Søren Jagd

Pragmatic sociology and competing orders of worth in organizations

Different notions of multiple rationalities have recently been applied to describe the phenomena of co-existence of competing rationalities in organizations. These include institutional pluralism, institutional logics, competing rationalities and pluralistic contexts. The French pragmatic sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot have contributed to this line of research with a sophisticated theoretical framework of orders of worth, which has been applied in an increasing number of empirical studies. This article explores how the order of worth framework has been applied to empirical studies of organizations. First, I summarize the basic ideas of the framework, stressing the aspects of special relevance for studies of organizations. Second, I review the empirical studies focusing on the coexistence of competing orders of worth in organizations showing that the order of worth framework primarily has been related to three main themes in organizational research: non-profit and co-operative organizations, inter-organizational co-operation, and organizational change. Third, I discuss how the pragmatic, process-oriented aspect of the research program, focusing on the intertwining of values and action in various forms of ‘justification work’, has been translated into empirical studies. I argue that even if highly interesting empirical studies have begun to appear on the pragmatic aspects of the order of worth program, empirical studies of ‘justification work’ may be a potentially very promising focus for future empirical studies.

Economics of Convention and New Economic Sociology Mutual Inspiration and Dialogue

This article is part of a larger exploration of the French economics of convention tradition. The aim of the article is to explore potential common themes in economic sociology and economics of conventions. The article explores two issues raised by economics of conventions that may be of particular importance to economic sociology. First, the explicit exploration of the consequences of a plurality of forms of justification, as elaborated in économie de la grandeur. This perspective was recently taken up in economic sociology by David Starks introduction of the notion ‘sociology of worth’. The second issue, recently raised by André Orléan, is the attempt to denaturalize economic theory and economic action to demonstrate the social constructed nature of economic action. It is argued that these two issues demonstrate that a fruitful dialogue is indeed possible between economic sociology and economics of convention and should be encouraged.

Balancing trust and control in organizations: towards a process perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that conceptualizing trust and control as interactively related processes, as opposed to more static conceptualizations of the two concepts and the relations between them, adds importantly towards understanding the challenges involved in balancing of trust and control in organizations.Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines recent literature on the conceptualization of the relation between trust and control in and between organizations.Findings – The literature review shows that trust and control has been conceptualized as either substituting or complementing each other. Further, it is found that the complementary/substitution debate calls for an explicit conceptualization of the relation between trust and control as an interactive process, in contrast to earlier conceptualizations of trust and control as two relatively static and isolated concepts.Practical implications – While the static perspective on trust and control made the problem of finding ...

Making sense of institutional trust in organizations: bridging institutional context and trust

Institutional-based approaches to trust can explain how trust logics can exist in a societal context as compared to logics of distrust. Strong institutions in the form of regulative, normative and cognitive structures can enable and inspire trust-relations among people at the interpersonal and inter-organizational level. We suggest, however, that the actor-dimension of institutional-based trust is an underexplored issue in the literature. Quoting Fligstein, institutional theory needs to explain how ‘some social actors are better at producing desired social outcomes than are others’ (Fligstein, 1997: 398). While Fligstein refers to actors who engage in ‘robust or local action’ we argue that actors who engage in (robust, local) sensemaking activities are better at (re)producing institutional-based trust. Particularly in situations when institutions are relatively unstable, unfamiliar to the actors and ambiguous, sensemaking strategies directed towards exploring the institutional foundations of trust at a local level can be an important basis of interpersonal trust-relations. First, based on a summary of studies of institutional-based trust we argue that an unresolved issue is how institutions more precisely form the basis for trust-relations. Second, we explore how sensemaking may serve as a bridge between institutional contexts and interpersonal trust processes. Based on Weber and Glynn’s (2006) model of relations between institutions and sensemaking, we argue that institutions are ‘emerging’ rather than ‘impacting’. The relevance of this view of sensemaking for bridging institutional-based and interpersonal trust processes is illustrated by reviewing a case study on how trust is created in a politically turbulent and foreign environment.

Studying trust as process within and between organizations

The goal of this book is to bring forward new knowledge about trust and processes in an organizational context. We argue that there is a need, on the one hand, to explore how trust is formed through processes of social interactions in which social actors observe, reflect upon and make sense of trust behaviour and its meaning in an organizational and social context. On the other hand, we need to explore how trust forms a constitutive element in social processes more generally in organizations. The goal of this book is to explore these two aspects of the intertwining of trust and social processes within and between organizations. Trust understood as ‘confident positive expectations regarding another’s conduct’ (Lewicki et al., 1998, p. 439) is today often seen as a precondition for social and economic development. Further, trust is sometimes regarded as a phenomenon that can be found – but not created (for example Sabel, 1993). Research shows, however, that trust can be influenced and manipulated through both social institutions and social interaction. Institutional arrangements, such as regulations and norms, can enable trust-relations at the interpersonal and inter-organizational level (Bachmann, 2001; Bachmann and Inkpen, 2011). Interaction with third parties (Burt and Knez, 1995; Ferrin et al., 2006; Lau and Liden, 2008) or management systems (Mayer and Davis, 1999) can also facilitate trust. Finally, trust relies on social processes of sensemaking that allow actors to explore and make sense of the foundation of trust at the interpersonal and institutional level (Fuglsang and Jagd, 2015). Together, these different insights show that while the basic propensity to trust may be difficult to impact, because it is formed in early childhood (Erikson, 1965), anchored in culture (Saunders et al., 2010) and probably relatively stable over time (Fleeson and Leicht, 2006), the