Inhabiting Institutions: Critical Realist Refinements to Understanding Institutional Complexity and Change

TLDR

Recent work on institutional complexity has highlighted the need to map how actions, contexts, and institutional logics interdepend, prompting this paper’s theoretical framework. The study aims to refine explanations of how actors inhabit complex institutional settings. Using a critical realist ontology, the authors distinguish agency from structure and apply relational analysis to trace how structural conditioning shapes socio‑historical contexts, available action options, and actors’ processes. The framework reinterprets the paradox of embedded agency, revealing the historically grounded, multilevel interplay of structures and agency, and provides conceptual refinements, a new sensitizing framework, and methodological insights for studying actors in complex institutions.

Abstract

This paper builds on recent contributions to understanding conditions of institutional complexity by developing a theoretical framework to elaborate the interdependencies between actions, contexts and institutional logics. Our aim is to refine existing explanations of how actors inhabit complex institutional settings. Drawing on a critical realist ontology, we treat agency and structure as analytically distinct phenomena to advance our understanding of conditioned action. This is subject to relational analysis in order to explain the structural conditioning that shapes particular socio-historical contexts, the potential ‘action options’ contained within these contexts and the processes through which actors draw upon these. This reading of institutional reproduction and transformation allows us to reassess the ‘paradox of embedded agency’ by advancing understanding of the historically grounded and multilevel nature of structures and agency in institutional processes. Our approach offers conceptual refinements, a new sensitizing framework and methodological insights to guide studies of the ways actors inhabit complex institutional settings.