Alberta Institutions 2025
Crafting Futures: Institutions and their Implications
Call for papers!
Seventh Triennial Alberta Institutions Conference and PhD Workshop
June 19-21, 2025
Banff, Alberta, Canada
The vaunted end of history has given way to a proliferation of futures – utopian, dystopian, simple, complex, and confused. Institutional theory has much to offer here: it provides tools to understand the cultural production and consumption of imagined futures, the cultural struggles and work through which such futures are brought into being, and the infrastructures that enable, constrain, and orient the construction of the future. It also has much to consider, and perhaps new themes to assimilate: the emergence of new modes of knowledge production oriented towards possible futures, of new and artificial entities that need to be accounted for, and of new cultural forces shaping the future of social theory and academia.
We aim to encourage a generative and diverse gathering of institutionalists and the institutionally curious across all career stages, including PhD students, to discuss such themes. We thus call for papers interested in the myriad intersections of institutions and futures, and in topics including (but not limited to):
- The institutional production of imagined futures. Building on discussions at the previous conference regarding the “era of crises,” we are keen to explore how utopian and dystopian futures are imagined, theorized, articulated, and disseminated. What institutional arrangements form fertile conditions for the emergence and consolidation of such futures? When are more or less distant futures likely to emerge? Which forms of institutional and social-symbolic work are implicated in the production and disruption of imagined futures? When and how are people excluded from these processes? Through which institutional channels do imagined futures travel – and how?
- The institutional consumption of imagined futures. Audiences are not passive recipients of futures, but participants in their elaboration, imposition and subversion. How do institutional conditions shape the types of imagined future that resonate and take root? How do differences across fields inflect the consumption, translation, and impact of futures? What forms of institutional and social-symbolic work reshape imagined futures as they take root – or prevent them doing so? Which actors are most influential in this process? Whose futures are trusted? Which kinds of futures lend themselves to assimilation in prevailing logics, or to the transformation of those logics? And which kinds of logics, in turn, provide hospitable terrain for the proliferation or hegemony of futures?
- Cultural infrastructures and futures. Futures are not just imagined, but brought into being or forestalled… How do institutional infrastructures enable and constrain the enactment of potential futures? And what institutional demands might specific futures entail? If we are concerned with dystopias, then what are the institutional preconditions of those dystopias – and how might they be undermined? If we are concerned with utopias, what institutional infrastructures must be established to render them possible? Such questions seem especially urgent in the face of imagined futures such as existential climactic transformations, the shoring up or demise of democracy, the fragmentation of world society, and the rise of artificial intelligences of varying intelligence.
- Theorizing future ontologies: environmental, technological, and anthropological. Shifting social realities call for conceptual stocktaking. How well do existing institutional theories translate to the Anthropocene and beyond—accounting for the interlaced social, natural, and technological assemblages that constitute our planetary system, and their transformations? How well do our theories translate to the rise of generative algorithms and the looming possibilities of artificial intelligence and robotics—accounting for these new actors’ distinctive patterns of intra-action with one another, and with institutions? How well are we positioned to account for the ways that futures may reconstruct human nature itself—genetically, neurologically, cybernetically, and discursively? And how might we best extend our toolkits to address the institutional foundations and implications of future ontologies?
- Practices for theorizing futures. All the themes above could fuel descriptive or representational theory and empirics, or performative and prescriptive work. What practices should guide us if we wish to pursue direct influence over the construction and forestalling of social futures? How does one effectively theorize the not-yet existent? What epistemic and occupational risks may attend such a shift in focus? How might such novel practices fit into our ecosystem of theoretical and empirical approaches, without displacing our achievements to date?
- Futures for institutionalism. Questions of theoretical practice cannot be wholly separated from the future of institutionalism itself, as well as its associated disciplines and field. What institutional shifts and risks do we see in the institutional foundations of institutionalism? What futures might we craft for ourselves? What futures might lurk uninvited over the horizon? How might unwelcome futures be yet forestalled?
Keynote Speakers
We are delighted to announce two keynote speakers, providing perspectives on institutions and futures from within and beyond the field of organizational institutionalism. We are excited for an engaging, transdisciplinary discussion around the interplays of institutions and futures, their consequences, and the potential futures of our field.
Tammar Zilber
Professor and Head of Organizational Behaviour at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and co-Editor-in-Chief of Organization Studies.
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Andreas Glaeser
Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Chicago, co-Editor of Chicago Studies in the Practices of Meaning
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Conference Details
The Seventh Triennial Alberta Institutions Conference, sponsored by the Alberta School of Business, will be held from June 19-21 in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Approximately 25 papers will be selected for presentation.
PhD Paper Development Workshop
A PhD Workshop will be held on June 19—co-sponsored by Organization Studies and Organization Theory. Spaces are limited. Participants are encouraged to arrive on June 18, and free hotel accommodation will be made available for those in need of support.
Submission Deadlines
- Extended abstract submission (approximately 500-800 words): November 22, 2024.
- Notification of acceptance: January 3rd, 2025.
- Submission of full paper (maximum 8,000 words): May 1, 2025.
Please email submissions to: ssheplaw@ualberta.ca. For regular submissions, please use the subject line “Alberta Conference Abstract”; for the PhD Workshop, please use the subject line “PhD Workshop Abstract”.
Fees:
There will be a conference fee of CDN$400 for all attendees (the fee will be waived for Ph.D. students).
Organizing Committee:
Emily Block, Tony Briggs, David Deephouse, Vern Glaser, Royston Greenwood, Bob Hinings, Dev Jennings, Joanna Li, Michael Lounsbury, Trish Reay, Angelique Slade Shantz, Bryan Spencer, Chris Steele, Lu Wang, Marvin Washington, and all of the University of Alberta.
Past Conferences
June 16-18, 2022
Westin Hotel, Edmonton
Amidst the current pandemic that has swept the world, it seems a timely opportunity to contemplate the durability and resilience of organizations and institutions. The current crisis related to COVID-19 is one of many crises we have faced and are facing (e.g., 2008-09 financial crisis; Ebola; rise of populism; climate change; displacement/mass migration). It may not be too much of a stretch to consider this the era of crises. How are our organizations and institutions responding? How are they coping with stress, transforming, disappearing, or enabling new forms of organizing and governing? We seek to explore these kinds of questions and their implications for organizational institutionalism at our next triennial Alberta Institutions Conference.
Our aim, as always, is to bring together diverse institutional scholars from all career stages, including PhD students, to discuss these and related topics. We are also delighted to announce that Renate Meyer (University Professor, Head of the Institute for Organization Studies, WU Vienna) will provide the keynote address.
June 7-9, 2018
Westin Hotel Edmonton
Over the past couple of decades, organizational institutionalists have redirected attention from isomorphism and the effects of wider environmental forces, toward the efforts of skilled, strategic actors, institutional entrepreneurship, inhabited institutions, work, change, and the microsociology of logics. This line of inquiry has been fruitful, but we believe it is time to take stock of where we have been, and where we are headed. In our effort to account for meaningful cognition and agency, have we begun to lose sight of the constitutive power of institutions, and their influence on the emergence and unfolding of interactions, organizations, and fields? In this installment of the triennial Alberta Institutions Conference, we call for renewed attention to the macro-foundations of social and organizational life.
To ask, "what of macrofoundations?" is to remind ourselves of the power of institutions to shape the contexts for individual and organizational action; and their limits in so doing. We encourage a re-engagement with classic texts dedicated to these questions. Phenomenologists, such as Berger and Luckmann, have pointed to the role of institutions in furnishing us with social facts that aid in decision-making and social interaction. Mary Douglas reminds us that institutions (classifications) shape the very means by which we think about the nature of the world. Goffman and Garfinkel, in turn, tell us that the macro-foundational context is at stake during interaction: that just a few words or gestures could transform an academic discussion into a partisan debate, a personal attack, an ivory-tower indulgence, or harassment. Such traditions, and their tensions, provide us with powerful tools to think through the interweaving of the institutional and interactional, the macro and micro-providing substantial scope for generative debate, and cross-fertilization. So too do our home-grown traditions: including the institutional logics perspective, world society institutionalism, Scandinavian institutionalism, the old and new institutionalism, social movement theory, and the like. We have assembled a very exciting program. As usual, we will be bringing together diverse institutional scholars from all career stages, including PhD students, to discuss these topics. We are also delighted that Mary Ann Glynn (Joseph F. Cotter Professor, Carroll School of Management, Boston College; current Academy of Management President) will provide the keynote address.
June 12-14, 2015
Banff, Alberta, Canada
Sponsored by Alberta School of Business, OMT division of the Academy of Management, and SSHRC.
The 4th triennial Alberta Institutions Conference took place from June 12 to 14, 2015 at the Fairmont Banff Springs hotel in Banff, Alberta. The conference, which was organized by the Alberta School of Business Strategic Management and Organization Department, brought together top scholars in the field of organization theory, institutional theory, sociology and more to present papers, participate in panels and offer mentorship to doctoral students. A total of 108 participants from 14 countries and 51 different academic institutions took in the spectacular views from the hotel and attended over 35 presentations and panels over the weekend. Sessions included topics such as entrepreneurship, institutional complexity, logics, processes, social problems and industry dynamics which all together contributed to a thorough examination of the conference theme of how institutions (and institutionalists) matter. This was the largest Alberta Institutions Conference yet.
June 15-16, 2012
Banff, Alberta, Canada
Sponsored and co-organized by the Alberta School of Business, the Copenhagen Business School, and Harvard University (the ABC Network).
The institutional logics perspective is a vibrant and rapidly developing research area in organizational theory. Recent work has employed a wide variety of methods (qualitative and quantitative) to generate insights about the sources and consequences of logics in institutional fields as well as inside organizations. Over the past decade, research has moved beyond highlighting the effects of shifts in dominant logics, focusing more attention on understanding the implications of plural logics and how organizations respond to institutional complexity where conflicting and overlapping pressures stemming from multiple institutional logics create interpretive and strategic ambiguity for organizational leaders and participants. In addition, conceptualization of institutional logics has been concomitantly revised away from more static, top-down imagery and towards a view of logics that is more fluid and loosely coupled to actors and their identities and practices.
These developments have opened up a variety of new questions and approaches to longstanding issues related to embedded agency, organizational change, and the dynamics of institutional fields. Open questions include: where do new institutional logics come from? How does the existence of plural logics affect the cognition of individuals, groups and organizations? How do organizations react to institutional complexity? How do individuals and organizations interpret institutional logics and enact them? How do individuals and organizations deploy symbolic elements associated with institutional logics to better situate themselves in institutional fields? How do institutional logics relate to the dynamics of organizational practices and identities? And how do actors combine institutional logics?
To further develop the institutional logics perspective, it will be especially helpful to couple attention to the cultural dynamics of societies and institutional fields with penetrating insights into the cognition and behaviour of individuals and organizational actors. We are particularly interested in receiving empirical papers that use innovative qualitative and quantitative methods to track institutional logics and their relationship to individuals and organizations, and that explicitly aim to shed light on cross-level mechanisms and effects. In addition, we encourage efforts to expand our conceptualization of institutional logics by drawing upon adjacent streams of theorizing on culture, practice, identity, justification, social worlds, inhabited institutions, symbolic interactionism, and institutional work. We plan to use this event as a foundation to pursue a special issue related to the topic.
June 21-23, 2009
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
The first Alberta Conference on Institutional Theory, held in June 2003, considered the 'present and future status of institutional theory'. The second conference, to be held in June 2009, has a similarly ambitious though more focused mandate. We aim to assess our understanding of institutional innovation while provocatively exploring nascent directions. That is, the conference will:- take stock of one of the central lines of research over the past few years, namely, the study of how institutional dynamics are both structured by, and, in turn, shape innovation; and,
- consider an emerging theme of research, namely the role of space as a dimension of community organization (geographic or virtual) and factor shaping institutional and innovation dynamics.
Over the past decade, the institutional analysis of organizations has increasingly shifted towards the study of institutional creation and transformation, emphasizing the role of powerful actors, such as the state and professions that act as "institutional entrepreneurs," who reshape the social organization of fields and/or catalyze the creation of new dominant practices. Much attention has been paid to identifying these actors, their strategies-especially linguistic strategies-and the circumstances under which they are successful. In contrast, more recent work has shifted away from such instrumental actor- centered approaches that valorize "hero" entrepreneurs, in order to give appreciation to more complex, emergent, and accidental multi-level processes of institutional innovation. This latter research gives primacy not to heroic actors, but to structural forces, such as contradictory or ambiguous logics, and to processes of social construction. Given the rush of theorizing and empirical work on institutional innovation, the time is right for taking stock.
A complementary but less developed trajectory of research gives attention to the role of communities, both geographically bounded and virtual, in shaping the production of innovations and institutional change. Most research using the institutional perspective assumes the organizational field as the level of analysis. Fields are typically defined either around issues or, more commonly, a core industry. However, there has been a rediscovery of communities as arenas where institutional processes occur. These communities may be spatially bounded. The relationship between fields and communities is not yet clearly understood and deserves consideration. Thus, the conference will seek to enrich current conversations on institutions and innovation by highlighting recent thinking on issues such as the geographical rootedness of logics, virtual arenas as incubators of institutional innovation, and practices in the context of work on globalization, social movements, and community.
June 2-3, 2006
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
The Department of Strategic Management and Organization, School of Business, University of Alberta is hosting a 2-day meeting on whether institutional theory is likely to continue serving as a useful way of understanding future circumstances. Or, is it past it's 'sell by' date? There is no doubt that institutional theory is one of the most widely used theoretical perspectives since it was developed in the late '70s and early '80s.
It is approaching two decades since Scott (1987) reported 'considerable variation in the types of concepts and arguments employed' within institutional accounts of organizations and declared the theory as in its 'adolescence'. Papers are invited that deal with any aspect of two fundamental questions: (a) to what extent has institutional theory matured into a coherent body of scholarship? And (b) what is its likely future relevance? The first question will take stock of institutional theory dealing with its development in the past several decades and assessing its current coherence. Does what we have produced add up to a coherent and informative interpretation of organizational behaviour? What insights has it provided? What questions does it address well? Which questions are ignored or poorly addressed? Taking stock, however, is more than retrospection. We need to consider future relevance. How far will institutional theory and/or the institutionalist perspective continue to provide important means of making sense of events in future decades?
These questions are dealt with in two different ways. The first way is through the involvement in the workshop of invited participants, namely, Renate Meyer, Christine Oliver, Woody Powell, Huggy Rao, Dick Scott, and Lynn Zucker.
The second way is through the various papers that will be presented. This call emphasizes the need for debate, especially between the 'optimists' and 'pessimists' of institutional theory. For some, the idea that institutional theory might have reached its 'expiration date' is premature. The theory is seen as robust, with an array of issues and problems around levels of analysis (social systems, organizational fields, organizations and intra-organizational units), change and innovation (institutional entrepreneurs) and the role of actors, all of which are central to our understanding of organizations, and, for all of which, institutional theory has concepts and theories to develop them further.
For others there may be a more cautious view. They will argue that institutional theory has become too broad and has lost its distinctive focus. It has also tended to become somewhat insular and thus 'impoverished'. The argument is that institutional theory should not new issues, such as social movement theory, power, and contingent rationality, but restrict itself to its original and seminal focus. Institutional theory has become so broad and encompassing that it risks the danger of losing sight of its core contributions. Thus, the future of the theory is in disappearing as it become indistinguishable from the generality of approaches to understanding organizations in the 21st century.
August 15 - 17, 2002
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
The fourth Biennial Conference on Professional Service Firms will be held at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, from the evening of August 15, 2002 to noon on August 17, 2002. The organizers are David Cooper, Royston Greenwood, and Bob Hinings.
Professional service firms - such as accounting, law, management consulting, financial institutions, advertising, architecture and engineering - constitute a significant and fast growing sector of the modern economy. The purpose of this conference is to encourage research into the management and role of these firms.