At the Intersection of Materiality, Organizational Legitimacy and Institutional Logics: A Study of Campus Tours

Abstract

De Vaujany et al. examine the relationship between institutional logics, materiality and organizational legitimacy. They analyze how organizations, immersed in a context characterized by competing logics, jointly involve space and institutional logics in their legitimacy claims. To examine the role that material practices play in conveying legitimacy in such contexts, they rely upon data on an established practice for universities that aim at managing their legitimacy: campus tours. Building on a practice-based view, and, in particular, on de Certeau’s vision of walking as an instantiation of the ‘language of space’, de Vaujany et al. forward propositions that highlight how university campus tours employ synecdoches (i.e. invoking a space to extrapolate a more encompassing meaning) and asyndetons (skipping or bypassing spaces in order to maintain a particular meaning) to leverage, downplay or reconcile institutional logics. They make propositions regarding the role of materiality in the elaboration of legitimacy claims and how organizational members invoke materiality to ‘anchor’ institutional logics in their everyday practices.