Chris Steele

University of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Strategy Entrepreneurship & Management

We examine the role of history in organization studies by theorizing how collectivememory shapes societal institutions and the logics that govern them. We propose that, rather than transhistorical ideal types, societal logics are historically constituted cultural structures generated through the collectivememory of historical events. Wethen develop...

Talk of "macrofoundations" helps foreground the constitutive and contextualising powers of institutions; dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of microfoundations. Highlighting these aspects of institutions in turn opens intriguing lines of inquiry into institutional reproduction and change, lived experience of institutions, and t...

This dialogue chapter explores the interplay of microfoundational and macrofoundational approaches in institutional theory-challenging traditional distinctions, and proposing a more integrative perspective. Essentially, the chapter casts the two approaches as complementary: microfoundational research foregrounding the role of individuals and locali...

We seek to understand the distinctive process of state-led category destigmatization, extending an emergent stream of research on category destigmatization that has so far focused on the efforts of stigmatized members of categories. When a category conflicts with a prevailing ideology, internal actors may face such substantial barriers to destigmat...

In this article, we take stock of the institutional logics perspective and highlight opportunities for new scholarship. While we celebrate the growth and generativity of the literature on institutional logics, we also note that there has been a troubling tendency in recent work to use logics as analytical tools, feeding disquiet about reification a...

We showcase the usefulness of a sociocultural community network approach to covid-19 contagion. Rather than modeling the atomistic individual as a social unit in an SEIR type model, we encourage researchers and policy makers to focus on social units, such as households, which, in turn, are part of sociocultural networks in a community and embedded...

Behavioral Science & Policy (forthcoming) We showcase the usefulness of a sociocultural community network approach to covid-19 contagion. Rather than modeling the atomistic individual as a social unit in an SEIR type model, we encourage researchers and policy makers to focus on social units, such as households, which, in turn, are part of sociocul...

Scholars in the management field have been increasingly interested in how historical factors and processes affect current organizational behaviors and have called for a fuller integration of a historical perspective into organization and management theory. This symposium brings together a diverse set of papers that explore ways through which histor...

Institutional logics and collective identities are closely intertwined: logics shape the emergence and evolution of identities, which in turn play a crucial role in mediating the influence of the logics themselves. Though there exists a significant body of research on the intersection of the two phenomena, relatively little attention has been given...

Sociologists often treat groups and organizations as if they had collective intentionality - that is, a collective impetus for action that exists semiindependently of the members of the group. At present, however, we lack a sound understanding of how collective intentionality is achieved or maintained. Furthermore, although organizations provide a...