How Institutions Feel: Toward an Institutional Logics Approach to Emotions

This chapter advances the institutional logics perspective by focusing on emotions. While prior work has reviewed theory and research on emotions within organizational institutionalism, our focus is on the ontological foundations of this work—an issue of particular significance for institutional scholarship and especially for the logics approach. We discuss two distinct ontological perspectives on the nature of emotions that have shaped institutional research—the realist and the constitutive. Drawing on insights from a range of disciplines, we clarify these ontological positions and illustrate how each has informed theoretical approaches and empirical research on the role of emotions in institutional dynamics. To bring research on emotions and institutional logics into alignment on a shared ontological foundation, we propose that institutional logics scholars take seriously a constitutive ontology. We further argue that this constitutive ontology positions emotions as more fundamental to institutional processes, enabling a deeper theorization of emotions as a central component in the formation, reproduction, and transformation of institutional logics. We conclude the chapter by posing a series of new and generative questions aimed at advancing a constitutive research agenda at the intersection of emotions, values, and institutional logics.