Actors and Actorhood in Institutional Theory

• Author: Gerardo Patriotta
• Date: 01 June 2020
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12558

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Actors and Actorhood in Institutional Theory

Gerardo Patriotta

University of Warwick

ABSTRACT Concepts of actors and actorhood, and different interpretations of these concepts,

underlie many debates in institutional research. The three Point-Counterpoint articles presented

here seek to reflect on what actorhood means in institutional theory. They offer thought-provok-

ing perspectives on the relationship between human agency and the normative arrangements

underpinning institutional behaviour.

Keywords: actors, actorhood, cognition, communication, institutional theory, phenomenology

INTRODUCTION

Debates on institutions in organizational analysis have been longstanding and, despite

the diversity of perspectives, they have been generally informed by an effort to explain

the interaction between human agency and the normative structures underpinning insti-

tutional behaviour. The three Point – Counterpoint articles presented here seek to reflect

on what actorhood means in institutional theory. More specifically, they ask: How do

people experience institutions? How do they internalize and enact particular institutional

arrangements? How they construct and communicate the institutional orders they are

part of ?

The article by Voronov and Weber (2020) argues for putting people at the centre of

understanding and evaluating institutions. The authors develop a phenomenological

perspective on actorhood that fully acknowledges the ‘humanity’ of persons, conceived

as ‘humans with a reflective capacity and sense of self, who engage with multiple insti-

tutions through the performance of institutional roles’. The authors maintain that other

perspectives on micro-foundations are limiting, conceptually and normatively, because

they reduce human beings to actors, entities that are constituted as roles within a particular

institution, and imply either a duality of institution and actor, or the complete absorption

Journal of Man agement Studi es 57:4 June 2020

doi:10. 1111/j om s.1 25 58

Address for reprints: Gerardo Patriotta, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL,

United Kingdom (Gerardo.Patriotta@wbs.ac.uk).