The Competent Actor

Abstract

Traditional institutional analysis and the conceptualization of a competent actor—an ordinary individual at times culturally disembedded and capable of proactively engaging with institutional complexity—have not made the best bedfellows so far. This is about to change. Limitations in the institutional logics perspective regarding its microfoundations are now beginning to be addressed and attention has shifted to the theorizing of actorhood. Recent work on institutional biography and reflexivity stresses the importance of agency in bringing the actor back into the debate around institutional logics or institutional orders in a broader sense. This commentary speaks to the growing research interest in actor’s “on the ground” dealing with multiple logics. The notion of the competent actor and its potential to be further developed from an institutional logics perspective together with French pragmatist sociology are discussed.

Keywords

institutional logics perspective French pragmatist sociology embedded agency institutional biography reflexivity economies of worth the competent actor

Putting either more emphasis on agency or structure is like “the chicken or the egg” question of institutional analysis. Although Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury (2012) depart from the limited role of agency in “old” neoinstitutional theory and integrate the actor as a mediator—reproducing and transforming institutional logics (in short IL)—into their cross-level model that is meant to serve as microfoundations for the IL perspective, the question of how far the authors take future research along this path remains open. Reading through their microfoundations chapter in their seminal book, one comes across several dichotomies: macro versus micro, reproduction versus transformation, persistence versus change, top-down versus bottom-up, automatic versus controlled, formal versus informal, sensemaking versus sensegiving, and so on—each latter term suggesting the more tricky circumstance with regard to the actor’s role. And even though the authors discuss the enabling aspects of IL (especially their multiplicity) being used by actors to be put into organizational practices, their argumentation leaves behind the impression of agency being a second-order concept in contrast to the constraining leverage of social structure (Edwards, in press).

But why does “the egg” seem to be more important than “the chicken”? The problem connects to issues regarding the microfoundations of social sciences in general. Barney and Felin (2013) identify several misconceptions of microfoundations: (a) being viewed as psychology, human resources (HR), micro-OB (organizational behavior) matters; (b) borrowing concepts that again are too much psychology, OB, and so on; (c) having issues with infinite regress concerning units of analysis and on the contrary with their aggregation; as well as (d) institutions and structures being ascribed to be denied. In other words, accounting for human behavior from the micro to the macro forms an obstacle. They as other scholars before (Jepperson & Meyer, 2011) trace back these conceptual concerns to Durkheim’s macro-methodological standpoint that abandons the individual and “privileges macro explanations and macro-to-macro relations, as well as macro-to-micro links, at the expense of individual nature, agency, and choice” (Barney & Felin, 2013, p. 139). With regard to the IL perspective, there are recent attempts to counter such approaches and build the individual’s active social contribution into the construction of reality, by opening the “black box” of logics working on the ground (McPherson & Sauder, 2013), stressing the importance of actors' social background (Suddaby, Viale, & Gendron, 2012), differentiating agents’ scope of action (e.g., Delbridge & Edwards, 2013, from a critical realist standpoint), and thus paving the way for bringing the actor back into the debate.

The purpose of this commentary is to jump on the bandwagon and further challenge the emphasis on the macro by refining the notion of the competent actor for institutional analysis in order “to understand [ . . . ] the constituent parts that make up [any collective phenomenon or thing]: individuals and their social interaction” (Barney & Felin, 2013, p. 139). In line with Cloutier and Langley (2013), I argue that French pragmatist sociology (in short FPS) is useful to this end. Bridging both perspectives may do even more justice for the individual actor’s central role in reproducing and transforming practices. Therefore, I first examine how IL and FPS ponder individual agency independent from one another and then discuss the potential to cross-fertilize each other along implications for future research.

IL and the Competent Actor

In mainstream IL research, one finds pretty much two extreme positions regarding the competences of actors and their dealing with IL: (a) “transformers” who challenge whole fields, industries, or even society by changing logics at the competent end of the spectrum, and (b) “reproducers” who are caught in taken-for-granted routines at the incompetent end of the spectrum (Cloutier & Langley, 2013, also point into this direction). Of course, these extreme ends are exaggerations and notions such as institutional entrepreneurship, institutional work, embedded agency, and inhabited institutions have started to bring back individual agency into institutional and organizational analysis (Morgan, in press). All the more, do recent studies (Daudigeos, 2013; McPherson & Sauder, 2013; Pache & Santos, 2013) show a tendency that individual actors intentionally use multiple IL as tools to reach agreements with other stakeholders or maintain legitimacy in a composite way to develop business. Their usage of certain logics is not strictly tied to categories of people, for instance, to professions (McPherson & Sauder, 2013) or members of particular organizational types (Pache & Santos, 2013). Logics on the ground are rather pragmatically employed to “get things done.”

McPherson and Sauder’s (2013) article on decision-making at a drug court is somewhat exceptional, because it shifts the focus from organization-level responses (in reaction to competing multiple logics) to the application of multiple logics on the ground. The authors study how local actors deal with institutional complexity, being interested in case-by-case coordination dynamics rather than stabilizing the organizational setting by maintaining legitimacy in the field. They even conclude that “[their] work shows how the ability and willingness of actors to draw on resources from other institutional backgrounds contributes to the maintenance of the existing organizational and institutional structures” (p. 186). According to their own statement, they complement research examining higher levels of analysis, therefore, providing “only” part of the picture.

Thornton et al. (2012) address the big picture and introduce an integrative model that links micro- and macro-processes with regard to availability, accessibility, and activation of IL through individual agency in the light of structural conditions that restrict their behavior. Keeping structure and agency rather as separate, Delbridge and Edwards (2013) apply a critical realist approach to the typical bifurcation and introduce a typology of “reflexives” to explain “conditioned action”: the fractured, the communicative, the autonomous, and the meta (Delbridge & Edwards, 2013). Their typology highlights the potential spectrum of agency—range of “reflexive deliberations” from the social dope to the metaphysician—as a result of the personal institutional history without neglecting the impact of the situational setting. They share a more active sense of agency with Suddaby and colleagues (2012) who point to the relevance of actors’ institutional biography in relation to their capacity to reflect their actions.

FPS and the Competent Actor

In contrast to IL, in FPS, the “competent actor” has a very well-defined meaning and it is a concept that occupies a central place in the theoretical framework. Competence (lat. competentia = the power of judgment) goes beyond authority or skill, rather a “sense of justice” is meant (Dodier, 1993, p. 557). Interestingly enough, the word competent (lat. cum und lat. petere = strive together) also implies the accomplishment of a common action. So competence of the actor is both about realizing joint activities (pragmatism), but with reference to higher order moral standards (a joint action toward the common good). In his early review of De la Justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006), Dodier (1993) highlights that “[t]he way in which people themselves qualify, identify, interpret and explain events” (p. 567) constitutes FPS’s key methodological standpoint, further he stresses the importance of “the methods that people adopt, locally, to demonstrate to others that their actions are meaningful” (p. 567). The competence of the researcher to this end resembles the competence of the ordinary actor (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999).

Both in everyday and work life, actors need to grasp conventional and unconventional situations. Conventional situations can be handled at ease, in a planned or justifiable manner (Thévenot, 2007), depending on the kind of coordination mode, but in any case, actors agree on a shared understanding of reality and how to act together. In the mode of justification (e.g., in public debates), actors draw from a publicly known evaluative repertoire that corresponds to a material universe that backs up their justifications. Even outside the public arena, actors engage in continuous interpretation or “justification work” (Jagd, 2011), question previous conclusions, and establish “local ordering” (Dodier, 1993, p. 563). Unconventional situations—as I call situations that are figuratively strange to a newcomer—cause uncertainty. It is not clear based on which conventions joint action is realized, a need for coordination occurs. Newcomers engage in reality tests to reduce uncertainty (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Reality tests “are moments of malaise in which the principals underpinning actors judgments and beliefs on what is appropriate for the situation at hand are made most visible through argumentative moves and reliance on material proofs” (Dansou & Langley, 2012, p. 504). To do so, actors develop a critical capacity and related competences. Either, they remember past interactions or are informed by coordination systems and their material objects in place (e.g., a manual). A third option is that actors find a new way to handle unclear circumstances, and invent conventions (Diaz-Bone, 2011).

Although the room to [maneuver] is strictly limited by the way the situation is arranged, a model incorporating several worlds gives actors the possibility of avoiding a test, of challenging a test’s validity by taking recourse to an external principal, or even of reversing the situation by introducing a test that is valid in a different world. The model thus includes the possibility of a critique for which determinist constructions fail to account. (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p. 216)

Thus, actors mobilize their critical capacity (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999) by contesting the worth of persons and things, reaching (a) a clarification in one world, (b) a temporary local arrangement, or (c) a compromise (Jagd, 2011).

To sum up, actors have competences to (1) assess the situation to understand whether conventions for joint action are certain or not. If they are, (2a) the justification repertoire is used, (2b) plans are made to be realized, or (2c) a familiar set of actions is followed. If they are not, (3a) a new convention that helps coordination is created or (3b) they are free to act without any convention through the use of violence and love, for instance, which Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) exclude from their conceptual focus in On Justification.

Bridging Perspectives

Boxenbaum in this dialogue makes the argument for the added value of FPS with regard to the situated stance in institutional analysis, I discuss the potential of the notion of the competent actor being jointly developed by both the IL and FPS perspective. Thornton and colleagues (2012) understand individual actors as situated, culturally embedded beings with bounded intentionality. They contrast, their restraining view on logics to FPS’s enabling understanding of logics attesting “a situated intentional actor, with limited embeddedness” (p. 101). The degree of embeddedness of the actor states a major difference to FPS (Diaz-Bone, in this dialogue), which I argue can be overcome. IL and FPS use partially different wordings to explain the same phenomenon: For instance, IL talks about social identities, goals, and schemas being accessed and activated in a situation of a shared focus of attention. FPS, on the contrary, speaks of communities, goals, and coordination forms being relevant in particular situations of common action. Both perspectives share the understanding of (a) the availability of a finite number of multiple IL or orders of worth in society, (b) the actor’s important role in persistence and change, and (c) the focus on practical coordination or conditioned action in situ.

Thornton et al.’s (2012) IL microfoundations model adds a more elaborate view with regard to the accessibility and activation of IL or orders (e.g., preconditions and boundaries for the competent actor). At the same time, their model downplays the actor’s agentic role by putting more emphasis on the constraining aspects of theoretical concepts the authors integrate into their framework (e.g., sensemaking preferred to sensegiving), as Edwards (in press) notes, “agency is treated as a second-order concept such that logics take explanatory priority over action” (p. X). The FPS perspective is useful as it provides microfoundations for “how institutions are formed, maintained and changed” (Cloutier & Langley, 2013, p. 1), particularly by providing a concept of the competent actor who has a cognitive and evaluative capacity based on higher order principles of coordination available in situations. A milestone in introducing FPS as a useful approach to institutional analysis (especially to North American scholars) is Cloutier and Langley’s (2013) Journal of Management Inquiry publication. They identify important distinctions and make suggestions where FPS fills gaps of IL. Furthermore, the authors argue that IL studies have already hinted toward FPS’s notion of the competent actor by concluding that “people do have the reflexive competence to draw on a wider range of cultural resources than simply the specific logics under review” (p. 13). This insight is interesting for two reasons: First, it “dis-embeds” the individual to some extent from pluralistic institutional fields and their prescriptions. Second, it speaks of resources that can be interpreted as (material) back-ups for the usage of outside-of-field logics. This further coincides with recent moves in the IL approach to clarify the scope for agency based on the notion of reflexivity (Delbridge & Edwards, 2013). With regard to the availability of plural logics Suddaby and colleagues (2012) put forward individuals’ institutional biographies that help actors make sense of complex situations.

The conceptual point I want to add is that actors at least switch along two dimensions: (a) between different distinct logics or orders and (b) beyond the mode of justification (e.g., public debates) to more informal modes of planned action and familiarity (Thévenot, 2007; Bullinger, in this dialogue). In FPS, actors’ competences are constrained by the coordination situation, what Dodier (1993) refers to as “structured pragmatism” (p. 564). The focus on the situation as the object of study is foundational (Diaz-Bone, 2011). Again recognizing the importance of contextual conditions for explaining institutional work resonates across both perspective, FPS’s stance corresponding with Friedland and Alford’s (1991) nested view of individuals operating in organizations that are embedded in wider social orders.

Discussion and Future Directions

Having drawn from recent IL and early FPS literature concerning notions of a competent actor, a number of shared research interests appear. Both perspectives are interested in actor’s competences to distance themselves from prescriptions of coordination situations, operating with multiple logics to maintain or disrupt arrangements or to create a new composite.

IL increasingly fancies with a logics as a toolkit approach (à la Swidler, 1986), whereas in FPS, evaluative repertoires across cultures were studied already more than 10 years ago (Lamont & Thévenot, 2000). Moreover, similarities between institutional sensemaking (Weick) and FPS’s concept of the test (Dansou & Langley, 2012) can be detected, FPS adding materiality to rhetoric back-ups for agreements. A variety of situational competences (e.g., to memorize, identify, interpret, enact, criticize, qualify, explain, evaluate, justify) is needed to be aware and able to handle multiple logics in concrete (test) situations. It does not help, for example, to be an expert or a businessman, if a father figure is regarded as appropriate quality of a person being involved in a specific organizational practice (e.g., as a mentor in a career program). To grow these competences (reducing cognitive limitations) is not only an achievement of the individual (personal biography) but prompted by the situation’s conditions or tools. Finally, I read recent IL work (McPherson & Sauder, 2013; Pache & Santos, 2013) as allowing the actor to “get things done” outside the prescribed scope, which is in line with FPS’s pragmatic methodological stance and opens the way to synthesize over- and undersocialized notions of the social actor.

By further opening the “black box”—McPherson and Sauder (2013) refer to the “workings of logics on the ground” (p. 168)—I suggest following two directions for future research combining insights from IL and FPS: FPS could consider IL’s work on intentionality (e.g., identity, personal interests, and goals), or more specific Delbridge and Edwards’ (2013) idea to include “internal conversation” aspects into the analysis of local orders. IL could benefit from FPS’s view of the individual at times being disembedded (e.g., inventing an entirely new convention or other arrangement from a cognitive repertoire beyond justifications). At the moment, both approaches are attested to be either too pragmatic or instrumental, missing individual aspects such as the actor’s passion for doing things (Friedland, 2012). Going back to the initial question of this commentary, I plead for “the chicken” to be treated as equally important as “the egg”—bridging IL and FPS perspectives possibly contributes to the emancipation of the competent actor.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Katharina Pernkopf-Konhäusner is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck School of Management as well as research partner and lecturer at WU Vienna. Her dissertation from 2012 with the title “Convention Theory and the Evaluation of HR Systems” was an attempt to approach the working of employment relationship models, HR systems or HR functions such as training and development from a French pragmatic sociology perspective and examine how organizations and its members manage seemingly competing institutional orders or logics in concrete coordination situations. Furthermore, she is interested in exploring new methods for contributing to the situated stance in organizational institutionalism. In 2014, she is SCANCOR visiting scholar at Stanford University.

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