Sub-Plenary 1-2

From Studying the Established to Shaping the Institutions of the Future

Chairs & Presenters:
Giuseppe Delmestri, WU – Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Anna Grandori, Bocconi University, Italy

Presenters:
Santi Furnari, City, University of London, United Kingdom
Daniel Nyberg, Newcastle Business School & University of Sydney, Australia
Juliane Reinecke, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Marc Schneiberg, Reed College, USA
 

In classic institutionalist works, institutions are commonly intended as what is established, accepted as legitimate, even taken for granted. Institutional scholars have studied change of institutions as either an emergent and incremental process, or as mainly punctuated and revolutionary. In most cases, the process is conceived as highly path dependent, although favored by ‘institutional entrepreneurship’ or ‘institutional work’. Only in rare cases, a more imaginative stance has been taken, considering the possibility of analyzing ‘untaken paths’ (Schneiberg, 2007), learning from institutional collapses (De Cock et al., 2021), ‘institutional bricolage’ (Delmestri, 2007) and other types of ‘disciplined imagination’ (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022) as an inspiration for shaping the institutions of the future.
 
Organization design models may also help, especially the (not so frequent) generative models of design (e.g., Hatchuel et al., 2011; Grandori & Furnari, 2008; Soda & Furnari, 2012) in reasoning on ‘unbuilt’ but possible organizational and institutional devices and forms. Hence, as basic inputs for discussion we think at presentations centered on ‘untaken paths’ in institutionalist perspectives; and on ‘unbuilt organizations’ in organization design perspectives; plus empirical presentations on experiences in actually shaping future institutions and organizations and/or contributions on suitable methods for doing so in an empirically grounded way: for example, case studies on outlier arrangements; field quasi-experiments or pilot experiences; reports on existing but unrealized project; studies on institutional failures, lost paths, and leveraging on counterfactual history for hypothesizing future paths.

There are three ‘takeaways’:

1. Institutions can be (and often have to be) designed.

2. Organizational design models can provide useful complementary inputs for institutional design.

3. New solutions can be devised analyzing forgotten pasts, past collapses and normative inquiries of the possible.
    

• Giuseppe Delmestri, Anna Grandori & Santi Furnari:
  The term ‘institution’ has become synonym of what is established and accepted as legitimate, but ‘instituere’ actually means ‘to establish’ into legitimate being. The presentation develops this ‘statuere’ side of institutions, which not only inherently requires design (i.e., ‘imagining the world as it might be’); but also design for the distinctive desirable traits of institutions, as responsiveness to legitimate claims and rights, equitable transparency and justice.

• Juliane Reinecke:
  Rather than extrapolating to future states of the world from our present, what we also need is research guiding normative conceptions of the future. For this, we need to move beyond scenarios and introduce new methodological approaches such as ‘speculative rigor’ and ‘disciplined imagination’ to theorize what does not (yet) exist.

• Marc Schneiberg:
  Institutional paths ignored or deliberately displaced can provide citizens, communities and local economies with substantial unanticipated benefits in meeting an uncertain future defined partly by those projects’ failures. Drawing on Chen & Tan Chen (2021) about “organizational imaginaries”, we consider the possibilities contained in often dismissed and sometimes abandoned systems of local, collective, cooperative and public enterprise for withstanding recessions, fostering autonomy and self- sufficiency, and assembling new development paths.

• Daniel Nyberg:
  Institutions produce truths of what is and what can be – they protect legacies and inform particular imaginations. New institutions and non-linear futures demand challenging dominant institutions and their narrow pasts. In this presentation, we are going to discuss three strategies for constructing futures: making the present strange, promoting alternative pasts, and performing imagined futures.