we have ascribed to them in the first step. If we define, for example, social structures as real but intangible, we need to explain how we can perceive them at all, and one possible explanation would be to infer them from their surface manifestations. What I propose for this book is the reversal of this argument. If we know about institutions through their presencing (the epistemological issue), which ontological qualities must they have in order to be able to presence? Conceptualising the emergence of institutions as presencing allows us to understand institutions as comparatively independent processes with their own dynamic. This own dynamic allows them to be self-organising and self-perpetuating. The qualifier “comparatively” points to the fact that human agency is not completely out of the picture. Human actors can intervene, but they do not have to, nor are their interventions necessarily successful. More importantly, enough has been said about their adventures elsewhere, so they will not play a big part in this book.

5

A sub-discipline that cannot exactly be described as thriving, some excellent recent discussions notwithstanding. See for example Gehman (2021); Meyer (2008) or Mutch (2020).

References

7

References Ahrne, Göran, Brunsson, Nils and Seidl, David. Resurrecting organization by going beyond organizations. European Management Journal. 34(2), 2016. Battilana, Julie. Agency and Institutions: The Enabling Role of Individuals' Social Position. Organization. 13(5), 2006. Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas. The Social Construction of Reality. 1967. Anchor Books. Bhaskar, Roy. A Realist Theory of Science. 1975. Leeds Books. Burrell, Gibson and Morgan, Gareth. Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. 1993. Arena. Chia, R and Langley, A. The first organization studies summer workshop: Theorizing process in organizational research (call for papers). Organization Studies. 25(8), 2004. Colomy, Paul. Neofunctionalism and Neoinstitutionalism: Human Interest and Agency in Institutional Change. Sociological Forum. 13(2), 1998. Creed, WE Douglas, Hudson, Bryant Ashley, Okhuysen, Gerardo A and Smith-Crowe, Kristin. Swimming in a sea of shame: incorporating emotion into explanations of institutional reproduction and change. Academy of Management Review. 39(3), 2014. Czarniawska, Barbara. Emerging Institutions: Pyramids or Anthills? Organization Studies. 30(4), 2009. DiMaggio, Paul. Interest and Agency in Institutional Theory. L. Zucker (Eds.): Instititutional Patterns and Organizations. 1988. Ballinger Publishing Company. Douglas, Mary. How Institutions Think. 1986. Syracuse University Press. Gehman, Joel. Revisiting the foundations of institutional analysis: A phenomenological perspective. (Eds.): Macrofoundations: Exploring the institutionally situated nature of activity. 2021. Emerald Publishing Limited. Guérard, Stéphane, Bode, Christoph and Gustafsson, Robin. Turning point mechanisms in a dualistic process model of institutional emergence: The case of the diesel particulate filter in Germany. Organization Studies. 34(5-6), 2013. Hallett, Tim and Ventresca, Marc. Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and Organizational Forms in Gouldner's Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory & Society. 35(2), 2006. Hughes, Everett Cherrington. The sociological eye: Selected papers. 1971. Transaction publishers. Hwang, Hokyu and Colyvas, Jeannette A. Problematizing actors and institutions in institutional work. Journal of Management Inquiry. 20(1), 2011. Jepperson, Ronald. Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism. P. DiMaggio and W. Powell (Eds.): The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. 1991. University of Chicago Press. Lawrence, Thomas B, Hardy, Cynthia and Phillips, Nelson. Institutional effects of interorganizational collaboration: The emergence of proto-institutions. Academy of Management Journal. 45(1), 2002. Maguire, Steve and Hardy, Cynthia. The emergence of new global institutions: A discursive perspective. Organization Studies. 27(1), 2006. Meyer, John, Boli, John and Thomas, George. Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account. G. Thomas, J. Meyer, F. O. Ramirez and J. Boli (Eds.): Institutional Structure. 1987. Sage. Meyer, Renate. New Sociology of Knowledge: Historical Legacy and Contributions to Current Debates in Institutional Research. R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, R. Suddaby and K. Sahlin (Eds.): The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. 2008. Sage. Mutch, Alistair. Institutional logics as a contribution to social ontology. Journal of Critical Realism. 19(5), 2020. Phillips, Nelson, Lawrence, Thomas and Hardy, Cynthia. Discourse and Institutions. Academy of Management Review. 29(4), 2004. Sawyer, Keith. Emergence in Sociology. American Journal of Sociology. 107(3), 2001.

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Scott, W. Richard. Reflections: The Past and Future of Research on Institutions and Institutional Change. Journal of Change Management. 10(1), 2010. Smets, Michael, Aristidou, Angela and Whittington, Richard. Towards a practice-driven institutionalism. The Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism. 2017. Strang, David and Sine, Wesley D. Interorganizational institutions. J. Baum (Eds.): Companion to organizations. 2002. Blackwell. Suddaby, Roy and Greenwood, Royston. Methodological Issues in Researching Institutional Change. D. Buchanan and A. Bryman (Eds.): The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods. 2009. Sage. Suddaby, Roy. Editor's Comments: Construct Clarity in Theories of Management and Organization. The Academy of Management Review. 35(3), 2010. Suddaby, Roy, Elsbach, Kimberly D, Greenwood, Royston, Meyer, John W and Zilber, Tammar B. Organizations and their institutional environments—Bringing meaning, values, and culture back in: Introduction to the special research forum. Academy of Management Journal. 53(6), 2010. Surachaikulwattana, Panita and Phillips, Nelson. Institutions as process. A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds.): The Sage handbook of process organization studies. 2017. Sage. Weber, Klaus and Glynn, Mary Ann. Making Sense with Institutions: Context, Thought and Action in Karl Weick's Theory. Organization Studies. 27(11), 2006. Weik, Elke. A Return to the Enduring Features of Institutions: A Process Ontology of Reproduction and Endurance. Philosophy of the Social Sciences. 45(3), 2015. Weik, Elke. Understanding Institutional Endurance: The Role of Dynamic Form, Harmony and Rhythm in Institutions. Academy of Management Review. 44(2), 2019. Weik, Elke. Was ist eine Institution?: Der organisationale Institutionenbegriff zwischen Pornographie und Fußball. R. Hasse and A. Krüger (Eds.): Neo-Institutionalismus: Kritik und Weiterentwicklung eines sozialwissenschaftlichen Paradigmas. 2020. Transcript Verlag. White, Harrison C. Identity and control: How social formations emerge. 2008. Princeton university press. Zilber, Tammar. The Work of Meanings in Institutional Processes and Thinking. R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, R. Suddaby and K. Sahlin (Eds.): The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. 2008. Sage.

Chapter 2

The Case Study: Military Monasticism and the Order of the Knights Templar

Abstract This chapter will present the case of the founding of the Order of the Knights Templar, and with it, the emergence of military monasticism as an institution in Christianity. I will show how ideas, songs and feelings propel events independently of actors’ plans and strategies. Already constituted ideas, values, emotions, objects and persons come together and develop new shapes and functions so that they form a recognisable new whole. This new whole carries with it conflicts and contradictions, potentials and fantasies, as it oscillates in a rainbow of ideas.

2.1

The Historical Case

As we have seen in the little vignette about Heinrich I, we like to tell stories about the emergence of institutions. The narrative format allows us, even invites us, to do the necessary sleights of hand that make our ignorance regarding the emergence more bearable by framing events in terms of actors, motives, actions and consequences. As I have explained in the introduction, I do not share the view that emergence is brought about by human actors, and with that I stand in a long line of authors addressing emergence as a somewhat mysterious, certainly not straightforward and very contingent process. What I want to do in this chapter is to examine a somewhat longer and more complex story about the emergence of an institution. I will narrate—for I would not know how else to convey this story—the emergence of an institution that I call “military monasticism”, embodied in the figure of the “monk of war” (Seward 2000). My narration will, however, point to the sleights of hand involved and will start the discussion from there. I limit the story to the emergence of military monasticism in Christianity, and to its most well-known organisation, the Order of the Knights Templar. It will be the empirical case that I will refer back to throughout the book in order to illustrate the points I make. The case for historical analysis in organisation theory has been made by a good number of authors such as Kieser (1994), Stager Jacques (2006), Ventresca and Mohr (2002), as well as Clark and Rowlinson (2004), Rowlinson (2005) or © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Weik, The Emergence of Institutions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89895-3_2

9

10

2 The Case Study: Military Monasticism and the Order of the Knights Templar

Maclean et al. (2016). Mutch (2018) as well as Suddaby et al. (2013) have added their voices for organisational institutionalism. More broadly, Clemens (2007), Sewell (2005) and Elias (1997) have made the argument for social theory and sociology. I do not want to rehearse their good reasons here. Suffice it to say that for the study of institutions as processes that are defined as enduring over a long stretch of time, it seems inconceivable to me not to do a historical analysis. Why military monasticism and the Knights Templar? Military monasticism in Christianity, first of all, fascinates me because it is such an obviously contradictory institution. How can Christianity, a religion based on ideas of peace and forgiveness, but also, and even more importantly, a missionary religion, develop an institution that is designed to kill unbelievers? Second, and methodologically speaking, this foundational contradiction also makes it easier to break the narrative up, to show that this was not, cannot have been, a process in which rational design, or more modestly, reason, played a major role. It is, finally, an institution that is, for all practical purposes, no more. While some of the military orders are still existent,1 the Catholic Church has given up the idea of sending them to wage war against infidels and heretics. This allows me to see the process in its fully developed form. As to the Knights Templar (or Templars, as I will call them from now on), what is not to like about knights in shining armour? I have chosen the case of the order mainly because many of us have feelings towards them. Some may fondly remember the glamourous knights, white mantles flowing over their horses’ backs, others (or the same people) may take them as symbols of European/Christian aggression and bloodshed. Younger people may think of them as characters in Assassin’s Creed, and there is also a sizeable right-wing virtual community using them as a rallying call to imagine a new religious war against Muslims. This fits because with the Templars everything has always been writ large. The drama, the bloodshed, the zeal involved in the rise and fall of the order should make it easier to get my points across regarding the central role of feelings and emotions in the emergence of an institution. It may also be instructive that the order at its height was, in terms of performance, assets, profit and power, one of most successful organisations ever to (dis-)grace our world.2 Most of the following narrative is dedicated to events happening before the Templar Order was constituted in 1118. Starting around 950, I trace how the concept

1

There are currently a number of orders claiming succession of Templar Order, for example the Ordo Militiae Christi Templi Hierosolymitani (www.tempelritterorden.de). None of them is approved by the Vatican. I will ignore them for the current analysis. 2 At the height of its power, the Templar Order owned 8700 castles and manor houses. Its credit rating was in a class of its own, with church institutions in France and Spain often only lending to the crown if the Templars secured the loan (Read 2001, p. 183). As part of its own financial transactions, the order provided individual loans as large as 28,000 livres tournois (c. €10 million) to King Edward I of England and 155,000 l.t. (c. €60 m) to Pope Martin IV. Edward paid c. €2 million in fees and interest for this two-year loan (Barber 1994, p. 276). In comparison, the Peter’s Pence, i.e. the annual tax paid by English dioceses to Rome, amounted to less than €100,000 annually (Lunt 1939).

2.2 What Is a Miles? A Chronology

11

of holy war became thinkable in Christianity and how it culminated in the First Crusade of 1096–1099. My argument is that pivotal trajectories and turns in this narrative were not controlled by human actors, either because they constituted unintended consequences of their actions or because they happened despite what human actors were planning. Quite often, they happened because there was a public mood in favour of them. Furthermore, even in cases where things were going as planned, it seems sometimes more plausible to assume that public mood or coincidence were the causes rather than the actors’ power and control. I use the term “public mood” to denote an often vague, sometimes tangible, certainly dispersed, and often highly emotional state of public discourse.

2.2

What Is a Miles? A Chronology3

The emergence of military monasticism is closely linked to the surfacing and formulation of the idea of holy war and, hence, of a holy warrior. Around 950, two social categories relating to warfare existed in the Occident.4 One was the secular miles5 waging war as we know it, the other the miles Christi, i.e. the monk, waging war against Evil in all its forms of temptation, sin and demons. His weapons were prayer, contemplation, constant vigilance and abstention from worldly luxury. By 1130, a third category had emerged. It was also called “miles Christi” (or, more rarely, “miles novus”) but characterised a new class of monks allowed to carry weapons and engage in worldly fights. This is their story. As stories go, they have human beings as grammatical subjects. A careful reading should, however, show that these human beings are not always the agents whose intentions move processes forward. The tenth century contempt for the secular miles is eloquently described 200 years later by Bernard of Clairvaux (1977, chapter 2): What, then is the end or fruit of this worldly knighthood, or rather knavery, as I should call it? What if not the mortal sin of the victor and the eternal death of the vanquished? [. . .] What then, O knights, is this monstrous error and what this unbearable urge which bids you fight with such pomp and labour, and all to no purpose except death and sin? You cover your

3 Unless otherwise referenced, my account follows Erdmann’s (1955) seminal study on the development of the idea of the crusade. Despite the fact that the book was written in 1935 it is still regarded as the most comprehensive work on the topic (Barber 1994; Constable 1998). 4 Use the term “Occident” (rather than “West” or “Europe”) to describe the cultural tradition spanning from late Antiquity to today and centring on North, West and Middle Europe. 5 After some consideration I have decided to retain the Latin term “miles” (pl. milites) as it occurs in the discussions of the time. The term can be translated as “soldier”, “knight” or “warrior” but each of these carries certain era-specific connotations that I want to avoid. The fighting men of the 10th century were no longer tribal warriors but not yet chivalrous knights, nor were they soldiers in the contemporary understanding of the term.

12

2 The Case Study: Military Monasticism and the Order of the Knights Templar horses with silk, and plume your armour with I know not what sort of rags; you paint your shields and your saddles; you adorn your bits and spurs with gold and silver and precious stones, and then in all this glory you rush to your ruin with fearful wrath and fearless folly. [. . .] Above all, there is that terrible insecurity of conscience, in spite of all your armour, since you have dared to undertake such a dangerous business on such slight and frivolous grounds. What else is the cause of wars and the root of disputes among you, except unreasonable flashes of anger, the thirst for empty glory, or the hankering after some earthly possessions? It certainly is not safe to kill or to be killed for such causes as these.

The secular milites, in other words, were prevented from entering in the grace of God because their “professional life” was based on vices (greed, anger, vanity) and, much like that of the henchman, brought them in contact with soiled goods: blood, sweat and tears. In a society obsessed with divine protection and forgiveness, this was a serious obstacle to upward mobility or even general social acceptance. This conception stood in some tension to a lingering Germanic heroic ideal popular among the lower classes (Curtius 1984, p. 520f.). Unfortunately for the Christian proselytisers, the Germanic codex of honour was centred on battle and warfare. Fighting was an end in itself. To compete and best an opponent in a fight was motivation enough to engage in it, even if there were no spoils, no need for protection or any other benefits. This, obviously, did not sit well with the new spiritual regime, and over time a pragmatic solution emerged that attributed moral responsibility to the leader (the aristocracy being the most thoroughly Christianised class), while the normal warrior kept his honour by following his chief as he had done for centuries. This worked fine as long as the Germanic ideals were still present among the pagans in the lifeworld of the European lower classes, i.e. till the tenth century. In the eleventh century, after a century of almost constant noble feuding, the common folk as well as the clergy were heartily sick of war. In the 1030s, peace movements were established that sought to bring the warring parties to heel. They mostly consisted of local townsfolk under the leadership of the local priest. As life is never simple, however, these movements soon found that they had to take up arms in order to achieve their goal, so they revised their negative evaluation of warfare to say that warfare could be justified if it was defensive and served to protect oneself or to bring peace. The Church found this tenet quite easy to embrace for the idea had been around for a while and could now resurface. St. Augustine had already written about “just war” (bellum iustum) as a legitimate Christian endeavour in the fourth century. To Augustine, a war was just if it was defensive. The discussion in the eleventh century, however, soon produced three different stances. The first rejected the tenet altogether on the basis that Christ’s gospel was one of peace. Killing in war was murder and should incur the same Church punishments. The second embraced the tenet in the form suggested by the peace movements. The third also adopted it, but in a modified form which specified that a war could not be just if it was based on the protection of individuals, but rather only if it served to protect Christ in the form of His Church, His house, etc. So now a just war that would not incur the wrath of the Church/God was possible. It was also possible for clergymen to lead people into such a war,

2.3 Ideas Encounter Other Ideas

13

although they personally were still not allowed to carry weapons. While the three options were certainly proposed by a human speaker at some time, they needed to reflect the feelings of more than one person in order to be understood and taken up. These feelings were feelings developed in the eleventh century. The three positions could be held and discussed because people were ready for them.

2.3

Ideas Encounter Other Ideas

With this, the basic requirement for a Christian warrior was in place. Two historical contingencies would bring further impulses for growth. The first was that the monasteries in France initiated and led a reform of monastic life that found a remarkable echo across Europe. They sought to eradicate the sloth, luxury and corruption that had evolved in many monasteries and that angered a lot of people by returning to strict rules and asceticism. For our purposes, the Cluniac reform of the tenth and the Cistercian reform of the early twelfth century are the most relevant. The monks’ zeal to re-establish the original monastic virtues was met with universal applause. When an intelligent, charismatic and eloquent young man took over as Abbot of Clairvaux in 1115, the Cistercian order expanded rapidly and the young abbot Bernard soon had the world at his feet. Clanchy (1997, p. 2) calls him “the most powerful voice in Christendom” indicating that he, like any good orator, understood the vibes of his audience. I will come back to Bernard in a moment. The second string of events played out in the Lateran.6 Impressed by the monastic reforms, Pope Leo IX (1049–1054) set out to reform the Church as a whole. The reform went hand in hand with an increase of papal power and authority not seen before in Europe. For the first time, Leo and his successors had the power to enforce the so-called “Donation of Constantine”, a document by the Roman Emperor Constantine granting the Pope overlordship over the Western half of the Roman Empire, supremacy over all Christian churches in the world, a status equal to emperors as well as territories in Italy.7 As a consequence, Leo and his successors were involved in many wars, most prominently with the Normans of Southern Italy and Henry IV, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. This, in turn, provoked a lot of thinking and re-thinking concerning the concepts of a just war. It, moreover, created a need for the Pope to recruit secular milites. Two of Leo’s early moves are highly relevant as far as the concept of just war is concerned, albeit in a different way than Leo imagined. The first occurs when the citizens of Rome ask him to support their fight against the counts of Tusculum. Leo refuses, unless the war justifies the criteria of a just war in the third interpretation, i.e. as a defence of Christ. To solve the problem, he has a synod declare the Tusculans heretics, then joins the war. The second occurs 4 years later when Leo

6 7

The Lateran was the seat of the pope before the Church of St. Peter was built. That the document was forged was not known before 1440.

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2 The Case Study: Military Monasticism and the Order of the Knights Templar

seeks to expel the Normans from Italian soil. Since he only receives a few knights from the German Emperor in support of the venture, Leo recruits a large number of Italians by promising indulgence and no punishment for crimes committed. This is the first papal army, recruited through religious rewards, marching under a banner blessed by the Pope. Leo’s justification for the war is still defence, in this case against the Norman “robbers” that plunder churches and oppress and kill innocent Christians “in pagan godlessness”. His aim is to “liberate Christendom”—a phrase that will resurface in the call to the First Crusade. None of this, however, finds unanimous applause. There are many voices that do not follow Leo’s reinterpretation of the just war. It is emotions and pragmatics rather than theoretical arguments that move the conceptual development forward. Leo’s papal army is a tangible thing. It has a Holy Banner, the Banner of St. Peter, implying that the apostle fights on its side. It has a cult of martyrs with all its tangible trappings, ceremonies and emotional appeal. More than anything else, it has a promise: the promise of forgiveness of sins and, in the case of the fallen, direct access to heaven. In the mind of its followers, we may safely assume, any war it fights is just. Within the next 10 years, the Banner of St. Peter starts to travel: one such banner goes to Spain for the fight against the Moors at Barbastro (1064), and one probably to Normandy for the fight against the English in 1066.8 Leo’s fifth successor, Gregory VII (1073–1085), spends much of his papacy on a quarrel with the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV (1056–1105), over questions of authority and supremacy. In 1076, the quarrel culminates in Henry declaring Gregory deposed and (with the help of the German and Italian episcopate) excommunicated. A few months later, Gregory retaliates in the same manner. Again, the situation produces a couple of innovations. Not only does a pope, for the first time, feel authorised to dethrone a secular ruler. To conduct war against the Emperor, Gregory, moreover, recruits volunteers, pays mercenaries, establishes feudal bonds to get vassals and asks bishops to lend him troops. In his books, just war, now called “Christ’s war” (bellum Christi), is war for the Church, and it is by necessity a war that is fought in the world, not in the monastery. Its soldiers are called “milites Christi”. Interestingly, Gregory fails. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that he failed to emotionally recruit the largest reservoir of military manpower: the milites themselves. His army falls apart. His escalation against Henry provokes a backlash of opinion. Everybody who sides with the Emperor—and there are many—attacks the papacy and Gregor’s interpretation of a just war. Most prominently, Clement III, Antipope by the grace of Henry, stresses that Christians must never engage in war, even if they suffer injustice, and that defence is a matter for the secular powers alone. There are also those who defend Gregory. As a consequence, all concepts, from absolute peace to war for the Church, can resurface. This is therefore no linear, logical story of how an idea evolves but a toing and froing of interests and desires.

8

King Harold had apparently been excommunicated for swearing a false oath.

2.4 Holy War

15

The logic of the categories and arguments remains the same as it had been in the tenth century, but the world had moved on. The people’s imagination is now caught by warrior saints like Santiago, Saint George or Saint Martin, who are invoked as active supporters in war. These men, in contrast to earlier saints, are saints because of their martial deeds, not in spite of them. The nascent vernacular literature is the epos celebrating the idea that Christian armies win because their cause is just (e.g. Song of Roland). In terms of manpower, the societal transformation produces warriors free of tribal bonds and obligations that can be hired as professional mercenaries. At the same time, those that serve as vassal knights are still looking for their place in Christian society and the Kingdom of Heaven. In 1094, Ivo of Chartres suggests the slightly illogical but popular notion that being a miles in a just war is a morally acceptable profession. A just war is a war led against heretics or in defence of one’s country. Killing a man in war, however, is a crime that requires penitence. About the same time, Bonizo of Sutri formulates an ethical codex for Christian knights that requires them, among others things, not to aim for spoils, to protect the poor, widows and orphans, and to fight heretics and schismatics. Again, this is no cerebral desk exercise but a concept relating to the needs and wishes of a large community.

2.4

Holy War

We are now 2 years away from the First Crusade. The idea of a just war against heretics has been established, as has the moral value of secular knights. What is still missing is the idea of a holy war fought in the Holy Land against the infidels. The clerical discussion of the just war, or even “Christ’s war”, had focused on Christian opponents in the form of heretics, excommunicated people and schismatics. Pagans or infidels had rarely been mentioned and even less been discussed in their own right. Nobody referred to Palestine as the “Holy Land”. If anything, Jerusalem was the “Holy City”, but that epithet normally referred to heavenly Jerusalem, not the city in Palestine (Erdmann 1955). In the imagination of the people, however, the infidels and Jerusalem were much more present than in the discussions among the clergy. Inspired by folk songs and tales, people believed that Charlemagne had travelled to Jerusalem to admonish the Muslims; some said he had led an army there to avenge the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre by them.9 The knights of Europe had very tangible experience fighting the infidels as mercenaries in the Byzantine army, in Southern Italy or in the Reconquista in Spain. Most prominently, the French knights had adopted the ideal of a Christian knight fighting in defence of the Church, not least due to the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux in France. Last but not least, the Church reforms engendered

9

The kernel of truth in this is that Charles had indeed sent emissaries to, and received them from, Jerusalem.

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2 The Case Study: Military Monasticism and the Order of the Knights Templar

a wave of pilgrimages to Jerusalem, with pilgrim columns numbering in the thousands. The final conceptual step is taken during the reign of the next pope, Urban II (1088–1099). Urban, a French Cluniac, admires his predecessor Gregory, but is far more cautious with regard to leading armies in actual warfare. He prefers a kind of chequebook diplomacy. One of his pet projects is the reconstruction of Tarragona, a Spanish city at the frontline of the Reconquista. To motivate knights to come to Tarragona, Urban promises them indulgence as if they had undertaken a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When a Byzantine call for help against the Turks arrives in 1095, he does the same. Fighting in Byzantium, he argues, is the same as fighting in Spain; both defend the Church against the infidels. Travelling through France to spread his call to arms for what will later be called the First Crusade, he calls for a liberation of the Oriental Christians. Jerusalem is initially only mentioned to the extent that joining the Crusade counts as going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The important difference is that this time the “pilgrims” are allowed to carry weapons. Together with the traditional pilgrim’s staff, swords and other weapons receive a blessing. Urban also assures participants that everybody fighting to “liberate Christianity” will be fully absolved. Erdmann is confident that Urban was indeed not interested in Jerusalem or the Holy Sepulchre, but in the fate of Oriental Christianity. The prospective recruits, however, could not care less about the Eastern Church. For them the goal was Jerusalem. The echo the call to arms finds surpasses anything the Pope could have imagined. An estimated 7000 knights and 20,000 support troops, all in all perhaps 100,000 people, answer the Pope’s call (Tyerman 2015). Nevertheless, he does not aspire to lead the army. Nor is any king or emperor part of that First Crusade. In the absence of the high aristocracy, the knights claim the field and the glory, establishing themselves as veritable milites Christi.

2.5

The Foundation and Rise of the Knights Templar

The term milites Christi had now obtained a double meaning. It was still used for monks, but it was now also used for Christian knights. The moral differentiation within the category, however, was still clearly demarcated, with the monks having the better end of it. In 1099 Jerusalem fell to the Christians, who established the Kingdom of Jerusalem and three further crusader states. As the crusader army dispersed, the rulers of the new kingdoms found that military resources—most importantly, the heavy knight on his destrier on whom their victories had been based (Seward 2000)—were difficult to find, perched as they were on a small strip of land on a different continent. Their reputation in Europe suffered, in particular from their inability to protect the still considerable numbers of pilgrims en route to Jerusalem from the raids of the Muslims.

2.5 The Foundation and Rise of the Knights Templar

17

In this situation, around 1118 or 1119, a couple of French knights led by Hugh de Payns, evidently enthused by the monastic reforms, asked the King and the Patriarch of Jerusalem for permission to form an order to protect the pilgrims (Seward 2000). It is unclear from the sources if they aimed to be an order, or if they were originally just religious laymen wanting to serve under a military commander rather than the Prior of the Holy Sepulchre (Barber 1994). Luttrell (1996) even doubts the motive of protecting the pilgrims to be the initial motivation. What is clear is that the knights were prepared to take vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. However, unlike any order before them, they also wanted to carry weapons. Both King and Patriarch were apparently impressed by the men’s zeal. They granted permission, and the King set up the “Poor Knights”, as they called themselves, in the Temple of Solomon (today’s Al-Aqsa Mosque). Despite the need for such a fighting force and the approval of the two most important men in Jerusalem, the Poor Knights probably came close to disappearing within the next two decades (Selwood 1996; Upton-Ward 1992). Two letters written around 1130, one by Bernard and one by an anonymous author, indicate that morale was low and that many knights doubted (and encountered doubt) regarding the legitimacy of monks wielding a sword. As a later critic formulated poignantly: “. . . a certain new monster composed from purity and corruption, namely a monk and a knight . . .” (Barber 1994, p. 41). Clearly, the enthusiasm of the First Crusade had waned. The Templars’ fate, however, took a different turn thanks to a helping hand from Bernard of Clairvaux. For Bernard, one of the most eloquent orators of his time, composed a treatise “In Praise of the New Knighthood”, in which he said: This is, I say, a new kind of knighthood and one unknown to the ages gone by. It ceaselessly wages a twofold war both against flesh and blood and against a spiritual army of evil in the heavens. When someone strongly resists a foe in the flesh, relying solely on the strength of the flesh, I would hardly remark it, since this is common enough. And when war is waged by spiritual strength against vices or demons, this, too, is nothing remarkable, praiseworthy as it is, for the world is full of monks. But when the one sees a man powerfully girding himself with both swords and nobly marking his belt, who would not consider it worthy of all wonder, the more so since it has been hitherto unknown? He is truly a fearless knight and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armour of faith just as his body is protected by armour of steel.

Just words? The treatise took Europe by storm (Seward 2000) and initiated the remarkable rise of the Templars. Recruits flocked to their banner, only outdone by the donations of those that could not join. The Poor Knights by then had been approved as the order of the “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon” by the Church. They were granted far-reaching exemptions and privileges by the Pope between 1139 and 1145. Now they entered popular imagination as the ideal of what secular men could aspire to: Their religious life was immaculate, their deeds in war legendary. They were the most effective fighting force in Outremer—in fact, the first properly officered and disciplined army since Roman times (Seward 2000)—known to neither give quarter nor ask for it. They had orders never to leave the battlefield as long as one Christian banner remained erect (Barber 1994;

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2 The Case Study: Military Monasticism and the Order of the Knights Templar

Upton-Ward 1992). They fought against the infidels. In fact, they showed this visibly by wearing the red cross of the Christian martyrs on their tabard and mantle (Barber and Bate 2002). Without them, Outremer could not have been held for almost two centuries (Barber 1994). “One chases a thousand, two put to flight ten thousand”, as Bernard of Clairvaux boasted (quoted in Barber 1994, p. 281). Fact and fiction fused into a powerful brew. The epitome of Templar veneration can be found in one of the most influential pieces of medieval literature, the “Parzival” by Wolfram of Eschenbach, who writes: ‘It is well know to me’, said his host, ‘that many formidable fighting-men dwell at Munsalvaesche with the Gral. They are continually riding out on sorties in quest of adventure. Whether these same Templars earn trouble or renown they bear it for their sins. A warlike company lives there. I will tell you how they are nourished. They live from a Stone whose essence is most pure. [. . .] By virtue of the Stone the Phoenix is burned to ashes, in which he is reborn (quoted in Barber 1994, p. 241).

It is the Templars that guard the Holy Grail—a story that would appeal to the masses well into the third millennium (Brown 2002). This was just the beginning. The Templars came to dominate the epic literature up to the fourteenth century when it came to the deeds of military orders. Nicholson (2001, p. 228) gives a flavour of the tenor of the accounts: Many contemporary and later accounts of the loss of Acre in 1291 gave the Templars prominence in the final defence of the city, and indeed the Templars’ headquarters was the last part of the city to fall. The chronicler of Erfurt depicted the Templars fighting to the last man; Thaddeo of Naples recorded that the Saracens knew that as long as the master of the Temple lived, the city could not be taken, a sentiment echoed by the later accounts ...

It is important to note, however, that the Templars never appear as named individual heroes but always as a collective. Moreover, none of the Templars who died for Christ on the battlefield, as Nicholson (2001, p. 189) points out, have ever been canonised. We may conclude from this that it was the order as such, rather than any individual acts of heroism, that enthused their contemporaries.

2.6

Discussion

As already indicated, the story of military monasticism is a story of powerful actors—that are busy doing something else, mostly with a short-term horizon. Be it Pope Leo IX declaring the Tusculans heretics or creating a banner for his army, Gregory VII fighting the Emperor with mercenaries, or Urban II promising indulgences for Tarragona. They all did not foresee what their actions would eventually create. Others tried to influence the process strategically, but failed (Gregory VII, Clement III). Solutions that worked mostly worked because they met an audience ready for them, not because they were well thought through or even consistent with contemporary “logics”. That was the case with the Germanic-Christian codex of the tenth century, the peace movement taking up arms in the eleventh century or Ivo’s

References

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moral compromise of 1094. The same cognitive solutions to the same problems came and went, vanished and resurfaced, in the discussions of the clerics, until public mood embraced them. This public mood was often shaped by contemporary arts, especially in the form of songs and tales. It was more often than not, especially in decisive moments, highly emotional and prepared to disregard any facts that did not fit. Tangible, especially visible, objects (e.g. banners, clothing) also influenced this mood considerably. Regarding the emergence of the institution, we can see how ideas, values, emotions, objects and persons that had already been constituted come together and are given new shapes and functions, so that they form a recognisable whole. There is no guarantee that the new institution will survive, just because it fits so nicely with a new logic or serves the interests of the powerful. The Templars, and with them the fledgling military monasticism, come close to failing less than 20 years into their founding. The turning point comes when Bernard enthuses the masses to revere and join the Templars.10 I interpret this enthusiasm as an alignment of what the Templars stood for and what the people craved. This “what” contains ideas, but also even more affective elements like values, aesthetics and emotions. I will continue specifying it in the chapters to come. The following chapter will start by clarifying the difference between an institution and the concept under which we normally subsume values, aesthetics and emotions: culture. I will then pursue the issue of human agency and its alternatives a bit further.

References Barber, Malcolm. The New Knighthood. A History of the Order of the Temple. 1994. Cambridge University Press. Barber, Malcolm and Bate, Keith. The Templars. 2002. Manchester University Press. Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. 2002. Doubleday. Clairvaux, Bernard of. In Praise of the New Knighthood. 1977. Cistercian Publications. Clanchy, Michael. Abelard. A Medieval Life. 1997. Blackwell. Clark, Peter and Rowlinson, Michael. The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards a "Historic Turn"? Business History. 46(3), 2004. Clemens, Elisabeth. Toward a Historicized Sociology: Theorizing Events, Processes, and Emergence. Annual Review of Sociology. 33(2007). Constable, Giles. The place of the crusader in Medieval society. Viator. 29(1998). Curtius, Ernst Robert. Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter. 1984. Francke Elias, Norbert. Towards a Theory of Social Processes: a Translation. British Journal of Sociology. 48(3), 1997. Erdmann, Carl. Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens. 1955. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Kieser, Alfred. Why Organization Theory Needs Historical Analyses - And How This Should Be Performed. Organization Science. 5(4), 1994.

10

One did not have to be a knight or join the order for life in order to become a Templar. They also offered one-year temporary membership.

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Lunt, William E. Financial relations of the papacy with England. 1939. Mediaeval Academy of America. Luttrell, Anthony. The Earliest Templars. M. Balard (Eds.): Autour de la première croisade. 1996. Publications de la Sorbonne. Maclean, M., Harvey, C., & Clegg, S. R. (2016). Conceptualizing historical organization studies. Academy of Management Review, 41(4), 609–632. Mutch, Alistair. Practice, Substance, and History: Reframing Institutional Logics. Academy of Management Review. 43(2), 2018. Nicholson, Helen. Love, War, and the Grail. 2001. Brill. Read, Piers Paul. The Templars. 2001. Phoenix Press. Rowlinson, Michael. Historical Research Methods. R. Swanson and E. F. Holton (Eds.): Resarch in Organizations. 2005. Barrett-Kohler. Selwood, Dominic. Quidam autem dubitaverunt: The Saint, the Sinner, the Temple and a Possible Chronology. M. Balard (Eds.): Autour de la première croisade. 1996. Publications de la Sorbonne. Seward, Desmond. The monks of war: the military orders. 2000. Folio Society. Sewell, William. Logics of history: Social theory and social transformation. 2005. University of Chicago Press. Stager Jacques, Roy. History, Historiography and Organization Studies: The Challenge and the Potential. Management and Organizational History. 1(1), 2006. Suddaby, Roy, Foster, William and Mills, Albert. Historical Institutionalism. M. Bucheli and R. D. Wadhwani (Eds.): Organizations in time: history, theory, methods. 2013. Oxford University Press. Tyerman, Christopher. How to Plan a Crusade. 2015. Penguin. Upton-Ward, Judith. The rule of the Templars: The French text of the rule of the Order of the Knights Templar. 1992. The Boydell Press. Ventresca, Marc and Mohr, John. Archival Research Methods. (Eds.): Blackwell Companion to Organizations. 2002. Blackwell.

Chapter 3

Institutions Between Culture and Agency

Abstract This chapter will address the two issues raised at the end of the previous chapter. Addressing them will help us understand the contours and elements of the phenomenon of institutions better, which in turn should help us in directing our attention to relevant occurrences when studying their emergence. The first question is how institutions differ from culture. The answer to that is that they are value-based orderings rather than logic-based orderings. The second question relates to the role of agency in cultural and institutional emergence. Here, I will argue that institutions are neither tools to be wielded at will, nor are they products or constructions in any meaningful sense. Rather, they presence. The mechanics of presencing will be explained in Chap. 5.

3.1

The Relationship Between Institutions and Culture

The first question relates to the difference, and relationship, between institutions and culture. Following the “cultural turn”, institutions have moved from being viewed as largely structural entities that constrain individual actors in the “old” institutionalism, to being viewed as dynamic entities that frame sensemaking in recent discussions.1 Consequently, they run the risk of becoming indistinguishable from the concept of culture, for it is culture that is traditionally awarded the task of framing and enabling sensemaking. To answer this question, I will use Archer’s distinction between the cultural system as a system of ideas versus socio-cultural integration as a causally related system of actions, as well as Ahrne, Brunsson and Seidl’s distinction between organisations as decision-based orderings and institutions as emergent orderings. Drawing on both, I will argue that we need to distinguish between “institutions” as value-ordered systems of ideas and “institutional practices” as causally related, value-based systems of actions. 1 See the literature on institutions and meaning (for example, Mohr 1998; Zilber 2008) or on institutional logics (for example, Greenwood et al. 2010; Thornton et al. 2012). Hatch and Zilber discuss the convergence of the two concepts as a brief conversation (2012).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Weik, The Emergence of Institutions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89895-3_3

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3.1.1

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Institutions Between Culture and Agency

Six Candidates

Let me illustrate my thoughts with the empirics of the case. In the Templar case, we can identify six2 phenomena relevant or necessary for events to unfold as they did. There is, of course, military monasticism as the focal institution of the case. It was an institution surfacing, and surfacing quickly and decisively, with the foundation of the Templar Order. It has its origins in the First Crusade (1096–1099) as the first manifestation of a Christian holy war (Erdmann 1955). A formulation of its ultimate value can be traced back to Bernard of Clairvaux’s Templar treatise “In Praise of the New Knighthood”, where he coins the idea of a “monk of war” as a man fighting Evil, both on the spiritual and the material plane (and hence superior to both the normal monk and the secular knight). As a result, other military orders were established in quick succession following the foundation of the Templar Order (Seward 2000). The Order of St. John joined military action in 1136. The Teutonic Order was established in 1198, initially in Outremer, but was soon to “crusade” in the Baltic. Similarly, a number of orders were established to lead the Spanish Reconquista. Military monasticism was embedded in Christian monasticism, which has its origins in Early Christian ascetic practices (Suso Frank 1987). The first Occidental (Roman Catholic) monastic communities emerged in the fourth century as relative latecomers to an institution already established in Oriental Christianity. All named founding members of the Templar order were members of the French aristocracy. Feudal society, as a societal organisation form based on fealty and fiefs, was in existence in the parts of Europe dominated by Franks (Normans). It had a strict hierarchy with the king at the top and the aristocracy in clearly defined tiers below him. The role of the knight was central to it because, first, only a knight could swear fealty and hold fiefs, and second, only a knight had the military power to uphold the society’s prime raison d’etre as a protective entity. Chivalry as we know it today was closely linked to feudal society, but was still very much in the making in twelfth century. The institution as classically depicted, i.e. centred on a code of chivalric virtues and linked to equestrian warfare and courtly love, peaked from the late twelfth to fourteenth century. Probably the biggest promoter of the virtues of chivalry in the twelfth century was a blossoming literary genre called “chansons de geste” (lit. “songs of heroic deeds”). It emerged in the tenth century as the first pieces of literature written in vernacular French (though meant to be sung). They celebrated the martial deeds of fictional heroes, often based on historical events or persons. One recurrent motif was the fight of the hero against the infidels, and indeed one sub-genre was entirely dedicated to stories from Outremer. The Templars figured prominently in them (Nicholson 2001). These chansons were incredibly successful in the Romance

2

There may be more, but I would hold that other candidates exemplify the same problems as the six I am discussing.

3.1 The Relationship Between Institutions and Culture

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countries and can, to a certain extent, be considered to represent “the people’s” view on events in the Holy Land. Far from being the age-old point of reference that we know, the notion of the Holy Land itself was at the time the Templar Order was founded, about as old as Luke, Leia and Han Solo are for us (and probably just as popular). Prior to the 1090s, the notion did not exist. There were references to Jerusalem as the Holy City. However, they did not denote the actual city in Palestine but Heavenly Jerusalem. It was only immediately prior to, and during, the First Crusade that the notion took hold in popular imagination as a geographical region that Christians had a supreme right to rule (Erdmann 1955). From a cultural-cognitive perspective, we could explain the foundation of the Templar Order with reference to these six phenomena without using the concept “institution” at all. The concept “culture” would be sufficient to explain sensemaking and interpretation. Does that mean the concept of institution is superfluous in the explanation of cultural phenomena? Should it fall under Ockham’s razor and be eliminated? Can it be reduced to culture? Such questions are not easily answered since it is quite unclear what an institution actually is and how it can, therefore, be distinguished from culture. Meyer, Boli and Thomas define3 institutions as cultural rules giving collective meaning and value to particular entities and activities and integrating them into the larger schemes (Meyer et al. 1987, p. 13). Somewhat later they speak of cultural accounts under whose authority action occurs (Meyer et al. 1987, p. 29). In a similar vein, Suddaby and Greenwood refer to institutions as social behaviour underpinned by normative systems and cognitive understandings (Suddaby and Greenwood 2009, p. 176). Judging from these, it is clear that the structural emphasis so prominent in “old” institutionalist definitions has made way for a cultural emphasis. The question remains, however, what then distinguishes institutions from culture more broadly. Let us start with a closer inspection of culture. I will base my conceptualisation on the works of Margaret Archer.

3.1.2

The Fallacy of Conflation

Archer (1988, 2005) distinguishes analytically between a cultural system and sociocultural integration. The cultural system encompasses all ideas ever formulated by

Straightforward definitions of institutions (as opposed to terms including the word “institutional”) have become quite rare. A recent collation by Creed et al. (2020) lists six influential definitions before 2000, but only two after the turn of the millennium. As with a number of basic terms in sociology (e.g. action, structure), a good number of institutionalist scholars take what I have called either the baseball or the pornography perspective (Weik 2020). The latter refers to a “I know it when I see it” attitude; the former to a purely nominalist “An institution is what I define to be an institution”. I will disregard the latter as I take institutions to be real phenomena. As to the former, I hope I can do better.

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humankind. These ideas are logically related to one another and have in this manner more or less proximity to each other. Socio-cultural integration, on the other hand, refers to relationships between cultural agents. This system is ordered by causation. Archer argues that these two levels of analysis are related in a contingent manner. This means that while sometimes one will change as a consequence of the other, there will also be times when there is only change in one without change in the other. More precisely, a contradiction between two ideas in the cultural system will not necessarily lead to a change in practices based on these ideas; and conversely, a political conflict over ideas will not necessarily lead to a change in the cultural system. It can happen, but if it does happen, an additional explanation has to be provided because the change in the respective other system does not suffice as explanation. According to Archer, authors who explain a change in one system with a change or contradiction in the other commit the fallacy of conflation. It comes in three forms, two of which are easy to spot. These two concern the reduction of either sociocultural integration to the cultural system (“downward conflation”), or the reduction of the cultural system to socio-cultural integration (“upward conflation”). In the first case, actors are overdetermined by culture without any room for interpretation and creativity. Classic examples of this fallacy in organisational institutionalism are formulations of the “paradox of embedded agency” which appears as a paradox exactly because actors are considered perfectly determined in their meaning-making by institutional frameworks and can therefore not think beyond these frameworks. A second variant of the fallacy is presented in the literature on organisational complexity that often treats conflicting or incompatible demands on the organisation as objective, positive occurrences in the environment of the particular organisation that are then automatically perceived by the members of the organisation (For a critique of this view see Besharov and Smith 2014; Meier and Meyer 2016). Applying upward conflation, culture becomes a toolkit to serve actors’ purposes. In organisational institutionalism, the selection criterion for the toolkit seems to be the predicted success of the element in question in dependence on a certain quality of the actor’s situational environment. In this vein, authors, for example, have argued that organisations can choose their response to environmental demands in a strategic manner (Pache and Santos 2010), or that logics serve as tools used by actors to influence decisions and justify activities (McPherson and Sauder 2013). In addition to committing the fallacy of conflation, Suddaby has noted critically that this picking and choosing often introduces more than a tinge of contingency theory (Suddaby et al. 2010). It also tends to favour elements of Rational Choice Theory (Clemens and Cook 1999; Mutch 2007). The third type of conflation, called “central conflation”, does not give priority to any of the two systems but regards them as co-constitutive of each other. The problem here is that they become so intimately connected in this co-constitution that they can no longer be prised apart analytically. A change in one will always and a priori affect the other.

3.1 The Relationship Between Institutions and Culture

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A second problem of the central conflation is that its central term of “coconstitution” suggests a simultaneous unfolding of events in the cultural system and in socio-cultural integration. This, according to Archer, is not helpful either. It makes more sense to assume that the interaction between both takes place in overlapping sequences.4 The first sequence, called cultural conditioning, describes an individual’s socialisation process. Here, the cultural system is passed on. The second sequence, socio-cultural interaction, captures the interactions the individual enters into as a youth and adult. These interactions are still largely based on the acquired cultural system. Later stages of this sequence, however, overlap with the third sequence, cultural elaboration, in which the individual might change the cultural system. Archer calls the whole process morphogenesis as it shows how structures are reproduced and changed through individual actors. Archer’s main focus of critique regarding the central conflation is structuration theory. By extension, institutionalist accounts that use structuration to conceptualise the interplay between culture and agency are prone to committing the same fallacy. Let me hold on to Archer’s definition of the cultural system as logic-structured in juxtaposition to socio-cultural integration as causally related, to their contingent relation, their irreducibility and to the morphogenesis model. Is there any mileage in this for a distinction between institutions and culture? Before I give an answer, let me look at a second distinction relating to institutions.

3.1.3

Institutions and Organisations

In organisation theory, Ahrne, Brunsson and Seidl (Ahrne and Brunsson 2011; Ahrne et al. 2016) have suggested a distinction between institutions and organisations. The authors argue that both represent a different form of order and must therefore be kept apart analytically, although we may find empirically that they overlap or transform into one another. They conceptualise organisations5 as a decided order, i.e. an order created by human beings taking decisions on who should be a member of the organisation, how the hierarchy is structured, which rules apply, as well as how they are monitored and sanctioned. An institution, in contrast, is defined as an emergent (!) order that has not been created by human fiat but has come into being almost unnoticed. More precisely, we only speak of institutions once the order is in existence. The authors suggest that patterns of behaviour, norms and processes can be institutionalised and that, once institutionalised, their main characteristic is that their implied beliefs and norms are

4

Archer originally introduced the conflation argument and the morphogenesis model in reference to concepts of social structure (Archer 1995). I, however, agree with Mutch’s reading of Archer to say that her interests have been in an overarching framework speaking to both culture and structure (Mutch 2020). 5 The plural is important here, as they refer to formal organizations, not organization as an activity.

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taken-for-granted. Institutions can either increase or reduce the need for organisation, depending on how much complexity they create or absorb. In comparison with institutions, organisations, due to their decision-based nature, dramatise uncertainty and contestation, provide transparency and accountability and emphasise human control and responsibility. As a result, institutional orders tend to be more resilient towards change.

3.1.4

Agency Versus Decision-Making

In order to relate Archer’s distinction, in particular her socio-cultural integration, to this definition of institutions, we need to understand how decision-making is related to causality. While the founders of the Templar Order took many well-documented decisions,6 they did not decide, for example, between adopting the Benedictine or the Augustinian Rule. Nor was the transfer of the monastic organisation to warfare and commerce an act of rational choice with a view to becoming more successful in these spheres. Insofar as the term “decision” is commonly linked to instances of rational or bounded-rational choice,7 I would indeed prefer the term “agency” in the sense that Giddens (1993, p. 9) suggests: “Agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the individual could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently.” The distinction here is one of consciousness and intention: While decisions require both, the statement that the individual “could have acted differently” requires neither. We can, for example, understand quite easily why the Cistercian, not the Augustinian, Rule8 became the rule of the Templar organisation: Bernard of Clairvaux was related to Hugh de Payns, he was abbot of a Cistercian monastery, and he was a political heavyweight. So Bernard was clearly the main cause of the bifurcation. Did he make a conscious decision for the Cistercian and against the Augustinian Rule? Probably not. As abbot of a Cistercian monastery, it may not have occurred to him to consider the Augustinian Rule at all. The question is, moreover, not very relevant; whether it was a conscious decision or not, he was the cause or agent of the adoption.

6

The Rule of the Templars has come down to us and consists of 686 paragraphs regulating daily monastic life, sanctions, appearance, hierarchy, military campaigns, relations to outsiders and recruitment. If we look at it from the perspective of Ahrne, Brunsson and Seidl’s definition of an organization, we find that the Rule restricts membership to male adults although it is apparent that women were members of the order prior to 1129. The hierarchy in the Primitive Rule is flat with only the Master elevated above the other knights. The regulations regarding daily life are monastic with an emphasis on silence, prayer and service (Upton-Ward 1992). 7 I do not claim that it is necessarily or always linked to these paradigms, but I find the term suggestive in that direction. 8 The Cistercian Rule is a variant of the Benedictine Rule.

3.1 The Relationship Between Institutions and Culture

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Table 3.1 Causality-based and non-causality-based systems Causality-based (socio-cultural interaction) Organisations Institutionalised practices

Non-causality-based Cultural system Institutions

Taking this distinction between agents and decision-makers into account, we can understand organisations as causal-agentic orders because single human beings can become causes or agents of change. Institutions, in contrast, are not agentic orders (because no single human being can be a cause of their change), although they can involve decisions. The institution of marriage, for example, involves the decision to get married. What Giddens refers to by “perpetrator”, however, is a causal involvement of the actor; his “differently” points to a bifurcation where the actual path taken digresses from other possible paths. My decision to get married (or not) does not affect the institution of marriage in a causal manner; it does not make or break it nor change it. Organisations are therefore orders based on agentic causality; institutional orders are not. This distinction obviously bears some resemblance to Archer’s distinction between the cultural system and socio-cultural integration. She referred to the latter as a system based on causality in the same way that I propose viewing organisations as causal-agentic orders. But what are institutions if they are not causal-agentic? Are they just a sub-set of the cultural system? First of all, I think it makes sense to apply Archer’s distinction once more to institutional theory and to distinguish between institutional practices and institutions in the sense of overarching principles.9 (I will henceforth call these “institutions”.) To avoid the fallacy of conflation, we should not assume that they are linked in any deterministic manner. In line with Archer’s taxonomy, I will also assume that institutional practices—but not institutions—are causality-based. My classification so far can be summarised by Table 3.1. The second row of the table can, however, be further distinguished by a second criterion. This is where values enter the stage.

3.1.5

The Missing Core: Values and Concerns

The difference between decision and action as defined above entails one further criterion. This touches on the issue of concern. The fact that human beings are characterised by a concern for themselves, other people, objects or issues (Sayer 2011) has been recognised in new institutionalism, among others, by Roger Friedland (2013a, b, 2017) who insists that values lie at the core of institutions. Weber has captured the idea in his notion of value rationality. Philosophically, it has Thornton, Lounsbury and Ocasio call them “institutional logics”, Friedland “institutional substances”.

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been expressed most prominently by Heidegger’s conceptualisation of human life as “Sorge” (care). I will discuss them in more depth in Chaps. 4, 6 and 8. Human action, in this sense, always takes place in a context of care. This is important because decisions, especially of the instrumental variety, can live without concern. They only need a given objective and a set of alternative means. This is, again, not to say that decisions never involve concern/care and action always does, but to point to the different emphases in the concepts. The introduction of the philosophical-anthropological notion of concern therefore helps us to move away from a primarily instrumental use of institutions (and culture), as suggested by the toolkit model, and allows us to conceptualise agency in a non-cognitivist, non-choice manner as an expression of human concern. This expression is mostly10 not strategic, intentional or even conscious in nature. Values, however, are not just important for a distinction between decision and agency, but are also crucial for the distinction between culture and institutions proper. I have argued, with Archer, that the cultural system is a system of ideas. Institutions, I would argue further, are ideas fraught with concerns. The relationship between logics and values is not instrumental. As a rule,11 ideas (logics) are not strategically chosen to serve certain values, nor are values strategically chosen to serve ideas and interests. Rather, when human beings appropriate ideas, they attach values to them.12 As they interact, these ideas and values create and elaborate institutional orderings. In other words, institutions are value-based orderings drawing on cultural ideas. Value-based orderings differ from logic-based orderings in a number of ways. Weber (1986, 2005) dwells on the “irrationality” of value-based orderings with regard to their lack of consistency and compatibility. By the same token, however, they manage to stay closer to the vagaries of everyday life, whereas logic systems tend to forsake the ability to match every aspect of social life in the interest of their internal consistency. As the notion of concern unavoidably speaks to issues of power and legitimacy, there is also an element of social structuring in value-based orderings that is absent from logic-based orderings. In the case of military monasticism, we can distil a web of ideas from the Church’s discussion of warfare (Table 3.2). These ideas are logically related to

10

Institutions can of course be used in a purely instrumental, strategic manner that is cynical with regard to the values expressed by the institution. Selznick refers to this as displacement, attenuation and corruption of institutional values by organizational imperatives and opportunism. He notes, however, that these processes undermine, and eventually destroy, the institution (Selznick 2014, p. 244ff.). 11 Strategic conduct can play a role in some cases, but institutions cannot be conceptualised as the outcome of strategic conduct. 12 I am painfully aware of the many contributions, especially in philosophy, that argue against a distinction between ideas and values (See, for example, Anscombe (1977), or for the social sciences, Sayer (2011)). I agree with them in many respects. However, as far as the argument presented here is concerned, I think it makes sense to isolate the value element at least analytically. This is not to say that the real world is much more fuzzy and complicated.

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Table 3.2 Concepts of war and the social category of miles—read as rainbow Concept of war Evil war Christians must not fight in war. Any war violates Christian ethics and missionary ethos. Aggression must be suffered but not responded to. Just war (bellum iustum) A defensive war with the aim to reinstate peace is just. War in the name of God (bellum deo auctore) The State can conduct war in the name of God as a disciplinary measure to bring heretics back in line. Missionary war War with the aim to convert pagans. State leads war to enable and protect Church mission. Imperialist war War in which expansion in pagan territory is prime motive, religious conversion secondary motive Heroic war War is honourable and the essence of life. A man should engage in battle even if there are no other incentives. Aggressive war Alliances with pagans and attacks against Christian possible depending on strategy. Not religiously motivated. Pagans not converted if they subject themselves to victors. War of liberation Pope as military defender of Christianity (liberanda Christianitas). Recruitment through promise of indulgence; army led under banner of St. Peter. Christ’s war (bellum Christi) Pope as military leader against heretics and schismatics (not pagans) to enforce internal Church discipline. Recruits papal army. Can fight against the state.

Concept of secular milites and valuation Milites Sinful.

Earliest formulation Early Church

Milites Milites on the right side serve God. Even if fighting on the wrong side, however, the individual soldier can be innocent if he does not understand the injustice of his cause; the ultimate moral responsibility lies only with the leader of the army.

St. Augustine (354–430)

No reflection.

Pope Gregory I (590–604)

Milites Sinful.

Frankish conquest of Germanic tribes (eighth century)

Honourable but not in Christian sense; in Christian sense sinful.

Germanic codex of honour (undated)

Milites Sinful.

Reconquista, Slavonic wars (tenth century)

Milites Christi Sin of killing is automatically forgiven. Fallen milites become martyrs.

Pope Leo IX (1049–1054)

Milites Christi Sin of killing is automatically forgiven. Fallen milites become martyrs. Milites fight Christ’s war in the world as monks fight it in monastery. Milites can also be vassals to

Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085)

(continued)

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Table 3.2 (continued) Concept of war

Religious war Pan-European “army” of believers march against pagans without clear religious or secular leadership. Pope blesses the army, gives them the Banner of St. Peter, promises indulgence. Bishops announce a Truce of God to prevent internecine warfare. Every Christian must fight heresy with his or her means. War can have specific Christian aims ! codex.

Armed pilgrimage Going to war (to the Orient) is going on a pilgrimage. Aim is to liberate Christianity, which is understood as defence. Pope leads morally, not militarily. Blesses weapons as accessories of the pilgrim. War against pagans is a just war. God and His angels and saints fight on the side of the just and honourable.

War against pagans is justified if there is no other way to keep them from harassing Christians and transgressing divine law. The killing of enemies in this war is not a killing of men but a killing of evil.

Concept of secular milites and valuation the pope and have thus a recognised feudal obligation to fight. Emphasis is not on “milites” but on “believers” that fulfil their duty to God.

Earliest formulation

Spanish crusade (1064)

Milites Can serve God with weapons. The moral decision is made by every single miles (not just the lord). Ethical codex: serve your lord; don’t desire spoils; protect your lord’s life with your own; fight for the state (res publica) to the death; fight heretics and schismatics; protect poor, widows and orphans; never break your fealty. Armed pilgrims Wear a cross on their clothes to show that they participate in the Passion of Christ. Adopt a Christian war cry (“God wants it!”).

Bonizo of Sutri (1085)

Champions of Christ (athleta Christi) Apostles or martyrs that reappear after their death to lead Christian forces to victory, often against pagans, sometimes against Christians. Epic heroes Fighting against the pagans. Their virtues are bravery ( fortitudo) and wisdom (sapientia). Milites Christi, milites novi Fight a twofold war against the enemy in the flesh and the spiritual army of evil.

Oral tradition (eleventh century)

First crusade (1096)

Song of Rolland (c. 1100)

St. Bernard (1139)

Note: Sometimes several concepts have been applied to the same war. Statements in italics should not be read as positions in their own right but as context

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Table 3.3 Logic-based and value-based systems Logic-based Value-based

Causality-based (socio-cultural interaction) Organisations Institutionalised practices

Non-causality based Cultural system Institutions

one another as they stand in contrast to each other, or form variants or compromise positions of each other. The institution of military monasticism draws on these ideas but attaches value to them. Bernard of Clairvaux is the leading proponent of the suggestion that some of these ideas, viz. worldly knighthood, lead to “mortal sin” and “eternal death”, whereas the new knighthood is “worthy of wonder”. The Papal Bull of 1139 follows saying: . . . like true Israelites and the most disciplined fighters of the divine battle, kindled by the flame of true charity, by your deeds you fulfil the words of the Gospel . . .

These are the values forming the core of military monasticism: those legitimating political favours and privileges but also driving thousands of men to enlist, serve or donate their possessions to the various chivalric orders. This is not a matter of having the world explained to them in terms of cognitive sensemaking, but a heartfelt, at times blazing, desire to adhere to values. As Friedland formulates: Without value, institutional theory is left with an impoverished energetics, with ample mechanism, but no motive, with manifold hows, but no—or impoverished—whys—typically power or pleasure, not to mention base, socially crippled, amoral and truly boring whos. Value, which also animates the agonistic positional game to possess, to near, to embody or to access it, is the basis of energy (Friedland 2017, p. 13).

Values therefore form the second criterion for my typology, which now reads like presented in Table 3.3.

3.1.6

The Expression of Values

Referring to values conceptually, however, is not enough. Values must be expressed and made manifest. Friedland has dedicated quite a lot of space to this thought in his recent publications. Departing (and parting) from Weber, he argues that (ultimate) values require periodic manifestation—visibility—to keep them alive and real. Institutional substances need to be enacted in material practices (Friedland 2012, 2013b). Only in this way can they become ontologically relevant and constitute institutional practices. Institutions are not some cognitive game we play in our heads; they are practical regimes of valuation (Friedland 2017); they compel people to act, as Durkheim would say. In the same vein, Creed et al. (2020) talk about macro institutions being translated into duties and obligations. It is no big theoretical leap to view this manifestation as a link between institutions and institutional practices. The ultimate values of institutions are displayed through institutional practices, and conversely, institutional practices are made meaningful through the values of institutions.

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I would argue, however, that there is more to this link. Just like language is not just a “veil” draped over reality to hide an ontologically independent body, but shapes reality at the same time as expressing it, so institutional practices shape institutions while expressing them. Conversely, while language is not completely free to express what the speaker wants but constrained by a “truth”13 in the emerging reality, so institutions limit what can be put into practice. The idea of language as an expression, rather than a veil, is very prominent in the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition that positions itself in opposition to representational understandings of language. In this line of thought, Charles Taylor, in his “Triple H model” (Taylor 1980), proposes that language has three basic functions: It, first, makes a matter explicit that was implicit before. This involves forming the matter in question in a specific and concrete manner and giving it a “shape” and “boundaries” it did not have before. It also entails enabling people to focus on it. Utterances in a conversation, second, put matters into a public or intersubjective space that forms the space in which people can be together (Heidegger’s “MitSein”). And it, third, provides the medium for expressing abstract and complex thoughts that cannot be conveyed otherwise. Taylor here dwells on moral standards in particular. In the case of military monasticism, the verbal exposition of values following the foundation of the Templar Order is quite striking in its strong tone and repetitive nature. We must remember that up to the First Crusade 40 years before, the combination of monk and warrior had been unthinkable, military monasticism a contradiction in terms. Monks were explicitly forbidden to carry weapons and spill blood. Now, the Order had been established, but nobody really knew what it was supposed to do and not do, and how either could be justified. This, apparently, was the reason why the Order came close to complete desertion and dissolution prior to the Council of Troyes. It was Bernard of Clairvaux who then forcefully publicised and shaped the Order’s values: It seems that a new knighthood has recently appeared on the earth, and precisely in that part of it which the Orient from on high visited in the flesh. As he then troubled the princes of darkness in the strength of his mighty hand, so there he now wipes out their followers, the children of disbelief, scattering them by the hands of his mighty ones.

And: The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls. Neither does he bear the sword in vain, for he is God’s minister, for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of the good. If he kills an evildoer, he is not a mankiller, but, if I may so put it, a killer of evil. He is evidently the avenger of Christ towards evildoers and he is rightly considered a defender of Christians. Should he be killed himself, we know that he has not perished, but has come safely into port.

The term “truth” is strictly speaking not correct, as truth is an attribute of propositions. Reality just “is”, and it is this stubborn fact that I refer to here.

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This is echoed in a papal bull about 5 years later: . . . like true Israelites and the most disciplined fighters of the divine battle, kindled by the flame of true charity, by your deeds you fulfil the words of the Gospel which says: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. [. . .] you have been appointed by the Lord defenders of the Catholic Church and attackers of the enemies of Christ.

These value statements come closest to what might be considered “founding documents” of the institution (if such a thing existed), because they explicate the values on which military monasticism is centred. Bernard, in demarcating the boundaries between a monk of war, a normal monk and a secular knight, prepares the ground for the new institution. His thoughts are then taken up by others, in particular powerful men like the pope. Institutional practices can express values through discourses, but also through objects. In a society that regulates closely who is allowed to wear which clothes, wearing a large red cross on a pure white garment, for example, is quite a powerful statement of mission and value. Practices can also express values through the form of their arrangements, for example, through rhythms (Quattrone 2015; Weik 2017, 2019). To attend a service nine times a day, every day, to obey the Master without any question, to forsake all personal property and to remain silent for most of the day express the value of self-sacrifice much more pervasively than, for example, the Templar motto “Non nobis, domine, sed nomine tuo da gloriam” (Not unto us, O Lord, but to thy name give the glory). Summing up, I have argued so far that we can analytically distinguish the cultural system as a logically ordered system of ideas, institutions as value-ordered systems of ideas and values, and institutional practices as causally ordered systems of activities. Moreover, institutional practices express values and ideas, whereas cultural systems form the basis of sensemaking and institutions form the basis of concerns. With Archer, I do not claim that the processes of expression and sensemaking/ concerning necessarily happen simultaneously but can happen morphogenetically. The notion of “expression” in the relationship between institutional practices and values/ideas will need to be examined further for I believe it is underexplored. Chapter 6 will be dedicated to this. In the present chapter, I want to stay with values and ideas for a bit longer. In order to understand emergence, I would argue that we need to relieve human beings of their sole agentic responsibility and explore how ideas and values can have, in the widest sense, agency too.

3.2

Human Agency and Wirksamkeit in Institutional Emergence

In answer to the second question posed in the previous chapter—the question concerning the role of human agency in emergence—I will argue that ideas and values can make a difference as well. With Weber, I call this “Wirksamkeit” in contradistinction to “agency”, which is a specifically human form of Wirksamkeit.

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Conceptualising how the logic-based cultural system interacts with causalitybased socio-cultural integration, Archer assumes that it is (1) human agents who adopt ideas in the phase of socio-cultural integration and (2) change the cultural system in the elaboration phase. The cultural system, in turn, (3) imposes itself on the actors in the conditioning phase. Then the cycle starts again. This conditioning (or socialisation), however, is not primarily the work of ideas but of other human actors (parents, teachers, peers). In contrast, my argument concerning the active role of ideas and values goes beyond this. I hold that ideas and values can indeed influence human actors of their own accord and without the intermediaries of human coercion or persuasion. In other words, human beings can adopt ideas and values, not because they serve their strategic designs, nor because others want them to adopt them, but because of the specific nature of a value or an idea. In what follows, I will draw on Max Weber’s research programme for the cultural sciences to argue that ideas can “do something” to human actors. In contradistinction to agency, I will use the German term “wirksam” for this kind of making a difference. I will also show how this Wirksamkeit is related to values through significance and semantics.

3.2.1

Independence from Strategic Design

Max Weber is the crown witness to the independence of ideas and values from strategic design. In his writings on religion, he argues that religion is an autochthonous sphere that is causally independent of actors’ socio-economic interests. More specifically, he disagrees with the assumption that ideas are just instruments of human strategic action. This is borne out by his famous switchmen metaphor which states that ideas “lead” people into action, not in the sense of a desire that would “power” the action (that is the role of interests) but in the sense of determining in which tracks the action proceeds along. A bit later in the same document, becomes even more explicit: It could not be further from the argument I want to make in this chapter to assume that the specific characteristics of any form of religion are a simple function of the social position of its proponents, their ‘ideology’ or a ‘reflection’ of their material or ideal interests. On the contrary, there could be no greater misunderstanding of my argument. However deeply politics and the economy, through their social aspects, may have influenced a particular religious ethic, this ethic has, first and foremost, received its character from religious sources (Weber 1986, my translation).

It is this “first and foremost” that the remainder of this section is concerned with. I do not claim that ideas cannot be reflections of ideal or material interests—in fact, they quite often are. However, I am solely interested in the type of ideas that Weber describes as not being of that kind. Religious ideas, Weber maintains, are autochthonous, i.e. independent of social or economic considerations. Religious ideas do not depend on ideas from other spheres nor are ideas from other spheres dependent on them. Most importantly, they are not causally dependent. This is what Weber shows in the “Protestant Ethic”.

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Nevertheless, these ideas are, second, related to one another. Although the Protestant ethic, in some regards, has prepared the ground for western Capitalism, Weber does not regard it to be a causal factor contributing with necessity to this development. Instead, Weber uses the concept of “elective affinity” (Wahlverwandtschaft) to describe the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of Capitalism (Schulz-Schaeffer 2010). It appears at a central place in the argument—the conclusion to the first part—and we should therefore take a moment to understand what Weber means. The German term “Wahlverwandtschaft” refers initially to family relationships that are not constituted through a common bloodline but through choice, for example godparents, foster-children or blood brothers. While being equally consequential in some aspects, these Wahlverwandtschaften are not “proper” family (blood) relationships in others. It has often been pointed out that Weber adopted the term either from Chemistry, where it describes an affinity between elements and/or from Goethe’s novel “Die Wahlverwandtschaften”. I would like to reject the former suggestion and retain only the latter. Not only has Weber held Goethe in very high regard (Albrow 1990), and not only was he, in general, averse to employing natural scientific terms and methods in the cultural sciences, but the use of the word in the chemical sense was no longer common by the time Weber wrote.14 Now, Goethe’s novel describes the interaction of two men and two women. Two of them are married to each other but find themselves developing a liking for the “wrong” man/woman. This liking develops because the character of the “wrong” partner is better matched to the person than the character of the person they are married to. The novel ends in tragedy, but that is not Weber’s point. What the Wahlverwandtschaft describes is a similarity in character leading to an attraction. Because of it, people feel close to each other despite the fact that they are not really (in the case of marriage, legally) related. So, a Wahlverwandtschaft is based on a perceived proximity that is often quite strong but can, from certain angles, be regarded as “merely apparent”. In the case of the Protestant Ethic, Weber uses the term to describe how a Protestant ethic and the spirit of Capitalism have developed a strikingly similar ethos and dispositions, but are not causally related. Wahlverwandtschaft constitutes an as-if-causality that is, exactly for that reason, not a causality.15 The argument for causality would also be difficult to make because Weber makes it quite clear that he regards, among others, religion and the economy to be different spheres following different inner logics (Eigengesetzlichkeit16).

It had been replaced by ‘Affinität’. A standard German encyclopaedia of the time; Meyer’s Großes Konversationslexikon of 1905, only lists Goethe’s novel and the earlier sense of family relationship under this entry. 15 Here lies the parallel to Archer’s distinction between logic- and causality-based systems. Weber’s notion of likeness, though not a strictly logical term, also depends on an idea’s content. 16 I prefer the translation ‘inner logic’ because ‘autonomy’ carries a connotation of independence that is quite subdued in the German word. Eigengesetzlichkeit refers to the fact that a system works to a unique logic with little regard of how this is possible in political terms. This is important because it says something about the dependence or independence of the various value spheres. 14

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The concept of Wahlverwandtschaft is important for my argument in two respects. First, it corrects Archer’s description of the cultural system by pointing out that many ideas are not logically connected at all. In fact, logical connections like implication, contrariness or contradiction link, I would argue, very few ideas. Far more are connected through elective affinity, i.e. through a proximity in their semantics. Second, rather than choosing an idea to suit their strategy in the social field, actors are hence persuaded to adopt certain ideas on the grounds of their likeness to one another. This formulation shifts the relative importance of ideas, actors and social structure considerably by allowing ideas to “persuade” actors into adopting them. Moreover, it allows certain ideas to persist as causes of action independently of actors’ interests and as part of an autochthonous cultural (i.e. neither social nor economic) sphere. Both “persuade” and “lead”, however, are terms indicating agency. In a clarification of what that means the idea of Wahlverwandtschaft will be useful.

3.2.2

Significance and Semantics: Weber and the Cultural Meaning of an Idea

In the Protestant Ethic, Weber makes, roughly speaking, the argument that the spirit of Capitalism was partly influenced by the ethics of certain Protestant sects and became later secularised and independent of Protestantism. This can be read as a certain ethos (i.e. a set of norms, beliefs and values) influencing a certain economic constellation or system (Capitalism) by infusing it with certain values and ideas (the spirit17). Weber (2005, p. 36) defines his object of study, the Geist (spirit), as follows: . . . ein historisches Individuum [. . .] d.h. ein Komplex von Zusammenhängen in der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit, die wir unter dem Gesichtspunkt ihrer Kulturbedeutung begrifflich zu einem Ganzen zusammenschließen.

I translate this18 as:

17

Although Weber does not use the concept of institution, it should be noted how close his concept is to Selznick’s definition of institutionalising as infusing with value (Selznick 2014, p. 233). 18 Any English discussion of Weber and/or German Idealism must start with the caveat that it is built on shaky foundations. The reason for that is of a linguistic nature. Weber, the first and greatest proponent of science as a system of precise terms (Iggers 2012, p. 160f.) used a terminology shaped by a by then almost 200 year old tradition that may broadly be referred to as German Idealism. And although Weber has distanced himself from Idealism on many occasions, we should bear in mind that when he uses apparently everyday terms like Geist, Kultur or Idee, they do not necessarily mean what they mean in the Anglophone world of the twenty-first century, as that world expresses its thoughts in a language that has developed in a very different philosophical, political and practical context. There simply are no words to render some of Weber’s terms with any hope of accuracy. Worse, the English words which come closest have a number of very unfortunate aspects of meaning that actually distort what needs to be said. I will address this problem by sticking to the

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. . . a historical individual, i.e. a complex of relations in historical reality that can be viewed as a conceptual whole as far as its cultural significance is concerned.

There are a number of central concepts in this quote—Geist, historisches Individuum, Komplex von Zusammenhängen, Kulturbedeutung, begriffliches Ganzes—that need to be explicated in order to appreciate fully what Weber is saying. The term Geist, in comparison with its translation “spirit”, is a more comprehensive term and a term filled with much more reverence.19 It is the rallying cry of German Classicism, the movement that gives birth to, and permeates, all German intellectual traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. If the aim of Classicism can be rendered in the words of Johann Gottfried Herder (quoted in Iggers 2012, p. 38) as: Our ability to reason is to be developed to reason; our finer senses are to be cultivated for art; our instincts are to achieve genuine freedom and beauty; our energies are to be turned to the love of man,

then this describes the development of the human Geist to perfection. Geist here refers to a morally infused anthropological ideal:20 der Mensch, which is still translated most accurately (albeit politically incorrectly) by “Man” in its capitalised version. Weber’s more idealistically oriented contemporaries held the view that larger social entities, for example a people (Volk), or certain cultural phenomena, for example Capitalism, can be infused by a Geist. Weber, however, insists that the Geist is construed by the scholar when he speaks of it as a historical individual and a Komplex von Zusammenhängen in der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit (complex of relations in historical reality21). The “historical individual” refers to the concrete and empirical nature of the subject matter. It is historical in the sense that it is to be treated by applying the methods of the cultural sciences (Kulturwissenschaften), not the natural sciences. These methods require scholars to select a part of reality and study its cultural specificity (Eigenart) i.e. its meaning, interdependencies, causes and consequences.

German terms as often as possible and by explaining rather than translating them. I will also comment on some linguistic subtleties in footnotes to provide a background for scholars who do not speak German. 19 Moreover, the meaning of spirits as ghosts is less obvious in German because German often uses the Latin root when talking about ghosts: Spiritualismus, spiritistisch, spirituell. 20 A number of exegetes get this wrong, see for example, Whimster (2007). Geist is not a psychological category for Weber. Weber makes this quite clear (for example in Weber 1988, p. 173f). 21 The German language differentiates between two possible translations for ‘reality’, which are ‘Realität’ and ‘Wirklichkeit’. The former captures the ontological and epistemological status of something being real as opposed to imagined or potential. The latter bears, in addition to that, the notion of ‘wirken’ as in ‘cause’ or ‘work’. Weber, significantly, uses the latter term, which adds a suggestion of activity.

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This is the Komplex von Zusammenhängen in der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit (complex of relations in historical reality). As both reality as such and every particular event in it are inexhaustible, scholars need to select the material that is relevant to their study. What is relevant is not determined by frequency of occurrence but by its Kulturbedeutung (cultural meaning/significance22). Since culture is based on values, cultural significance is generated through a relationship to certain value ideas (Wertideen) on the part of the scholar. Its ultimate validity rests in the plausibility the resulting argument has for others in the community. As values cannot be deduced from facts or axioms, cultural studies cannot operate in the lofty heights of formal deduction but must always study particular historical constellations. The “historical individual” is hence a particular cultural (historical) phenomenon studied with the methods of the cultural sciences. It is created by the scholar who fuses the historical events into a conceptual whole (begriffliches Ganzes). So Weber embeds a whole research programme in this condensed statement. Applying these notions to military monasticism, Weber would probably describe the concrete empirical actions, people and objects related to each other in the concept of military monasticism as the historical individual. Their relationship, however, is construed by the scholar—myself and others. The scholar, aiming to describe a culturally relevant phenomenon, draws on her knowledge of culture and her Wertideen (value ideas) to relate the empirical occurrences with each other and isolate them from irrelevant facts or other relevant complexes. The Wertideen guiding this relationship and selection are the institutional principles of military monasticism. They make up the Geist of military monasticism, or as we would say, the institutional principles of military monasticism. In this sense, the institution is a nominalist construction on the part of the scholar.23 The only things that have reality are ideas, values, objects, people and actions. While I largely agree with, and adopt, Weber’s construction, I do not agree with his nominalist metaphysics regarding the Geist, and will discuss my disagreement in the next chapter based on a relational metaphysics and strong process theory as well as in Chap. 6 when I introduce the notion of dynamic form. For this chapter and the question of agency, however, we can take five ideas from Weber’s account. The first is the proposition that ideas are part of the Wirklichkeit (reality) and as such wirksam (active).24

In contrast to ‘significance’, Bedeutung also has the meaning of ‘meaning’. Its significance is based on meaning. 23 In his more recent work, Friedland seems inclined to agree (Friedland 2017, p. 19). 24 Translating the corresponding verb wirken into English while preserving Weber’s subtlety is quite a headache but crucial for understanding his position. Wirken means ‘to cause’ in the widest sense of the word. The cause can be an actor, in which case we can replace wirken with handeln (to act). It can, however, also refer to an inanimate cause, like a rain shower that prevents me from going out. In this case we cannot replace it with handeln. On the other hand, Weber himself uses ‘to cause’ (German verursachen) or ‘causal’ (German kausal) very restrictively in the sense of causing 22

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Their capacity for being active is based on the fact that they constitute cultural reality, or as Weber formulates: “Empirical reality is ‘culture’ to us because, and insofar as, we relate it to value ideas” (Weber 1988, p. 175, his emphasis). Parsons has read this to say that ideas are part of the actor’s definition of the situation (Swedberg 2005, p. 121), which is true but not the whole story. Sensemaking is one aspect in which ideas constitute culture. Within this aspect, we can argue that ideas are prior to actors’ interests. There is, however, a second aspect that refers to the compelling force25 that values have on individuals. This compelling force is most clearly expressed in a “Gesinnungsethik” (ethic of conscience26) that Weber describes as follows: One may try to convince an adherent to an ethics of conscience with the best arguments that the consequences of his action will improve the chances of the restauration, increase the oppression of his class and diminish his chances to make a career—it will make no difference to him. [. . .] He feels solely responsible for preserving the flame of conscience, for example of protesting against the injustice of a social order (Weber 1919).

The third idea we may take is the proposition that ideas have a significance for the culture in question that arises from them giving meaning to certain cultural expressions. This is linked to, fourth, the proposition that ideas are not necessarily made explicit, for example in a discourse and as data that can be collected, but may stand “behind” the phenomena as their meaning or significance. I will pursue this thought in Chap. 7. This insight provides the context for Weber’s rather cryptic remark that “ideas occur to us when they please, not when it pleases us” (quoted from “Science as Vocation” in Swedberg 2005, p. 121). All four propositions lead, finally, to the fifth, which is the proposition that ideas of this kind can only be grasped through nachvollziehendes Erleben (experiential understanding) as conducted through Weber’s method of Verstehen. Reverting to our initial question about the (independent) agency of ideas and values, we can conclude that Weber considered ideas and values to be wirksam (active). This entails, on the one hand, that they are not just passive tools in the hands of human agents. It entails, on the other hand, that they have no agency in the sense of handeln (acting). Their activity is based on a form of persuasion, which is in turn based on their content.

with necessity or forming a sufficient or necessary condition for the next phase. (See also his Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet der kulturwissenschaftlichen Logik.) He never makes this claim with regard to the Protestant Ethic ‘causing’ Capitalism. Translating wirken as ‘to cause’ would therefore be misleading. So ‘being effective’ is probably the most appropriate translation in a Weberian context. In this sense, ideas ‘leading’ actors into an action means ideas making actors act in certain ways, with the emphasis on ideas, rather than actors, being the active part of the relationship. 25 Durkheim makes a similar point. I will discuss his argument in Chap. 7. 26 It is interesting to note that, to my knowledge, there is no technical English equivalent for the term.

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The realist philosopher Karl Popper, on whose philosophy Archer bases her distinction, has suggested in a similar manner that the world of ideas must be kept separate from the world of human minds entertaining these ideas (Popper 1979). He, moreover, holds that while ideas require being adopted in people’s thoughts, it is nevertheless the ideas, not individual thoughts, that change the course of history. The adoption of ideas in thoughts is, according to Weber, connected to values. Be it cultural significance or the “flame of conscience” (i.e. Weber’s third and second idea, respectively), every act of becoming relevant has a valuation moment in it. It is, finally, to values, rather than to propositional ideas, that his method of Verstehen speaks. Verstehen, with its emphasis on nachvollziehend, is the retracing of the process of expression in the other direction. It is exactly because of the hermeneutic qualities of values that we require a hermeneutic method to study them. This method will be presented in Chap. 7.

3.3

Summary

We have started this chapter with two questions. The first, exploring the difference between culture and institutions, has resulted in a distinction between the cultural system, institutions proper, institutional practices and organisations (Table 3.3). I have defined institutions proper as value-based orderings drawing on cultural ideas. The second question explored the role of human agency in the emergence of institutions. Here, I have argued with Weber that actors do not always adopt ideas to serve their interests but that sometimes ideas can persuade actors to adopt them. Ideas are real and wirksam. Their persuasion is based on their Wahlverwandtschaft with other ideas and values the actors already cherish. With regard to institutional emergence, this means we have another causal dimension we need to take into account. Human agency is not solely, and not even primarily, what brings institutions about. A final thought to take away from this chapter is Weber’s insistence on a hermeneutic method when studying the Wirksamkeit of ideas and values. I will return to this thought in Chap. 7. From here, the argument branches into three sub-questions of equal relevance. The fact that they are ordered one after the other is a mere artefact of the linear way we make books and has little to do with a logical succession, as arguments in one chapter will be taken up in the others. The three questions are: 1. From a strong process perspective, what does it mean ontologically and epistemologically for a social entity (or process) to emerge? This will be discussed in the next chapter. 2. How does an institution emerge, i.e. what does this specific form of emergence called presencing look like? This will be discussed in Chap. 5. 3. How does an institution emerge, i.e. what must an institution be like in order to be capable of presencing? This will be discussed in Chap. 6.

References

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References Ahrne, Göran and Brunsson, Nils. Organization outside organizations: the significance of partial organization. Organization. 18(1), 2011. Ahrne, Göran, Brunsson, Nils and Seidl, David. Resurrecting organization by going beyond organizations. European Management Journal. 34(2), 2016. Albrow, Martin. Max Weber's Construction of Social Theory. 1990. St. Martin's Press. Anscombe, G.E.M. Natürliche Tatsachen. G. Meggle (Eds.): Analytische Handlungstheorie. 1977. Suhrkamp. Archer, Margaret. Culture and agency: The place of culture in social theory. 1988. Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret. Realist Social Theory: the Morphogenetic Approach. 1995. Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret S. Structure, culture and agency. M. Jacobs and N. Weiss Hanrahan (Eds.): The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture. 2005. Blackwell. Besharov, Marya L and Smith, Wendy K. Multiple institutional logics in organizations: Explaining their varied nature and implications. Academy of Management Review. 39(3), 2014. Clemens, Elisabeth and Cook, James. Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change. Annual Review of Sociology. 25(1999). Creed, WE Douglas, Hudson, Bryant Ashley, Okhuysen, Gerardo Andres and Smith-Crowe, Kristin. A Place in the World: Vulnerability, Wellbeing, and the Ubiquitous Evaluation that Animates Participation in Institutional Processes. Academy of Management Review. 2020. Erdmann, Carl. Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens. 1955. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Friedland, Roger. The Institutional logics Perspective: A new approach to culture, Structure, and Process (Book Review). M@n@gement. 15(5), 2012. Friedland, Roger. God, love and other good reasons for practice: Thinking through institutional logics. Institutional Logics in Action: Research in the Sociology of Organizations. 39(2013a). Friedland, Roger. The Gods of Institutional Life: Weber's Value Spheres and the Practice of Polytheism. Critical Research on Religion. 1(1), 2013b. Friedland, Roger. The Value of Institutional Logics. G. Krücken, C. Mazza, R. Meyer and P. Walgenbach (Eds.): New Themes in Institutional Analysis: Topics and Issues from European Research. 2017. Edward Elgar. Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society. 1993. Polity Press. Greenwood, Royston, Díaz, Amalia Magán, Li, Stan Xiao and Lorente, José Céspedes. The multiplicity of institutional logics and the heterogeneity of organizational responses. Organization Science. 21(2), 2010. Hatch, Mary Jo and Zilber, Tammar. Conversation at the border between organizational culture theory and institutional theory. Journal of Management Inquiry. 21(1), 2012. Iggers, Georg G. The German conception of history: The national tradition of historical thought from Herder to the present. 2012. Wesleyan University Press. McPherson, Chad Michael and Sauder, Michael. Logics in action: Managing institutional complexity in a drug court. Administrative Science Quarterly. 58(2), 2013. Meier, Frank and Meyer, Uli. What’s the Problem with Complexity? (Working Paper). 2016. TU München. Meyer, John, Boli, John and Thomas, George. Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account. G. Thomas, J. Meyer, F. O. Ramirez and J. Boli (Eds.): Institutional Structure. 1987. Sage. Mohr, John W. Measuring Meaning Structures. Annual Review of Sociology. 24. 1998. Mutch, Alistair. Reflexivity and the Institutional Entrepreneur: A Historical Exploration. Organization Studies. 27(7), 2007. Mutch, Alistair. Institutional logics as a contribution to social ontology. Journal of Critical Realism. 19(5), 2020.

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Nicholson, Helen. Love, War, and the Grail. 2001. Brill. Pache, Anne-Claire and Santos, Filipe. When worlds collide: The internal dynamics of organizational responses to conflicting institutional demands. Academy of Management Review. 35(3), 2010. Popper, Karl. Three worlds. 1979. University of Michigan. Quattrone, Paolo. Governing Social Orders, Unfolding Rationality, and Jesuit Accounting Practices A Procedural Approach to Institutional Logics. Administrative Science Quarterly. 60(3), 2015. Sayer, Andrew. Why Things Matter to People. 2011. Cambridge Univ Press. Schulz-Schaeffer, Ingo. Eigengesetzlichkeit, Spannungsverhältnis, Wahlverwandtschaft und Kausalität. A. Maurer (Eds.): Wirtschaftssoziologie nach Max Weber. 2010. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Selznick, Philip. The Moral Commonwealth. 2014. University of California Press. Seward, Desmond. The monks of war: the military orders. 2000. Folio Society. Suddaby, Roy and Greenwood, Royston. Methodological Issues in Researching Institutional Change. D. Buchanan and A. Bryman (Eds.): The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods. 2009. Sage. Suddaby, Roy, Elsbach, Kimberly D, Greenwood, Royston, Meyer, John W and Zilber, Tammar B. Organizations and their institutional environments—Bringing meaning, values, and culture back in: Introduction to the special research forum. Academy of Management Journal. 53(6), 2010. Suso Frank, Karl. Geschichte des christlichen Mönchtums. 1987. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Swedberg, Richard. The Max Weber Dictionary. 2005. Stanford University Press. Taylor, Charles. Theories of meaning. Man and World. 13(3), 1980. Thornton, Patricia H, Ocasio, William and Lounsbury, Michael. The institutional logics perspective: A new approach to culture, structure, and process. 2012. Oxford University Press on Demand. Upton-Ward, Judith. The rule of the Templars: The French text of the rule of the Order of the Knights Templar. 1992. The Boydell Press. Weber, Max. Politk als Beruf. 1919. Weber, Max. Einleitung zur Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. 1986. C.B. Mohr. Weber, Max. Die 'Objektivität' sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis. M. Weber (Eds.): Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. 1988. J.C.B. Mohr. Weber, Max. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. 2005. Area Verlag. Weik, Elke. Institutions as Adverbs. G. Krücken, C. Mazza, R. Meyer and P. Walgenbach (Eds.): New Themes in Institutional Analysis: Topics and Issues from European Research. 2017. Edward Elgar. Weik, Elke. Understanding Institutional Endurance: The Role of Dynamic Form, Harmony and Rhythm in Institutions. Academy of Management Review. 44(2), 2019. Weik, Elke. Was ist eine Institution?: Der organisationale Institutionenbegriff zwischen Pornographie und Fußball. R. Hasse and A. Krüger (Eds.): Neo-Institutionalismus: Kritik und Weiterentwicklung eines sozialwissenschaftlichen Paradigmas. 2020. Transcript Verlag. Whimster, Sam. Understanding Weber. 2007. Routledge. Zilber, Tammar. The Work of Meanings in Institutional Processes and Thinking. R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, R. Suddaby and K. Sahlin (Eds.): The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. 2008. Sage

Chapter 4

Strong Process Theory: An Ontology for Institutions

Abstract This chapter presents key concepts of Whitehead’s process philosophy: creativity, one and many, relationality, Actual Entities, principle of process, experience, datum, ideas, valuation, intensity, enduring objects and causal efficacy. It then applies these concepts to formulate a strong process theory of institutions as adverbial, experiential processes in a world of concern.

4.1

Key Concepts from Whitehead’s “Process and Reality”

The previous chapter has raised a number of issues that I want to discuss further. There is 1. the idea that institutions are systems, or value-based orderings, while at the same time they are processes. 2. the question of the Geist, i.e. the complex of relationships in historical reality, and my rejection of Weber’s nominalist stance. 3. the distinction between human agency and the Wirksamkeit of ideas, both of which are forms of causality. 4. the idea that the expression of values creates reality. These questions will help me answer the central question of the chapter, which is, what it means to say that institutions “emerge”. What kind of process stands at the beginning of an institution? In addressing these questions, the present chapter elaborates the metaphysical assumptions this book is based on. Metaphysics, or more modestly, a discussion of the ontological and epistemological assumptions and implications of a theory, has gone out of fashion in the social sciences as they hasten to prove their relevance to deans and funders. For organisational institutionalism in particular, a focus on problem-generated research has further exacerbated the problem (Suddaby and Greenwood 2009). This makes, I would argue, for bad theory, as conceptual rigour and consistency can only be achieved across a wider field of publications if scholars apply the same assumptions and are able to reflect on them.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Weik, The Emergence of Institutions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89895-3_4

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Institutions are a classic example in which a major shift in paradigm—from a structural or entitative perspective on institutions to a process perspective—is exercised by introducing a verb form (e.g. institutionalise)1 or a central process (e.g. a competition of logics). That done, everything else, in particular methods of study derived from an entitative conception, are left unchanged. I would like to illustrate this, as one example of many, with an empirical study by McPherson and Sauder (2013) on institutional complexity and competing logics. The study is remarkable because it shows, as I read it, the tension between the “fluid” reality the authors encountered and the professional requirements of “properly” documenting one’s research findings in such a prestigious journal as The Administrative Science Quarterly. So the authors time and again make reference to the fact that the actors they observed were oscillating between the logics, for example: The data in the table show that although actors tend to favor their own professional logics over others, each at times employs the full array of institutional tools. At one extreme, probation officers were adept at invoking all of the logics . . . (p. 178) . . . actors were surprisingly fluid in their use of available logics to solve the practical problems of the court. (p. 178f.) Not only were logics available for use by almost all actors, but each logic was also used to argue for more or less severe sanctions: the same logics could be used toward different ends. (p. 179) While using logics of any type was generally successful, using the logics of others was noticeably more so: hijacked logics influenced the decision of the presiding judge in 78 of these 90 instances . . . (p. 180)

Apparently the logics were not clearly distinguishable, at least not by the participants of the study. The findings of the study as documented in the tables, however, show four clearly demarcated logical entities (McPherson and Sauder 2013, Table 4.1) whose occurrence can be counted (McPherson and Sauder 2013, Tables 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4). This suggests an entitative conception of logics. I will now provide a sketch of my underlying metaphysical assumptions that stand in juxtaposition to such an entitative conception. They are based on a strong process theory, i.e. a metaphysics that assumes that process is primordial and prior to any other state of being. Readers who are familiar with Whitehead’s thoughts can skip this section, as it is intended to provide a very brief sketch of his process theory. I will then conceptualise institutions as (Whiteheadian) processes and show how concern, experience and relationality play a central role in their constitution. I draw on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy as set forth in his books “Science and the Modern World”, “Adventures of Ideas” and most importantly, “Process and Reality”. Whitehead is one of a few genuine process philosophers, a line of metaphysics that was basically created by his, William James’s and Henri Bergson’s work (Rescher 1996). Whitehead, a renowned mathematician,2 became in his later

It is remarkable that this verb form then becomes substantivised again as “institutionalisation”, which expresses the state of being in becoming institutionalised. 2 He wrote the “Principia Mathematica” together with Bertrand Russell. 1

4.1 Key Concepts from Whitehead’s “Process and Reality”

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years a philosophy professor at Harvard. While Bergson’s process philosophy has a powerful literary exposition that eventually won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, Whitehead’s strictly logical and rather dry argumentation has won him the reputation of being difficult and maze-like. Despite this, my personal preference lies with him.3 Whitehead calls his philosophy a metaphysics or cosmology to indicate that he aims for a theory so abstract and general that it encompasses, and explains, all the occurrences in the world. Every theory is, in some sense, meta-physical, i.e. beyond the confines of proof through physics. A cosmology is just a couple of notches more abstract and general than the theories we use to operate with in the social sciences. Like them, it must pass the tests of coherence and consistency—just on a larger scale, and like them, its ultimate “proof” lies in that which it can explain. Catering to social scientific sensitivities around liquidity, ambiguity and process as well as to the findings and puzzles in quantum physics (see the discussion in Malin 2001), Whitehead’s cosmology, I believe, serves the twenty-first century quite well.

4.1.1

The Basic Elements of Whitehead’s System

To Whitehead, the two ultimate metaphysical principles that “drive the world”,4 so to speak, are creativity, i.e. the permanent creation of novelty, and a back-and-forth movement between the one and the many. The latter can be pictured as many elements coming together to form one unit, the units multiplying, and combining again in a new unit, which is, however, again one among many. Since the latter element is so basic and fundamental for his scheme, he considers his metaphysics to be relational or organic. The term “organic” should not be read as referring to biological organisms, but to the general organisational principle of organising a thing as a whole composed of parts, in which the parts only become parts courtesy of being part of a whole, and the whole only becomes a whole courtesy of the parts.5 The permanent creation of novel entities and the oscillating movement between one and many characterise the most fundamental process in the universe. In logical terms, they are the presuppositions on which Whitehead’s system is based. The new entities that are permanently created—Whitehead calls them “Actual Entities”—are relational beings in the sense that they are an integrated bundle of the relationships they form with already existing things. The easiest way to picture this is I think any further argument as to why Whitehead is “better” than James or Bergson would be disingenuous. They are all excellent process philosophers, but space and economy forbid I use them all. 4 On page 21 of “Process and Reality”, Whitehead calls them “ultimate matter of fact”. 5 I would hold that this, though seldom discussed explicitly, is a useful model for the relationship between an institution and its manifestations. A policeman, a police uniform and a police car become what they are through the institution, and conversely the institution manifests itself through them. 3

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perhaps as a new perspective, whose only “content” is the many things that can be seen from it, and can be seen from it in a manner that is unique to this perspective. Another metaphor that Whitehead uses is “a drop of experience” (e.g., Whitehead 1985, p. 18). The Actual Entities, as their name indicates, are the only entities in the universe that are actual (as opposed to potential). They are concrete realities. The central process is the becoming of these Actual Entities out of the many relationships they form with already existing entities and potentials. Their being is entirely constituted by their becoming, i.e. there is nothing additional in them that was given from the start. Whitehead calls this “the principle of process” (Whitehead 1985, p. 23). While becoming, Actual Entities relate to existing entities and potentials. Whitehead refers to this act of relating as “prehension”, but we may call it “experiencing” for our purposes, and may picture the Actual Entities experiencing different entities in different manners and incorporating these experiences. Experience hence forms the most fundamental building block of reality. It is, however, important to omit consciousness from this experience. Human conscious experience is a very special form of the generic experience that pervades the universe. This generic experience is just relatedness. We can also call it an “event” (if we retain the relationship to other events), or as Whitehead sometimes does, an “occurrence”. Once an Actual Entity has completed its becoming, i.e. once it “is”, it ceases to be an Actual Entity and becomes a “datum” (Latin for “given”). This datum can then be experienced by subsequent Actual Entities. Actual Entities, however, do not only experience data but also potentials, most prominently among them ideas. Like Archer and Popper, Whitehead envisages ideas (which he calls “Eternal Objects”) to be timeless, a system unaffected by agency or causality.6 Some ideas may not be related to by human beings. They may have been forgotten or not yet discovered, but they are there as potentials for experience. They are, however, only potentials, not actualities, because they do not become. Nor are they concretised in a specific time-space location. It is only when they enter an Actual Entity, i.e. are experienced by it, that they become concrete. Ideas, in other words, are realised once they are adopted by an Actual Entity. Values enter the scheme predominantly in the activity of valuation. In its becoming, every Actual Entity relates to the existing data and ideas in a negative or positive way, i.e. rejects or accepts them. Rejected data and ideas play no further role in the becoming of the Actual Entity, while accepted data and ideas become constitutive of the Actual Entity. In addition to the qualitative distinction between positive and

6

Examples he gives are colours (e.g. blue, green) and their grades (e.g. light or dark blue), mathematical expressions (formulae or shapes) as well as universals (e.g. dog, man). (For an overview, see Christian 1959). Eternal objects, as Whitehead formulates on page 59 of “Process and Reality”, have adventures in the real world, as they enter discussions, are used in different ways or are forgotten, but they always emerge unscathed out of these adventures. Blue remains blue, a triangle remains a triangle.

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negative, the positive or negative valuation can also come in different intensities.7 Beyond valuation, Whitehead seems to regard values as ideas (to which a valuation gets attached). For example, justice is an idea that is often valued positively. The concept of intensity plays a rather central role in the becoming of an Actual Entity, for intensity, or more precisely, intensification of experience is what Actual Entities strive for. Whitehead calls this a “lure for feeling” (Whitehead 1985, p. 85). Intensity is created through repetition, rhythm, contrast or focus. An intense experience is an aesthetic fact (Whitehead 1985, p. 279).

4.1.2

Enduring Objects

As every Actual Entity is related to previous Actual Entities (now data) and will be a datum for future Actual Entities, a coherence of the process is guaranteed. The fundamental twin principles of creativity and one/many make sure that there is always new material fed into the process. This is, however, not the only way in which continuity is produced, for if this was the case, the world would only consist of infinitely small Actual Entities. Using the same principle of organic (or partwhole) relationality, however, Actual Entities can build larger, macrocosmic entities. Whitehead calls them “enduring objects”, and one classic example is of course the line from atoms to molecules to cells to biological organisms. Let us bear in mind, however, that their smallest building block is not a piece of matter, as classical physics would have it, but an integrating experience, i.e. a form of order.8 Enduring objects therefore do not have to be material objects for it is order, not materiality, that ensures their endurance. (Materiality can come into it and further ensure endurance, but is does not have to.) As a consequence, all sorts of arrangements, whether material, partly material or immaterial, can be enduring objects. An enduring object integrates actual entities and complexes of actual entities (called “nexus”9). Enduring objects are important in Whitehead’s scheme because they are the things that change in the classical sense of moving from one state to another. Eternal Objects (ideas), as we have seen, do not change. Actual Entities cannot change either, because they perish in the moment they have completed their becoming and thus never reach a state of being that they could move from or to.

It is interesting to see that on page 254 of “Process and Reality”, Whitehead stresses that valuation in high-grade organisms constitutes the first step towards intellectual mentality, i.e. thinking in the commonsense understanding of the term. This means that, as I will elaborate in Chap. 6, valuation predates thinking and is a prerequisite for it. 8 This seems to align with findings of quantum physics saying that matter, if divided till the end, ultimately “dissolves” into order. Hans-Peter Dürr, former director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics formulates: “As a physicist, I have spent fifty years—my whole life as a researcher—to find out what lies behind matter. The result is simple: There is no matter!” (Dürr 2010, p. 44, my translation). 9 The singular and plural form of the word are identical. 7

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Enduring objects, on the other hand, are stable enough for us to recognise them as objects, while at the same time not being immutable. Even a rock, as a very enduring object, is subject to physical erosion and chemical activity at any given moment of time. What enduring objects do retain, however, is their order. An enduring object is ordered in two ways. The first—which Whitehead, somewhat exotically, refers to as “social”—is an order based on at least one common idea that is positively valued by all nexus of the enduring object and imposed on each nexus because of its relation with other nexus. In other words, this common idea is not a part of each nexus before it enters the enduring object, but arises out of the coming together of many nexus. The second—again, somewhat exotically termed “personal”10—is a social order that is serially ordered, which means that it stands in a genetic relationship with a nexus in the past from which it inherits and a nexus in the future into which it will pass on its characteristics. The most important thought we need to take from this definition of an enduring object is the fact that it can change while staying the same, and that this “the same” is predicated on its order. Institutions, I would hold, are such enduring objects. I will explain in more detail below.

4.1.3

Causality

In classic, non-process, philosophy, causality plays a central role because it is needed to relate substances with each other. In an ontology in which every object (including a single atom) or person is self-sufficient and clearly distinguished from all others, it becomes difficult to explain how one such isolated substance can interact with any other isolated substance. We perceive that things happen because of other things happening, that people do stuff because of other people, but in an atomic, substance philosophy, this is very difficult to explain, for after all, there is by definition no connection between the two. Causality is the concept that bridges the chasm. We say that person or object A causes person or object B to do something. It is clear, however, that causality is no empirically perceivable event or relationship (as convincingly argued in Hume 1993); we just assume that there is a causal relationship if, for example, events correlate on a regular basis. In a relational scheme like Whitehead’s, there is no need for causality in this function. There remains, nevertheless, a need to conceptualise power and its direction from cause to effect. Whitehead does this by turning the classical philosophical discussion on its head. Philosophers11 often argue that we, first, perceive a succession of activities, say a hand throwing a ball, and, second, ascribe causality to the

10

It has, as Whitehead explains on page 35, all the characteristics of a person in the legal sense, but does not necessarily have consciousness. 11 Whitehead discusses John Locke and David Hume in depth here.

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hand in moving the ball. Causality is something we construe between two activities that we perceive, and we construe it on top of our perception of the two activities. Whitehead rejects this perspective. He claims that causality, or “causal efficacy”, as he calls it, is what we—and indeed every Actual Entity—feels immediately and directly. It may be vague and non-conceptual, but it is the immediate feeling of the power of the things around us. Only because we know how this power feels, can we then construe a perception of causality. This conceptualisation of causality, which is often rather complex, is only possible because we are intellectually very advanced beings. The feeling of causal efficacy, in contrast, is a relationship to the world that we share with every being, however non-intellectual it may be.

4.1.4

Ensuring Continuity in Process

The greatest danger for process theories is to dissolve their objects into ephemeral happenings without recognisable features (Weik 2011). If everything is fluid, it becomes difficult for the human mind to hold on to, and operate on, “something”. In our everyday understanding, change presupposes a something that changes but stays recognisable as the subject of that change. Actual Entities that perish in the moment they have finished becoming are not very good vehicles to establish any continuity. They are more like atomistic “drops” or “blips”. And although they are produced continuously, they themselves have no continuity. The task of ensuring continuity in Whitehead’s cosmology falls, therefore, to those elements that are around for longer. Prime candidates are Whitehead’s Eternal Objects, viz. abstract ideas, patterns or relations.12 Since they remain the same over time (for example, the colour blue remains blue), they can link instantaneous experiences that are otherwise there and gone (for example, my experience of a blue ball in t1 and t2). “‘Change’ is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things”, as Whitehead (1985, p. 59) says quite poetically with reference to the “something” that remains stable. Continuity is the prerequisite for another important process: intensification. Many of the attributes that are Eternal Objects, like “blue” in the previous example, come in degrees and can therefore be intensified. Other Eternal Objects that do not come in degrees (e.g. the notion of the sea) can be intensified through repetition, especially rhythmic repetition. It is one of Whitehead’s basic assumptions that all experience strives for greater intensity. This does not just apply to a greater intensity of single qualities but also to more complex and more differentiated structures. A strong contrast, for example, provides more intensity than a set of the same entities. The same goes for complex artistic compositions in music or drama.

12 Whitehead’s usage of Eternal Objects goes beyond these, but for our purposes we can focus on these.

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Strong Process Theory: An Ontology for Institutions

From Whitehead to Institutions

Let us now return to the four questions posed at the beginning of the chapter, viz. how institutions can be orderings at the same time as they are processes; my rejection of Weber’s nominalist position on the Geist; the distinction between agency and Wirksamkeit; and the idea that expression of values creates reality. I will address them in turn.

4.2.1

How Can Institutions Be Processual Orderings?

A World of Concern So the most fundamental “drop” of reality, the actuality on which everything else rests, is an experience. This experience is, in turn, nothing but a relation to the already existing world. It is constantly churned out by a creative process and, once established, adds to the existing world. It is the basic function of this experience to value its relations in different degrees of positivity or negativity. We may call this evaluative relating to the world “concern”, as other philosophers13 have done. We should also note that this concern is not something an established subject “has” as an attribute that can be taken on or shed, but that this concern constitutes the subject. Since this concern is primarily affective, this makes a claim about the primacy of the affective. We will pursue this line of enquiry in Chap. 6. Conversely, this experience does something to the world. Beyond its emotional capacity, experience (or concern) also forms the basis of power and hence of causality, for both can be defined in terms of affecting something else and being affected by something else.14 Experiencing is not, as Cooper formulates quite vividly “a process of returning with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness . . .” (Cooper 1993, p. 9), but “to weave a thread (perhaps be a thread) in the universe” (Cooper 1993, p. 6). Conceptualising institutions in this cosmology therefore means conceptualising them as strands in a permanently changing world of concern. These strands, or enduring objects, are made up of experiences through which they are given reality, and through which they, in turn, constitute the subjects who experience them. As enduring objects, they have a social and personal order, with the former referring to some common element of form and the latter referring to an identity over time. In his institutionalist interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology, Gehman has recently characterised institutions as involving a task or idea that “governs the total

13

A good number of authors particularly note the analogies between Whitehead’s and Heidegger’s philosophies. For Heidegger, Sorge (care) is the fundamental structure of Dasein (being). This is even more remarkable since the two seem to have been unaware of each other’s work, as Cooper notes. (See, for example, Cooper 1993; Rapp 1984; Rather 1961). 14 This is, in fact, one of the oldest definitions of power, suggested in Plato’s Theaetetus.

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development of its movement and becomes the inner motive behind all its tensions”, “a hidden teleology” that “implicates a kind of agency” (Gehman 2021, p. 243). This task or idea fulfils the same function as Whitehead’s common element. Drawing on our definition from Chap. 3, both the social and the personal order are value-based orders, which in a Whiteheadian terminology means that, first, their experience is based on a positive valuation. This, however, is true for everything we experience and is not particular for institutions. Second, and more importantly, it means that a value provides the common element of form so vital for its social order. Relating to what I said about an Actual Entity being a new “perspective”, we may say that with a new institution, experiences become rearranged around a new value centre. The Adverbial Nature of Institutions This is what I have called elsewhere (Weik 2017) the “adverbial” nature of institutions. If we follow the logic of grammar, institutions are not nouns because they are not things or persons. Neither are they verbs, for they are not activities. My suggestion is that they are adverbs, i.e. manners of doing things. In particular, they are ways of seeing things, i.e. perspectives. Since they are, however, not purely cognitive, they also are ways of feeling and doing things. An emerging institution, I would claim, is first and foremost a new way of perceiving actors, objects and practices, and as a consequence, of creating new actors, objects and practices. As the institution endures, this way of seeing and acting becomes an established perspective shared by many. From here, the theory links to the literature on sensemaking and meaning creation in institutions. It differs from that literature in the small but important distinction that a) institutions do not provide or legitimise frameworks but are the frameworks, and b) that these frameworks are not just cognitive but experiential, i.e. also affective. Cooper (1993, p. 50) gives the example of us feeling the heat of a hot piece of iron. Feeling the heat, we do not actually feel “a thing”, for the only thing around is the piece of iron. Heat is not a thing on top of the iron. Nor is it a permanent attribute of the iron (i.e. an adjective) for when the iron cools down, it is gone without a trace. Rather, the heat is a quality of our perception; we “feel the iron hotly”. I will come back to this thought and explore it in more depth in Chap. 6. For now, I will apply it to our case. The Emergence of Military Monasticism The six cultural candidates of Chap. 3 (military monasticism, Christian monasticism, feudal society, chivalry, chansons de geste and the Holy Land) were not fixed and stable states persisting over decades or centuries, but dynamic arrangements, constantly shifting in emphasis and growing or declining in importance. They were, in other words, processes with varying intensities. Figure 4.1 provides an impression of the varying degrees of intensity over time. It shows how some of these arrangements were “on their way in” while others were “on their way out” when the Templar Order was founded. If institutions are value-based orders of experience, then military monasticism emerged as the group of French noblemen under the lead of Hugh de Payns were

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Fig. 4.1 Developments of institutional arrangements (degree of blackness indicates climax of institution)

perceived as different from the other sword-carrying Christians in the Holy Land. This perception did not come unprompted. We have seen how ideas shifted towards the notion of a holy war (see Table 3.2). Emotions, too, were stirred in favour of a military triumph over a heathen aggressor by Pope Urban and Bernard of Clairvaux. Nevertheless, the switch did not happen automatically. It did not present itself as the obvious, reasonable or even rational “solution”, as so many in the institutional logics and entrepreneurship literature would have it. It may seem obvious in hindsight to connect a desire for holy war with some knights prepared to fight in the Holy Land, but it was not that simple. As we have seen, the Templar Order came close to extinction within the first two decades of its existence, and neither the King of Jerusalem nor the Patriarch of Jerusalem “saw” anything special in Hugh and his friends. They needed prompting from a world-class orator, Bernard of Clairvaux, followed by the Pope, who also added credibility to the new perspective by granting tangible privileges based on it. From then on this new “thing” became so much more visible in horses, money, garments, written rules and other documents. The very same activity of dying on the battlefields of the Holy Land that had been performed 10,000 times during the First Crusade, now became a different activity—martyrdom. Never leaving the battlefield alive unless victorious became an expectation, a programme, which in turn bred new, and sometimes spectacular, activities. The story of the wounded knights of the Order of St. John strapping themselves to chairs so they could be carried into the breached wall to fight the Turkish attackers at the battle of St. Elmo15 speaks volumes of that new perspective, both in terms of what the perspective did to the knights and what it did to their audiences. That rationality or strategic design did not come into it is evidenced by the fact that, due to these

15

Admittedly one of my favourites.

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actions, the Templar Order as a whole faced annihilation on the battlefield several times within the span of 70 years.16

4.2.2

Are Institutions Real or Nominal?

Even if established institutionalist theories agree with the assumption that institutions are an order or ordering principle, they have difficulties explaining how this fits with the assumption that institutions are processes. While old essentialist theories did not have that problem, for it was the essence of the institution (however defined) that would guarantee its endurance, a processual take on institutions cannot retreat to such an easy theoretical figure. So, if institutions are processes and thus, by definition, changing all the time, what allows us to speak of the same institution over the course of decades and centuries? Is it, as Weber would have it, a Geist construed by the scholar based on their perception of what is culturally significant? Is it, as Bourdieu (1990) would have it, a structure that generates other structures (structura structurans)? Is it a mechanism generating surface manifestations as in the parlour of Critical Realism (Bhaskar 1975)? Yes and no. In a relational metaphysics like Whitehead’s, everything is “in between” the perceiving subject and the perceived object, as subject and object are constituted by that which is in between. So the Geist is not just a construction on the part of the observing scholar, but the scholar plays a role in its emergence and endurance. On the other hand, it is not an ontologically independent structure or mechanism that can impose itself on the unwary observer either. Rather, as explained above, the “in-between”, the basic act of experiencing, constitutes subjects (Actual Entities) and objects (data, enduring objects and ideas).

4.2.3

How Do Agency and Wirksamkeit Differ?

Following on from what I said about causality above, it is important to note that the feeling of the power of others, which lies at the basis of causal efficacy, is not limited to physical power. On an affectual plane, non-physical power is just as real and effective as physical power. By the same token, feeling compelled by the wishes of another person and feeling compelled by an idea can result in the same behaviour. 16

Barber and Bate estimate that the decisive defeats at Hattin (1187), La Forbie (1244) and Mansourah (1250) cost the order 230, 267 and 280 knights respectively. They come out of an estimated total of 600 knights serving in all provinces of the Holy Land before Hattin. The Masters of the Order were regularly among the fallen. (Barber and Bate 2002, p. 12f.). I speculate that each of those would have been the death knell for the organization if it had not been linked so strongly to the institution.

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We may want to keep the distinction between agency and Wirksamkeit to leave room for a discussion of free will and responsibility (on the part of the agent), but in terms of the “affective effect”, i.e. the compulsion the receiver feels, they are indistinguishable. For institutions, this means that it is not only agents within institutions that can create effects on people; it is also—and sometimes in the absence of agents—ideas or orderings that can achieve the same thing. This is, as we will see later, often the case when aesthetics come into play.

4.2.4

Emergence from a Process Perspective

If we understand institutions as enduring objects in Whitehead’s sense, then these enduring objects emerge as their social and personal order is constituted. For these orders to be constituted, we need at least one common, positively valued idea to become constitutive for each element (social order), as well as a passing on of this idea through time (personal order). The crucial element is the common idea becoming constitutive for all elements, which does not point to a birth of new elements or ideas, but to a reconfiguration of existing elements with regard to an idea (see also Chap. 7). This new configuration needs to be experienced, and becomes more intensive the more often it is experienced. Of vital importance for these experiences is not just cognitive sensemaking, but an affectual “being touched”, based on a life-world of concern. It is here where the cognitive bias of mainstream institutionalist theory prevents scholars from understanding how new institutions come into being and how they gain power over people. By the time institutions become objects of discursive logic, their emergence in the “belly of society”, to coin a flowery expression, is long past.

References Barber, Malcolm and Bate, Keith. The Templars. 2002. Manchester University Press. Bhaskar, Roy. A Realist Theory of Science. 1975. Leeds Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. 1990. Stanford University Press. Christian, William. An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics. 1959. Yale University Press. Cooper, Ron. Heidegger and Whitehead: A Phenomenological Examination into the Intelligibility of Experience. 1993. Ohio University Press. Dürr, Hans-Peter. Geist, Kosmos und Physik. 2010. Rotona. Gehman, Joel. Revisiting the foundations of institutional analysis: A phenomenological perspective. (Eds.): Macrofoundations: Exploring the institutionally situated nature of activity. 2021. Emerald Publishing Limited. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 1993. Encyclopedia Britannica. Malin, Shimon. Nature Loves to Hide. 2001. Oxford University Press.

References

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McPherson, Chad Michael and Sauder, Michael. Logics in action: Managing institutional complexity in a drug court. Administrative Science Quarterly. 58(2), 2013. Rapp, Friedrich. Zur Geschlossenheit metaphysischer Konzeptionen: Whitehead, Hegel und Heidegger. H. Holz and E. Wolf-Gazo (Eds.): Whitehead und der Prozeßbegriff. 1984. Karl Alber. Rather, L.J. Existential Experience in Whitehead and Heidegger. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry. 1961. Rescher, Nicholas. Process Metaphysics. 1996. State University of New York Press. Suddaby, Roy and Greenwood, Royston. Methodological Issues in Researching Institutional Change. D. Buchanan and A. Bryman (Eds.): The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods. 2009. Sage. Weik, Elke. In Deep Waters: Process Theory Between Scylla and Charybdis. Organization. 18(5), 2011. Weik, Elke. Institutions as Adverbs. G. Krücken, C. Mazza, R. Meyer and P. Walgenbach (Eds.): New Themes in Institutional Analysis: Topics and Issues from European Research. 2017. Edward Elgar. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. 1985. Free Press.

Chapter 5

Presencing

Abstract This chapter, together with the subsequent one, constitutes the centre of my argument, as it describes the process of emergence. The previous chapters have introduced the core concepts of non-human activity, values, process dynamics and intensities. This chapter links them with the concept of emergence resulting in the concept of presencing. Presencing describes and explains how institutions emerge largely without human intervention. It is based on a strong process theory, and so takes seriously the idea that each institution, as a process, has its own trajectory and particular degree of reality at any given moment in time. Presencing gives room to valuation, aesthetics and emotions in the emergence of an institution by considering them co-constitutive factors.

5.1

Perception as Presencing

This chapter is twinned with the subsequent chapter, as each describes one side of the same question: How does an institution emerge? The chapter at hand asks how an institution emerges, i.e. what this specific form of emergence called presencing1 looks like. The next chapter will ask how an institution emerges, i.e. what an institution must be like in order to be capable of presencing. The chapter at hand rests on a number of thoughts developed in the two previous chapters. In particular, it draws on the conceptualisation of: • • • •

institutions as value-based orderings; ideas and values as wirksam, i.e. active and real; the processual nature of all reality, including institutions; experience as the basic ontological act in a world of process.

Institutions have a rather particular ontological status. They are not like a car that, once assembled, sits around whether human beings take notice of it or not. Nor are 1 An anonymous reviewer has alerted me to the existence of a “Presencing Institute” founded by Otto Scharmer. I should clarify that my conceptual apparatus as presented in this book is unrelated to the man or the institute.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Weik, The Emergence of Institutions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89895-3_5

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they like a moment of merriness, that passes without a trace once it has been experienced. They can endure well beyond the life-span of a human being, yet do not exist when nobody takes them into account in their behaviour. When perceived, they are perceived often as constraining, and always as external to the perceiver. Yet scholars are convinced it is a mistake to reify them. Berger and Luckmann (1967) have, of course, discussed the objectification of institutions. Zucker (1983) has done the same with the taken-for-granted nature of institutions. Others have given explanations for why institutions endure and how they are reproduced (for an overview, see Weik 2015). All, however, have employed some Cartesian notion of subject and object describing how something subjective becomes objectified, and how it in turn influences subjective perception and behaviour; how actors establish, maintain or dismantle institutions, and how they in turn receive legitimacy and power from them. Starting from a strong process theory, however, the Cartesian distinction becomes obsolete, as both subject and object are outcomes of the same process—a process I call presencing. Presencing describes the coming-into-being, or emergence, of an “object” as it is perceived by a “subject”. I put these terms in inverted commas because they carry a lot of unwanted conceptual baggage of the Cartesian kind. Most importantly, they assume that the subject and object are constituted prior to the experience, which is exactly the opposite of what strong process theory would suggest. I will therefore replace them with the somewhat artificial notions of “experiencer” and “experienced”, to denote the more subjective and objective poles of an experience, respectively. The term “poles” indicates that they are actually inseparable from the experience. Let me sharpen the contours of the concept by discussing two examples from the home of positivism, i.e. the natural sciences. The first relates to Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter2 (which revolutionised our conception of the universe by introducing moons orbiting a planet other than Earth). These moons had, of course, been visible to others, as they were then to Galileo. His achievement was to see the moving dots “as” moons. As described in his own account, he started out by observing them as fixed stars. As he tracked their movement relative to Jupiter in subsequent nights, he began to wonder and question the conventional wisdom of his time. Finally, he saw “entirely beyond doubt, that in the heavens there are three stars wandering around Jupiter like Venus and Mercury around the Sun. [. . .] This was at length seen clear as day . . .”. Note the expressions of obviousness once the first experience of the spots “as” moons had been made. We misunderstand, I would argue, Galileo’s experience if we understand it as the seeing of an established, independent object. The moons he saw became moons in the moment he saw them “as” moons. Everything we see and experience is something we experience “as”: a table, a family member, a workplace routine. This is basic sensemaking, without which we cannot actually experience anything.

2 I have borrowed the Galileo example from Bortoft (2013) and the Howard example from Bortoft (2012).

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The second example relates to Howard’s discovery of the cloud formations cirrus, cumulus and stratus. Again, here is a man seeing the same cloud formations thousands have observed before him, but understanding that their patterning is meaningful and tells us something about their dynamics. And that these dynamics, furthermore, constitute generically applicable laws, even in such ephemeral and variable phenomena as clouds—thus opening the door for meteorology. Now, if the perception of physical objects like moons or clouds can be re-read in terms of an experiencer co-constituting the experienced, how much easier should this be for social phenomena3 consisting largely of non-physical elements like values and ideas? If we look at military monasticism, it would be strange to assume that it was around before anyone noticed and perceived it. We can, however, show that its elements had been around for some time prior to its formation. Then, when people began to see the Templars as something different from other monastic orders and other worldly knights, the institution emerged.

5.2

Presencing as “Seeing as”

The pivotal moment of presencing, therefore, is the moment of “experiencing as”. It is the moment that constitutes the experienced, as opposed to a positivist notion of sensing an object. I have already touched on this topic in Chap. 4 when I discussed the adverbial nature of institutions, i.e. the idea that institutions form a particular way of seeing or doing things. I will now elaborate on this thought.

5.2.1

A Note on “Experience”

First of all, it may be useful to think about two rather different meanings of “experience” that tend to get conflated because English does not really offer different expressions for it (Lash 2006). The German equivalents are “erfahren/Erfahrung” and “erleben/Erlebnis”. The former is translated into English as “experience”, whereas the second often is referred to as “lived experience” (though sometimes it

3

Some notion of it is obviously already contained in the idea of social construction, which proposes that our social reality is construed by human beings. In contrast to social construction, however, presencing starts one step earlier, for it is not in the social interaction or communication that these notions arise, but in the experiences that enable social interaction and communication in the first place. This contrast may be overdrawn depending on which understanding of social constructionism one departs from (For a disambiguation of social constructionism, see Hacking and Hacking 1999). The contrast is, however, valid for all forms of social constructionism that presuppose a finished human being acting as “constructor”. It is overdrawn for those forms that allow a co-constitution of constructor and construction. However, even for the latter, I would argue that the emphasis differs.

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is just translated as “experience”). The two have rather different philosophical ancestries. Erfahrung refers to the Kantian idea of experience as inextricably shaped by mental categories (e.g. space, time, quantity). The outer world (“Dinge an sich”) is not accessible without them. Erlebnis refers to the idea of an immediate, visceral contact with the world, as proposed by phenomenology or life philosophy. Their common ancestor is German Classicism and Romanticism, which is why Erlebnis also has a strong aesthetic, evaluative and emotional component. Although I will, for reasons of simplicity, continue to use “experience” instead of “lived experience”, one should think of this aesthetic-affective Erlebnis rather than of the Kantian categories.

5.2.2

Presencing in Phenomenological Philosophy

An explanation of presencing is, as I have already indicated, much easier to give drawing on the humanities. Here, we can invoke phenomenological philosophy by quoting Heidegger (2000, p. 107): “Being means appearing. Appearing does not mean something derivative, which from time to time meets up with being. Being essentially unfolds as appearing”. This coincidence between being and appearing4 is what I call presencing. To Heidegger, there is not one world in our heads (appearances) and one world outside of them (beings). Instead, Dasein fundamentally relates to the world and its phenomena. This relationship is one in which the phenomena can “show themselves as themselves”, which is the original meaning of the word “phenomenon” (Heidegger 1977, § 7). It is important to note that this appearance, or presencing, is not a twofold act: There is no object, which then is perceived, but the object comes into being in the act of perceiving. As Bortoft (2012) formulates, there is no “it” that then “appears”, just as there is no “it” that then decides to “rain”. The act is all there is. The hermeneutic understanding of the world can easily be linked to institutionalist ideas of interpretation and sensemaking in institutions. Zilber has paved the way with a number of publications, to be followed by a growing number of other authors studying institutions in terms of taken-for-granted frames and perspectives (Voronov and Weber 2016; Weber and Glynn 2006) or local variation and enactment (Binder 2007; Hallett and Ventresca 2006). The link that I am looking for, however, can only be truly established for those authors that move away from cognitive sensemaking towards a kind of experiential or emotional sensemaking. Cognitive sensemaking is

4

Heidegger draws on the meanings of the German word scheinen as (1) leuchten (shine), (2) den Anschein haben (appear as), and (3) erscheinen (appear, become visible). Drawing on Greek philosophy, he explains how Being is related to scheinen as that which manifests itself and becomes unconcealed. Our opinion (doxa) is what we see, the aspect of Being. It is central for the understanding of Heideggers philosophy not to understand Being as a thing or object that can be grasped representationally, but as (a form of) living, a process or mode of being in the world, that can therefore emerge in our relationship to the world.

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making sense of “givens”, an intellectual effort to put the pieces of the puzzle together in the right, or at least a socially accepted, way. In contrast, the kind of sensemaking I am describing starts by creating the puzzle. It may encompass cognitive sensemaking, but it starts much earlier.

5.2.3

The Common Element

Perhaps the most difficult part for readers schooled in the traditional scientific method is to distance themselves from the idea of appearances as something ephemeral, transient and illusionary that hide the real objects, structures or mechanisms “behind” them. We are schooled in asking whether the perceived relationships between elements are imposed by us (nominalism) or in the object (realism). Presencing and strong process theory, however, reject the either-or. The perceived unity of the experienced, as well as its relations, are real, but they are realised in our perception of them. This means that they are as much and as little mind-dependent as the mind is world-dependent. Here, as in many other instances, we need to leave behind the “scientific”5 notion of the distanced, unaffected observer perceiving an independent object. Like all other objects, institutions change by being perceived, just as the perceiver changes by perceiving them. Shotter (2005, 2006) refers to this as a relationally-responsive understanding, as opposed to a “scientific” referential-representational understanding. A relationally-responsive understanding draws on the experiencer’s receptivity, sensuality and imagination in order to allow the experienced to show itself. The experienced will therefore differ in every experiencer. More importantly, each experience will not just form a representation (i.e. a duplicate) of the experienced, but will form it in response to the experiencer’s individual concerns. Like in a conversation, where we listen to our partner with the aim of responding in the near future, and therefore do not produce a duplicate of what she says in our mind but take from it what we need to respond, so our experience of an institution does not duplicate a configuration “out there”. Instead, it provides an experience of the institution shaped by our individual concerns. I will expand on Shotter’s ideas in Chap. 7. This does not preclude the possibility of error, i.e. of seeing relationships where there are none. All phenomenologists stress the time and effort required to comprehend a phenomenon with any measure of accuracy and completeness. I will talk more about this in Chap. 7. If the experience of the phenomenon was entirely subjective, a figment of mind, there could be no error. The phenomenon, however, is independent of the experiencer, as it is a part of countless experiences.

5

A notion that physics, in fact, has abandoned since the early twentieth century. It is almost a trope to point to quantum physics here.

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In that sense, very little of what has been observed about institutions over time is untrue. Organisational institutionalism may no longer stress the externality of institutions or their restrictive character, but it would be difficult to dismiss these characterisations as untrue. Whether authors primarily see the cognitive or emotional or evaluative elements of institutions, whether they describe their cognitive, interpersonal or structural processes, is more a matter of emphasis, theoretical stringency and, to a certain extent, academic fashion than testimony to what institutions actually are. I find, for example, Durkheim to be a keen observer of institutions, although I may not share his theoretical explanations. A good example of the difference between individual interpretation and phenomenal presencing is a play, like “Hamlet”. It exists in a multitude of prints, performances and podcasts providing a multitude of interpretations. There is, however, something real linking this multitude; something that allows us to say “This was not a good performance of Hamlet” or even “This was not Hamlet”. It may not be clear cut and it may change over time, but it is there. The same goes for institutions. Marriage, the police and Christianity are many things to many people. Yet there is a common element linking them and allowing us to speak of a bad husband, a fake policeman or a heretic. We have discussed this common element under the heading of “social order” in the previous chapter. From what I explained there, it makes sense to revive the old structuralist phrasing (see, for example, Barthes 1977) that speaks of the meaning of a text participating6 in the reader, rather than the reader producing an understanding of it. One important characteristic of this common element is its dynamic form. I will discuss this in depth in the following chapter; suffice it to say here that we should not conceptualise it as an “element” in the sense of a static object or attribute. It is dynamic, a moving point of reference, but a point of reference nevertheless. What it was to be a Templar changed, and changed dramatically, over the 150 years of the order’s existence, as it developed from an armed troupe in the royal stables of Jerusalem to the most powerful organisation on Earth. Yet, the meaning at each given point in time was a development from the meaning of the previous point in time.

5.3

Multiplicity in Unity

When faced with the challenge of extracting a common element, the scientific method prescribes abstraction. Abstraction requires the subtraction of all particular, contextual information in order to reach a generic smallest common denominator. The choice of the word “participate” is no coincidence. It revives the Platonic term μεϑεξις, which indicates that individual entities participate in ideas or forms. With the concept Plato tried to solve the problem of how many utterances (or entities more generally) could be an expression of the same idea without being identical with that idea or consuming that idea. All dogs have in common that they are dogs, all cars that they are cars, all performances of “Hamlet” that they perform “Hamlet”.

6

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The method is, of course, particularly prevalent among quantitative-statistical studies. We may call this procedure, with Bortoft (2012), a procedure operating with multiple units. Multiple units are individual, otherwise unrelated instances displaying a common characteristic. This common characteristic is isolated through the process of abstraction. Finding multiple units is a common recipe for institutionalist empirical studies. In a review of the institutional change literature of the last 20 years, Micelotta et al. (2017) identify two major research traditions—those looking for external triggers and those looking for institutional entrepreneurs, or internal agents of change—as traditions preoccupied with isolating relevant causes and examining their effects. At the end of their article, they explicitly recommend “bringing back” variance theory and quantitative studies into the examination of institutional change (Micelotta et al. 2017, p. 1904). The opposite procedure—and the one I would recommend for the study of institutions—is based on finding the multiplicity in unity. This refers to understanding the individual instances as instances that initially belonged together before they became separated. The unity is then this previous, pre-differentiated state that encompasses the instances in their difference. The rainbow of concepts I have provided for the concept of holy war in Chap. 3 is such a multiplicity in unity. It shows how concepts that will later be seen as contrary have a common origin or “coconstitute” each other, though not necessarily in a straightforward dialectical manner. The “rainbow” is a theoretical strategy that moves away from the binary logic of dualisms, dichotomies and thesis-antithesis. I will come back to this in Chap. 7.

5.4

Holism and Increase in Being

Much of what I have discussed up to now can also be framed in terms of a holistic approach. As a process or a form of organising, institutions cannot come into being piecemeal, one element after the other. The whole, i.e. the institution, must appear at the same time as its elements, i.e. the institutional discourses, practices, subjects and objects.7 In a world without military monasticism, a Knight Templar does not make sense. Conversely, military monasticism would not exist without its knights and their warfaring practices. It is a requirement of logic that they come into existence at the same time.8 It is a requirement of hermeneutics that we understand them as a

7

This thought struck me early on as I was trying to describe the emergence of the university and found that I had an institutional logic without an institution (Weik 2011). At the time, I had no answer and just left it as an open question. 8 The last statement is, of course, the same as saying an institution and its elements are co-constitutive of one another, which implies that we are sailing close to the central conflation discussed in Chap. 3. To recap, Archer maintained that the fallacy did not lie in the claim that cultural system and socio-cultural integration were co-constitutive, but that they were changing simultaneously and of necessity. This is, however, not what I am saying. Mine is a logical part-

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whole, for a loss of any part results in a reduction, or even corruption, of meaning (Robbins 2006). This coming into existence is what I call presencing. It means that people start “seeing as”. They saw the arrangement of ideas, values, discourses, men, horses, weapons etc. “as” a new kind of entity, which means as a unity or a whole. And they started doing things with this new whole: they talked about it, they cheered, they condemned, they pinned their hopes on it, they enrolled, they granted it privileges and donated their possessions to it. And with every act, the whole became more real.9 It is in this individual moment of realisation (note the term!), the moment of “seeing as”, that the institution is born. This first perception, of course, needs confirmation by others, needs to become a shared realisation, a felt and valued realisation. It needs to be repeated over and over, grow as other elements, values and discourses are added to it. Gadamer (1990) indeed refers to this repetition and addition as “Seinszuwachs”, i.e. an increase in being. “Hamlet” grows with every performance and every new interpretation; so did the Templars with every reference to them, every heart, mind and sword won. Institutions do not grow quantitatively by adding members or practices, but by increasing in being. The idea of an increase in being may sound odd, used as we are to the 0/1understanding of being (i.e. something either is or is not) on which positivism is based. It is, however, an idea that has been around for a long time. One prominent example of it—and it is no coincidence I quote this here—is Aristotle’s understanding of the Good as being intensified by every good deed (Chiurazzi 2011). The good deed here is not, as Plato would have it, a weaker image of the (perfect) idea of the Good. Instead, the deed relates to the ideal and makes it stronger. As we conceptualise institutions as value-centred orderings, this is a pertinent thought. A second relevant source is the Neo-Platonic concept of emanation as the process of flowing from a source that is never exhausted by that flow. Whitehead’s creativity, as the ontological source of all process, sits neatly with that idea. It is also the concept that Gadamer draws on for his increase in being (Chiurazzi 2011). I will pursue the idea further, couched in terms of “intensity”, in the next chapter. The neo-institutionalist term that probably comes closest to this increase in being is the “degree of institutionalisation”. It is, as far as I can see, used in two different fashions. One indicates the degree of institutionalisation of a given practice, i.e. the extent to which this practice has become widespread, legitimate and taken for granted. The second indicates the degree of institutionalisation of a field or environment in which an organisation operates. Both are present in Zucker’s (1977) seminal whole argument: Something cannot become a part of a whole that does not exist. Conversely, a whole without parts cannot exist. This does not mean that isolated instances existed before. There were men riding on horses and attacking people. There were ideas of holy war. There were feelings of fear and animosity. They were, however, not part of anything (or of something else) before military monasticism emerged. 9 There is a symmetry to the decline of an institution as a lack of activity makes it less and less real.

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work on cultural persistence, in which she argues, first, that acts can be more or less institutionalised depending on their degree of exteriority and objectification; and second, that settings can be more or less institutionalised and therefore affect transmission. Organisations are, to her, such institutionalised settings. Similarly, Jepperson (1991) argues that institutions (i.e. social patterns) can be institutionalised in varying degrees, but that they form the environments of lower level institutions. Tolbert and Zucker (1996) subsequently drop the second meaning when they examine the institutionalisation of social structures. Following from this, we find a large number of studies discussing the institutionalisation of certain practices and discourses, which becomes the dominant interpretation of the degrees of institutionalisation. The second interpretation persists in the works of Beckert (1999), where he talks about institutionalisation as the degree of stability and predictability an organisational environment can display. Dorado (2005) echoes this thought. All of these conceptualisations are, however, based on a quantitative understanding of “more instances of x”—although they will in some cases concede implicitly that the “more” cannot really be measured and therefore retreat to terms like “high” and “low”. Some rhetorical studies of institutionalisation (Green et al. 2009; Hossfeld 2018) have, in contrast, adopted a more qualitative thinking, proposing stages of institutionalisation. These stages can be identified by their use of different rhetorical devices. It will, however, not come as a surprise that I do not agree with their definition of institutionalisation as “inherently a linguistic process” (Green et al. 2009, p. 13)—nor, in fact, with their interpretation of “the” (!) phenomenological tradition as one that “emphasizes the importance of cognitive legitimacy” (Green et al. 2009, p. 13).10

5.5

Summary

Moving forward, what we should take from this chapter is the insight that institutions presence. This presencing happens—over and over, in a hundred places—as they are experienced as a coherent configuration (or order) of values, ideas, people and objects. Each act of experiencing adds to their being at the same time as shaping the experiencer.

This reduction of a “big tent” philosophical tradition (for an overview see Baumgartner et al. 1989) to one rather narrow cognitive-constructivist strand can also be found in Meyer and Jepperson (2000). I suppose it is due to neo-institutionalist sociology tracing its origins back to Berger and Luckmann’s book. I do not dispute that Thomas Luckmann indeed is a prominent phenomenologist. It should not be overlooked, however, that the book in question is primarily a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, in whose cognitivist tradition it stands. (The Marxist tradition in which it also stands is funnily enough never mentioned by the proud heirs.) However, as my discussion of Heidegger, Goethe and others in this book should show, phenomenology can also be understood differently.

10

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It follows from this that we should conceptualise institutions as • Gradual in their existence: They wax and wane, and come in different shades of intensity. • Holistic: The elements of institutions do not exist as elements before there is a whole (i.e. the above configuration) that integrates them. The establishment of this whole happens in the act of experiencing, of “seeing as”. • Aesthetic-affective: The experience of configurations, as I will explain in the next chapter, has a strong aesthetic component that often precedes the cognitive one. The experience of values presupposes the capacity to be affected and concerned. • Partly independent from human intervention: Human beings experience these institutional configurations, and they require human aesthetic, affective and rational capabilities to be experienced. Human beings are, furthermore, part of these configurations, whether active or inactive. The values and ideas forming part of the institutional configuration, however, were not deliberately put in place by human actors, nor, as I have shown for the Templars, was their coming together a human deed. Elective affinities linking certain values and ideas as well as “laws” of aesthetic harmony and rhythm play a much bigger role than we have hitherto assumed. The next chapter will pursue this thought further. The Gestalt switch of “seeing as” is, moreover, one reason why we only see the emergence of an institution “in the rear mirror”. For once performed, the switch makes it impossible to go back behind it. As Galileo reported with the moons, once he had seen them, they were clear as day, impossible not to see. Impossible also to imagine they had not been there before—no, they were there, but we did not see them! The same, I would argue, happens with institutional origins. They moment we perform the Gestalt switch, we automatically assume that what we perceive has been there for much longer.

References Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. R. Barthes (Eds.): Image-Music-Text. 1977. Fontana/ Collins. Baumgartner, W., Landgrebe, L. and Janssen, P. Phänomenologie. J. Ritter and K. Gründer (Eds.): Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. 1989. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Beckert, Jens. Agency, Entrepreneurs, and Institutional Change. Organization Studies. 20(5), 1999. Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas. The Social Construction of Reality. 1967. Anchor Books. Binder, Amy. For Love and Money: Organizations’ Creative Responses to Multiple Environmental Logics. Theory & Society. 36, 2007. Bortoft, Henri. Taking Appearance Seriously. 2012. Floris Books. Bortoft, Henri. The Wholeness of Nature. 2013. Floris Books. Chiurazzi, Gaetano. Truth Is More Than Reality. Gadamer’s Transformational Concept of Truth. Research in Phenomenology. 41(1), 2011. Dorado, Silvia. Institutional Entrepreneurship, Partaking, and Convening. Organization Studies. 26(3), 2005. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode. 1990. J.C.B. Mohr.

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Green Jr, Sandy Edward, Li, Yuan and Nohria, Nitin. Suspended in self-spun webs of significance: A rhetorical model of institutionalization and institutionally embedded agency. Academy of Management Journal. 52(1), 2009. Hacking, Ian and Hacking, Jan. The social construction of what? 1999. Harvard University Press. Hallett, Tim and Ventresca, Marc. Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and Organizational Forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory & Society. 35(2), 2006. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 1977. Vittorio Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. 2000. Yale University Press. Hossfeld, Heiko. Legitimation and institutionalization of managerial practices. The role of organizational rhetoric. Scandinavian Journal of Management. 34(1), 2018. Jepperson, Ronald. Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism. P. DiMaggio and W. Powell (Eds.): The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. 1991. University of Chicago Press. Lash, Scott. Experience. Theory, Culture & Society. 23(2-3), 2006. Meyer, John and Jepperson, Ronald. The ‘Actors’ of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency. Sociological Theory. 18(1), 2000. Micelotta, Evelyn, Lounsbury, Michael and Greenwood, Royston. Pathways of Institutional Change: An Integrative Review and Research Agenda. Journal of Management. 43(6), 2017. Robbins, Brent Dean. The Delicate Empiricism of Goethe: Phenomenology as a Rigorous Science of Nature. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology: Methodology: Special Edition. 6, 2006. Shotter, John. Goethe and the Refiguring of Intellectual Inquiry: From ‘Aboutness’-thinking to ‘Withness’-thinking in Everyday Life. Janus Head. 8(1), 2005. Shotter, John. Understanding Process From Within: An Argument for ‘Withness’-Thinking. Organization Studies. 27(4), 2006. Tolbert, Pamela and Zucker, Lynne. The Institutionalization of Institutional Theory. S. Clegg, C. Hardy and W. Nord (Eds.): Handbook of Organization Studies. 1996. Sage. Voronov, Maxim and Weber, Klaus. The heart of institutions: Emotional competence and institutional actorhood. Academy of Management Review. 41(3), 2016. Weber, Klaus and Glynn, Mary Ann. Making Sense with Institutions: Context, Thought and Action in Karl Weick’s Theory. Organization Studies. 27(11), 2006. Weik, Elke. The Emergence of the University. A Case Study of the Founding of the University of Paris from a Neo-Institutionalist Perspective. Management and Organizational History. 6(3), 2011. Weik, Elke. A Return to the Enduring Features of Institutions: A Process Ontology of Reproduction and Endurance. Philosophy of the Social Sciences. 45(3), 2015. Zucker, Lynne. The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence. American Sociological Review. 42(5), 1977. Zucker, Lynne. Organizations as Institutions. S. B. Bacharach (Eds.): Research in the Sociology of Organizations. 1983. JAI Press.

Chapter 6

Institutions as Dynamic Forms of Aesthetic-Affective Experience

Abstract This chapter forms, together with the previous chapter, the core argument of the book, by asking what institutions must be like in order to presence. It discusses the work of Antonio Damasio and Suzanne Langer to show how the new configuration we perceive in an institutional process is established through aesthetic features, in particular harmony and rhythm, and how we experience and express this dynamic form. It then discusses the role of values and emotions as central elements of this dynamic form, concluding that institutions emerge as aesthetic expressions of an intense, morally charged collective feeling that I have called “zeitgeist”.

6.1

Enter Intensity

The present chapter addresses the question of how an institution emerges, i.e. what it must be like, or which elements and configurations it must have, in order to be capable of presencing. It will therefore look more in depth at the arrangement of the elements we have identified, and further strengthen the argument regarding presencing, intensity and own trajectories. It is indisputable that ontology and epistemology are related in the sense that propositions in one presuppose certain propositions in the other realm. For example, empiricism is only possible if there are objects we can grasp with our senses. Positivism is based on the assumption that there is nothing else than these objects we can grasp and meaningfully talk about. In the same manner, presencing, as we have seen, presupposes forms of being that come in degrees of intensity and have emotional, evaluative and aesthetic qualities that can be experienced and expressed. These forms of being stand in relation to human beings without being their purposive constructions. We have, therefore, already developed a quite generic idea of what institutions are. This chapter will now determine how institutions are different from other varieties of presencing. I will argue that they emerge as expressions of many people’s intensive feelings and valuations. These expressions are, to a large extent, based on rhythmic and harmonic forms.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Weik, The Emergence of Institutions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89895-3_6

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I should add at this point that my argument is not intended to overthrow everything we know about institutions in terms of structuration, power, resources, norms, institutional work etc. These explanations remain valid with regard to the later stages of an institution’s life. Once an institution has been established and recognised as an institution, other processes set in that eventually turn the moral into the factual (Zucker 1977), and from there gradually empty the institution of values and feelings (Selznick 2014). I do not dispute that this happens, but it is not my concern in this book. My concern is the emergence of institutions,1 where those values and feelings the institution will later be stripped of still play a pivotal role. Let us go back to the Templar Order. As I have shown in Chap. 4 (Fig. 4.1), the five candidates forming the background to the creation of military monasticism waxed and waned in their importance over the centuries. In 1129, some of them were in their prime, others in their infancy. Military monasticism itself got off on the wrong foot and was about to be added to the junk heap of never-to-be institutions. It would have, had the spark not kindled more or less by coincidence. Such a setup makes it difficult to apply Berger and Luckmann’s notions of sedimentation and objectification or Zucker’s taken-for-grantedness.2 Times were not sedate enough to allow for sedimentation nor was there a generation handing over to the next. On the contrary, emotions ran high as central beliefs and values were at stake. People were not about to take anything for granted, or to adapt Zucker’s phrase: The moral was very much the moral, and not about to become factual for quite some time.3 And this makes sense if we indeed conceptualise values to lie at the core of institutions. In that case, the emergence of institutions must take place in the moral sphere. The drama with which the new institution entered the stage also points to a second important aspect: intensity. Institutions do not emerge from trifles. Hannigan and Casasnovas (2021) speak of moments characterised by intense interaction as shaping the institutionalisation process. Mutch (2018) has argued that the most long-lived institutions are responses to basic human needs, viz. physical survival, making sense of our existence and social engagement. These are things we are deeply, deeply concerned about, and continue to be concerned about. Juxtaposing institutions and taken-for-grantedness may seem unusual for an institutionalist account. It is, however, justified within a phenomenological theory, as Gehman has recently clarified. Drawing on Husserl, Gehman (2021, p. 238) posits

1

I have written elsewhere about the conceptualisation of institutional endurance as a process (Weik 2019). 2 Friedland associates the centrality of the taken-for-grantedness assumption with a cognitivist strand of institutional theory and demands to complement them with desire and passion (Friedland 2013a, b). He suggests that taken-for-grantedness actually refers to shared understandings rather than shared norms. This fits with my approach, and my insistence that these understandings emerge as institutions emerge. 3 This resonates with Swidler’s (1986) contention that in unsettled times of transformation, we find explicit highly organised meaning systems that establish new strategies of action.

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that “the power of institutions is greatest when they are least taken-for-granted”. This is because taken-for-grantedness requires a forgetfulness of the original establishment of the institution (Stiftung in Husserl’s terms). Husserl (1962) sees this original establishment as the giving of a task, i.e. an imperative, rather than the creation of a state of affairs. Again, this dovetails nicely with my emphasis on values and concerns, since an imperative entails a (moral) obligation or compulsion. This task, once established, furthermore follows a trajectory that is not fully in the hands of the actors (Husserl speaks of “teleology”), but instead displays a “kind of agency” (Gehman 2021, p. 243) itself. Taken-for-grantedness only comes in to the degree that, over time, this original task becomes forgotten or loses its vitality, i.e. long after the institution has emerged. I will present my argument in four parts. First, I will establish a connection between feelings and values based on the neurobiological studies of Antonio Damasio. Next, I will link feelings and intensities and introduce the central concept of dynamic form as what I earlier (Chap. 3) called value-orderings or “that which” we see adverbially. This will be based on the writings of the philosopher Suzanne Langer. I will, third, discuss harmony and rhythm as the most important forms of intensive feeling. Finally, I will draw on social and institutional theory to embed Damasio’s and Langer’s ideas in an institutional context.

6.2

Insights from Neurobiology: Feelings and Evaluations

Some observations are so pertinent that they return to us, even if discarded. Compare Durkheim’s thoughts (quoted in Sandelands 1998, p. 49f.): Feelings relating to social things [. . .] are a product of human experience, albeit confused and unorganised. They are not due to some transcendental precognition of reality, but are the result of all kinds of disordered impressions and emotions accumulated through chance circumstances, lacking systemic interpretations.

. . . to this passage from a 2004 book of neurobiologist Antonio Damasio (2004, p. 86): . . . a feeling is the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes. Feelings emerge when the sheer accumulation of mapped details reaches a certain stage.

Both authors, across a divide of more than a century as well as a divide of ontologies and epistemologies, recognise the fact that feelings are perceptions of the world around us as it affects our body physically or mentally in a hundred little instances. Let me stay with the contemporary explanation for a while. According to Damasio (2004), a feeling emerges from a previously unrecognised assemblage of vague thoughts and emotions. The locus of this assemblage is the body. Recognition of the previously unrecognised sets in once the assemblage crosses a certain intensity threshold.

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Table 6.1 Differences between emotions and feelings (Damasio 2004) Consist of. . . Visibility Linked to Can be found in. . . Prerequisite Function

Emotions Inner or outer actions or movements Public (can be made visible) Body All living organisms Life Evaluate situation

Feelings Mental images (perceptions) Private (always invisible) Mind Humans only Brain, consciousness Monitor inner balance and harmony

Table 6.2 Levels of homeostatic regulation (Damasio 2004, p. 37, Damasio 2000, p. 286) Top level Next level Next level Next level Lower level

Feelings: fatigue, energy, excitement, surging, balance Emotions: joy, sorrow, fear, pride, shame, sympathy Drives and motivations: hunger, curiosity, play, sex Behaviour related to (but not caused by) pleasure or pain: approach, withdrawal, sickness behaviour Metabolism (internal chemistry) Basic reflexes Immune system

Damasio distinguishes between emotions and feelings (Table 6.1). For him, emotions are very early evolutionary reactions to favourable or unfavourable environments.4 They can be found in monocellular organisms and do not require consciousness, a brain or even a differentiated nervous system. Feelings, on the other hand, have only developed with the advent of the human species. Damasio (2004, p. 6) defines them as expressions of human flourishing or distress as they occur in mind and body. For this reason, they contain pleasure and pain as main ingredients. Both feelings and emotions contribute to the homeostatic regulation of the human body, albeit, once again, emotions precede feelings in this regulatory process (for a hierarchy of levels see Table 6.2). Feelings are the results of the interplay of many body maps (i.e. inner perceptions of parts and states of the body) with thoughts and modes of thinking (e.g. attentiveness, speed of image change). Put more simply, feelings are perceptions of processes inside a person’s own body. Moving forward, I will adopt the somewhat artificial word “feeling-perceptions” to emphasise that I am not just referring to emotional states but perceptions. Neither am I referring to perceptions in the classic sense of inner sensations triggered by external stimuli, but to perceptions already processed and evaluated (as good or bad) by our body.

4

Here is the link to Whitehead’s causal efficacy, i.e. the immediate feeling of the power of the things around us. Damasio agrees that it is this emotion that causes even the most primitive organisms to move away from danger and towards advantageous conditions.

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Although the monitoring continues all the time, the perceptions are only felt when the activity of the various parts crosses a threshold, or reaches a “critical pitch”, as Damasio (2004, p. 86) puts it. What are feelings for? Damasio argues that they not only fulfil an immediate function with regard to the individual body’s survival by alerting it to disturbances that could endanger the balancing act called life. Feelings also fulfil social purposes by linking emotions with concepts or thoughts. This enables human beings to learn through reward and punishment, to classify situations and situational responses and to develop future orientations. Institutionalist scholars may, at this stage, think about sanctions, sensemaking or justifications, but that is not the train of thought I am pursuing. I want to stick with the aesthetic basis of these issues. In his seminal work on the aesthetics of work and management, Strati (1999) defines aesthetics as a form of knowledge or understanding derived from our sensory faculties. In contradistinction to traditional empirics, it is inextricably linked to feelings, for example of pleasantness or repulsion, as well as the capacity to be affected by objects. Warren (2008) coins the beautiful term “felt meanings” to describe the close connection of this process to human sensemaking. The meaning that is felt often cannot be clearly expressed verbally, but rather forms the pre-cognitive “bedrock” on which our assumptions and convictions are based. Despite this pre-cognitive aspect, aesthetic judgments are not innate but developed through socialisation and habitus. On a societal level, they have a history (Strati 1999). Authors have pointed out many different aspects that can characterise an aesthetic inquiry. The most important to me are: the issue of an aesthetics of organising (rather than an aesthetics of organisation or organisational artefacts) speaking to the question of how our aesthetic faculties build the social world, and in particular its institutions (Linstead and Höpfl 2000); the importance of immediate experience, elusiveness and imagination as fundamental features of the aesthetic experience (Strati 1992); the pivotal role of evocation as a trigger of aesthetic experiences (Linstead and Höpfl 2000) as well as a critique of the myth of rationality (Strati 2000) so pervasive in organisational institutionalism. “Aesthetic forms of expression are like experiments that allow us to reconsider and challenge dominant categories and classifications”, as Taylor and Hanson (2005, p. 1216) maintain. I think exactly this is happening when a new institution emerges through a collective aesthetic experience.

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6.3 6.3.1

6 Institutions as Dynamic Forms of Aesthetic-Affective Experience

Insights from the Philosophy of Mind: Feelings, Intensities and Dynamic Forms Critical Pitch and Vagueness

Damasio (2000, p. 287) cites the “remarkable but unsung” American philosopher Susanne Langer as crown witness for his idea of feelings having to reach a “critical pitch” before they can be felt (Langer 1951, 1970). This critical pitch, Langer argues, is reached when the nervous system becomes highly stimulated following an input from the body’s environment. A critical pitch is hence a dynamic phenomenon. It cannot be observed on its own but is defined by what comes before and after. It is a part of a process. The metaphor of a “threshold” may be misleading here, as it suggests a static part of a doorframe. When we refer to thresholds in a metaphorical manner, however, we mostly talk about phenomena that acquire a characteristic through a certain context. A temperature of 100
C, for example, is not a threshold as such, it only becomes one in the context of water (but not oxygen or iron) changing its state of matter from liquid to gaseous. What actually happens is the water becoming hotter and hotter—a process increasing in temperature intensity—until suddenly a qualitative change occurs. As the example shows, the critical pitch is not something we can study independently of the water; it does not hang around somewhere to be discovered if we remove the water.5 Human beings, I have argued in the previous section, feel because their body and mind processes flow together, incite and reinforce each other and finally cross an intensity threshold. The confluence, or dynamic interrelation, of various flows can be most generally described in terms of growth and decline, mutual reinforcement and cancelling out, as well as tension and resolution. Langer calls these dynamic patterns “forms”. The dynamic pattern, or form, of feelings is difficult to describe in words. Feeling “happy” or “sad” are quite vague terms and fail to convey the processual aspect of the feeling altogether.6 Cromby (2015) gives examples like “the sinking feeling of dread” or the feeling of an inarticulate refusal, and quotes William James: “We ought to say a feeling of, and a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or feeling of cold”.

5

Langer’s main point in developing the notion was that the human mind also is such a critical pitch that we cannot discover independently of the body’s functioning. This, however, is not of interest to the argument of this book. 6 Scheff (2014) makes the interesting point that the Western emotional vocabulary has become vague and misleading as a consequence of our depreciation of emotions in comparison with rational thought.

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Table 3.3 depicting the rainbow of concepts7 in Chap. 3 may serve as an illustration of the processual, vague and sometimes even conflicting feelings with which people have perceived the matter of holy war. While the matter may have been clear cut for some individuals proposing “the one and only solution”, the collective reaction shows a far more complex and inconsistent picture. Yes, Templars were fantastic knights, but were they not also sinners? Yes, they fought for God, but were their wealth and privileges really justified? The same can be said for the other institutions partaking in the emergence of military monasticism. Christian monasticism already came in three variants: the Oriental, Roman Catholic and Celtic tradition. The Roman Catholic variant was based on the Rule of St. Benedict which was written in the sixth and disseminated in the seventh century, but only became used exclusively in the tenth century. Once this happened, however, it was immediately reformed under the leadership of the monastery of Cluny, who proposed a reinterpretation of the existing exegesis. Feudal society was in existence in the parts of Europe dominated by Franks (Normans), while in other parts, for example the Holy Roman Empire, tribal organisation remained an important factor throughout the Middle Ages. The Stammesherzogtümer (tribal duchies) were only ultimately converted into Territorialherzogtümer (territorial duchies) in the reign of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1155–1190), but even then the nobles drew some of their power from possessions that were independent of the king. As to Chivalry, knights were the pillars of feudal society, but on the other hand, the Church was not yet promoting the idea that a secular knight was, or could be, a good Christian. Killing people for honour, spoils or even in defence of anybody but Jesus Christ was considered a sin. Neither were knights necessarily aristocrats. In the First Crusade, everybody who fought (preferably skilfully and with his or her own weapons) was a “miles”. Even ordinary monks were referred to as “miles Christi” because they fought Evil through prayer and abstention from sin (Erdmann 1955). These dynamics and contradictions are important and should not be conveniently abstracted from when making an institutional argument. We will, I stress, not understand the dynamics of institutions if we ignore the “if and buts” in the feelings of the people. Nor will we understand the power of institutions if we depict their power as something radiating from an undivided “Sun King” at the centre of things. This is where cognitivist approaches to institutions go wrong. Framing every major strand of thought as logically coherent, they have to theorise the “ifs and buts”

The only “rainbow-like” studies I have found in the institutionalist literature are, interestingly, the mathematical analyses of John Mohr and colleagues (e.g., Friedland et al. 2014; Mohr and Duquenne 1997). Like myself, Mohr is interested in the commonalities and differences between the various words used to refer to a given problem. I do not agree with him that mathematics will help us where hermeneutics fails, but I do share the idea that we need to look at the whole assemblage of words and understandings in order to grasp the phenomenon. 7

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as two or three different strands, or “logics” in institutionalist parlance.8 These logics then compete, win and lose, are accepted or rejected. Much like race horses, each comes complete and separate in a dedicated body. Their competitions seem to leave them relatively unchanged, just like a horse remains unchanged by switching owners. And in that perspective, the owners, the human beings, are all that really matters because it is their decision to adopt or reject that actually determines the course of events. This is, of course, just another variant of the common assumption discussed in the introduction that, at the end of the day, social life is about humans using and manipulating objects, be they material or ideal. The objects remain unchanged until their masters decide to change them. In many discussions of institutional logics, these objects also have quite a transparent, un-complex nature that can be reduced to simple choices: stay with the incumbent or support the challenger. This should not come as a surprise. Cognitivist approaches are approaches based on rational behaviour. The very term “logic” points to that fact. It is definitionally impossible to integrate ifs and buts, shades, doubts and degrees of intensity into such constructions. What presents itself as a living, moving reality to our affects must be fixed and cleared of its ambiguities by our intellect. That is even truer if it becomes an object of study in a positivist science, in which ambiguity and vagueness in a description are considered deficiencies. The aesthetic perspective, in contrast, strives to take the ifs and buts into account, as they are part and parcel of the dynamics of an institution.

6.3.2

Feelings as Expressions: An Invitation from the Arts

Up to now, I have focused on feeling-perception as the impression we get from our body and environment. Feelings, however, also have an expressive dimension as they express the state the body is in. Damasio, as we have seen above, speaks of “expressions of human flourishing or distress”. To him, feelings are expressions and impressions (perceptions) of the functioning of our body. This dual character bears a remarkable resemblance to presencing, which is the experience of something (impression) as well as the something experienced (expression). This section will be dedicated to the expressive part of feelings. Langer points to art as the activity most suitable for expressing feelings. A piece of music, for example, with its harmonies and dissonances, its tensions and resolutions, its growing excitement and moments of rest, presents us with a pattern that mirrors the pattern of feelings. Langer stresses that the prime motive of art is not the individual self-expression of the artist, but the expression of common feelings.

Talking about “institutional logics”, I refer to work in the wake of Thornton and Ocasio’s work (Thornton and Ocasio 2008; Thornton et al. 2012), not to Friedland’s understanding of logics (Friedland 2012; Friedland and Arjaliès 2019). 8

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Fig. 6.1 The bison of Altamira (Wikimedia Commons)

Writing the “Eroica”, for example, Beethoven probably did not feel particularly heroic on the day himself, but wanted to give expression to what he perceived to be a common feeling. One major quality of art is its ability to express life in its living, abundant flow. This flow cannot be pinned down to one single description but is always full of subtle shades and stark contrasts, brimming potentials and lurking threats, as well as the movement of growth and decline, tension and resolution. To capture this flow a work of art needs to have a “living form” as Langer (1951) calls it. This living form is a gestalt that can be spotted in such early works as the bison portrayed in the caves of Altamira (Fig. 6.1). The few lines indicate a balance amid tensions that give a feeling of aliveness to the picture and speak directly to the viewer. A similar strike of artistic mastery is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (Fig. 6.2), where the aliveness of the composition is created by its ambiguity, the vagueness of detail in the background, the tension between the direction of her glance and the line of her shoulders. The contrast becomes even more striking if compared to a “standard portrait” of the time (Fig. 6.3). In addition, the Mona Lisa adds another moment of engagement by intriguing the spectator. Like life, this is not an open-andshut case; the smile is pointing to something beyond the picture, to several potentials that may or may not be realised in the future. The same, in a different art form, can be said for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a character equally convincingly interpreted by Laurence Olivier’s hesitant rendition (Olivier 1948) as by Franco Zeffirelli’s/Mel Gibson’s action hero (Zeffirelli 1990).

78 Fig. 6.2 Mona Lisa by da Vinci (Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 6.3 Left half of the portrait of the Dukes of Urbino by Piero (Wikimedia Commons)

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There is a savvy, unscrupulous prince in Hamlet, as he disposes of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (V, ii), immediately understands the threat Fortinbras poses (IV, iv) and dominates the final fight by his sword fighting skills (V, ii, 243–253), just as much as there is a doubter over the nature of the ghost (I, iv), a procrastinator (III, iii, 73ff.) and tragic loser. The fine line between madness as a ruse to deceive the court and real desperation is crossed repeatedly in both directions. It is this ambiguity and tension, played out in so many shades, that has drawn audiences over the centuries. The “living form”, to retain Langer’s expression for a moment longer, is hence an art symbol that sets forth how vital tensions appear (Langer 1970, p. xix, my emphasis). As such it always appears organic, as one symbol whose elements, if taken in isolation, mean nothing. Our engagement with it is not based on reasoning or a conceptual appreciation of the gestalt, but its immediate appeal to our senses by way of a structural-metaphorical semblance. The semblance is metaphorical because it comes from a different field. Life is not art. It is structural because its effect does not rest on one-to-one likenesses of single elements but on the relationships between the elements, i.e. the arrangement. As Langer explains for music: It “sounds the way moods feel” (Langer 2009, p. 244). In the same way, I argue, institutions express processes of social life. As something that stands for something else, art symbolises feelings in a nondiscursive manner. This, I have argued above, is easier because music or drama are themselves processes that can display increases, declines or tensions as the piece moves along. A discursive symbolisation, in contrast, is far more difficult because the structure of language does not mirror the living form of feelings. Nevertheless, social scientists have tried over the decades to capture this living form; the organicist language of the early twentieth century (e.g. Simmel’s “Mehrals-Leben”) testifies to that, as do more recent attempts in Complexity Theory (e.g., the dynamic simulation of complex adaptive systems (Anderson 1999)) or Systems Theory (e.g., Luhmann’s autopoiesis (Luhmann 1995)).

6.4

Harmony and Rhythm

Dynamic forms can also come in more complex shapes than linear growth and decline, or simple reinforcement and cancelling out. These shapes, classically captured by the terms “harmony” and “rhythm” will be discussed in this section. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Weik 2019), I find it quite remarkable that despite the many definitions emphasising the repetitive character of institutions, for example, as enduring regularities (Crawford and Ostrom 1995) or broad patternings (Meyer and Jepperson 2000), despite the accepted view of social logics being more mutable when they are rife with ambiguity and contradiction (and hence more stable in their absence) (Rao and Giorgi 2006), despite even Jepperson’s (2002) choice of words regarding the intensification of individualism as the main theme of Western history, nobody seems to have made the link from repetition to rhythm or from patterns to harmony.

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The definition of harmony I use is not too distinct from the everyday usage of the term as an arrangement of parts that pleases (Webster 1986, p. 1035). On a more philosophical note, Belaval (1974) directs attention to the original sense of the Greek harmonia meaning unity in manifoldness—a remarkable choice of words, given what I have discussed above as “multiplicity in unity”. The important observation is that harmony, to a certain extent, preserves multiplicity; it is not uniformity. The multiplicity is, however, bound to obey a certain consistency or balance or, more generally, order. When I talk of “harmony” or “harmonic” in the subsequent chapters, I most often refer to the aesthetic order or arrangement of elements that we, mostly sub-consciously, perceive as “fitting together”.9 Rhythm is the most prominent aspect of harmonic arrangements. I define rhythm as an order created by periodicity. Periodicity is the repetition of a pattern within a certain duration. The pattern itself is experienced as a succession of stresses and non-stresses following each other in a certain tempo. We find stress patterns in the meter of verse (e.g. dactyl, anapaest), in the composition of a picture (e.g. background-foreground, light-darkness) or in the rhythms of a piece of music. Rhythms of social life have been studied before, though not with a focus on institutions. Scholarly interest in the phenomenon seems to wax and wane in what is perhaps a rhythm in itself. From early discussions of rhythm in Durkheim (1976), but also in Spencer (discussed in Henriques et al. 2014) and Simmel (1918), to comprehensive works by Hall (1983), Fraser (1981) or Zerubavel (1978, 1981), rhythm has been discussed in its empirical manifestations and its functions for social life, such as co-ordination, distinction, predictability or learning. Marcel Mauss calls man a “rhythmic animal” because collective time is always structured through rhythms (Iparraguirre 2016). In organisation theory, many of the studies on rhythm are disguised as studies on timing (for an overview, see Albert and Bell 2002) in which the “right moment” is defined as a window of opportunity created by a certain constellation of rhythms. In a remarkable analysis, Albert and Bell (2002) have applied music theory to show how the Waco tragedy was caused by a violation of the rhythms of interaction. Other authors focus on the impact of work rhythms on labour processes (Shenav 1994; Starkey 1988; Taylor 2004), while the effects of work disrupting biological rhythms in night shifts or jet lag is evident even to the untrained eye. It is only recently, however, that sociologists have turned their attention (back) to complex and largescale rhythms, like the ones represented by institutions. Thus, for example, Rose studies the relationship between urban life and mental health (2013–2014) in an approach he describes as “vitalist” (2013).10 Blue (2019) suggests that practices are connected through rhythms, and that therefore stable practice constellations like

9

I am not interested in the rather naïve, sugar-sweet notion of effortless and perfect harmony that the term, unfortunately, has taken on. 10 Rose characterises vitalism as accepting the irreducibility of life to mechanical, physical, stochastic or other processes and embracing its self-organising complexity as well as the inseparability of organism and milieu.

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institutions are characterised by eurhythmia, i.e. harmonic rhythms, as different from arrhythmia, i.e. disruptive rhythms. Many of these studies, however, are based on a traditional empirical orientation to which the “strong” processual dimension is not particularly amenable.11 Feelings are not “things” to be felt; they are processes. Nor are institutions “things” to be felt; they are processes. It is not enough to take their present state or a historical series of states, into account. As has often been pointed out by process theorists (e.g., Hernes 2008; Nayak 2008; Tsoukas and Chia 2002), a series of states gives us very limited information about the process. It is like taking a bucket of water out of a river at three different locations. An analysis of the buckets’ contents will tell us a few things about the river, but it will leave far more unsaid. The study of the dynamic form, in contrast, is a more challenging endeavour as it focuses on the recognition of complex qualities of gestalt and development that, in turn, draws on notions of meaning, sense or destination. Quite often, it relies on fleeting configurations, like the critical pitch, that can only be observed in one moment and then are gone. To this, the aesthetic dimension adds a plethora of aspects that cannot be fully verbalised, like potentials, feelings, hopes and anxieties. There is a big research agenda here, however, it requires “empirical research” to be reframed as something much less reliant on data in the classic sense. I will say more about this in Chap. 7.

6.4.1

The Generative Function: Harmony and Rhythm as Impressions

Harmony is important for my argument because harmony produces intensity—and hence the “critical pitch” Damasio is looking for. This relationship between harmony and intensity is argued in extenso by Langer’s mentor, Alfred North Whitehead.12 We have seen in Chap. 4 that he maintains that all experience strives for ever greater intensity, and that intensity can be created through repetition, harmony or focus. His argument concerning harmony is based on a mathematical vector argument: aligned vector forces add up to a stronger force, while vector forces pointing in different directions need to be subtracted from each other (Whitehead 1985). Or, in a less physicalist language, energies directed towards the same goals produce synergies while conflicting goals produce none. For Whitehead, as for Langer and Damasio, it is this aesthetic synthesis that creates experiences in the first place, by stimulating the critical pitch that moves the experience 11

Interestingly enough, this seems to be more true of more recent contributions than of the classics. Durkheim, for example, employs processual notions like drama, cult, rhythm, projection, synthesis, amplification or intensity, as well as speaking of anonymous, vague and diffuse feelings. 12 It should be noted that the “other” great process philosopher, Henri Bergson, makes a very similar argument in which he describes harmony and rhythm as producing a “physical sympathy” between observer and observed. This physical sympathy then “subtly suggests” a moral sympathy (Bergson 1910, p. 12f.).

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beyond the threshold of feeling-perception. Whitehead’s main candidate for creating intensity is rhythm. Rhythm, on the one hand, requires repetition of elements. A rhythm based on repetition alone, however, is not very attractive. While creating a certain intensity, it can quickly become unpleasant and nerve-racking in its monotony. In the same way, monotonous social arrangements, like routines, may be considered safe and predictable but not very stimulating. More interesting rhythms feature contrasts, probably even polyrhythms, without losing sight of the underlying harmony. Intensity may also be an explanation for the often observed but little understood compelling quality of rhythm. Human heartbeats adapt their pace to slow or fast music, people having a conversation fall automatically into rhythmic turn-taking, a rhythmically clapping audience prevents any improvisation. In “The Dance of Life”, Hall (1983) speculates that there is an innate desire to be in sync with others. To summarise, the aesthetic dimension of institutional emergence reads like follows: In the unconscious monitoring of the body-environment balance, the patterns that are monitored sometimes produce critical pitches. These critical pitches arise when the underlying pattern adopts a harmonic, and in particular rhythmic, form. Here is the explanation why repeated invocations or displays of an institution create reality, and “more of reality” every time they happen. Once they have crossed a threshold, they are “there”, i.e. enter our feeling-perception. The intensity that is produced by the harmony of the arrangement and its rhythms can also account for some of the compulsion we feel vis-á-vis institutions. This is not the cognitive compulsion brought about by the fear of sanctions or the hope of reward, but a much vaguer, more visceral compulsion that can be as light as the tapping of our foot in sync with a rhythm we hear or as heavy as the bone-shaking droning of a bass rhythm. There is certainly still a lot of work to be done to understand how institutional harmonies and rhythms “affect” us in the literal sense of the word. We need to map out various forms of harmony and rhythm, their trajectories as well as the intensities with which they affect us. I do not doubt, however, that they lie at the basis, and a pre-cognitive basis, of our relationship with institutions.

6.4.2

Harmony and Rhythm as Expressions

As Langer explains, however, harmony and rhythm have a second function with regard to the critical pitch. Not only can they “push” a dynamic arrangement towards a critical pitch, they are also used to express the feeling produced by the critical pitch. Feelings, as dynamic forms, are very difficult to express verbally. This distinguishes them from objects or concepts. They lack the unambiguity needed to be “pinned down” by a word, as they always contain shades of potentiality, contrariness etc. They are hence much better expressed through dynamic arrangements, for

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example pieces of music or artistic pictures in which the composition is more important than any single element. We therefore need harmony and rhythm, not only to create a critical pitch, but also to describe the feeling generated by the critical pitch. This is the expressive function of harmony and rhythm. The examples from Altamira, da Vinci and Hamlet I have given above illustrate this function. It is important to bear in mind that they can, in contrast, convey much more complex and subtle impressions in a far more condensed fashion than a linear prose text13 can. To summarise, I have argued that harmony and rhythm can function as impressions as well as expressions of feelings, that is, they can express complex feelings as well as trigger them. This duality of expression/impression mirrors the duality we have found in feeling-perceptions. These also function as expressions (of body states) and as impressions (perceptions). Both dualities map on to another duality central to this book. This is the duality of experience, or presencing, as constituting both subject and object.14

6.4.3

Dynamic Form

I have now repeatedly quoted Langer talking about the dynamic form as giving shape to a piece of art, and of harmony and rhythm acting as dynamic forms. Let me just say a bit more about this concept, which I have treated more extensively elsewhere (Weik 2019). Rather simply put, the dynamic form is what keeps a piece of art together.15 A picture is not delimited by its frame, nor is a play by the rise and fall of the curtain. Instead, they have an “inner order”, a composition, that indicates where the piece ends and something different begins. This composition is also what allows us to see it as a whole and to feel that a part may be missing. The attribute “dynamic” indicates that, in contrast to a static form like a frame or skeleton holding things together, we need to look not for a permanent “thing” but for a changing process. The idea that a changing process can provide stability to another changing process, for example a symphony, is difficult to entertain, but necessary if we

13

This is of course frighteningly true of academic texts that mostly have become so sterile and formulaic that reading them is a pain. This questionable virtue is celebrated in the “one paper, one idea” advice, in accordance with which authors are admonished to “streamline” their text and avoid “digressions”. Footnotes are seen as a sign of muddled thinking. I think it is sad to see how the highest intellectual endeavour—science—has been reduced to this under-complex and primitive form of expression. Goethe, in contrast, held that one of the scientist’s tasks was to coin a language that could do justice to the dynamic complexity of the phenomena. 14 I have discussed this in more general terms (as experience) and with reference to Whitehead in Chap. 4. I have discussed again with a more specifically hermeneutic focus (as presencing) in Chap. 5. 15 I would argue that this is also what Weber describes as the historical individual or complex of relationships in history (see Sect. 3.2.2), now with a different, not nominalist, metaphysics.

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want to use strong process theory. Fortunately, our aesthetic sense is rather well equipped to spot dynamic forms, often much better than our logical-discursive faculties. Notions of balance, complementarity, or tension and resolution are often more easily felt than explained.16 A second important characteristic of a dynamic form is that is has generative powers. As different from a skeleton that can support exactly what it is designed to support, a dynamic form is, to a certain extent, open for future developments. A tension between two characters in a play, for example, can be resolved in a number of ways, yet the outcome is never arbitrary. Plays may vary in the extent to which a certain ending is inevitable—and there is art even in playing with the inevitable—but many writers and playwrights will tell of how the ending “wrote itself”, which is to say, how the dynamics of the plot established earlier now pushed for a certain resolution. But even in the less inevitable cases, where several options can be chosen, the author is never entirely free to design the fate of the characters.17 Once set in motion (note the expression), well-crafted characters tend to travel on their own trajectories. The same, I argue, happens to institutions because they also obey the laws of aesthetics. As I have said before, I do not want to claim that that is all they do, and that no other factors come into play, especially as they endure over long periods of time. I do claim, however, that the aesthetic, dynamic form plays a central role in the emergence of institutions, and that it is woefully under-researched.

6.5

Institutions as Impressions and Expressions

We now have all theoretical ingredients in place: We have seen how feelings can be impressions and expressions and how they are triggered by a critical pitch. I have discussed their vagueness in comparison with verbal expressions, but also their capacity to convey complex and contradictory sentiments. I have, finally, introduced the concept of dynamic form as the dynamic gestalt of feelings, as well as harmony and rhythm as basic aesthetic qualities guiding the impression and expression of feelings.

16

This is not to say that we are born with them. They have developed in a culture-specific manner, and continue to develop throughout our lives. This, in turn, implies that they are subject to social control (Reddy 2001) and exclusion (Bourdieu 2000, p. 73ff.). 17 G.B. Shaw’s “Pygmalion” is arguably one of the best examples. The ending of the text written by Shaw has Higgins and Eliza go their separate ways. The dialogue is succeeded by a rather long explanation in which Shaw explains why there is no happy ending, conceding: “As our own instincts are not appealed to by her conclusion, let us see whether we cannot discover some reason in it” (Shaw 1912). However firm and good Shaw’s intentions might have been, they did not survive into the play’s adaptations. The 1938 film, to which Shaw wrote the Oscar-winning script, added a secretly filmed happy end (of which Shaw knew nothing) in which Eliza returns to Higgins (Howard and Asquith 1938). There is also a happy ending in the most well-known adaptation, the 1964 musical “My Fair Lady” (Cukor 1964).

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With this in place, we can now address the central questions of this chapter: In which manner can we think of institutions as expressions and impressions? How do values and emotions fit this aesthetic perspective of institutions? What are we experiencing when we experience institutions on an aesthetic-affective level? I will discuss these questions first with regard to values, then with regard to emotions, and finally draw both strands together.

6.5.1

Values

Let us start with the centre of an institutional experience: values. Stinchcombe (1997) refers to them as the “guts” of institutions. Suddaby et al. (2010, p. 1235) speak of the “causal core”. Both want to stress—in critique of the existing neo-institutionalist literature—that values play a central role and that without them we cannot understand why people adhere to institutions. In other words, a pivotal reason for the continued existence of institutions is that people believe in the values that institutions embody (Stinchcombe 1997). Such a view of values is, of course, not the only one it is possible to take. In their comprehensive review on values, Kraatz et al. (2020) point out that values have become rather marginalised in the neo-institutionalist research tradition. Nevertheless, they describe a plethora of perspectives on the nature, functions and origins of values in the institutionalist and broader sociological literature. While I do not see my perspective as standing outside the range that Kraatz et al. have described, I probably display a preference for a more continental-European tradition in my choice of Weber as my starting point (continuing from Chap. 3). As is well known (Albrow 1990; Swedberg 2005), Weber, besides being an institutionalist titan, stands in a long tradition of German “idealistic” thinking that links him to Goethe, an author that we will meet in the next chapter. I will also discuss two exegetes of Weber—Parsons and Friedland—to compare and sharpen the contours of the issues I am interested in. There are a number of links between values and the aesthetic-affective perspective that I will develop subsequently with the help of Weber, Friedland and Parsons. They point to a system integration of the aesthetic kind, not just of the normative kind that we are used to expecting. Before discussing these, however, there is a rather evident link that I would like to address straight away. Kraatz et al. (2020) cite the motivation of actors as the most prominent function of values across the literature. Values provide the “energy” for action, and they do that by appealing to the affects of actors. A cognitive plan in itself does not incite us to embark on the action. We need a volitional component to get us started. In other words, knowing is not the same as wanting or willing. The difference between both lies in the affective nature of the latter. That is why, I believe, Stinchcombe uses the term “guts” to indicate the traditional seat of desire. The argument shows that values and emotions are linked so intrinsically that it becomes difficult to distinguish between them even on an analytical level.

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I will now say more about the aesthetic-affective aspects of values. Weber’s Conceptualisations of Values Values play a central role in Weber’s work; yet he does not treat them as termini technici that would require an unequivocal definition (Swedberg 2005). Rather, he uses a number of concepts: Wertrationalität (value rationality), Wertsphäre (value sphere), Wertbeziehung (value relation), Wertorientierung (value orientation), Wertidee (value idea), Werturteil (value judgment). In Weber’s time, values are a pivotal but controversial issue in the discussion promoting the emancipation of the cultural sciences (Iggers 2012).18 Dilthey proposes that values are elements of a real process called “history”, which is propelled by a spontaneous and creative force called “life” (Iggers 2012). History comprises different objective chains of events that each follow their own inner logic. Therefore, the occurrence and development of values is contingent. To a certain extent, however, these chains form “islands of intelligibility” in an otherwise incoherent totality. They are objectified expressions of a (real) collective spirit (Volksgeist), and differ therefore from nation to nation. These objectified expressions form institutions (Röd 2002), such as family, state or art, in a manner similar to how Berger and Luckmann describe the objectification of institutions. Rickert and the Marbach School, in contrast, hold, in a Neo-Kantian tradition, that values are intellectual categories with whose help we make sense of the chaotic world around us (Zijderveld 2006). Culture, as opposed to nature, is formed by selecting and extracting certain events from the continuous stream of experience and giving them meaning. Values help us do that. The cultural sciences must therefore put values at the centre of their study, but they cannot discover them in reality. In his essay on objectivity, Weber (1988) defines the term value relationship in Rickert’s sense, but draws on Dilthey for his concept of value spheres. The latter is the origin of the incompatibility of value spheres. I think Weber may have coined the term “value idea”, which he otherwise uses interchangeably with “value”, to conceptualise a logical/cognitive/conscious alternative to the term “value”. The former would then be a reference to Rickert, the latter to Dilthey. What we can take from this is the dual nature of values as cognitive and affective entities. Weber’s indecision regarding the logical compatibility of values is a direct consequence of this dual nature. The dual nature is created, as we have seen, from a clash of ontologies: here Dilthey’s Lebenssoziologie where values arise from life processes, there Rickert’s Neo-Kantianism where they are intellectual categories.19 While I believe that Weber had as little time for obscure life forces as he had for a Volksgeist, it must be noted that his concept of value-rational action (which carries the main weight of system integration in his theory) is closely linked to affectual action. They only differ in the degree to which the actor is aware of the content of the action (Weber 1972, p. 11f.). “Cultural sciences” (Kulturwissenschaften) is Weber’s primary term when referring to the social sciences and humanities. 19 This is the same distinction I have discussed under the heading “experience” in Sect. 5.2.1. 18

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Friedland’s Development of the Weberian Concepts Friedland is arguably the author who has done most to (re-)introduce values into organisational institutionalism. He uses the concept of “institutional substance”, that he defines as the highest value ordering all subordinate means and ends. It also invests persons, objects and practices with institutional meaning (2009a, b). Friedland (2013b) explicitly refers to the Weberian concept of value spheres. He stresses the non-empirical, non-sensory, character of values that implies that people have to believe in them to bring them about. He therefore calls them “institutional gods”, thus upholding Weber’s postulate of their incompatibility. Friedland (2013b, p. 20ff.), however, does not follow Weber in his evaluation of material practices. He interprets Weber to disregard the link between values and material practices, for example rituals. Friedland, in contrast, stresses the importance of a recurring manifestation and embodiment of the (invisible) ultimate values, because he holds that a purely symbolic-discursive treatment is not enough to anchor institutions in society. People need to see and take possession of these ultimate values.20 In a next step of his discussion, Friedland (2017) conceptualises values as “motors” of social life, providing social actors with motive and energy. Values and material practices now co-constitute each other. This step is made possible by Friedland switching from the noun “value” to the verb “valuate”. Human beings create reality through practical action, and valuation is a part of that practical action. Conversely, the reality so created manifests certain values or valuations. Drawing on Damasio, Friedland considers emotions to form the basis for such valuations since they constitute a basic valuation of “This is good/bad for me”. As a consequence, he conceptualises institutional logics not as fields, but as fieldgenerating mechanisms. They form valuation orders at whose centre lies one ultimate value as institutional substance. Practices and discourses in the field are constituted by this ultimate value, as they, conversely, manifest it. This triad of institutional substance, logic and practices makes the concept of institution superfluous, and indeed Friedland speculates: “Institutions, per se, may not exist” (2017, p. 19). With regard to my argument, Friedland adds a number of important points. The first is the processual nature of values as permanent valuations. It is important to note that values, in this view, are not seen as outcomes of valuation processes but that they are ongoing valuation processes. Values like justice or generosity are not fixed concepts but require constant (re-)definition in a permanently changing social world. They also require (re-)affirmation through visible behaviour and verbal invocation. I would even go a step further than Friedland and say that values are not just maintained through rituals and invocations, but experience an increase in being, as I have discussed in Chap. 5.

20

This understanding also leads Friedland to a rejection of the concept of institutional logics as developed by Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury (Friedland 2012).

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Parsons’ Development of the Weberian Concepts It is well known that Parsons has studied Weber intensively,21 most prominently in “The Structure of Social Action” (Parsons 1968). A few years before its publication, however, Parsons already dedicated two essays to the relationship between values, action and institutions (Parsons 1935, 1990). In these essays, Parsons draws on the belief that a human being is “essentially an active, creative, evaluating creature” (1935, p. 82). Based on this, he proposes a voluntarist theory of action. Like Weber, he understands action primarily in terms of means-ends-relationships, which he classifies as intrinsic or symbolic. In the former, means realise the end in a scientifically understandable fashion, whereas in the latter, the means stand in an arbitrary relationship to the end. Intrinsic means-end-relationships can form chains leading from simple means up to an ultimate end. The beginning of the chain is characterised by an absence of values and a full conditioning of the action through environmental factors.22 The middle part of the chain is important for the conceptualisation of institutions, as it comprises technological, economic and political means-end-relationships. Parsons holds that true value-rational actions, i.e. actions in which means realise an (ultimate) end immediately, are empirically rare. Most means-ends-chains are eventually directed to an ultimate end, but this end is something the actor is not conscious of while acting because it is “too far away”. In these cases, institutional norms stand in for ultimate values as points of orientation. Institutions are, for Parsons, analytical configurations (“patterns”) of concrete behaviour and sanctions. They are moral entities that receive their authority through the norms they comprise. They can, however, also become subject to calculation and conformity. If they do that, they interact with, and stabilise, interests to create social structures. Parsons does not follow Weber in assuming that ultimate values form a random plurality. The fact that we have to choose between them, he maintains, presupposes some common criteria between them. These criteria create a certain coherence, both in a logical fashion but also as practically shared values. Parsons refers to this coherence as a “common system”, qualifying at the same time that this system can neither depict social reality nor the moral dimension in a satisfying manner. Nevertheless, he stresses that normative integration does play a significant role in social life. It is important to point out that, while considering it the central category for analysis, Parsons does not view the mean-ends-scheme as sufficient to characterise values. Values can be pursued outside the means-ends-scheme, for example in the arts. Here, the value does not lie in a realised end but “on the way” to it. He also

21

What is less well known is that Parsons was also an ardent admirer of Whitehead, whom he met at Harvard (Wenzel 1990). The methodological considerations of “The Structure of Social Action” are clearly inspired by Whiteheadian cosmology. The fact that this has gone largely unnoticed is testimony to Whitehead’s unpopularity among the exegetes of Parsons. 22 I find Whitehead’s influence clearly recognisable in this dual-pole structure.

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distinguishes between values and objectives. Objectives are logical formulations of values and as such abstract from the non-verbal parts of values. He conceptualises this non-verbal part as “value attitudes”, but treats them as a residual category. Parsons clearly understands Weber’s dilemma regarding the cognitive and affective nature of values and pushes his definitions further towards the cognitive pole, effectively marginalising the affective component for analytical purposes. His justification is that system integration otherwise becomes very difficult to theorise, due to the incompatibility that the affective component brings with it. I think this is an important point. While Parsons cannot solve Weber’s dilemma, he shows that it impacts on our ability to theorise how values play a role in the integration of society. I will come back to that discussion in a moment. Parsons’ own solution—normative integration—has been treated with contempt since the 1970s. I would, however, be reluctant to dismiss normative integration completely. While it, obviously, cannot play the all-encompassing role Parsons envisaged for it, it would be strange to discuss values without any reference to that particular function. Values in an Aesthetic-affective Perspective The three authors have provided us with a number of important insights into how values fit into the aesthetic-affective perspective. We have established that values have a dual, cognitive and affective, nature23 and that we can perceive them as permanent valuation processes. Moreover, they increase in being when performed and/or invoked. It is important to note that Friedland’s treatment of values as institutional substances fits well into the dualist concept of feeling-perceptions, presencing and harmony/rhythm that I have elaborated in this book. Valuations as substances, he maintains, “become actual in the act of sensation or knowing; the potentiality on the side of the human and potentiality on the side of the object become actual in the same act” (Friedland 2018, p. 528). Values, moreover, have an integrative function, both on the level of interaction and on the system level. This integrative function, however, is impeded by value incompatibility, which in turn is a result of their affective, “irrational” dimension. This dimension is, in some philosophical traditions, directly related to values being a part of ontologically real and independent (life) forces. With regard to the ontological status of values, Weber remains undecided between Dilthey’s life forms and Rickert’s intellectual categories. Parsons maintains this indecision in a different manner by distinguishing between logic-discursive ends and affective value attitudes. Since the latter cannot be subjected to scientific analysis, he effectively follows Weber’s pragmatic decision to give centre stage to rational action in the analysis of social behaviour. Both agree, however, that values have an irrational,

23

Although I will not pursue this line of inquiry further, this seems to link with insights from neurobiology. In his study on belief, Ward (2014) cites the psychiatrist McGilchrist to say that the right brain hemisphere, which is the side producing inchoate, implicit and intuitive thinking, is also where our sense of moral responsibility seems to be located.

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affective “life component” that makes it difficult to subsume them fully under a logically structured system of ideas. Friedland avoids the ontological decision by switching from noun to verb. The entity “value” is thus transformed to an activity, “to valuate”.24 Despite Friedland’s critique of Heidegger, which I do not share,25 I would classify his solution as Heideggerian. Heidegger’s basic concept of Sorge (care) is a valuating concern. Just as Friedland conceptualises the activity of valuating as constituting subjects and objects, so Heidegger conceptualises Dasein as an activity based on care that is constituting objects and practices. The following two passages may illustrate the similarity: Institutional logics are orders of valuation through which a good is constituted, produced, evaluated and referenced to different domains in the world (Friedland 2017, p. 28, my emphasis). 1. A certain care has the characteristic to develop (disclose) its object and bring it into Dasein; 2. to concretely explicate the so developed; 3. to retain the explicitly explicated in a certain manner; 4. to dedicate oneself to the retained, i.e. to use the principles of retention as norms for other instances of care . . .26

We find in both cases, I would argue, human beings that encounter, relate to and make sense of, their world through continuous evaluating activity. In the case of Friedland, this evaluating activity is guided by orders of valuation. I would argue that the notion of concern speaks to the same “life component”27 that Weber and Parsons were so uncomfortable with, for it is only living beings that

He qualifies however: “In thinking about value it seems to me we still have need of the noun” (Friedland 2017, p. 20). This is, as I read him, because an important part of the activity of valuation is centred on the object, and objectification of the object, of valuation. 25 I think that Friedland overdraws the distinction between value and being. Contrary to what he claims, Heidegger’s care can be understood as valuating activity. I would like to point to the other terms that Heidegger discusses in his analysis of care in § 39 of “Sein und Zeit”. He starts with anxiety (Angst) as the key to the understanding of care. He characterises will, wish, inclination and desire (Wille, Wunsch, Hang und Drang) as based on it. These are all terms that relate to, or even presuppose, affective valuation. In his notion of “usability”, Friedland also seems to interpret Heidegger’s ready-to-hand-ness (Zuhandenheit) in a utilitarian manner, which is not what Heidegger meant. Not only does utility require calculation, which ready-to-hand-ness cannot offer, Heidegger also characterises ready-to-hand-ness as comprising all final causes (um-zu) in much the same way as Schütz proposes the life-world to be an organised set of final motives (um-zu Motive) (Schütz 1993). This is a world of practice, not of utility. Utility may come into it, but if it does, it changes the practice into a reflexive practice of a particular sort. 26 “1. Eine bestimmte Sorge hat die Eigentümlichkeit, das, um welches sie geht, zu erschließen und in das Dasein zu bringen; 2. das Erschlossene dergestalt, wie es da ist, konkret zu explizieren; 3. das explizit Ausgebildete in einer bestimmten Weise zu behalten; 4. dem Behaltenen sich zu verschreiben, d.h. bestimmte Grundsätze daraus für das Besorgte anderer Sorgen normativ zu machen . . .” (Heidegger, quoted in Kranz 1995, p. 1087, emphasis in the original). 27 I have chosen this rather vague formulation on purpose. I am not saying that any of the authors adheres to a Lebenssoziologie presupposing an ontological life force. I do maintain, however, that the biological fact of life as an attribute of living organisms plays a role in their argument. In a 24

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live in a world of concern.28 This “life component” is much more elaborated in Friedland’s account than in those of the other two authors, but the kernel, I would argue, is much the same. One reason Weber and Parsons were reluctant to give too much room to the “life component” is that it poses difficulties for any account of system integration, a central concern of classic sociology. Parsons, as we have seen, opts for a solution— the much-criticised normative integration—that addresses, in his eyes, a significant number of cases with the exclusion of those guided by value attitudes. Weber denies the possibility of an integration of different value spheres. Friedland somewhat circumvents the problem by presupposing shared practices and orders of valuation, without explaining how they come about.29 A proper discussion of the problem of system integration is beyond the scope of this book. Nevertheless, integration is an important issue for institutions as well as for processes, for we need to determine in either case what “holds them together” (as we have seen in Chap. 4). We can analytically distinguish a number of integrative mechanisms that are served by values: normative integration, i.e. an integration based on shared values, as well as cognitive-instrumental integration as an integration based on shared means-ends relations. Both, however, do not sit easy with the affective component of values: cognitive-instrumental integration disregards them completely; normative integration considers only emotions that are, by definition, shared. Therefore, I argue, we need to look for a third form of integration, which I will call aesthetic-affective integration. Aesthetic-affective Integration There is a form of aesthetic integration that is based on the dynamic form of a process. I have discussed this form in the first half of this chapter. The dynamic form, i.e. the composition revealing the meaning of the whole, is by definition something that integrates elements into a whole. We feel that something belongs together, long before we cognitively understand why this is the case. We feel that “this” is the right ending for a story, just as we feel disappointed or underwhelmed by others. On an institutional plane, we feel that “this” is the right way to react to events, that “this” is what we should fight for, that “things” now have to change. We may be able to give reasons, but they often come after we have made our decision to act. The ancient art of rhetoric is an example of bringing aesthetic-affective integration to bear on an apparently rational argument. In Antiquity, it is defined as an attempt to “direct the souls” (Plato 1993) of the audience (not their intellects). The orator exposes the pros and cons of the issue before presenting his own solution. The

similar vein, a number of institutionalist authors conceptualise values as arising from basic human needs for sustenance, protection etc. (Mutch 2018; Selznick 2014). 28 Concern does not presuppose consciousness, nor even a brain. Primitive organisms move towards nutrition and away from toxins. In this sense, they display a concern. 29 Practice theory presupposes integration to a certain extent, as it starts from regularised patterns of behaviour. As Reckwitz (2002) observes, the term “social practice” is tautological because practice already refers to a community of practitioners.

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“drama” of the juxtaposition has an emotional function, which is to generate curiosity and commitment in the audience that can persuade them to overlook the weakness of the argument in logical terms. Integration, however, is never perfect. First of all, like any stage of a process, it is a temporary thing. Second, values remain, to a certain extent, incompatible, so any integration based on them only works as long as there are no competing values (a point that, among others, Clemens and Cook (1999) have made). Third, tensions or even contradictions can be part of a composition without disintegrating it. An aesthetic perspective, much better than a cognitive perspective, enables us to understand this. A good work of art requires some tensions to make it dynamic and “convincing”. An impeccable piece of logic requires no such thing.

6.5.2

Feelings and Emotions

Emotions provide, as we have seen, the “irrational” element in values and are thus intrinsically linked to them. They do, however, and evidently, also play a role in their own right when it comes to the aesthetic-affective perspective on institutions. Studying the role of emotions in institutionalisation has become a visible trend in organisational institutionalism. In the literature dedicated to them, emotions are defined as relational and intersubjective (rather than private) phenomena (Voronov 2014; Voronov and Vince 2012; Voronov and Weber 2016) that are shaped by social norms and culture, in particular by institutions (Jakob Sadeh and Zilber 2019; Voronov 2014; Voronov and Vince 2012; Voronov and Weber 2016; Zietsma and Toubiana 2018). The majority of institutionalist authors draw on symbolic interactionism to show how emotions are implicated in social interaction, and from there in the creation of macro structures (Creed et al. 2014; Voronov 2014). In this manner, emotions are relevant for the microfoundations of institutions, whose analysis has also recently become a growing field of interest (Creed et al. 2014; Lok et al. 2017; Voronov 2014; Zietsma and Toubiana 2018). A second interest lies in providing a fuller picture of human beings as emotional, corporeal and experiential beings (Creed et al. 2014; Lok et al. 2017) beyond the “cognitive miser” (Voronov and Vince 2012) conception of many cognitivist approaches. Here an important research question is how human beings experience institutions, in particular with regard to emotions (Creed et al. 2010; Lok et al. 2017). Overall, the consensus is that emotions are both a prerequisite and outcome of institutional structures (Voronov 2014). I agree with these definitions and discussions. My focus, however, differs from that of the institutional literature on emotions. I remain suspicious of the capacity for human intervention as expressed in the “strategic” line of research.30 It seems to me

30

The distinction refers to structuralist, people-centred and strategic research traditions, with the latter studying how emotions can be used as tools for institutional work (Lok et al. 2017).

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that as scholars use them to criticise the cognitive bias in neo-institutionalist theory, emotions run the risk of becoming cognitivised or rationalised tools in the institutional work toolkit. Jakob Sadeh and Zilber are among the few that insist that emotions “carry an unbidden, erupting quality, and can be ‘uncontrollable as a sneeze’” (2019, p. 1415)—which is why they have become ostracised from most sociological literatures in the first place. Neither am I interested in re-phrasing insights from other (older) sociologies thus bringing them into the big tent of neo-institutionalism, such as the connection between the use of fear in the exertion of power (Gill and Burrow 2018) or between (organisational) change and strong emotions (Wijaya and Heugens 2018). I am, finally, not so much interested in what Jakob Sadeh and Zilber call discrete emotions (Jakob Sadeh and Zilber 2019), but in the much vaguer, and more difficult to grasp, feelings or moods. My definition of emotions and feelings follows Damasio’s above distinction (Table 6.1). With Cromby (2015), I place emphasis on feelings as body states that are different from previous body states. They are not attributes that ingress into the body at a given time, but represent the body in a particular activity phase. They are living, organic and situated. Most importantly, they are ineffable, i.e. cannot be expressed fully in words. Hunger, thirst, tiredness and pain, if taken with their accompanying panoplies of moods, physical sensations, desires, inclinations or proto-judgments, are examples of feelings. Cromby provides three “fuzzy-edged” analytical distinctions dividing feelings into emotional feelings, extra-emotional feelings and feelings of knowing. The first term relates to the embodied element of emotions, for example the butterflies in one’s stomach or the dead weight of sadness. The second relates to bodily needs and impulses, like feelings of being stroked or feelings of sexual desire. The third encompasses the most subtle and fleeting sensations, for example inarticulate refusals or tentative decisions. We often employ the term “gut feeling” for these. William James has characterised them as “a feeling of, and a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by” (James 1890, p. 246). Since feelings are ineffable, Cromby agrees with Langer that they are much better expressed in music, film or dance. When we express them verbally, we often use metaphors.31 Lastly, feelings are immediate and require no reflection to become effective. “They have us before we have them”, as Cromby (2015, p. 2) quips quite fittingly. These feelings, or feeling-perceptions, as I have called them earlier in this chapter, are perceptions of dynamic arrangements our bodies sense. They are a result of impressions we get from our bodies and, through our bodies, from the world around us. These impressions are not just triggered by physical objects, as optics or acoustics would have it, but also contain non-physical elements like ideas or atmospheres. Damasio (2000)—after all, a natural scientist—is quite clear on that.

31

Remember Langer who says that we capture the living form as structural-metaphorical semblance earlier in this chapter.

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Institutions as dynamic arrangements (or value-orders) of people, objects, ideas and behaviours can be felt. They leave an impression on us as we interact with them. This impression, as I have explained elsewhere (Weik 2019), can be valued positively or negatively, i.e. we can feel pleasure interacting with the institution, or pain, intensive like or dislike, or indifference. Conversely, institutions can be expressions of our feelings. Intensive feelings relating to values need to find an expression. This is the often cited “energy” that emotions provide for action. The action in question, however, is not just any action, and the energy is not limited to action. In fact, the “energy ! action” equation is quite a physicalmechanistic notion. People are “energised” by feelings in many different ways, including preferences for ideas or persons or the opening up (or shutting down, in the negative case) of new perspectives and resonances.32 Whatever the actual expression may be, it is an expression of feeling. And the major point of this book is that the emergence of a new institution is closely linked to this expression of feeling in the sense that the valuations and dynamic arrangements of the nascent institution express the feelings of the collective33 at the time. I will call these feelings zeitgeist. It is important to note that this zeitgeist is not just the sum of individuals’ feelings but a truly collective feeling in the sense that each individual body feels the feelings of the bodies around it. This is what Whitehead describes as social order (Chap. 4), i.e. a collective with a shared, positively valued idea that is positively valued in part because of one’s membership in the collective. Crucial for the emergence of a new institution is not just the intensity of the zeitgeist—a collective feeling must already be quite intense to become a zeitgeist— but also the aesthetic quality of the new institutional arrangement (harmony) and the rhythms it is embedded in and engenders. As to harmony, people must feel that the new institution expresses their feelings adequately and that its relationship to existing structures and value-orders “fits”. Does the zeitgeist call for revolution or restoration or consolidation? I will readily admit that there is a considerable methodological problem involved in this argument. Aesthetic notions of fit or harmony are, first, very difficult to capture in the generic, abstract terms of science—that is exactly why some hold that arts and sciences should be kept separate. So even if we can identify a zeitgeist, it is difficult to say in advance which expressions fit it because there is a wide spectre of “fitting” candidates. The second, even more important, problem is that the zeitgeist is not a given object that can then be matched against candidates. Rather, it evolves and 32

The German sociologist Rosa has recently published a comprehensive theory on this aspect (Rosa 2018). 33 The collective is, of course, not just a homogeneous totality of people living at the time. As always in the social world, there are people who have more power and capacity to make things happen and to express their feelings. In my opinion, chance, this nemesis of the social sciences, also plays a tremendous role. I ignore both aspects at this point in time because much has been said about the former elsewhere and little can be said about the latter.

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expresses itself in these candidates. Just like I have explained in the previous chapter, that ideas are not first there and then expressed, so collective expressions like a zeitgeist get formed in and through their expressions. I have no ready solutions to these two problems. My suggestions, which I will elaborate in Chap. 7, point toward an intensive study of the individual case without too much emphasis on generic terms and insights. I would prefer to understand what is going on in the concrete case first, and then build a theory much later. After all, an aesthetic perspective is quite a new suggestion, and not just in institutional theory. In contrast to the institutionalist literature on emotions, I would like to emphasise once again that what I have just described happens before traditional meaningmaking and should be considered the first step of sense-making. It is testimony to the fact that, as Friedland (2018) maintains, institutional life operates through affects, not meanings. He quotes Stewart saying that affects “do not work through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds” (Stewart, quoted in Friedland 2018, p. 529). It is on this very basic, and mostly pre-reflexive level that we, as he terms it, “confront ourselves” (2018, p. 536) because the institutions that emerge are expressions of our feelings. A second noteworthy aspect is the bodily nature of feeling-perceptions. They are, as I have said above, not attributes but states of the body. Following Bourdieu, we can argue that their non-physiological elements have been formed to a large part through childhood socialisation and are less malleable in later stages of life. This, again, is a strong argument against the pick-and-choose mentality that characterises many cognitivist approaches. Institutions—or institutional logics, as they term it— are not a matter of rational choice or rational design. This is very likely one of the reasons why they endure over such long time spans. Beyond my focus on feeling-perceptions, I think the literature on emotions and institutions has gained a number of valuable insights that complete the picture on a more reflexive level. This is particularly true for the connection between emotions and systemic power (see, for example, Creed et al. 2014; Jakob Sadeh and Zilber 2019; Voronov 2014) as well as for the role of emotions in institutional work (see, for example, Creed et al. 2010; Gill and Burrow 2018; Voronov and Weber 2016). Since this work, however, deals with the maintenance or change of established institutions rather than with emergence, I will not discuss it further.

6.6

Experiencing Institutions

Viewed from an aesthetic-affective perspective, institutions are value-orders that emerge when values need to be ordered anew. They emerge, in other words, in “moral times”, i.e. times of transformation and change, in which the established value-order is challenged. These are the times when we find intensive feelings and clashes of values and ideas coalescing into a zeitgeist.

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Emergent institutions are impressions and expressions of that zeitgeist in the sense that I have used the terms throughout this chapter. They employ aesthetic arrangements into which some of the valuation processes, subjectivation processes and objectivation processes available at the time feed. On top of suggesting new values for new forms of normative integration or new forms of means-ends-relations (technologies), they also integrate aesthetically, which is to say they create a complex, but holistic, expression of the zeitgeist, containing ifs and buts, tensions and potentials, emphases and margins. Lastly, they are aesthetic arrangements in the sense that they need to please the members of society—to “fit” the zeitgeist—in order to achieve endurance. In rejection of an institutional design approach, I argue that emergent institutions “make” aesthetic decisions, in the sense that certain aesthetic arrangements evolve following aesthetic “laws”34 of what makes a good, fitting, harmonic, pleasing arrangement. One important side aspect of this is that it matters less why the arrangement evolved in the way it did—the popular causal or final question of any academic analysis35—and more whether it pleased or not. If we, therefore, want to study the emergence of institutions, we need to concentrate on feeling-perceiving them in an aesthetic-affective manner. We need to feelperceive the arrangement of ideas, values and emotions I have called zeitgeist (rather than the ideas, values and emotions as discrete elements). We need to feelperceive the ultimate values and value-orders to which all the manifest expressions point. In order to do this, we need to study the zeitgeist as well as institutional arrangements as complex and dynamic structures with all their tensions, potentials, half-attempts, promises, threats, ifs and buts. Like with a symphony, we understand nothing if we just focus on the violins or the first movement. We need to look at the whole, and the invisible bit that keeps it together. We also need to understand the aesthetic “choices”36 the institution makes, not as rational-functional “whys” but as “hows” of expression that elaborate the feelings so expressed. A further consequence of the aesthetic approach is that, to return to the symphony, we should not mistake the sounds for the moods. What Langer above has termed “structural-metaphorical semblance” is not identity. Sounds are not moods. They sound like moods feel. That is an important difference, and why a feelingperception of the zeitgeist is so important. To do so, we need to employ all our senses, including our seriously underrated sixth. I will say more about this in the next chapter. There exist already a few, but 34

These laws vary, of course, over time and space since they are culturally conditioned. Eleventh century kings had rather different aesthetic sensibilities than twenty-first century scholars have. 35 To which I still think the honest answer is: for many reasons and, more often, no particular reason at all. But that is just my personal belief. 36 The word “choice” is less than ideal because it implies a conscious, individual decision, which is not at all what I want to say here. It would be more proper to speak of “aesthetically motivated developments”, which is quite vague, or “developments in which individuals and collectives express their aesthetic preferences”, which is quite long.

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notable, examples of an aesthetic-affective perspective in the institutionalist literature. The thick description of dining at a Cambridge college by Dacin et al. (2010), the in-depth inquiry into the spirit of Jesuit accounting by Quattrone (2015), or the ethnographic study of the Advocates Library by Siebert et al. (2017) provide examples of how a re-enchantment37 of the objects of our study produces insights we could not gain in any other way. Finally, we need to be careful not to reify (or re-reify38) the processes we observe or, at the very least, to pay attention to the duality and to the increase in being that unfolds before our eyes. This is, to my mind, less a question of speaking than of thinking. While it is true that our language invites us to fix things, the bigger impediment is the desire to “say how (and why) it is”, preferably once and for all. Instead, I side with Wittgenstein, who remarks: I think one reason why the attempt to find an explanation is wrong is that we have only to put together in the right way what we know, without adding anything, and the satisfaction we are trying to get from the explanation comes of itself (Wittgenstein 2010, p. 2).

This stands in marked contrast to the recent journal practice of cramming all descriptions (data) into small-font tabled heaps, so that the reader can move quickly to the theoretical explanation at the end. Goethe, of whom I will speak more in a bit, reminds us that: Hypotheses are scaffoldings that one raises in advance of the building and that one takes down when the building is finished. The worker cannot do without them. But he must be careful not to mistake the scaffolding for the building (Goethe 1988, no. 1222).

6.6.1

Templar Values and Emotions: An Illustration

I will now illustrate my points once again with the help of the Templars. The illustration cannot deliver a full analysis of the institution of military monasticism and the zeitgeist in which it emerged—that would take another book.39 I can only point to some pivotal elements I have discussed above. In particular, I will • show how military monasticism is a dynamic arrangement held together by a dynamic form with generative powers;

With this term, I refer to the call by Suddaby et al. (2017, p. 7) for a “re-enchanted theory of institutions”. Unlike the authors, however, I doubt to which extent such a theory is possible within a representational epistemology. 38 I find it remarkable how, as soon as nouns have been turned into verbs, e.g. institution ! institutionalise or value ! valuate, they become substantivised (institutionalisation, valuation) again or are at least used in infinite grammatical forms like the gerund. The infinite form, of course, indicates the stripping of any agency or temporality. This is not to say that I also would not find it terribly difficult to talk in sentences containing two or three finite verbs; it is just to say that a change in grammar may not be the solution. 39 Such a book could also take up Gehman et al.’s (2013) advice to study values in their practices. 37

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• discuss how it increased in being; • give examples of how it expressed the zeitgeist; • address the aesthetic “choices” the emerging institution made. The Templars start out, to invoke March and Olsen (1976), as a “solution without a problem”. The straggling band of warriors seeking permission from the King of Jerusalem did not foresee that they would become the force on whose strength depended the continued occupation of the Holy Land, the pope’s army or the bankers of kings. All the functions the Templars performed, all the problems they solved, were functions and problems that either developed with them or were construed ex post. The Templars were not institutional entrepreneurs that read the signs of the time and understood what needed to be done. Nobody is. (I will say more about this in the next section.) At the beginning, they, at best, solved a local problem that only the King was aware of and did not think to pass on to posterity. All this changed with the letter from Bernard of Clairvaux. From this moment onwards, the Templars had a central value, a substance, and a unique one, too: to doubly serve God, in prayer and in arms. Bernard, arguably the most brilliant orator of his time, had a keen sense of the zeitgeist, i.e. the intense collective feelings and beliefs, the fervent ideas regarding Christianity’s superiority and destiny. Only 30 years before, these had erupted in the mobilisation of the First Crusade that had been crowned, from a Christian perspective, by the capture of Jerusalem. The crusade, however, had only been a temporary, and rather chaotic,40 organisation. The ecclesiastical and monastic reforms in Europe, on the other hand, were driven by the same intensity of belief, this time turned inwards, and provided much more stable configurations. The time for an institution serving God in a new way was, in this sense, ripe. Bernard then even took the intensity one step further by basing the fundamental Templar value on a contrast almost as old as the religion itself: prayer and military action. Contrast, as rhetoric teaches us, is a means to increase intensity. In his letter, as in the eyes of many, the Templars were an expression of the highest religious dedication, military prowess, and unfailing communal integration. The intensity and critical pitch that created the institution, and that the institution was an expression of, is unmistakeable. Bernard also links the ideas of crusade and pilgrimage to the (bloody) passion of Christ. It is only at this time that the Holy Land, the land the Templars are constituted to protect, becomes the land of Jesus, not of Moses (Barber 1994). The value Bernard provided was, however, not a static thing but a dynamic form that continuously developed. There was (and continued to be over the decades), vociferous critique of the fusion of the religious and the military. Seward (2000, p. 18f.) quotes a contemporary saying:

40

We should not forget that neither the pope nor any king took part in the First Crusade. It was in this sense closer to a grass-roots movement. The estimated costs for the year 1096 alone were higher than the combined annual income of all participating kingdoms (Tyerman 2015, p. 196).

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. . . this dreadful new military order that someone has rather pleasantly called the order of the fifth Gospel was handed for the purpose of forcing infidels to accept the faith at the point of the sword. Its members consider that they have every right to attack anyone not confessing Christ’s name, leaving him destitute, whereas if they themselves are killed while thus unjustly attacking the pagans, they are called martyrs for the faith . . .

Three papal bulls were issued within 6 years (by three different popes) to make clear that the official favour lay with the Templars. The critique, however, remains important for the trajectory of the order because it never really goes away. Some of it will be invoked again when the Templars are forcibly dissolved 150 years later. The order itself, to use Aristotle’s phrase, was permanently “working to stay the same” (Sachs 2001). We see that its rule is often reformed, added to and adapted to define what serving God means in practice (Upton-Ward 1992). In the founding years of the order, for example, it seems as if any miles was welcomed in the same manner, whereas in later times—clearly under the influence of chivalric feudalism— social status divided the brothers into the knightly elite and supporting sergeants and pages, each serving god in a different manner. Not surprisingly, given the contrariness in their central value, there were continuous discussions regarding the order’s legitimate relations with others, as well as its scope of power and privileges. Were they an order or an army? The King’s or the Pope’s men? In these troubled times of new social orders being established, very little was taken for granted; very little of the moral was factual. The increase in being is not difficult to see as we follow the emergence and subsequent fate of the Templar Order. From a fledgling band of warriors at the brink of extinction to the most powerful organisation in the world, from an end in flames to the stuff of video games and the object of revisionist fantasies on YouTube, the Templars, and with them the institution of military monasticism in the Occident, have come full circle. We can see the arrangement grow—new and more elements, stronger relations between them—and increase its generative power, until it is weakened by the loss of the Holy Land, forcibly dissolved, and devalued by new forms of conflict resolution to the point where today it continues as a shadow, a mere fantasy. The dynamic form was, as I have said, productive, i.e. it generated new subjects, objects and practices. We can see how the new institution produced a new class, or social category, of people: the monks of war, as Seward (2000) has called them. It further entrenched the idea of a military defence of Christianity and (re-)invented new forms of organisation, both in monastic and military terms. For the Templars were a monastery in the field, so to speak, that had to adapt the traditional monastic life form to the exigencies of warfare. As such, for example, the Templar Rule requires all knights to sleep fully dressed with shoes and belts (Upton-Ward 1992, Rule no. 21). The obedience requirements surpassed in strictness even Benedictine and Cistercian rules. Even the adjustment of stirrups required the permission of the master (Seward 2000). Conversely, importing the monastic discipline onto the battlefield created the “first properly disciplined and officered troops in the West since Roman times” (Seward 2000, p. 17). The order, however, also displayed a productive capacity outside its mission proper, from agricultural production and the

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development of international banking to feeding the dreams and aspirations of millions. The Templars became the subject of a whole medieval literary sub-genre (Nicholson 2001), and people continue to be fascinated by them into the third millennium. The order also influenced the valuations of others. Cardini (1990) holds that the Templar’s fusion of military and Christian ethos “christianised” the secular aristocracy into adopting the chivalric code as its institutional substance. At the same time, the rift between Christians and Muslims widened as military solutions became an accepted, and preferred, solution for disputes between the world religions. Many of the developments engendered by the dynamic form of the ultimate value must be regarded aesthetic “choices” because they do not follow with logical necessity but have a strong affective component. The obvious places to look for such choices are, first, the visible elements of the order. The Templar banner,41 like all banners of its time, embodies the growing fusion between the Church and feudalism (Erdmann 1955). While in the first millennium AD, banners of war were considered pagan and their holiness repulsive, we now see banners being carried regularly by Christian armies and blessed by Christian priests. Among these, however, the banner of the Templars was considered to be of particular significance (Barber 1994). In battle, ten knights42 would guard it and, as we have heard already, no Templar was to leave the field before it went down. The banner, however, was no relic (these were often also carried into battle, though not by the Templars), for the army carried a second banner that could be raised if the first was lost. It was, therefore, no sign but a symbol. As such, it carries the element of aesthetic choice43 characteristic of a symbol. There can also be little doubt that the Templars understood the importance of displays of grandeur for a continuous flow of recruits and resources. Barber (1994, p. 194ff.) describes the size and decoration of the Templar churches as particularly rich. Shortly before the fall of Jerusalem, at the height of their power, they had plans to build a cloister church on the Temple Mount that would have covered about a third of that area. King Henry III of England originally wanted to be buried in the Temple Church in London, before he embarked on rebuilding Westminster Abbey. Likewise, the Templars were in possession of some most powerful relics, like the crown of thorns, which was displayed on special occasions. There is, however, more than just what is playing to our sense of vision. As I have discussed above, aesthetics has its home in rhythms and arrangements coming

41

We have no confirmed image of the banner, but historians assume that it was a simple black and white flag. It was often referred to as “piebald” (baucent in old French). 42 Depending on the size of the Templar unit, this could easily be 10–20% of the knightly fighting force. 43 This is not to say that it may not originally have been selected by chance; maybe there were no other pieces of cloth around when the first banner was sewn. What matters, however, is that this original “choice” was being confirmed throughout the decades and imbued with symbolic significance of good vs. evil or fierceness in battle vs. friendship outside.

6.6 Experiencing Institutions

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together to create a powerful sensation. Let us take a closer look at the description from a pilgrim at around 1187 (cited from Barber 1994, p. 179): The Templars are most excellent soldiers. They wear white mantles with a red cross, and when they go to the wars a standard of two colours called balzaus is borne before them. They go in silence. Their first attack is the most terrible. In going they are the first, in returning the last. They await the orders of their Master. When they think fit to make war and the trumpet has sounded, they sing in chorus the Psalm of David, ‘Not unto us, O Lord’, kneeling on the blood and necks of the enemy, unless they have forced the troops of the enemy to retire altogether, or utterly broken them to pieces. Should any of them for any reason turn his back to the enemy, or come forth alive [from a defeat], or bear arms against the Christians, he is severely punished: the white mantle with the red cross, which is the sign of his knighthood, is taken away with ignominy, he is cast from the society of brethren, and eats his food on the floor without a napkin for the space of one year. If the dogs molest him, he does not dare to drive them away. But at the end of the year, if the Master and brethren think his penance to have been sufficient, they restore him the belt of his former knighthood. These Templars live under a strict religious rule, obeying humbly, having no private property, eating sparingly, dressing meanly, and dwelling in tents.

The first part of that description relates an attack. Let us picture these knights, clad in metal armour, on the back of heavy horses. They ride in silence—except that there is no silence. Horses trained to be aggressive, riding in close formation, are never silent. They will snort, neigh, shake their heads, eager to break into a gallop. But they are reined in, held back, building suspense until the moment they are allowed to go. Like with the Bison of Altamira, there is a tension in this contained form. The mere movement of this heavy metal entity of horse and rider makes noise; 300 or even 600 of them make the ground shake.44 And yet, the riders are silent—breaking with a long battlefield tradition in Europe. Then the trumpet sounds, and they break into song. Again, the advance of 300 would make a powerful impression on its own, but the sound is dominated by orchestrated singing, praising the Lord in humility;45 not arbitrary sounds here and there but the same sound carrying the same message as a fight of life and death commences. This is what the pilgrim experienced as he watched the institution of military monasticism in action. His is one drop of experience constituting this institution. This is, in this particular moment in time, the “working-to-stay-the-same” of military monasticism. This “working-to-stay-the-same” is constituted likewise by being degraded to the status of a dog, by never being celebrated by individual name, or by never being allowed to be absent from mass even for good reasons.46

44

The role of heavy cavalry in the Middle Ages cannot be compared to the role of cavalry in modern times, but is more similar to the modern role of tanks. 45 The pilgrim’s description refers to Psalm 115: “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory . . .”, which is often considered to be the “hymn of the Templars”. 46 The Templars dropped this relaxation which was originally included in the Benedictine rule from their own set of rules (Barber 1994).

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6 Institutions as Dynamic Forms of Aesthetic-Affective Experience

Institutional Entrepreneurship

Although this book is not dedicated to human agency and intervention, the question might arise whether we may say that the Templar order as an organisation, or individuals like Hugh de Payns and Bernard of Clairvaux, functioned as institutional entrepreneurs with regard to the institution of military monasticism. I have quickly dismissed this thought in the previous section but will now give a more nuanced explanation. It should be clear from what I have argued up to now, and especially from my focus on the affective and unreflected, that I fully embrace the critique of the classic concept of institutional entrepreneurship. To cite Mutch (2007) as well as my own critique (Weik 2011b), we should not operate with a concept based on rationalstrategic calculation, manipulative skills, or on willed and intentional change more broadly, for if we do this, we invite rational choice in through the back door. I do, however, see one place where we might discover institutional entrepreneurs even in the vague, foggy and undirected process of institutional emergence, right in the middle of the ifs and buts and maybes. My central concept here is that of personification; a term used by Schütz (1993) as “personaler Idealtypus” as well as Berger and Luckmann (1967), and recently brought back into the discussion by Voronov and Weber (2020). Voronov and Weber explain that it is personification that makes an institution phenomenologically real to people. Personification, in their view, is the outcome of a fusion of the self with an actor role in a particular institutional order. In this fusion, a person comes to personify the specific ethos of that institutional order in the eyes of others. Personification is therefore always public. Adapting the concept to the specifics of institutional emergence, in which the institutional order is not yet established, we may speak of “pre-figuring” the dynamic form that the emerging institution has adopted. An institutional entrepreneur, in this perspective, is a person that pre-figures and embodies the values, intensities and tensions that will become characteristic of the new institution. We should, for this reason, not look for entrepreneurs at that point in time when the institution becomes visible, but much earlier.47 I could not identify such an institutional entrepreneur for military monasticism; this is where the scarcity of sources gets in the way. I can, however, point to an institutional entrepreneur for a different institution emerging at about the same time, viz. the university. My studies on the founding of the University of Paris (Weik 2011a) as the “template”48 for all future universities have discussed the role of Peter Abelard. I

47

We may also be able to identify unsuccessful entrepreneurs in persons that became extremely popular/controversial without a subsequent new institution. This is, however, quite speculative, and I will not follow that line of inquiry here. 48 Unlike the University of Bologna, founded probably a bit earlier, the University of Paris adopted a magisterial organization in which academics, not students, ran the university.

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found it rather remarkable that all historians discussing the University of Paris (Cobban 1975; Compayré 1893; Denifle 1885; Ferruolo 1985; Rashdall 1886), or medieval universities in general (Le Goff 1986; Rüegg 1992; Southern 1993), dedicated considerable space and prominence to Abelard as the man “who made it happen”. Yet, Abelard died in 1142, 66 years before the University of Paris published its first document and 78 years before it was treated as a legal person. He cannot have been the founder in any meaningful sense of the word. Still, I would agree with these historians and hold that everybody studying Abelard’s life will feel that this is where it began. This is despite the fact that Abelard did not have a vision, and his leadership record was pitiful. He was regarded as the master of rhetorical elegance, but he never formulated the idea of a university. What he did, and what modern readers recognise I think, was to live, write and talk in an arrangement of tensions, joys and valuations that would be mirrored by the new institution: introducing a positive valuation of new knowledge, of questioning and debate, employed by the church yet subject only to reason, championing the truth yet proud of his own intellectual prowess, incendiary in his ideas yet powerless to save himself. In this sense, he was the classic autonomous reflexive that Mutch (2007) discusses as the most likely institutional entrepreneur. He did not pursue a project of social change but his very own project of “being Abelard”. His ideas, incompatible as they were with the old order, brought him into bitter conflict with the authorities, but that is not the main point. The main point is that the configuration that he personified so intensely resonated with enough people, and enough people over time, to trigger the emergence of a new institution. Abelard did not produce a shiny ideal or a set of virtues for his followers to implement, but prefigured the dynamic form of the university and embodied it at a time when the critical pitch made people search for new expressions of new feelings. He was, as Le Goff (1986, p. 41, emphasis in the original) puts it, “the first great modern intellectual, the first professor”.

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Chapter 7

Methodological Considerations

Abstract This chapter focuses on how to study the dynamic form of institutions. It draws on the methodologies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Shotter and Antoine Hennion, who all, in their different fields, have thought about how to capture living, developing forms as well as subtle, largely nondiscursive feelings. The proposed methodology focuses on the duality of experience, the immediate relatedness of world and observer, the central role of the body and its feelings in this relationship, as described earlier in this book. It suggests a time-intensive, patient and “delicate” approach that avoids theory-building as long as possible and studies experiences as achievements that can be more or less skilful. It strongly prioritises description over explanation. With regard to future research, it suggests studying volition, shades of being, institutional passions and ecstasies, as well as the temporal dimension of our being-in-institutions, and asks us to borrow or develop aesthetic vocabulary for the description of institutional arrangements.

7.1

How to Study Emergence from an Aesthetic-Affective Perspective

In this chapter, I want to provide some ideas and guidance regarding the “how to” of applying an aesthetic-affective perspective. In particular, I want to draw attention to the emerging features of institutions. At various points in the previous chapters, I have promised some methodological elaboration. In Chap. 3, I have directed attention to Weber’s notion of ideas and values as wirksam (active) and as standing “behind” the phenomena. I have also described the hermeneutic study of values as a retracing of the expressive process in which they were constituted. In Chap. 5, I have devoted some time to explaining how institutions are expressions of concern, and as such our responses to the world. I have introduced the idea of multiplicity in unity as guiding us toward the common factor in the manifoldness of the phenomenon, i.e. that which keeps it together. One chapter later, I have described this as the dynamic form, and still owe an explanation of how to study it.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Weik, The Emergence of Institutions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89895-3_7

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Finally, in Chap. 6, I have characterised this dynamic form further to say that it contains, among other things, potentials, nonverbal moods and premonitions or contradictions that are difficult to express in a thin description. I have already alluded to Goethe as someone suggesting a method of study that focuses on description rather than theoretical abstraction and that employs all our senses and faculties. In order to address these various concerns, I will divide this chapter into three parts. The first part will be dedicated to Goethe’s method and will answer how to study not fully verbalised, dynamic ideas standing behind the phenomena. The second part will discuss Shotter’s notions of relationally-responsive thinking and withness-thinking to address the Wirksamkeit of ideas and values, as well as our responses to, and through, them. Finally, I will introduce Hennion’s concept of a “sociology of taste”, which can help us understand the active and unpredictable character of our encounter with ideas, values and material objects.

7.2

Goethe’s Method of Studying Ideas as Dynamic Forms

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1750–1832) is best known as a great German poet, but has also devoted a considerable part of his life to the study of minerals, animals and plants.1 This scientific part of his studies is of particular significance for the topics of process and emergence, as it is placed at a point in history at which—in hindsight—two important decisions regarding the future of the sciences were taken. The first was Newton’s reformulation of physics in abstract, mathematical terms. Goethe, who saw his “Farbenlehre” (Theory of Colours)2 (1998) as a direct counter proposal to Newtonian optics, was vitriolic in his critique of the growing influence of abstract thinking on the study of nature (Bortoft 1986). He saw it as abandonment of the phenomenal reality and its relationship to human life and morals. The second decision, in the nascent discipline of biology, was to study living organisms in a taxonomic way, as exemplified by Carl Linnaeus. Goethe argued that the method, while being well suited to study dead materials, was inappropriate for living, changing organisms. He lost both of his battles. If he had won them, there might have been no need for this book. Discussing Goethe’s method it will be useful to take the following statement of his as a caveat:

1

They consist of works on plant and animal morphology, geology, meteorology, colours as well as some smaller pieces on the natural sciences in general that are collated in Goethe (1998). 2 In fact, the two works are almost impossible to compare, for Newton is interested in formulating the mathematical equations describing the fracturing of light beams (of which colours are a result), while Goethe describes the physical, chemical and psychological attributes and effects of the individual colours. He would probably not have been happy with the English translation of the title as “Theory of Colours”. It was, however, translated after his death.

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“Method is the refuge of those who have tired of the empirical world” (Goethe 1988, no.1214, my translation). While describing his methods in various papers and alluding to them in his correspondence, Goethe has never formulated a coherent methodology. I suspect he saw it as the scientific mind going into overdrive and focussing on aspects that were either not really important or bloody obvious. I will say, first, something about Goethe’s notions of dynamics, life and development before moving on to his proposed method of studying them.

7.2.1

Ideas as Dynamic Essences

Goethe regarded the continuous change and development of phenomena, and living organisms in particular, as a central feature in the study of nature. Whenever he talks of “essence”, he refers to a dynamic entity that is part of the eternal Heraclitean Flow. To be is to change, for the alternative is death. In order to develop, however, each previous stage must die. Or as Goethe puts it in the essay “On Nature”:3 There is eternal life, becoming and movement in Her and yet she does not progress. She permanently changes, and there is not a moment of rest in Her. She has no concept of remaining, and She curses stasis. She is firm. Her step is measured, Her exceptions few, Her laws immutable. [. . .] Her drama is always new, because she always creates new spectators. Life is Her most beautiful invention, and death is her knack to produce as much life as possible.4

Ideas, for Goethe, are the dynamic forms of organisms and of larger composites of organisms.5 They do not stand behind the phenomena but are an inseparable part of them. Most importantly, Goethe holds that ideas can be experienced. In order to understand this tenet, we need to know that, first, his definition of experience is broad and includes aesthetic, cognitive and emotional experiences as well as intuition and sense perception. We need, second, to remember that

3 It is unclear to which extent Goethe can be considered the author of the essay. He confirms in later correspondence that it was not written in his hand—which is not unusual since he used secretaries— but was based on his ideas. Whether the words are his is doubtful. 4 “Es ist ein ewiges Leben, Werden und Bewegen in ihr und doch rückt sie nicht weiter. Sie verwandelt sich ewig und ist kein Moment Stillestehen in ihr. Fürs Bleiben hat sie keinen Begriff und ihren Fluch hat sie ans Stillestehen gehängt. Sie ist fest. Ihr Tritt ist gemessen, ihre Ausnahmen selten, ihre Gesetze unwandelbar. [. . .] Ihr Schauspiel ist immer neu, weil sie immer neue Zus0063hauer schafft. Leben ist ihre schönste Erfindung, und der Tod ist ihr Kunstgriff viel Leben zu haben.” (Anon. 1783). 5 Goethe used different concepts. The “Form” is what provides unity to an individual phenomenon. The “Typus” does the same for a number of individual phenomena of the same species. The “Gesetz” (law) provides a unity of types, and the “Urphänomen” (primordial phenomenon) a unity of laws. With the “Urphänomen” science reaches its ultimate point of reference, a point that is already almost beyond reach. Goethe characterises it as “demonic” in the sense that it can be felt but not clearly expressed. Taken together, the concepts show nature to be an ever-changing nexus of ideas and experiences (Stephenson 1995).

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experience is an individual, unrepeatable act different from the repeatable exercise that collects data in the modern sciences.6 What we experience is, say, a rose. We do not just perceive separate colours, textures or smells but a whole consisting of sense perceptions, as well as a particular gestalt and context. (We also feel emotions, connotations etc., but we will leave them aside for the sake of simplicity.) Moreover, as we come back repeatedly to the flower, we see it changing from its budding to its withering. Gestalt and development take us towards Goethe’s ideas. For it is not just sense data that we perceive, but a characteristic form that allows us to identify the rose. As von Weizsäcker (1998) has put it, we see the idea the moment we see the rose as rose. It is the holistic impression of the generic qualities of the changing phenomenon. In understanding this figure of thought, it is important to remember that for Goethe the idea of the phenomenon, like its qualities, is objective and real. It is not a static concept born of analysis and abstraction but a product of synthesis, of seeing the whole in its dynamic, of seeing, ideally speaking, every single rose at any given time. Goethe had to defend his notion of the visibility of ideas against the critique of friends and colleagues trained in Kantian philosophy. He himself recalls an exchange with Schiller, who was an ardent Kantian: I gave a spirited explanation of my theory of the metamorphosis of plants with graphic pen sketches of the symbolic plant. He [Schiller] listened and looked with great interest, with unerring comprehension, but when I had ended, he shook his head saying, ‘That is not an empirical experience, it is an idea.’ I was taken aback and somewhat irritated, for the disparity in our viewpoints was here sharply delineated. [. . .] Controlling myself I replied, ‘How splendid that I have ideas without knowing it, and can see them before my very eyes (Naydler 1996, p. 96).

The notion of development is taken further by Goethe’s concept of “Metamorphose”, which refers to the development of an individual organism7 through its various stages. Like with the previous notions, Goethe holds that there is an identifiable unity in that development, and that it is the task of the scientist to find it. The organic force behind all developmental processes, finally, is the “Bildungstrieb” (formative drive). The German word “Bildung” can refer, as it does here, to formation, but also translates as “higher education, cultivation”. It can, moreover, be used to refer to a process as well as to the result of that process. Goethe chooses the word to distinguish his theory from the static taxonomy of Linnaeus, but also from a nascent biology inspired by Newtonian physics in which life is reduced to mechanistic explanations. Goethe’s Bildungstrieb, in contrast, seeks to combine material and spiritual development in nature.

6

Goethe, in fact, was one of the people who popularised the notion of experience as Erlebnis (see Sect. 5.2.1). 7 May (1913) points out that Goethe uses the concept in at least six different ways, but the development of the individual organism seems to be the most central.

7.2 Goethe’s Method of Studying Ideas as Dynamic Forms

7.2.2

113

Delicate Empirics8

Goethe’s method has been called phenomenological, and as far as phenomenology focuses on the study of phenomena, this is correct. It has been called a “science of qualities”, and as far as this is taken to reject a mathematised version of the natural sciences, this is correct too. He is a functionalist in the sense of exploring the function of each part for the whole; a vitalist in the sense of believing that living Nature is the ultimate, most complex being permeating everything; an organicist because he holds that every phenomenon can be understood in terms of parts and whole. None of these labels, however, refer to a number of unique characteristics of Goethean science. There is, first, the self-actualisation of the scientist as one aim of the scientific endeavour. We do not study the world to control it but to develop our faculties in response to it—linguistic faculties in the study of languages, mathematical faculties in the study of mathematics, and so on.9 Every individual scholar must develop new ways of seeing and understanding with every new object of study. Goethe insists, second, on using every human faculty to approach and understand the phenomenon: None of the human faculties should be excluded from scientific activity. The depth of intuition, a sure awareness of the present, mathematical profundity, physical exactitude, the heights of reason, and sharpness of intellect together with the versatile and ardent imagination, and a loving delight in the world of the senses—they are all essential for a lively and productive apprehension of the moment (Naydler 1996, p. 116).

There is, finally, the need to reconnect every piece of scientific knowledge to the meaning structures of the everyday world, for the ultimate aim of science is not knowledge generation, but supporting human beings in living “good”10 lives. Based on this, the research process can be described in three stages: active seeing, exact sensorial imagination and connecting the multiplicity in unity (Bortoft 1986; Holdrege 2005; Robbins 2006; Seamon 2005).

I have deviated from the normal translation featuring “Delicate Empiricism” because Goethe only speaks of “Zarte Empirie”, not “Zarter Empirismus”. 9 This idea entered the humanist programme of the Humboldtian university as the ultimate aim of education (Humboldt 2017). Goethe was a fatherly friend to Wilhelm von Humboldt. 10 Hartmut Rosa has recently pointed out how much sociology shies away from descriptions of what a “good” life may constitute, and instead strives to optimise everybody’s chances for leading a “good” life, whatever that may be in their personal definition. As sociologists also assume that material wealth relates directly to realising these chances, it has introduced a justification of capitalism through the back door (Rosa 2018). The natural sciences, in contrast, do not even pretend any longer to cater to some moral good in their knowledge production. The physicist Heisenberg, reflecting on Goethe, sees this as a problem: “In a darkening world no longer enlightened by the unum, bonum, verum in its middle [. . .] technological progress is nothing more than a desperate attempt to make hell a bit more comfortable to live in” (Heisenberg 1968). 8

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Active Seeing Goethe’s method centres on what he calls “active seeing”, an activity that is juxtaposed to (Newtonian) “passive observation”. Let us remember that the phenomenon is able to speak for itself. Its essence, qualities and relationships are objective. The phenomenon, moreover, hides nothing (although not every quality may be visible at first glance). The phenomenon is, finally, dynamic; it is constantly evolving, changing and adapting. The dynamics it displays are, however, not arbitrary but constrained by an inner form. The observer is and always has been a part of Nature. Their sensorium is hence well equipped to observe Nature and there is no categorical—Kantian—division between the observer and the observed. In order to see actively, however, the observer must not rely on rational thinking alone but on other mental faculties as well. Rational thinking produces abstractions and analytical relationships that are linear and static. It is hence not the ideal device to apply to a dynamic and complex phenomenon. In order to comprehend such a phenomenon, the observer needs to develop a “holistic consciousness” able to grasp dynamic and simultaneous events and relationships. Goethe describes the process itself as: Just looking at something cannot improve our understanding of it. Every seeing becomes an observing, every observing a meditating, every meditating a connecting, and in this way we can say that we theorise with every attentive look at the world. To do this consciously, reflectively, freely and, to use a risky concept, with irony; such a competence is necessary if the abstraction that we abhor should be avoided and the experience that we hope for should be lively and useful.11

Exact Sensorial Imagination So, to start with, we need to study the phenomenon intensively, with all our senses and our imagination—that is active seeing. The next, intimately related, step is exact sensorial imagination, which is the recreation of the object in our minds. The stubborn return to the empirical phenomenon in both phases, and the time taken to study the phenomenon, cannot be emphasised enough. Holdrege (2005) describes the study of a skunk cabbage that includes looking intensively, drawing it, drawing it from memory, revisiting it during the changing seasons, etc., until finally: The plant begins to reveal itself as a process. When we begin observing, we have many separate images, and we have to overcome separateness to begin seeking the plant as the living creature it is (Holdrege 2005, p. 35).

“Denn das bloße Anblick in einer Sache kann uns nicht fördern. Jedes Ansehen geht über in ein Betrachten, jedes Betrachten in ein Sinnen, jedes Sinnen in ein Verknüpfen, und so kann man sagen, dass wir schon bei jedem aufmerksamen Blick in die Welt theoretisieren. Dieses aber mit Bewusstsein, mit Selbstkenntnis, mit Freiheit und, um uns eines gewagten Wortes zu bedienen, mit Ironie zu tun und vorzunehmen, eine solche Gewandtheit ist nötig, wenn die Abstraktion, vor der wir uns fürchten, unschädlich und das Erfahrungsresultat, das wir hoffen, recht lebendig und nützlich werden soll.” (Goethe and Krippendorf, 1994, p. 29).

11

7.2 Goethe’s Method of Studying Ideas as Dynamic Forms

115

I myself talked to nursery nurses in a Steiner kindergarten12 that would, as part of their job, observe one single child of their group in turn for 4 weeks, writing down his or her behaviour but also sketching the child, interacting with it, listening intensively to it, etc. All of them, practitioners as well as academics, report that after a long time of studying and revisiting the object, hitherto unseen patterns and lines of development emerge—the object reveals itself. We cannot, however, force that revelation, no matter how much time and effort we put into our studies. Again, all students of Goethe repeat the master’s credo that this variant of empirics is “delicate”. From Holdrege’s “gentle sensibility” (2005, p. 47) to Seamon’s “strong environmental ethic” (2005, p. 87), the focus is always on engaging with the phenomenon in a way that gives it room to unfold. Goethe even speaks of how Newtonian science “tortures” nature in order to force responses that suit its theories. In contradistinction, he demands that we respect the rights of nature—a phrase of uncanny foresight: If the scientist wants to defend his right to a free description and study, he should also feel obliged to secure the rights of Nature. Only where she is free, will he be free; where she is bound by human conventions, he will find himself bound too (Goethe and Krippendorf, 1994, p. 42, my translation).

Studying the phenomenon, the observer would look for the simplest occurrence, which is that occurrence with the least modifications attached. Since the aim is not abstraction, there is no need for large quantities of the same data. Confirmation does not lie in repetition. Ideally, “an instance worth a thousand” (Bortoft 1986) can display all the relevant qualities and relationships. In any case, the observer needs to cover the full qualitative scope of the phenomenon. Goethe’s preferred method for this is looking for differences in the individual instances of the phenomenon rather than for similarities. We should, I think, always observe in what respects the objects we are studying differ from one another rather than in what respects they are alike. Differentiating is more difficult and laborious than finding similarities; and if one has differentiated well, the similarities will show themselves. If one starts by finding similarities, one quickly falls into the trap of ignoring differences to maintain one’s view or hypothesis. [. . .] The life that fills all existing beings can neither be imagined in the totality of its scope nor in all the different ways it discloses itself.13

12

Steiner kindergartens are organised around the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, who based his “anthroposophic” philosophy on the works and life of Goethe. 13 “Wir sollten, dünkt mich, immer mehr beobachten, worin sich die Dinge, zu deren Erkenntnis wir gelangen mögen, voneinander unterscheiden, als wodurch sie einander gleichen. Das Unterscheiden ist schwerer, mühsamer, als das Ähnlichfinden, und wenn man recht gut unterschieden hat, so vergleichen sich alsdann die Gegenstände von selbst. Fängt man damit an, die Sachen gleich oder ähnlich zu finden, so kommt man leicht in den Fall, seiner Hypothese oder seiner Vorstellungsart zuliebe Bestimmungen zu übersehen, wodurch sich die Dinge sehr voneinander unterscheiden. [. . .] Das Leben, das in allen existierenden Dingen wirkt, können wir uns weder in seinem Umfange, noch in allen seinen Arten und Weisen, durch welche es sich offenbart, auf einmal denken.” (Goethe and Krippendorf 1994, p. 82).

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This is where experiments have their place. In contrast to modern science, the experiment does not reduce the body of findings (by falsifying hypotheses) but enriches it by multiplying the observations into a manifold (Vermannigfaltigung) (Heinemann 1934). They are acts of convenience that enable the observer to produce certain conditions at that particular moment rather than wait until they occur naturally. Hypotheses and theories, if developed too early in the process, impede knowledge generation because they distort the observer’s view in favour of their confirmation: Theories are often rash judgments of an impatient mind that wants to get rid of the phenomena and replace them by images, concepts or even just words (Goethe and Krippendorf 1994, p. 36).

Seamon provides a good example of this in his account of physics students looking through a prism.14 Asked to describe what they see, many of them report that they see light being fractured or talk about light waves and frequencies. Moreover, to Goethe, theory is not the ultimate aim of science. It is a means to reach knowledge about the real, phenomenal world. This knowledge cannot, like theory, remain in the abstract and generic, but must show the generic in the particular, and vice versa: The universal and the particular are the same: The particular is the universal appearing under specific conditions.15

Careful and patient observation is not something that comes naturally to most of us. Hence Goethe often speaks of training the sense organs. He also implies that a natural tendency to jump to conclusions must be overcome. Multiplicity in Unity However: “Images, descriptions, measures, numbers and signs do still not make up the phenomenon” (Goethe and Krippendorf 1994, p. 157, my translation). Connecting is then the ultimate stage after active seeing and exact sensorial imagination, because the overall aim of this painstaking process is to find the unifying principle that can account for the qualities at hand, but also for their inherent dynamics. This unifying principle, as Bortoft (1986) explains, is the unity of a

14

This is a basic recreation of Newton’s and Goethe’s famous prism experiments that led to very different insights in both cases. Goethe criticised Newton for studying a “spectre” in the sense of a ghost, because Newton’s experiment, on which the Newtonian theory of colours is based, is very complicated. It involves the following conditions. “In order for the spectre to appear, we need: first, a glass prism. Second, this must be three-sided, third, small, fourth, a shutter, fifth, an opening therein, sixth, the latter very small. Seventh, sunlight falling in, eighth, this at a certain distance, ninth, from a certain direction falling on to the prism, tenth, the light creating a picture on a board, which, eleventh, stands in a certain distance from the prism. If you take conditions 3, 6 and 11 away—create a big opening, use a big prism, move the board closer—the popular spectre will not appear.” (Goethe 1988, no. 1288). 15 “Das Allgemeine und Besondere fallen zusammen: das Besondere ist das Allgemeine, unter verschiedenen Bedingungen erscheinend.” (Goethe and Krippendorf 1994, p. 149).

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117

living, changing organism. It cannot be divided and thus cannot be understood extensively. Through extensive understanding, we can perceive the parts in isolation and later put them together to form the whole. Intensive understanding, in comparison, requires us to grasp the whole nexus in one go. It is, again, a difference between analytic and synthetic understanding, but also a difference between reducing a multiplicity to homogeneous units (quantification) and retaining the multiplicity in unity. Bortoft gives the example of a print photo as opposed to a hologram. Cutting the former into pieces and reassembling the photo from the pieces, we may be able to reconstruct large pieces of the photo even if we have lost some fragments. This does not work with the hologram where taking one beam away means we have lost the whole picture. There is, as Robbins (2006) remarks, an interesting analogy to meaning and value that was not lost on Goethe. Both can only established if we have an idea of the whole object, and both will be reduced, if not entirely destroyed, if parts of it are missing. Goethe refers to either “Vernunft” or “Anschauung” as the faculties best suited for this final coming together. “Anschauung” is often rendered as “intuition” in the English translation, which captures the ephemerality of the insight and the moment of grace it requires to have it. The German word, however, also carries a strong connotation of plain “seeing”, “overview” and of “contemplation”, especially when Goethe talks of “innere Anschauung”. “Vernunft”, often translated as “reason” or “understanding”, is juxtaposed to “Verstand”, which is the intellect or cognitiverational faculty. “Vernunft” will make use of “Verstand”, but includes a spiritual and moral element that, according to Goethe, links it to the divine. As such it is the highest human faculty, synthesising the realms of nature and morals. The insights thus won cannot remain on a purely cognitive-epistemic plane, they also transcend into the moral. Kronenberg (1924) argues that Goethe’s use of intuition (Anschauung), too, refers to the moral freedom that Schiller has discussed in his aesthetics.16 In sum, reaching the moment where the multiplicity presents itself as a unity is not a quick and easy process. It requires time and patience, intensive use of the sense organs and the observer’s cognitive, emotional and intuitive faculties. It requires moving back and forth between the stages mentioned above. And it requires holding final judgments and conclusions in suspense. If successful, however, there comes a “moment of seeing” in which the idea, the gestalt, emerges. It is, as Holdrege (2005) describes it, not vague although it is nondiscurvise.

16

Schiller, a Kantian, sees the realm of nature and the realm of human freedom (morals) as incommensurable. They can, however, briefly come together in the arts when human beings play and thus sever themselves from the necessities of reality. Artistic practice promotes sensitivity (Empfindungsvermögen), which is necessary to balance reason (Verstand) and avoid the latter’s unchecked domination. (Schiller 2000).

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7.3

7 Methodological Considerations

Shotter’s Method of Studying a Living Human World

Almost exactly 200 years later, Shotter starts his diagnosis of current academic research once again with the lack of understanding of the living dynamics of the phenomena under study. Like Goethe, he sees the world populated by living embodied beings, surrounded by a world of flowing, changing forms (Shotter 2005). His emphasis, however, is on the social sciences and the question of how to study our “world”, in the phenomenological sense of a human world whose primary meaning structure is based on, and disclosed by, language (Shotter 2003).

7.3.1

Relationally-Responsive Understanding

The particularity of living beings is that their organisation is primarily temporal, i.e., constituting a development over time, rather than static and spatial (Shotter 2006). It follows, once again, that we cannot study them in a series of snapshots, however long that series may be. Instead, Shotter suggests making use of a second important characteristic of living beings, which is their responsiveness to their environment. I have discussed this under the label “concern” in previous chapters. As living beings are essentially responsive, the adequate way to study them is to enter into a dialogue with them (Shotter 2006, 2008). A dialogue has a number of characteristics that already present a first stab at method (Holdrege 2005): • • • • • • •

A dialogue differs from chitchat because I am interested in the topic. A dialogue differs from a drill because I do not keep it too narrow or too rigid. A dialogue differs from mere listening as we both make active contributions to it. My dialogue partner is not my fabrication; it is an independent being. A dialogue is open-ended; neither partner knows where it will go. A dialogue will change me, as it will change my partner. I am responsible for the part I contribute to the dialogue.

Shotter calls this methodology “relationally-responsive” and juxtaposes it to the traditional “representational-referential” methodologies. The latter convert experiences into fixed, static data in the past tense that are unable to indicate potentials and developments, transitions and moods (Shotter 2003, 2006, 2008). It is, however, not just the temporal dimension that traditional methodologies are missing. They also ignore feelings. Shotter especially focuses on the vague and fleeting feelings that I have referred to earlier as containing “ifs and buts”. These feelings are not only present in a live interaction, they actually guide the interaction. Every statement in a dialogue, Shotter (2006) insists, is a joint product of the author, the receiver and the situation. More than that, my statement (which includes not only words but intonations, gestures and postures) is not only a result of what went on before, but more importantly a reaching into the future, as I anticipate my partner’s reactions in formulating it.

7.3 Shotter’s Method of Studying a Living Human World

119

In fact, Shotter (2003, 2008) continues, our attitude in a conversation and in our everyday lives is largely a matter of “how to go on” rather than “knowing that” or “knowing how”. He draws on Wittgenstein, who maintains that our everyday lives are not geared to discovering new facts but to orienting ourselves in the situation we are in and finding appropriate ways of “going on” in it—in other words, of understanding what is in plain sight. And in order to achieve this, we do not so much rely on our intellects as on our bodies, which are our primordial organ for relating to the world. It is my feeling for the situation and for the people I deal with that allows me to orient myself, long before I make sense of the situation—before I can describe it and justify my actions—in an intellectual manner. Many of our most popular notions—for example, language, communication, organisation, democracy, beauty, education—have this practical, hermeneutical function of disclosing the situation to us, rather than being descriptive of some entity or essence. This is why, as Shotter (2003) explains, we know what they mean without being able to say what they mean. Traditional methodologies, in contrast, are focused on intellectual problem solving—on what Wittgenstein calls “problems of the intellect” (i.e. knowing what to do), as opposed to “problems of the will” (i.e. doing it) (Shotter 2003). As such, and with regard to the living world we are a part of, traditional methodologies: • are too late, because rather than watching processes as they unfold, they take basic elements of an analysis established in the past; • go in the wrong direction, because they look backwards to actualities rather than forward to possibilities; • have the wrong attitude, because they seek a static representation rather than a living sense. Little wonder, Shotter (2016) muses, that most people find academic research irrelevant.

7.3.2

Withness-Thinking

We should, therefore, not think about the phenomena but with them (Shotter 2006). We do not reference what is already there, but bring it into existence. There is no distancing from a world in which we are deeply, existentially, involved. There is only participation in it. Like all the other authors I have cited in previous chapters, Shotter is well aware that a processual perspective of permanent, primordial change implies a certain independence of the processes involved. This is not the isolated independence of a classical substance—after all, processes are related—but the independence of dynamic form (Shotter 2013). It was this seeing of the dynamic form Goethe wanted to arrive at, the emergence of a “pattern” or gestalt that I have described above. In the same manner, Shotter (2013) insists that all dynamic processes, not just biological organisms, have agency

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(in the sense of enactment) as they emerge and express themselves (here lies the connection to my discussion of Wirksamkeit). As to the method proper, I have already described above the dialogical attitude we need to adopt. Shotter also stresses that, as with all “difficulties of the will”, we need to overcome the urge to see what we want to see—what would be right, proper, rational—and focus on what is there. For an academic mind, that entails giving up the dream of splitting situations into parts that are amenable to separation and analysis: actors, practices, positions, capitals, fields, logics, etc. (Shotter 2011). Instead, we should study living relationships, for example through autoethnography or other forms of thick description. He (2013) suggests we confront each new situation with particular attention to what he calls “noticings”. They come in seven kinds: being struck by an event; sensing a unique, emerging whole; sensing that something is wrong; sensing an incipient form, i.e., a public form emerging from communal life; sensing the elephant in the room; experiencing telling moments, i.e., moments that capture a complex story; and sensing disquiets, i.e., the feeling that there is something more. We should then start moving around, act and react, resist the temptation to turn away from the situation by asking how to best think about it and listen to people talking (not jotting down their words but understanding what they are talking about). Over time, a “something” begins to emerge that indicates a gestalt or pattern. This often happens at first in the form of an image, and our description of it is a simile or metaphor. Then more and more images emerge and come together in what Wittgenstein calls “a city” or “a game”. The final step is to feel completely acquainted with the “game” and understand its field of possibilities. It is then that we can formulate a rich, evocative description of what we have experienced (Shotter 2003, 2011). Note that none of this involves explanations in the classical sense of the term. The sole aim is to arrive at, as Geertz would put it, a thick description. Such a description, however, is not a trivial thing. Shotter (2008) uses the notion of “polyphony” to indicate that we need to give voice to the complexity and dynamics of a phenomenon, even if the various voices are conflictual or contradictory. He (2005, p. 149ff.) even takes this idea a step further, and directly into the heart of institutionalist theory,17 when he reproduces Wittgenstein’s critique of James Frazer’s “Golden Bough”: Frazer’s account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory, it makes these views look like errors [. . .] The very idea of wanting to explain a practice—for example the killing of the priest-king—seems wrong to me. All that Frazer does is to make them plausible to people who think as he does. It is very queer that all these practices are finally presented, so to speak, as stupid actions (Wittgenstein 1993b, p. 119).

Shotter continues:

17

The passage Wittgenstein criticises refers to a ritual killing of the priest-king, an event of institutional significance.

7.4 Hennion’s Method of Studying Taste

121

. . . we need a sense of the original feelings shaping the experience of the people in question. Mere cognitively held ideas, beliefs, or opinions do not possess sufficient compelling weight to account for the compulsive power of religious ceremonies [. . .] We need a sense of that power if we are to understand the source(s) of people’s detailed activities within them—the rational justifications they may offer of them after the fact do not give us any access to that power. Such rationalistic, functionalist explanations are, so to speak, far too ‘thin’. . . .

And he continues with Wittgenstein: Compared with the impression which the thing described makes on us the explanation is too uncertain.

7.4

Hennion’s Method of Studying Taste

A third strand of research that I would like to introduce in this method chapter is the sociology of taste, mainly promoted by the French sociologist Antoine Hennion.

7.4.1

Taste

Hennion wants to restore aesthetics as a legitimate concern of sociological enquiry (Looseley 2007). At the same time, he seeks to distance himself from Durkheimian sociology—that would assume that a work of art becomes beautiful because we project our collective feelings into it—and Bourdieusian sociology—that would assume that the art object is an arbitrary sign in a struggle for social position and power (Hennion 2004; Hennion and Muecke 2016). To him, a work of art is neither a passive object nor an illusio, but an ongoing performance made possible by the particular form of attunement we call taste (Highmore 2016). Inspired by ActorNetwork-Theory,18 Hennion sees objects as actors (or actants) that inherit effects from previous arrangements, briefly stabilise what is always in flux, and influence subsequent arrangements. Taste, then, is the performance that realises the aesthetic qualities in the object. It is an accomplishment that draws on a collective framework of good practice and discourse to which the practitioners always compare themselves and their experiences. It depends on certain spaces (e.g. museums, wine tastings) and times (e.g. a quiet hour to listen to music), tools and media (e.g. CD players, INAO wine glasses), circumstances, rules, etc. (Hennion 2004). Taste presupposes a certain attunement to the object of taste, a love and appreciation of it, which signifies a concern (Hennion 2015, 2017b).

18 He self-defines as a pragmatist but has helped develop, and worked with, ANT (Hennion and Muecke 2016).

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In his studies, Hennion focuses on what he calls “amateurs”. The French meaning of the word refers to “lovers”, i.e. people willing to devote time and resource to a subject. Amateurs are, at the same time, no experts in the field (Hennion 2007). Neither are they, however, dopes. They display reflexive performances in which they put the object of their love constantly to tests and trials—savour it again and again, with different tools, at different times, under different circumstances. They become skilled in eliciting pleasure out of the object, thus realising its aesthetic potential at the same pace as they develop themselves (Gomart and Hennion 1999; Hennion 2007, 2010; Looseley 2006). Nevertheless, they are always aware of the elusive quality of the sensation—a sensation (pleasure) that cannot be forced and may not materialise, even when everything is arranged optimally. In the performance of tasting, subject and object, taster and tasted, begin to merge, or at least become de-centred as the taster moves towards the tasted and the tasted towards the taster. Let me quote an example of this experience in full: The goal [of rock climbing] most certainly is not to reach the top, for having barely attained it, the climber redescends. [. . .] The top of the path is nothing but a point of reassurance, that is when it does not arrive at a parking lot! Are they following a plan? Nothing happens as they wanted to. Progress is defined by the gestures that enact it. One might say that the object of the climb is really in the achievement of the route. But even in this, the attempts they make fail and there lies all the pleasure. A route made is a route already forgotten, to the benefit of the next one, different, more difficult, the route which another climber just attempted in vain. A curious action, in which defeat is more interesting than success. [. . .] At the bottom of the route, the climber is eager to abandon all of the personal attributes that make up his regular identity. In practicing this sort of thing together, one might begin at the outset by depositing all of that which is not concerned with this activity. A little bit like among army comrades, nothing remains but the pleasure of doing what is being done, the stereotypical character of each one, the jokes, and of course, the interminable discussion on this or that passage, the traps, the movements to make, the way to place oneself, the rest stops. Before their cliff, the only important thing for a moment, for humans together like this, is the common practice. As with all amateurs—be they the miniature modellers that come to compare their balsa wood planes on Sunday at the Bagatelle, or the Bocce players on the promenade in the South of France—it is the activity that defines them, not the reverse. [. . .] For everything which the theory of action emphasises—the subject, the goal, the plan— is of no importance. All that matters, to the contrary, is precisely what the theory of action places in aninstrumental position: gestures, holds, movements, passages—all the words between the two, that attach one or the other, the climber to the rock, that speak to their uncertain contact, and that have no meaning if we attribute them to only one or to the other. These words are situated at the precise point where contact between the hand that grasps and the fold in the rock face defines the fact of climbing (Hennion 2007, p. 99).

It is unclear what or who gives or takes pleasure. In some European languages, the old grammatical form of the medium still exists that allows for expressions like: “Der Wein trinkt sich gut”19 or “La musique s’écoute . . .”.20 These expressions still retain the experience of a de-centring of subject and object (Hennion 2007). Another way language uses to refer to this double relation is the passive constructions around

19 20

lit. “The wine drinks itself well.” lit. “The music listens itself . . .”

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the word “passion”: Amateurs report “being taken”, “being seized” or “being transported”. This is, however, not a passive happening to an inert object, like a chair being transported, but an active state in which something happens that is beyond one’s agency. Passion is anything but passive, and yet, something is also done to us. In this context, Hennion explicitly refers to values and valuation (as obvious topics for a sociology of taste). Rather than understanding values as liberal choices between clear alternatives,21 and valuation as the activity that produces these values, he argues that we need to return some agency to the objects of our valuation. In order to achieve this, we have to de-cognitivise the perspective by starting with our concern for, and attachment to, the world, and realise that things only exist to the extent that they are worth something to us, and that they increase their existence as we increase our valuation of them (Hennion 2017b).22

7.4.2

Studying Taste

In line with his critique of normal sociological methods, Hennion (2001, 2007) proposes a methodological inversion: to treat everything a theory of action emphasises (e.g. actors, motives) as unimportant, and to focus instead on gestures, postures, devices, relations, movements and passages. They come together in the reflexive performance of the amateur as she makes contact with the object of her passion. This contact is skilfully managed, drawing on sensitivities that she has schooled herself in. Yet the consequences emerging from the contact are partly unpredictable (Gherardi 2009; Highmore 2016). Gherardi (2009) suggests three conceptual shifts. The first is the move from action to passion. Instead of maintaining the classic model of action as something resulting from plans or intentions, studying taste requires a reconceptualisation of action as something that has a passive component. Passion, as we have seen, is an achievement, and as such a curious mixture of active and passive elements. It refers to human activity that is made possible and conditioned by objects of love. The object, conversely, is not something given but needs to be marked in its boundaries through its effects and consequences, by what it enables and constrains. The second shift refers to the move from action to event. Since action carries with it so many unwanted connotations, we should give up the concept and turn to the study of events. In events, “something” happens. Objects play a central role in that happening as they become inscribed with action, prolong action or transform action. Gomart and Hennion (1999) therefore speaks of objects as mediators or translators. The final

21 22

In order to avoid this connotation, Hennion prefers the word “attachment” (Hennion 2017a, b). This thought mirrors Whitehead’s understanding of valuation (see Sect. 6.4.1).

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shift relates to our understanding of feelings as affects in the sense of passive23 sensations of the stimuli our environment provides, and requires moving to an active understanding of feelings as efforts and achievements. These shifts entail paying attention to the amateur’s skills, the acquisition and development of these skills through the object, the practice and the discourse with others, but also to the amateurs’ bodies, feelings and experiences, as they make contact with the object. The new perspective studies times and places of contact, the media through which contact is made, and the devices through which the object presents itself. As with Goethe, this analysis requires a love for detail: It is necessary to go through each mediation, look at each device, see each situation and follow the way in which pieces and languages, but also bodies, collectives, objects, writings, ways of judging and ways of listening circulate, producing sets of words or styles of music. . .(Hennion 2004, p. 134)

A renewed focus on experiences also requires a de-sociologisation, not just for the scholar, but also for the interviewees, as the latter have come to adopt sociological explanations into their way of thinking about their practice and experiences (e.g. “I come from a middle class family . . .”) (Highmore 2016). The aim is to arrive scientifically where lay people have long since dwelled: where despite one’s objectives and actions, efforts and skills, nothing is settled or guaranteed; things emerge, or do not (Hennion and Muecke 2016).

7.5 7.5.1

The Study of Institutions from an Aesthetic-Affective Perspective Common Points of Departure

So, over the span of 200 years, from the study of living nature to the study of living human beings and living works of art, from the observations of a poet-cum-naturalist, a sociologist and a social psychologist, many similarities surface. First and foremost is the observation that our world, and the beings that populate it, are alive, and that it is their nature to change. They are related to one another as they are related to us. They are not our fabrications, although some may have started out with us. What defines them is their dynamic form, their shape, gestalt, otherness or inner organisation that follows its own, sometimes unpredictable, trajectory. They come in material or spiritual shape, and most often as a mix (or better: nexus) of both.

The classic philosophical tradition uses passive terms to describe feelings: “passion” from Latin “patere” (suffer) and “affect” from Latin “affectum” (being fastened to or impressed).

23

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They change and develop according to laws which are not of a deterministic, mechanistic nature but follow, in part,24 aesthetic rules of harmony, contrast, intensification and so on. We have successfully purged any note of such rules from the realm of the social sciences, but they can still be found in the classic authors of sociology, for example Durkheim25 or Simmel (1918, chapter 1). It may be time to re-direct our attention to them. The ontological relatedness of the phenomena to us can be captured in a number of dualities that I have described previously in this book: impression/expression, feeling/perceiving, or experiencing/creating. The three authors above have used terms like mediators, concern/worth, what we hold onto and what holds us, active passion (Hennion); relationally-responsive, meaning/uttering, active/passive nature of dialogue (Shotter); or studying/revealing, creating/experiencing (Goethe). Whatever the terms, this relationality is embedded in our sensing, corporeal presence, or dwelling, in the world and expresses itself in the feelings we constantly produce in response to our surroundings and our own bodies. These feelings are largely nondiscursive, complex, fleeting and iridescent, but, fortunately, do not lie completely beyond our means of expression, as literature and the arts continue to prove. Expressing, creating, experiencing the otherness that I have called phenomena cannot happen from the distanced viewpoint of the traditional observer, but requires a concern for the object of study, an appreciation for the effort that goes into achieving the experience, as well as the willingness to be changed and transformed oneself. For the fundamental relationship is one of dialogue, of give-and-take, and of developing oneself, both while acquiring this kind of knowledge and when having it. Mastery, in the sense of striving to control the object, does not come into it.26 The three authors converge on method with regard to the time it takes and the diligence and patience it requires. Understanding the development of the amateur’s skills and proficiency, as well as their developing love and understanding of the object, takes time; the same time it takes to have an extended dialogue with a phenomenon, to revisit it, or to achieve, as Goethe puts it, an exact sensorial imagination of all the stages, situations and nuances involved.

24

To note again, this is not a Theory Of All Things Institutional. Durkheim’s demands that the collective consciousness be regarded a “synthesis sui generis” of multiple individual consciousnesses, and continues: “Now this synthesis has the effect of disengaging a whole world of sentiments, ideas and images which, once born, obey laws all their own. They attract each other, repel each other, unite, divide themselves, and multiply, though these combinations are not commanded and necessitated by the condition of the underlying reality. The life thus brought into being even enjoys so great an independence that it sometimes indulges in manifestations with no purpose or utility of any sort, for the mere pleasure of affirming itself. I read this, especially the second sentence, as a description of aesthetic laws not governed by physical causality or logic” (Durkheim 1976, p. 424). 26 An unfortunate insight for universitary Business Schools. Or maybe an opportunity to review their ultimate purpose? 25

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Part of the reason why it takes so long is the unforced nature of the inquiry. All authors emphasise the respect and care, as well as the delicacy, that needs to go into the study in order to preserve the other as the other, rather than just as my understanding of my very own, mastered version of the world. This care not only involves a very reluctant use of theoretical classification and expectation, but also the use of more than just our intellectual toolkit. The reward—if it is achieved, for it requires a “moment of grace” beyond our call—is a new understanding of what had been in plain sight all along. “Meaning is a physiognomy“, as Wittgenstein (1993a, no. 568) remarks. This physiognomy is what Goethe calls the “idea”, and what Weber recognises as standing behind all phenomena. Weber even goes further in his agreement with Goethe, stating “ideas occur to us when they please, not when it pleases us” (quoted from “Science as Vocation” in Swedberg 2005, p. 121). In a similar manner, Shotter (2003, p. 450) talks of a new perspective suddenly showing up; Hennion (2010) refers to the unpredictability in the emergence of taste. All these characterisations show a remarkable congruence with the definition of arts by Gabrielle Starr (2013), a scholar studying aesthetics on a neuroscientific basis. She argues that works of art do not provide us with new knowledge but reconfigure our existing knowledge by showing us what we value.27

7.5.2

Studying Institutions

In some sense, I guess, we are all amateurs of institutions: We feel them, taste them, try them, we love them or may find that they are not to our liking as we make bodily contact with them. They are part of our world of concern, our pre-reflexive understanding. We reveal more of them every time we put them to a test, every time we invoke them. But, of course, scholars do not just want to be amateurs, we want to be experts on institutions. In line with what I have explained above, this requires, first and foremost, becoming describers of institutions—describers who are well aware that their descriptions are also creations. In order to become a describer of institutions in the sense suggested by this book, it is necessary to shed some habits of study that we, as scholars in the field of neo-institutionalist sociology, or of the social sciences more broadly, have acquired as good practice. It is also necessary to adopt some new ideas. Shedding positivist notions about our object of study and our relationship to it is an obvious move. If we take language and feeling as representations of something already established, we will not be able to cater to the duality of experience and presencing that forms the core of this book. However, we also need to shed some

27

Note that the reference to value provides an interesting link back to institutions as value-orders.

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cognitivist notions that scholars otherwise dedicated to a constructionist approach may be fond of. The first is our understanding of meaning and interpretation as something happening in the brain. As I have argued, our basic meaning structures—the ones in which institutions play their most important role—are pre-cognitive and of an affective nature.28 We know where we are long before we draw the map. That knowledge may not be as precise and easily communicable as what the map shows, but it is the basis for the map and could guide us even if we could not come up with a map. This insight is closely linked to the second point, which is that of concern. Concern is the basis of our lives and our understanding of the world, and as such it is the basis of our institutions. Values arise out of concern in processes of valuation, but they are not fixed results of a process in which a subject chooses an object. They are ongoing, complex activities in which subjects and objects are changed and stabilised and for which the word “worth” may be a more adequate description. These ongoing, complex activities at the core of institutions, as well as the fleeting, nondiscursive nature of many of our contacts with institutions, seem to be at odds with the institutionalist scholar’s focus on institutionalisation, i.e. on the stabilising and enduring features of reality. It is indeed, and I would argue it calls for a methodological inversion of the kind Hennion suggests above, and which I will quote here again: . . . to treat everything a theory of action emphasises as unimportant, and to focus instead on gestures, postures, devices, relations, movements and passages. They come together in the reflexive performance of the amateur as she makes contact with the object of her passion. This contact is skilfully managed, drawing on sensitivities that she has schooled herself in; yet, the consequences emerging from the contact are partly unpredictable.

We need to let go of, or at least fundamentally revise, our concepts (e.g. an institutional entrepreneur, an institutional logic) that suggest that institutions are some“thing” fixed, and instead devote our attention to describing how there is multiplicity in unity held together by a dynamic form. One important element of this inversion is the acceptance of the fact that representation is not the primary mode of perception, but a quite sophisticated mode presupposing a lot when it comes to the quality of both the processing brain and the data processed.29 These presuppositions are constituted by feelings. A second important element in studying the skilled performance of the institutional amateur is the notion that the object has powers and agency. As this has been

28

I would argue that this also goes beyond the symbolic interactionist understanding of the inhabited institutions approach as described in Hallett and Ventresca (2006). Their understanding of meaning as arising from interaction, however, is clearly a fruitful step away from cognitivist approaches. 29 It is probably no coincidence that not only Shotter and Hennion but also Whitehead come to this conclusion. He discusses this under the notion of “presentational immediacy” (Whitehead 1985).

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another of the core arguments of this book, I will not say much more except to remind readers that we cannot conceive of strong process theory, or of any of the methodological suggestions discussed above, without making this conceptual move. We are not the only agents in an otherwise dead universe, and the social is not just there for us to be moulded at will. As Shotter notes: It has us long before we have it. If we reverse our assumptions and approaches in the manner just described, we may find a good number of phenomena and puzzles waiting to be tackled. One is Wittgenstein’s “difficulties of the will” and the understanding of the role volition, rather than cognition, plays in institutional matters. Volition, it should be noted, is not a just a plan or intention, but has traditionally been understood as the third basic human faculty, next to cognition and affect. Compared with what medieval philosophy has to say about it, we have almost forgotten it altogether, or perhaps more precisely, have buried it under cognitive decision-making. Volition in the classical sense, however, also thinks about the body and about non-representational perception and thinking. A second puzzle is the increase in being of the phenomenon. Again, we have long left behind any tradition of thought that would not cater to the 0/1-approach to being: either it is or it is not. Again, maybe it is time to rediscover some of the notions of the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Third, and on the affective plane, the study of pleasure or displeasure institutions give us is something we need to look into (Weik 2019). This can range from the subtle, fleeting moments mentioned above, via the epiphanies and passions Hennion relates, to cases of collective outbursts or even hysteria.30 With regard to the latter, Emile Durkheim (1976, for a modern interpretation see Joas 1996) has written extensively about “collective effervescence”, a phenomenon that I have elsewhere called “institutional ecstasy” (Weik 2012). Institutional emergence, as I have shown for the Templars, seems to some extent dependent on the institution’s ability to generate enthusiasm. However, this enthusiasm does not factor in a cognitive “I like it” calculation, but rather remains on the emotional level where it allows the individual to abandon itself in the crowd and to reach a state of ecstasy in merging itself with the whole. Neo-institutionalist authors have largely ignored the emotionally based “force” of institutions, or treated is as an outcome of primary socialisation.31 In opposition to this view, Joas (with Durkheim) stresses the fact that this “force” is not just present in the early stages of human development, but is continuously drawn upon and from time to time even explicitly enacted and reinforced through ceremonies and rituals during an actor’s lifetime. Durkheim states that it is exactly for this reason that institutions need to become visible in staged events every now and again—to renew the emotional bond in which the individual dissolves. We should not think of rain dances and other “primitive” magical practices—although they make colourful examples—but, for example, of

30 Durkheim’s studies on religion provide many good examples. In recent times, Sewell has described collective effervescence in the Storming of the Bastille (Sewell 1996). 31 Except in the field of religion (see, for example, Friedland 2009).

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the shedding of individual responsibility (and the relief that goes with it) as a modern individual gives itself up to an institution. In this sense, it may be better to talk of “compulsion” instead of “power” to convey the connotations of irresistibility, non-rationality, motivation and impulse.32 Fourth, on the aesthetic plane, we need to develop a vocabulary that captures the processes and effects institutional aesthetic arrangements, in particular rhythms, have on individuals and collectives. There are a few guiding principles that appear in older literature, such as intensification or polarisation. Goethe makes the interesting observation that constraining forms have an aesthetic effect of intensifying what they constrain. In his view, a life force needs to be formed, channelled or constrained in order to become productive. Institutional forms, laws, ceremonies and rituals are thus not “toppings” on an underlying drive, but contribute an equal share to the institution’s compulsion. As Goethe (Anon. 1783) explains, they serve to, in fact, intensify the institutional experience and make it more compelling. Lastly, there is the temporal dimension that is so fundamental for process thinking but has been largely ignored in institutionalist theory. I am not referring to longitudinal studies in which data from different points in time are compared to present a development. These “buckets of water” out of the stream have no processual quality, as I have explained earlier. I am indeed not referring to clock time or calendar time at all. I am referring to time as a fundamental structure of our experience and our world in the sense that Heidegger (1977) has elaborated. Heidegger’s triad of thrownness, falling and projection (Geworfenheit, Verfallen, Entwurf), as modes characterising past, present and future, refer to the basic structure of human activity and worldbuilding, rather than to points in physical time.33 As part of understanding these different temporal dimensions, we also need to take into account that the “data” we collect from people is anti-representational as it does not just describe their present state of affairs. It contains the future—potentials, 32

Other authors have contributed other assumptions about the nature of this force, and the following list is not comprehensive albeit hopefully indicative: Anthony Giddens talks about the need for ontological security and predictability of social interaction (Giddens 1993, p. 50ff.); Mary Douglas refers to a universal human tendency to save energy in interaction by devising routines and habits (Douglas 1986); Tom Scheff sees the need to avoid shame as the basis of social interaction (Scheff 1990); Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann claim that the emergence and reproduction of institutions is due to an anthropological need as human beings are, in Arnold Gehlen’s terms, “deficient beings” (Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 52). 33 Luckmann presents one example, though not an institutionalist one, in his phenomenological account of inner, social and historical time and their relationship to personal identity. Luckmann’s conception of time has a stress on rhythm, for rhythm is our prime measure of time. Without the periodic recurrence of time markers, from sunrises to birthdays to pulsating atoms, we would not be able to “keep” time. The processes that establish personal identity are a synthesis of rhythmic processes on the level of the body, face-to-face interaction and larger (historical) time scales. A manic, for example, is a person whose display of enthusiasm and excitement (otherwise rather positive capacities) is out of sync with accepted social rhythms of enthusiasm and excitement. Similarly, pregnancy is often a cause for joy, but teen pregnancy is not. Third, biological, subjective and intersubjective rhythms come together either in harmony resulting in a “healthy” form of identity or in dissonance, creating a pathological form of identity (Luckmann 1983).

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desires, plans, but also immediate expectations—as well as the past in their unique perspective. These temporal dimensions are merged in a way that makes it impossible to draw more than analytical lines between past, present and future in the way longitudinal research commonly does. In order to achieve and integrate the above points, or some of them, in a piece of research, we need to value description over explanation. As Shotter, with Wittgenstein, has argued at length, a well-crafted description contains all the explanation that is needed, and indeed possible. Feelings and aesthetics do not follow the laws of logic, but follow other principles that we are, by our nature and socialisation, well equipped to understand. If we take Goethe’s views on the phenomenon seriously, explanations do indeed lose most of their attractiveness. Instead they appear in a reductive light. Without hidden mechanisms to surmise about, they also lose much of their usefulness. In our search for the invisible depth of the world we overshoot and miss, or as Wittgenstein pace Shotter puts it: . . . the difficulty—I might say—is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it (Shotter 2005, p. 143).

In this light, description does not precede explanation but already provides everything that is necessary to understand the phenomenon. It does not teach by telling, but by asking for an active contribution from the reader in the spirit of co-production of knowledge. And while we may find an abundance of explanation in academic thinking,34 we might at the same time discover a lack of appropriate descriptions, as the descriptions Goethe—the poet—had in mind were evocative, rich, compelling and polyvalent pieces, and not the factual, neutered and bleak accounts that the sciences currently hold in favour. Let me re-quote him: None of the human faculties should be excluded from scientific activity. The depth of intuition (Ahnung), a sure awareness of the present, mathematical profundity, physical exactitude, the heights of reason (Vernunft), and sharpness of intellect (Verstand) together with the versatile and ardent imagination, and a loving delight in the world of the senses— they are all essential for a lively and productive apprehension of the moment (Naydler 1996, p. 116).

The notion of co-production also takes us one step further to what Shotter calls “evaluation” of the knowledge thus won and what Goethe would refer to as the moral aspect. For the knowledge we generate to have a practical—not utilitarian but moral—value, it must provide us with guidance. This guidance, however, is neither prescriptive nor couched in technological “if-then” terms. It is a guidance fostered by an understanding of the subject-matter and its relationship to our everyday lives, a guidance that provides both evaluation of the present combined with anticipation of the future. Like Bourdieu’s (1990) “feeling for the game”, it grows out of inhabiting the world of phenomena rather than just observing it, of spending a lifetime studying 34

In recent decades, this overemphasis on explanation has also created the need to explain the “contribution” one’s publication makes—to liberate readers from the cumbersome task of co-creation, and in the service of speedy reading and googling.

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it. As Goethe emphasises over and over, it is a long and arduous process, a slow getting to know and finding one’s way around. Is this doable? Or is this approach hopelessly naïve in the light of output counts and performance measures requiring scholars to spout out publications—and generate the research for them—with a conveyor belt mentality? Maybe. Let me end this chapter with an—admittedly old—joke. Apologies to all who already know it: A policeman watches a drunk walking up and down the pavement, apparently in search of something. He walks up to him and asks him what the matter is. The drunk replies that he has lost his car keys. So the policeman helps him in his search.35 After a long while, finding nothing, the policeman turns again to the man saying: “Look, I have searched everywhere now. Can you tell me a bit more precisely where you lost them?” The drunk replies: “Over there”, pointing to the other side of the street. “But why are you searching here if you lost them over there?”, asks the policeman. Says the drunk: “Because the light is better here.”

I have often thought what a descriptive little gem this story is when it comes to the research of institutions.

References Anon. Die Natur. Fragment. 1783. Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas. The Social Construction of Reality. 1967. Anchor Books. Bortoft, Henri. Goethe’s Scientific Consciousness. 1986. Institute for Cultural Research. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. 1990. Stanford University Press. Douglas, Mary. How Institutions Think. 1986. Syracuse University Press. Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 1976. George Allen & Unwin. Friedland, Roger. Institution, Practice, and Ontology: Toward a Religious Sociology. R. Meyer, K. Sahlin, M. Ventresca and P. Walgenbach (Eds.): Research in the Sociology of Organization. 2009. Emerald. Gherardi, Silvia. Practice? It’s a Matter of Taste. Management Learning. 40(5), 2009. Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society. 1993. Polity Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Maximen und Reflexionen. 1988. Insel Verlag. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von and Krippendorf, Ekkehart. Goethes Anschauen der Welt. Schriften und Maximen zur wissenschaftlichen Methode. 1994. Insel Verlag. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Werke. Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften I. 1998. Dtv. Gomart, Emilie and Hennion, Antoine. A sociology of attachment: music amateurs, drug users. The Sociological Review. 47(1_suppl), 1999. Hallett, Tim and Ventresca, Marc. Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and Organizational Forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory & Society. 35(2), 2006. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 1977. Vittorio Klostermann. Heinemann, Fritz. Goethe’s Phenomenological Method. Philosophy. 9(33), 1934. Heisenberg, Werner. Das Naturbild Goethes und die technisch-naturwissenschaftliche Welt. Physikalische Blätter. 24(5), 1968. Hennion, Antoine. Music Lovers: Taste as Performance. Theory, Culture & Society. 18(5), 2001. Hennion, Antoine. Pragmatics of taste. The Blackwell companion to the sociology of culture. 2004. Hennion, Antoine. Those things that hold us together: Taste and sociology. Cultural Sociology. 1(1), 2007.

35

Can you see how old this joke is?

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Hennion, Antoine. Loving music: From a sociology of mediation to a pragmatics of taste. Revista Comunicar. 17(34), 2010. Hennion, Antoine. Paying attention: What is tasting wine about. Moments of valuation: Exploring sites of dissonance. 2015. Hennion, Antoine and Muecke, Stephen. From ANT to pragmatism: a journey with Bruno Latour at the CSI. New Literary History. 47(2), 2016. Hennion, Antoine. From Valuation to Instauration. Valuation Studies. 5(1), 2017a. Hennion, Antoine. Attachments, you say?. . . How a concept collectively emerges in one research group. Journal of Cultural Economy. 10(1), 2017b. Highmore, Ben. Taste as feeling. New Literary History. 47(4), 2016. Holdrege, Craig. Doing Goethean science. Janus Head. 8(1), 2005. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Der Königsberger und der Litauische Schulplan. G. Lauer (Eds.): Wilhelm von Humboldt. Schriften zur Bildung. 2017. Reclam. Joas, Hans. The Creativity of Action. 1996. Polity Press. Kronenberg, M. Goethes Naturanschauung. Die Naturwissenschaften. 12(44), 1924. Looseley, David. Antoine Hennion and the sociology of music. International Journal of Cultural Policy. 12(3), 2006. Looseley, David. Intellectuals and Cultural Policy in France. J. Ahearne and O. Bennett (Eds.): Intellectuals and cultural policy. 2007. Routledge. Luckmann, Thomas. Remarks on Personal Identity: Inner, Social and Historical Time. A. Jacobson-Widding (Eds.): Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural. 1983. May, Walther. Der Sinn der Pflanzenmetamorphose bei Goethe. Die Naturwissenschaften. 41, 1913. Naydler, Jeremy. Goethe on Science. An Anthology of Goethe’s Scientific Writings. 1996. Floris Books. Robbins, Brent Dean. The Delicate Empiricism of Goethe: Phenomenology as a Rigorous Science of Nature. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology: Methodology: Special Edition. 6, 2006. Rosa, Hartmut. Resonanz. Eine Theorie der Weltbeziehung. 2018. Suhrkamp. Scheff, Thomas. Microsociology. 1990. University of Chicago Press. Schiller, Friedrich von. Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen. 2000. Reclam. Seamon, David. Goethe’s Way of Science as a Phenomenology of Nature. Janus Head. 8(1), 2005. Sewell, William. Historical Events as Transformations of Structures. Theory & Society. 25, 1996. Shotter, John. “Real presences”. Meaning as living movement in a participatory world. Theory & Psychology. 13(4), 2003. Shotter, John. Goethe and the Refiguring of Intellectual Inquiry: From ‘Aboutness’-thinking to ‘Withness’-thinking in Everyday Life. Janus Head. 8(1), 2005. Shotter, John. Understanding Process From Within: An Argument for ‘Withness’-Thinking. Organization Studies. 27(4), 2006. Shotter, John. Dialogism and Polyphony in Organizing Theorizing in Organization Studies: Action Guiding Anticipations and the Continuous Creation of Novelty. Organization Studies. 29(4), 2008. Shotter, John. Knowledge in transition: The role of prospective, descriptive concepts in a practicesituated, hermeneutical-phronetic social science. Management Learning. 43(3), 2011. Shotter, John. Reflections on Sociomateriality and Dialogicality in Organization Studies: From “Inter-” to “Intra-Thinking”. . . in Performing Practices. P. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds.): How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies. 2013. Oxford University Press. Shotter, John. Speaking, Actually. 2016. Everything-is-connected Press. Simmel, Georg. Lebensanschauung. 1918. Duncker & Humblot. Starr, Gabrielle. Feeling Beauty. 2013. MIT Press. Stephenson, Roger H. Goethe’s conception of knowledge and science. 1995. Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh, UK.

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Swedberg, Richard. The Max Weber Dictionary. 2005. Stanford University Press. von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich. Einige Begriffe aus Goethes Naturwissenschaft. J. W. v. Goethe (Eds.): Werke. 1998. Dtv. Weik, Elke. Introducing “The Creativity of Action” Into Institutionalist Theory. M@n@gement. 15(5), 2012. Weik, Elke. Understanding Institutional Endurance: The Role of Dynamic Form, Harmony and Rhythm in Institutions. Academy of Management Review. 44(2), 2019. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. 1985. Free Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. M. Adler (Eds.): Great Books of the Western World. 1993a. Encyclopedia Britannica. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’. J. C. Klagge and A. Nordman (Eds.): Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951. 1993b. Hackett Publishing Company.

Chapter 8

Contributions and Connections

Abstract This chapter summarises the contribution of the book to our understanding of institutional emergence, the ontology of institutions and the role of values, feelings and aesthetics in this. It also discusses recent contributions to the institutionalist literature—on sensemaking and multimodality, institutional aesthetics, macro foundations, and phenomenology and symbolic interactionism—to sharpen the contours of my aesthetic-affective approach.

8.1

My Contribution

In this book I have analysed institutional emergence, a rarely discussed feature of institutions and an extremely difficult one to capture. In order to succeed where many have not even tried, I have adopted lines of inquiry that are new to the organisational institutionalist literature. I have, most visibly, introduced a number of new concepts: presencing, dynamic form, strong process theory, Wirksamkeit, delicate empirics, relationally-responsive understanding and taste. These were necessary to conduct a shift from the classic empirically-positivist view of institutions, as either analytical units or objects manufactured in social construction, to a • phenomenological, • strong process, • aesthetic-affective conceptualisation of institutions. I also maintain that institutions are real, not analytic, processes and have accordingly paid considerable attention to their ontology. Within this new conceptualisation, I have suggested presencing, i.e., the co-constitution of institution and institutional member in a drop of experience, as a mode of emergence specific to institutions. This drop of experience is then linked to other drops over space and time through a common (value) element. From this it follows that institutions are gradual in their existence, holistic and can be experienced through our affects and aesthetic senses. Institutions are perspectives

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Weik, The Emergence of Institutions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89895-3_8

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or “adverbs”; i.e. modes of seeing things “as” parts of a specific whole ordered by an ultimate value. Their emergence therefore requires a gestalt switch. While values have put in a re-appearance as important features of institutions in the recent literature, I have put them squarely at the centre by defining institutions as value orders. More than that, I have argued that institutions emerge in the moral sphere as experiences become re-arranged around a new value centre. Of equal importance, I have argued, are individual and collective feelings. Not only do they provide a pre-reflexive understanding of institutions, they are also a source of intensity. With intensity, my conceptualisation of feelings departs from recent contributions in the literature and takes an aesthetic turn. Intensity, as I have explained, defines the moment in which institutions emerge as recognisable configurations. Intensity is also what institutions work towards, employing rhythms and harmonic (self-enhancing) arrangements. At the end of the day, institutions emerge as expressions of many people’s intensive feelings and valuations. Taking emergence seriously has furthermore led me to look for agents beyond human agency. My study therefore moves away from the “agentic turn” in institutionalist theory, trying to understand the effective role of ideas, values and material objects. I view this also as a contribution to the agentic literature, a contribution that shows the triggers, limits and conditions of human agency. With the help of strong process theory I have been able to provide an ontological conceptualisation of institutions that allows them to be dynamic, self-perpetuating entities rather than things being manipulated by human actors. I have in this manner re-connected to the earlier, “naturalistic” institutionalist tradition in which the process of institutionalisation is not directed by human agents (Strang and Sine 2002). While institutions are outcomes of human concern, they are not things to be fiddled with at any given moment in time. An aesthetic approach focused on arrangements and flows also requires us to take a holistic approach, and to appreciate a multiplicity in unity rather than the commonly sought smallest common unity denominator. It is an approach valuing differences and manifoldness within a phenomenon, not similarities and averaging. I have proposed a number of methodological moves to grasp the inarticulate, dynamic, contingent and responsive features of institutions.

8.2

Connections to Recent Discussions

While this book has been taking shape, a number of contributions by various institutionalist authors have been published that speak to the same ideas I have discussed, albeit with some important nuances or straightforward differences. I have identified four thematic complexes (sensemaking and multimodality, institutional aesthetics, macro and micro foundations, and phenomenology and symbolic interactionism) and will reflect on them in the light of my own approach. One insight that has kept coming back to me while writing this chapter was the fundamental difference between theorising institutional emergence and any later

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stage of institutionalisation. Once we reach a full reproduction cycle, be it of aesthetic codes, discursive texts or meaning-interaction, emphases and explanations change. This is true for the conceptual model, which can then start moving between micro and macro level or between agency and structure, as well as for the empirical representation, as the institution has increased sufficiently in being to provide proper “data”.

8.2.1

Sensemaking and Multimodality

Perhaps the most obvious link between my aesthetic-affective approach and current discussions in the institutionalist literature is on the topics of sensemaking, interpretation and multimodality. Let me discuss a few issues here. This book has taken up the three topics on several occasions. In Sect. 4.2.1 I have suggested regarding institutions as adverbs, i.e. as ways of seeing and doing things. These ways of seeing and doing constitute perspectives, which are at the same time a medium and outcome of interpretation and sensemaking. In Sect. 5.2 I have explored the phenomenological-hermeneutic concept of “seeing-as”. In Sect. 6.4.2 I have claimed that the affective experience of institutions sometimes pre-dates what we classically understand as interpretation, and have drawn a distinction between affects and sensemaking. It is not difficult to see from these discussions that I consider discursive interpretation and sensemaking—on which most of the institutionalist empirical literature is focused—to be a next step in the analysis of institutions. They operate with clearly delineated (oral or written) texts and clearly delineated actors, whereas my perspective looks into the creation of these actors and into the creation of the perspective from which the texts are interpreted. Emergence aside, one important aspect in which I differ from this literature is that I do not regard meaning as first constituted and then shared (diffused, translated). This view bears too much resemblance to a material process in which an object is manufactured and then transported to be enjoyed elsewhere. When meaning is constituted in the process I have called presencing, it is already constituted as shared. When I see a cumulus cloud formation, I relate to an idea that is already in the public sphere, so to speak. This idea has been there since Howard named cloud formations. If a population sees black people as persons with the same rights and dignity, where before they have seen them as slaves and objects, they relate to different ideas. And while it is certainly worthwhile studying how they come to see them differently, I think it muddles the analysis to assume that the meaning of “black” has changed. Black is still black, but people relate to it in a different manner, i.e. by bundling different ideas with it. In this line of thought, I find the concept of “actor-meaning couplets” proposed by Hannigan and Casasnovas (2021) very helpful. To study which actors propose which topics and how they relate to one another is a first step in paying attention to the experiential relationship between actors and ideas. It would be even nicer if the ideas

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then became rainbows in the manner I have shown in Chap. 3. Similarly, Meyer et al. (2018) talk about “ideas” as packages of typified activities, actor categories and meanings that become more integrated as institutionalisation advances. Although my approach is “experiential” in contrast to their “communicative” approach, I agree that this relational understanding of ideas, activities and actors is an important re-conceptualisation of the “actor has ideas” understanding. The transition from discursive approaches to an aesthetic-affective approach could further be helped by taking the concept of “discourse” not just as texts used in communication but in its Foucauldian sense (Foucault 1970, 1972) as the ordering of experience. Some recent discussions regarding the multimodality of institutions move in that direction. Zilber (2017) talks of multimodality as exploring entities more “imme-diate” as words—just as I have done. She invites us to study the discursive beyond texts, which is the relationship the subject has with its world, and to which I have referred as concern and presencing. Such an understanding of multimodality also invites thinking about what I have called the Wirksamkeit of objects and ideas. Zilber (2017) discusses the agency of objects, drawing on cultural anthropology and STS. I have used strong process theory to do the same. My approach may be centred more on ideas than on objects, but that is a personal accent, not a theoretically different orientation. Multimodality, finally, involves multiple modes of perception, as Meyer, Höllerer and Jancsary (Jancsary et al. 2017; Meyer et al. 2018, 2020) have shown. I think paying attention to the variety and detail in the way subjects relate to the world is an important way of broadening our understanding. I would even like to see more variety, perhaps along the lines Goethe (see Sect. 7.2.2) has suggested: not just a loving delight in the world of the senses, but intuition, a sure awareness of the present, mathematical profundity, physical exactitude, together with versatile and ardent imagination. All of these are ways—modes—of relating to the world that are worth exploring in more depth. Suddaby and colleagues have made a start by studying magic and enchantment as a mode of relating to the future (Ganzin et al. 2020) and as the source of commitment to, reflexivity in, and incantation of, institutions (Suddaby et al. 2017).

8.2.2

Institutional Aesthetics

Another obvious connection runs from my work to the work of Douglas Creed and colleagues, especially in their most recent contributions on institutional aesthetics (Creed et al. 2020b) and concern (Creed et al. 2020a). We agree in our critique of the prevalence of cognitivist approaches speaking in impoverished language, as well as our conviction that institutions play a role long before rationality comes into play. We also agree in our focus on aesthetic practices as sensory practices that provide pleasure or displeasure, and on concern as the “motor” driving human beings to engage in institutions.

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Against that foil of fundamental commonalities, our respective works differ in emphases and theoretical preferences. Creed et al.’s understanding of aesthetic codes also stresses the vague, complex and evolving nature of aesthetically felt phenomena, but in conceptualising it as a “code”, the authors then give it a semiotic and, in the end, discursive shape. They need to do this in order to open up the possibility of an internal conversation that can deliberate one’s own values etc. (Creed et al. 2020b, p. 423). This internal conversation is a feature of a micro level, symbolic interactionist approach about which I will say more below. At this point, I just want to stress that my model does not assume such a semiotisation at such an early stage of the perception process. My model is also more centred on a feeling-perception of configurations (viz. harmonies and rhythms) than on individual sensory qualities. These configurations “resist” being turned into semiotic codes more successfully, as they tend to be more complex and diachronic. This is not just true on the individual level of perception, but applies to what Creed et al. call “institutional aesthetic codes” as well. I do not want to deny that there are such codes and that they do shape the aesthetic perception of individuals, but I want to add those non- (or partly-) codified collective perceptions that I have referred to as “zeitgeist” because, as I have shown, I think they play an important role in the emergence of institutions. The second difference lies in exactly this construction of the relationship between subject and world. As I read them, Creed et al. switch between a phenomenological and a symbolic interactionist conceptualisation of that relationship. I will explain below why I think the two are not fully commensurable. The authors also use micro, meso and macro levels of analysis, and again I differ in my conceptualisation (see my discussion of macro foundations below). A third difference lies in the clear focus on human perception and behaviour (as constituting the micro level) versus my own strong process understanding of a variety of factors, some of which are relatively independent of humans. I am not sure if we gain that much by replacing the rational-cognitive subject in full control of the world with the affective-concerned subject, still in full control of the world. The notion of “affect”, of course, already implies the possibility of being at the receiving end of an action. Symbolic interactionism, however, ignores this opening and closes the world again to become a world of human interaction and human perception in which human beings pull all the strings. A final minor difference lies in the understanding of valuation. While agreeing that this is an ongoing activity, and one that questions the taken-for-grantedness of taken-for-grantedness in institutionalist theory, we differ in whether it is an empirically observable activity. Creed et al. (2020a, p. 18) say it is. I do not think so. We can, of course, observe valuation processes as prices are set or spouses are chosen. The fundamental valuation, however, that goes with fundamental concern is not observable, as it pre-dates observation. In the language of strong process theory, this is part of the emerging actual entity, the original drop of experience that comes before any observation or reflection can be applied. We may be able to re-construct it ex post, but that is not the same as being empirically observable.

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8 Contributions and Connections

Macro and Micro Foundations

Creed et al. place their work firmly on the micro level. Does my work also contribute to the discussion of micro foundations of institutions because it starts from an individual drop of experience? Not really. I have found that paying ever closer empirical attention to the “moment” of emergence will not give us emergence, just like you cannot come closer to sensemaking by watching somebody’s lips in close-up. The strategy of analytical division into ever smaller parts has proven incredibly successful in the advance of the natural sciences, but it does not work as well for the humanities and the social sciences because the objects we are studying—from meanings to structures—are not objects consisting of atoms. This is, of course, not to denigrate the insights we have gained from studying individual behaviour or interaction. It is merely a point I make concerning the emergence of institutions. Is my level of analysis therefore macro? Or multi? Not really. Recent work revisiting the concept of macro foundations stresses their intimate connection to micro foundations (Steele and Hannigan 2020; Steele et al. 2020) and the resulting need for multilevel analysis (Thornton and Höllerer in Höllerer et al. 2021). It takes them as regularities or patterns occurring on a global (as opposed to local) scale, often involving multiple institutions in their interplay (Höllerer et al. 2021; Steele and Hannigan 2020). Authors describe them as forceful and formative with regard to the local contexts they become applied to (Steele and Hannigan 2020). I agree with Höllerer (2021) that micro and macro perspectives are analytical lenses and can as such be useful. The problem, I think, is that many scholars treat them as dichotomous lenses in the sense that one sees what the other does not. I would, however, reject that assumption and hold that there are phenomena that neither of them capture, and that in order to capture those we need yet other lenses. The organismic, or part-whole, lens is such a lens, though not the only one. Höllerer mentions Sloterdijk’s distinction between instance and substance; I myself find purchase in Whitehead’s contention that the basic dichotomy is potentiality and actuality. The micro-macro lens is one that focuses on human intervention: how human interaction builds and reproduces structures (micro), and how structures enable and constrain human agency (macro).1 It is a useful one but it gives you exactly that: human intervention. A further problem I see with the micro-macro distinction is the idea of the unaffected observer studying social phenomena that I have criticised in Chap. 7. The notion that we can adopt any lens and switch between them at will harks back to a scientific model I have criticised in the previous chapter.

1

Jeffrey Alexander, for example, defines the micro end of what he considers a continuum as focussing on negotiated orders, whereas the macro end focuses on externally created order. Ritzer aligns the micro-macro continuum with the subjective-objective continuum. Coleman talks about systems at the macro level and values and behaviour at the micro level. (Ritzer 1996).

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My own perspective is therefore more indebted to a microcosm-macrocosm model of phenomena that are related in an organismic manner, and in which each reproduces the common characteristics and relations in its specific way. This display of characteristics is not exclusive to a “level”. There is neither bracketing nor change of lens required. Instead, the microcosm already includes everything from the macrocosm, and vice versa. A second distinction, and this time indeed a dichotomy, I find of interest is the one between potentiality and actuality. As I have briefly explained in Chap. 4 and touched upon in my above discussion of shared meaning, understanding change and emergence involves a well-founded grasp of what changes and what doesn’t, of what emerges and of what remains the same, despite being involved in change. I follow Whitehead in thinking that potentials do not change, that they have adventures in the concrete world, as he puts it, of which they, however, emerge unchanged. They are, however, essential for us to perceive change, for it is only in the comparison of two states that we see change. The potential functions as tertium comparationis, i.e. the fixed criterion of comparison. Comparing police work of the 1960s to that of the 1990s, for example, only works against a backdrop of continuous ideas, norms and definitions regarding the police. On a more sophisticated level, and as I have shown with military monasticism, institutional emergence refers to the inclusion and concretisation of other potentials than previously employed. A third distinction, and again a real, not analytic, one is the distinction between subject and world, not in a Cartesian sense of subject-object or inner-outer, but in a phenomenological sense of co-constitution. I will say more about this in the next section.

8.2.4

Phenomenology and Symbolic Interactionism

In the previous sections I have already identified some theoretical divergence between my work and that of other institutionalist authors. I would now like to discuss this in more depth from a philosophical angle. Despite Suddaby and Greenwood’s (2009) critique that the majority of the institutionalist literature is focused on empirical knowledge generation and does not get involved in paradigmatic or philosophical reflection about its basic assumptions, we do have a small number of authors doing exactly that. Others, like the contributions discussed above, situate their thoughts explicitly in certain major schools of philosophy or sociology. My reading of the field identifies three major paradigms authors are working with: phenomenology, practice theory and symbolic interactionism. Phenomenology is the oldest of these, both in terms of its philosophical origin and of its application in neo-institutionalist sociology. Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) book is arguably the most quoted source when talking about the roots of the school. The authors base their work on Schütz’ phenomenological sociology, which in turn draws on Husserl’s philosophical phenomenology. Meyer (2008) and Meyer et al. (2020) and, most

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recently, Gehman (2021) are prominent authors keeping the tradition alive. The present book also partly stands in this tradition. Symbolic interactionism has become a popular theory, with authors studying the micro foundations of institutions, the affective nature of agents or agency more generally. It is the explicit frame of reference in discussions of inhabited institutions (Hallett and Ventresca 2006), emotions in institutions (Creed et al. 2014; Voronov 2014) and institutional aesthetics (see above). Authors studying these topics draw on the conviction that institutions are constituted through interactions, which in turn co-constitute meanings. Institutions, in this sense, are stable components of the generalised other which has been created as a result of interpretations and interaction sequences. In this manner, for example Voronov (2014) and Creed et al. (2014) can study how institutions constrain and shape people’s emotions through their ability to induce shame; or Hallett (2003) can study how expressed emotions feed back on felt emotions. While Symbolic Interactionism, in this sense, is well suited to emphasise the role of meaning and integrate emotions, we must not forget that it centres on conscious behaviour and cognition—that is why it is called “symbolic”. Blumer explicitly classified unconscious, spontaneous and immediate responses as non-symbolic interaction and considered them uncharacteristic forms of interaction (Hallett et al. 2009). This differs from a Heideggerian understanding of concern (Sorge) as the constitutive relation of Dasein, and it also differs from a Whiteheadian concept of an actual entity and its valuations. Both are pre-conscious forms of being or becoming. The difference may, again, matter most when we study the emergence of institutions, and matter less and less as institutional actors increase in being and become fully-fleshed empirical data carriers. Nevertheless, I think it is important to note that the human being studied in each of the philosophies is a different beast, and the world it inhabits is a different world. The symbolic interactionist perspective invites a focus on human beings as the “ultimate constituents of the social world” (Creed et al. 2020a, p. 17). It also invites the classical empiricist, micro/macro form of study in which the scholar is the distant observer.2 Its conceptualisation of concern is different, too. Creed et al. (2020a, p. 14) hold that scholars “. . . need to focus on people’s persistent vulnerability, their preoccupation with securing the wellbeing of themselves and of important others”. As indicated earlier, they employ Dewey’s notion of valuation as a central activity which can be observed empirically. They also repeatedly refer to Sayer, who conceptualises values as “sedimented valuations that have become attitudes or dispositions, which we come to regard as justified” (Sayer 2011, p. 25) and which “inform the evaluations we make of particular things” (Sayer 2011, p. 26). As I read

This is how I interpret the critique of other sociologies as succumbing to “metaphysical pathos” (Hallett et al. 2009).

2

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it, values are therefore the outcomes of an empirical act of valuation, and become dispositions as this act is performed over and over again. This understanding, though widely accepted, is different from the Heideggerian notion of care (Sorge) as that which discloses the world to Dasein. First of all, Dasein is no empirical being and therefore care is not an empirical activity. If one were to “translate” Heidegger’s terminology—and that is always a risky operation, especially for a non-philosopher like me—one might rather speak of Dasein as an activity and of care as a structure of that activity, namely a potential3 to be affected by the world. The difference this makes for the theorising of institutional emergence is that in the case of Symbolic Interactionism, we have “finished” people constructing institutions. I will cite two examples for this from recent institutionalist literature. The first is the model by Gray et al. (2015) of the relationship between interactional framing of meaning and institutionalised cultural conventions. They suggest that meanings are generated in local interactions. In these interaction rituals, people re-enact existing norms and power structures in a structuration cycle. Some of these meanings then become amplified and taken for granted, eventually replacing older meanings. Gray et al. suggest four mechanisms for this: the old frame breaks and is replaced; the old frame persists; the old frame shifts its meaning; and both frames are kept in an ambiguous setting. Which of these mechanisms comes into operation and the manner in which the mechanism plays out is decided by power structures (domination and legitimacy) and the codes used (signification). My second example is the above cited paper by Creed et al. This is far more phenomenological in outlook than the previous one, yet still explicitly symbolic interactionist in its reference to inhabited institutions or Dewey. Creed et al. start with the individual human being and its vulnerability, which powers its preoccupation with securing a livelihood for itself and others that it cares about (Creed et al. 2020a, p. 14). As part of this, the human being will participate in certain institutional arrangements. Over the years, evaluations and experiences, and participation in a community’s shared world of concern, will create a sediment of experience that functions as a lens for judging the institutional arrangements the individual comes into contact with. These judgments are then presented to important others for ratification (Creed et al. 2020a, p. 34). Both the outcome of the initial judgment and of the ratification will then determine if and how people participate in institutional arrangements. Both examples tell a plausible story about how individuals are involved in institutional change or maintenance. The first talks more about interaction and structures, the second more about emotions and valuations. Both employ a basic theoretical configuration that starts from individual sensemaking/experience/concern

3

I refer here to an understanding of structure employed, among others, by Giddens. He considers structures to have a paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimension. He defines the latter as a “patterning of social relations in time-space” and the former as a “virtual order” (Giddens 1993, p. 17). This means that structures exist in concrete instantiations and as potentials for these instantiations.

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to interactional sensemaking/experience/concern to institutional structures/arrangements and back to these structures/arrangements framing/informing the individual sensemaking/experience/concern. While every one of those four pillars of the model is open to modification, each needs to be constituted or established before the model can work. Moreover, observing and validating the processes empirically would not be feasible. For exactly the same reason neither of the two (and, by implication, any model based on Symbolic Interactionism) can explain novelty and emergence, and in fact, Gray et al. concede explicitly that they cannot “account for de novo change or how new frames arise and eventually become institutionalised” (2015, p. 117). In order to explore novelty and emergence, I hold that we need to go “beyond” or “below” the individual human being as the unit of analysis. I have made this point already when discussing micro foundations above, and I hope to have provided additional depth to it through this discussion.

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Index

A Abelard, 103 Active seeing, 113, 114, 116 Actual entity (Whitehead), 43, 46, 47, 49, 51, 54, 139, 142 Adverb, institutions as adverbs, adverbial nature of institutions, 51, 59, 71, 136, 137 Aesthetics, 19, 47, 54, 60, 66, 73, 74, 76, 80–82, 84–86, 89, 92, 93, 95–98, 102, 109, 111, 117, 121, 122, 125, 126, 129, 130, 135–136, 142 Affect, 2, 5, 19, 25, 27, 50, 51, 54, 71, 73, 76, 82, 86, 87, 89–92, 96, 97, 102, 103, 124, 128, 135, 137–139, 142 Agency, actors, intervention, 1, 9, 18, 19, 21, 24, 33, 34, 37, 39, 43, 44, 46, 50, 51, 54, 58, 66, 71, 86, 87, 93, 98, 103, 119–121, 123, 128, 136–138, 140, 142 Archer, Margaret, 4, 21, 23–28, 33, 34, 36–38, 40, 46, 63 Arts, 19, 38, 50, 76, 77, 79, 84, 86, 89, 92, 93, 95, 117, 121, 124–126

Christ, Christian, 10, 18–19, 22, 23, 29–31, 33, 52, 75, 99, 101, 102 Concern, 24, 28, 44, 50, 54, 70, 91, 109, 110, 118, 121, 123, 125–127, 136, 138, 139, 142–144 Conflation, 24, 25, 27, 59 Creativity, 24, 45, 47, 50, 64 Critical pitch, 73, 74, 81–83, 85, 99 Crusade, 11, 14–17, 22, 23, 30–32, 53, 75, 99 Cultural significance, 38–40 Cultural system, 21, 23–31, 33, 34, 40, 64

B Bernard of Clairvaux, 11, 13, 15, 17–19, 22, 27, 29, 33, 52, 53, 98, 99, 103 Bison of Altamira, 77, 102

E Emergence, 1–6, 9, 19, 33, 34, 40, 52–54, 57, 58, 63, 70, 75, 82, 84, 94–96, 98, 100, 110, 119, 126, 128, 129, 135, 136, 139–143 Emotion, 2, 10, 11, 14, 19, 50, 52, 60, 62, 69–73, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92–94, 96, 97, 111, 112, 117, 129, 142, 143 Enduring object (Whitehead), 47, 48, 50, 54 Eternal object (Whitehead), 46, 48, 49

C Catholic church, 10, 12–17, 29, 33, 75, 102 Causality, 3, 4, 26, 27, 34, 36, 40, 43, 46, 48–50, 54, 72, 85, 96, 125

D Damasio, Antonio, 71–74, 76, 81, 82, 87, 94 Datum, 46, 47, 81, 98, 112, 115, 118, 127, 129, 130 Decision, 1, 21, 25–28, 30, 44, 76, 90, 92, 94, 96, 110 Delicate empirics, 115, 135 Dynamic form, 39, 62, 71, 74, 75, 79, 81, 83–85, 92, 98–101, 110, 111, 119, 125, 127, 128, 135

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Weik, The Emergence of Institutions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89895-3

147

148 Exact sensorial imagination, 113, 114, 116, 126 Experience, Erfahrung, Erlebnis, 15, 40, 44, 46, 47, 49–52, 57–61, 66, 71, 73, 74, 76, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 93, 102, 111, 112, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 135–140, 143 Expression, 2, 28, 31–33, 40, 43, 50, 58, 59, 62, 69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 83–86, 94, 96, 97, 99, 109, 122, 125, 136

F Feeling, 10, 13, 47, 49, 51, 54, 64, 69–79, 81, 83–85, 94–97, 99, 118–121, 124–126, 130, 136, 139, 140 Feeling-perception, 71, 72, 76, 82, 83, 90, 94, 96, 98, 139 Friedland, Roger, 27, 28, 31, 32, 39, 76, 85–92, 96

G Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 35, 65, 85, 98, 110–119, 124–126, 129–131

H Hamlet, 62, 64, 79, 83 Harmony, 66, 70–72, 77, 80–85, 90, 94–96, 125, 136, 139 Heidegger, Martin, 28, 32, 50, 60, 65, 90, 91, 129, 143 Hennion, Antoine, 110, 121–123, 125–128 Hermeneutics, 31, 32, 60, 64, 75, 83, 137 Historical individual, 37, 84 Holism, 63, 66, 96, 102, 112, 114, 135, 136

I Impression, 51, 71, 76, 83–85, 94, 96, 102, 112, 121, 125 Increase in being, 64, 88, 89, 98, 128, 142 Institutional entrepreneur, 1, 3, 6, 63, 98, 103, 127 Institutional logics, logics, 18, 19, 25, 26, 28, 34, 36, 40, 44, 45, 52, 76, 80, 86, 88, 89, 96, 102, 120, 127, 130 Intensity, 47, 49, 51, 64, 66, 69–72, 74, 76, 81, 82, 95, 99, 114, 117, 136 Interpretation, 4, 13, 14, 23, 24, 51, 60, 62, 64, 65, 127, 128, 137

L Langer, Suzanne, 71, 74–77, 79, 81–83, 94, 98

Index M Miles, 11–13, 15, 26, 29, 30, 76, 100 Military monasticism, 9–11, 18, 19, 22, 29, 31–33, 38, 51, 52, 59, 63, 70, 75, 98, 100, 102, 103, 141 Mona Lisa, 77, 79 Monk, monastic, 9, 11, 13, 16, 17, 22, 33, 59, 76, 100, 101 Mood, 11, 19, 79, 94, 97, 110, 118 Multimodality, 136–138 Multiplicity in unity, 63, 80, 109, 113, 117, 127, 136

O Ontology, 6, 25, 38, 43, 48, 57, 64, 69, 71, 87, 90, 91, 125, 129, 135, 136 Order of the Knights Templar, 9, 10, 15, 18, 22–23, 32, 51–53, 59, 63, 64, 66, 70, 75, 98–102, 128

P Parsons, Talcott, 39, 85, 86, 88–91 Phenomenology, 4, 32, 51, 60, 65, 71, 113, 118, 130, 135–137, 139, 141, 143, 144 Pope, 13, 14, 16–18, 29, 30, 33, 52, 53, 98–100 Positivism, 5, 58, 59, 64, 69, 76, 126, 135 Practice, practices, 4, 21–25, 27, 31–33, 40, 51, 63–65, 81, 87, 88, 91, 92, 98, 100, 117, 120–122, 124, 126, 129, 138, 142 Presencing, 5, 6, 57–62, 64, 66, 69, 76, 83, 90, 125, 127, 135, 137, 138 Process, 1, 10, 18, 25, 40, 43–47, 49–51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 62–64, 70–75, 79, 81, 84, 86–89, 92, 93, 96, 98, 110, 112–114, 116, 117, 119, 127, 129, 136–138

R Referential-representational understanding, 61 Relationally-responsive understanding, 61, 110, 118, 125, 135 Rhythm, 33, 47, 49, 66, 69, 71, 80–85, 90, 95, 102, 129, 130, 136, 139

S Seeing as, 64, 66, 100 Sensemaking, 2, 21, 23, 31, 33, 39, 51, 54, 58, 60, 61, 73, 136, 137, 140, 143 Shotter, John, 61, 62, 110, 118–120, 125–128, 130

Index Sorge, 28, 50, 91, 142, 143 Strong process theory, 5, 6, 40, 44, 58, 61, 84, 128, 135, 136, 138, 139 Structural-metaphorical semblance, 79, 98 Symbolic Interactionism, 93, 136, 139, 141

T Taste, Sociology of Taste, 110, 121–123, 126, 135 Taylor, Charles, 32, 73

V Value-based order, 28, 31, 43, 51, 57 Value, evaluation, 12, 15, 19, 21–23, 27, 28, 31–35, 37–40, 43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 57, 59, 60, 62, 64, 66, 69–73, 85–94, 96–98,

149 100, 102, 109, 110, 123, 127, 130, 131, 136, 139, 141, 143

W Wahlverwandtschaft, 35–37, 40 War, holy war, 9, 17, 22, 23, 27, 29–31, 33, 52, 63, 75, 100 Weber, Max, 28, 32, 34–40, 43, 50, 53, 85–91, 109, 126 Whitehead, Alfred North, 44–49, 53, 64, 81, 82, 123, 127, 140–142 Wirksamkeit, 34, 43, 50, 54, 110, 120, 135, 138 Withness-thinking, 110, 119–121

Z Zeitgeist, 95–98, 139