Institutions and Maintenance: The Repair Work of Italian Professions

Abstract

This paper contributes to extending institutional theory by theorizing institutional maintenance as a process of repair and empirically examining repair work in a professional setting. Our in-depth, longitudinal case study illustrates how Italian professions—led by two professional associations—rebuffed the decisive intervention of the Italian Government to coercively reform the professional service sector and reconstituted institutional arrangements that had been severely disrupted. The paper advances theory on the resilience of institutions by showing that maintenance repair work enables powerful incumbents to reverse change and re-establish the status quo.