Institution, Practice and Ontology: Towards A Religious Sociology

That my approach to institutional theory has garnered most interest from students in business schools is ironic in that it derives from sources that hard-headed management theory would likely consider ridiculous. To put it baldly it derives from a double messianism, two unobservable subjects to come: the proletariat and God’s messenger. My initial preoccupation with the institutional level of analysis began when I was a neoMarxist graduate student grappling with the inadequacies of instrumentalist understandings of class on the one hand, and with what appeared to be the absurd totalizations of structuralist Marxism on the other. (Given the systematicity they espoused, that Nicos Poulantzas committed suicide and Louis Althusser murdered his wife were emblematic of the failure of their theories.) As a political sociologist, I found it incredible that Marxism lacked any theory of the state, let alone democracy, that structuralist Marxisms could code vast swaths of the public sphere won as the result of popular agitation as “ideological state apparatuses.” I first entered the institutional domain by considering the symbioses and contradictions between market, state and democracy, and with what my mentor Robert Alford and I distinguished as systemic, structural and participational powers (Alford and Friedland, 1985). My own understanding of institutional theory began as a religious question. “Bringing Society Back In” was written with Robert Alford after a long immersion in a city where God seemed a palpable political force (Friedland and Alford, 1991). Together with Richard Hecht, a historian of religions, I had been studying Jerusalem’s political struggles for eight years, a city where contests over the organization of space and time were simultaneously struggles over their meaning (Friedland and Hecht, 1996). The city humbled me, shredding my assumption that all social phenomena could be parsed with the categories of interest and power. Initially I thought this stony redoubt on the edge of the Judean desert was an anomalous zone where the ordinary laws of social gravity had been suspended. But the more I thought about the city’s politicized religions – a phenomenon that neither I, nor any of my intellectual friends, had taken seriously before the more I came to believe that there was as much faith in capitalism as there was material interest in religion, that there were commonalities between the bearded zealots of the Gush Emunim, “the bloc of the faithful”, who were assiduously settling the West Bank and Gaza, and the professionals who had captured the American corporations in the managerial revolution. That essay was motivated by a sub rosa desire to explore the notion that rather than being a historical oddity, the social processes I found in this triply