h/t Matthew Mezey

[I know, another paper on institutions and contradictions – a sort of companion to

Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates – Huising (2019)

• may sound like the sort of thing only an academic journal could love. But this helps explain something I see constantly in systems change and public service transformation: the contradiction is visible, mapped, discussed, evidenced, sometimes even agreed – and still nothing changes.]

Academy of Management Review

https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2013.0152

Why do some people see that an organisation, profession, or system is full of contradictions, while others carry on as though everything is normal? And why can the same contradiction liberate one person, distress another, and barely register for a third?

Voronov and Yorks argue that institutional theory has often been too quick to assume that contradictions in institutions will be noticed by the people living inside them. They ask a sharper question: what does it take to apprehend a contradiction? Not just to be exposed to it. Not just to recognise it intellectually. But to experience the social order around you as provisional, constructed, and potentially changeable.

Their answer draws on constructive developmental theory, especially Robert Kegan’s work. People differ in how they are invested in institutional arrangements. For some, the institution is held through valued relationships: ‘people like us don’t question this’. For others, it is tied to a chosen identity: ‘this is what it means to be a serious professional’. For others still, institutions can be held more lightly, as partial and revisable arrangements — though even then, distance from lived experience can turn moral clarity into abstraction.

The really interesting point is that apprehension is both cognitive and emotional. You can understand the contradiction and still defend the system. You can feel the pain of the contradiction and still lack the words or permission to name it. This is why so much ‘systems change’ work stalls after the mapping stage. The map may reveal the contradiction, but the people in the room may still be held by loyalty, identity, fear, status, or the quiet tyranny of ‘the way things are done round here’.

For me, this connects strongly to systems practice, adult development, power, and the work of helping organisations see their own worlds. It’s not enough to ask whether the contradiction is there. We have to ask whether it can be noticed, felt, spoken, and survived.

1. This is a useful bridge between institutional theory and adult development. It takes Kegan-style developmental theory out of the purely psychological space and puts it back into institutions, power, identity, and social arrangements.
2. It gives a good explanation of why ‘raising awareness’ is often such a weak intervention. Awareness of what, by whom, at what level, with what emotional cost, and against which relationships and identities?

Abstract:

Over the past decade, institutional researchers have relied extensively on the premise that institutional contradictions are key drivers of institutional instability and institutional change. In this article we argue that apprehending institutional contradictions—that is, experiencing institutional arrangements as provisional and potentially changeable upon encountering the contradictions—is more problematic than typically acknowledged. Drawing on insights from constructive developmental theory, we develop an individual-level theory that seeks to explain the differences in people’s capacityto apprehendinstitutional contradictions. Theresulting framework proposes that there are important differences among people with respect to the nature of their investment in institutional arrangements that correspond to the differences in bothblockages andfacilitators of apprehension. The framework contributes important insights to the study of embedded agency and inhabited institutionalism, as well as strategic change.

Click to access Voronov-and-Yorks-proofs.pdf