Macrofoundations: Exploring the Institutionally Situated Nature of Activity

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MACROFOUNDATIONS:
EXPLORING THE
INSTITUTIONALLY SITUATED
NATURE OF ACTIVITY
Christopher W. J. Steele, Timothy R. Hannigan,
Vern L. Glaser, Madeline Toubiana and Joel Gehman
In recent years, institutionalists have devoted increasing attention to the so-called
“microfoundations” of institutions: that is, to the everyday activities and dynamics
through which institutions are constituted, exert their inuence, and decline into
obscurity (Haack, Sieweke, & Wessel, 2019; Powell & Colyvas, 2008; Powell & Rerup,
2017). While the value of such work is both substantial and self-evident, several
authors have expressed concern that the imagery of “microfoundations” smug-
gles in an inappropriate ascription of causal primacy to “the micro,” or even to
atomistic individuals, and thus casts into shadow some critically important facets
of institutions and institutional theory (Boxenbaum, 2019; Hwang & Colyvas,
2019; Jepperson & Meyer, 2011). Most notably, a focus on microfoundations risks
obscuring the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions (Gehman,
Lounsbury, & Greenwood, 2016; Lounsbury & Wang, 2020; Meyer, 2010; Wooten &
Hoffman, 2017). Constitutively, institutional arrangements are inscribed into
the symbolic frameworks, bodies, emotional registers, and sensory apparatuses
through which people experience world and self (Bitektine, Haack, Bothello, &
Mair, 2020; Meyer & Vaara, 2020; Toubiana, in press; Voronov & Weber, 2020);
as well as being inscribed into the forms and workings of organizations and other
social actors (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013; Meyer, 2010; Tracey, Phillips, & Jarvis,
2011; Waeger & Weber, 2019). Institutional arrangements also play a complex
and intricate contextualizing role: furnishing settings, materials, and infrastruc-
tures for local episodes of individual, interactional, and organizational cognition,
emotion, and action (Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2014; Hinings,
Macrofoundations: Exploring the Institutionally Situated Nature of Activity
Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 68, 3–16
Copyright © 2021 by Emerald Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X20200000068017

4 CHRISTOPHER W. J. STEELE ET AL.
Logue, & Zietsma, 2017; Lawrence & Graham, 2015; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2019;
Ocasio, Thornton, & Lounsbury, 2017; Sadeh & Zilber, 2019; Steele, in press). Both
of these themes sit oddly with any explanatory privileging of “the micro” – indeed,
at rst glance, they would seem to support a precisely inverted prioritization of
“the macro.” With such thoughts in mind, the 2018 Alberta Institutions Conference
invited participants to articulate the “macrofoundations of institutions”; using this
impish terminology (Fine, 1991) in a purposefully provocative call.
For us, the concept of macrofoundations was ultimately intended to be heard
in harmonic counterpoint with that of microfoundations: to highlight that “the
micro” and “the macro” are always and everywhere entwined in a co-constitu-
tive interplay, in which both have every bit as (patently in)valid a claim to being
foundational (Fine, 1991; Meyer & Vaara, 2020; Steele, Toubiana, & Greenwood,
2019).1 Contributions to the conference seemed to us to intuit, embrace, and
embody this spirit. The interest and enthusiasm of the 106 registered participants
motivated the present volume – and the 34 presentations provided plenty of
material for inclusion! The 11 chapters of this volume, drawn from this rich vein
of material, explore and expand upon the broad notion of macrofoundations
empirically and theoretically; and we would like to express our gratitude to all
the contributors for the work that they did in generating an eclectic yet coherent
array of insights into the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions.
Here, we will briey introduce the 11 chapters, in their order of appearance. We
do so under four headings, which we have used to structure the volume: “deni-
tions and pontications,” “macrofounding the local,” “localizing the macrofoun-
dational,” and “reections and future directions.”
DEFINITIONS AND PONTIFICATIONS
In the rst chapter of the volume, Steele and Hannigan make an initial exploration
of what a macrofoundational agenda might entail, and the opportunities it might
offer (Steele & Hannigan, 2021). They rst propose focusing attention on the
ways in which institutions contextualize local activities, and the ways in which
institutions shape the nature of people, objects, and physical spaces. They suggest
that exploring these topics should cast light on how institutional arrangements
elicit, shape, and – critically – preempt micro-dynamics, on how institutions shape
lived experience (and the conditions in which such experiences arise), and on the
tectonics of large-scale institutional change. Importantly, they also highlight
another idea that should inform any emergent macrofoundational agenda: that
macrofoundational forces are implicitly and explicitly negotiated, or refracted,
in the course of local happenings. In this sense, they follow Gary Alan Fine in
suggesting that there are no clear causal arrows running from the micro to the
macro or vice versa, but, rather, an unfolding process of mutual constitution. As
they put it (p. 21):
Macrofoundations are not linkages to stable and given entities, which hover above local activi-
ties; rather, they are concrete concatenations of activities and states of affairs over multiple sites
– specic ows of effects and reactions, which work to pin local activities into place.

Macrofoundations: Exploring the Institutionally Situated Nature of Activity 5
Their explorations ultimately lead them to suggest abandoning the imagery of
“foundations” entirely, in favor of an alternative “optometric” imagery, which views
the micro and macro as lenses; that is, as microscopes and macroscopes. They argue
that embracing this imagery would not only encourage further reexivity regarding
the lenses we use as institutionalists – each of which draws some phenomena into
focus, at the cost of blurring or blocking out others – but also help to foreground
the use of various micro and macro “lenses” by participants in everyday life, as a
consequential empirical phenomenon. Thus, they explore the horizons opened up
by the idea of macrofoundations, even as they set aside the term.
MACROFOUNDING THE LOCAL
The next section of the volume focuses on the role of institutions in contextu-
alizing the ostensibly “micro”; which is to say, the ways in which institutional
arrangements “macrofound” local life. The three chapters esh out the contextu-
alizing and constitutive powers of institutions, both empirically and theoretically.
Thus, Middleton, Irving, and Wright (2021) explore empirically how institu-
tional prescriptions shape and transform the social spaces in which everyday
life unfolds – with important consequences for the patterning of local activities.
Biygautane, Micelotta, Gabbioneta, and Cappellaro (2021) show empirically how
inter- institutional orders can provide a critical context for evolving populations
of organizations – shaping local motivations and feasibilities in ways that can
preempt the adoption of organizational forms. And Crawford and Dacin (2021)
theorize four distinct types of punishment that can characterize institutional
arrangements – contextualizing everyday activities through the shadow of pun-
ishments present, or potentially-to-be. Beyond the immediate insights that these
chapters provide into multiple extant conversations, they also provide a collective
justication for further research into the contextualizing and constitutive force of
institutions, and a generative set of directions for future work. Below, we introduce
them in more detail, in sequence.
In the rst chapter of the section, Middleton et al. (2021) explore how insti-
tutions exert their inuence through the mundane spaces in which everyday life
unfolds, through a qualitative study of the emergency department in an Australian
hospital. They begin with the premise that everyday life is consequentially contex-
tualized by mundane spaces, such as rooms, corridors, and buildings: as the mate-
rial design of these spaces, and their prevailing patterns of use, shape the ease
and consequences of various lines of action. The authors then argue that such
spaces are in turn shaped by institutional arrangements. In their empirical work,
they explore how a shift in the institutional context of Australian medical care –
reected in an increased prioritization of time-before-treatment – gave rise to, and
took effect through, a change in the design and use of space. Previously, use of a
waiting room kept walk-in “emergency” patients away from the treatment area,
thus rendering them less visible and reinforcing professionally accepted patterns
of prioritization (which gave priority to patients delivered by ambulance). Shifting
institutional priorities led to abolition of the waiting room, with all patients being

6 CHRISTOPHER W. J. STEELE ET AL.
queued instead in “an internal waiting corridor” by the treatment space. In these
circumstances, walk-in patients – and delays in their treatment – were made very
visible indeed; enmeshing physicians in a space of surveillance that challenged
their old ways of working. The authors abstract from this to argue that spaces
can serve institutional arrangements by hiding and revealing. They also show how
spaces provide cues for identity and for institutional policing (reminding people of
their responsibilities), and how they offer possibilities for the physical exclusion
of disruptive actors (containing resistance). The rst chapter of this section thus
shows how institutions shape the mundane spaces that contextualize everyday
life; providing the macrofoundations not only for local activities, but also for one
of the most immediate and concrete contexts of such activity.
In the next chapter, Biygautane et al. (2021) begin with the observation that
institutional theorizing has generally privileged western conceptions of institu-
tional orders, neglecting the distinctive workings of institutional orders in non-
western cultures. To illustrate this, they argue that the tribal system in Qatar
anchors the inter-institutional system in that setting and has given rise to dis-
tinctive institutional orders of state, market, and family. The authors then show
how these institutional orders in Qatar, as a macro-institutional context, have
consequentially shaped the adoption and implementation of a Western organiza-
tional form – in the form of public–private partnerships (e.g., long-term contracts
between government actors and private actors, based on a delegation of respon-
sibilities for the construction, ownership, and management of an infrastructure
project). For example, their study shows how the role of the ruling family in gov-
ernment mitigated the very need for public–private partnerships by fusing the
public and private sectors, and by prioritizing the needs of certain interest groups
in a manner that reduced the benets that might accrue from public–private part-
nerships. Additionally, the authors point to the ways in which the tribally inu-
enced role of the state, the lack of market norms of competition in Qatar, and
the uncertainty foreign investors faced in their interactions with the ruling family,
collectively led to public–private partnerships creating inefciencies – the exact
opposite of what might be expected in a western context (optimistically speaking).
The chapter thus “reveal[s] the importance of considering the culturally-contingent
nature of institutional orders in examinations of countries that are particularly
distant from the Anglo-Saxon tradition”; both as an end in itself, and as a means
of better understanding more localized or specic dynamics, in those contexts.
In the third chapter of the section, Crawford and Dacin (2021) draw our atten-
tion to the macrofoundational by exploring the distinct types and patterns of
punishment that can uphold institutional arrangements. Building on the premise
that “one way that institutions exercise their constitutive power is by punishing
wrongdoers or those who violate the integrity of the institution (beliefs, norms,
structures and practices),” they introduce four distinct types of punishment, which
vary in their visibility and formalization. While the rst type of punishment, retri-
bution, is the formalized and visible type most often explored in the literature (i.e.,
sanctions, nes, and incarceration), the authors argue that the three other types –
punishment-as-charivari, punishment-as-rehabilitation, and punishment-as-vigi-
lantism – though less explored, are equally important. They draw our attention to

Macrofoundations: Exploring the Institutionally Situated Nature of Activity 7
the shaming efforts which are part of punishment-as-charivari, to restoration and
forgiveness as part of punishment-as-rehabilitation, and to intense violence as the
core mechanism of punishment-as-vigilantism. In the process, they highlight
the multimodal nature of punishment, and the role of emotions, the material
and the symbolic in dening both punishment and response. Crawford and
Dacin thus cast light on another way in which institutions macrofound local
activities: by inspiring and intertwining with distinctive regimes of punish-
ment, which contextualize everyday life. In addition, they also illuminate the
recursive relationship between the micro and the macro. In both punishment-as-
charivari and punishment-as-vigilantism, for example, people who are emo-
tionally invested in institutions seek to publicly shame or to hurt others in order
to uphold those institutions. Institutional arrangements and patterns of pun-
ishment thus contextualize local efforts to reinforce and defend institutions;
with micro and macro unfolding in a co-constitutive interplay. In closing, the
authors critique institutional researchers for ignoring some of the most harm-
ful ways institutions can operate – through violence – and ask readers to take
seriously the role of violence as they further explore the macrofoundational
agenda.
LOCALIZING THE MACROFOUNDATIONAL
This discussion of the inseparability of micro and macro neatly sets the scene
for the third section of the volume. Here, we emphasize a second element of the
“macrofoundational agenda” as we see it: that macrofoundations are themselves
locally negotiated in part, and are matters of implicit and explicit local concern as
local happenings unfold. This opposition to the analytic partitioning of the macro
and micro is a critically important idea behind the macrofoundational challenge
rst posed by Gary Alan Fine, and a key part of the spirit of the volume. The
three chapters in this section explore empirically how local understandings of
institutional arrangements and their impacts play into local activities – and how
these local activities, through their concatenations and reverberations, consti-
tute and reconstitute the macro-context over time. First, Brüggemann, Kroezen,
and Tracey (2021) explore how the felt encroachment of dominant institutional
logics can inspire efforts at resistance; efforts that may not only preserve mar-
ginalized logics, but also drive their renement, elaboration, and evolution. In
the second chapter, Hannigan and Casasnovas (2021) explore the interplay of
micro and macro in emerging elds: how eld-conguring events, captured by
media reports, serve as provisional portraits of the eld that contextualize further
events; providing a kind of “bootstrapping” process of eld emergence. In the
nal chapter of the section, Meyer, Kornberger, and Höllerer (2021) explore how
local efforts to understand and change a complex conguration of institutional
arrangements – in their case, the city of Sydney – helped to constitute a distinc-
tive thought style, associated with a reformulated “public” of participants and
audiences; essentially providing “the city” with a new infrastructure for ongo-
ing self-reection or thought. All three chapters give a sense of the recursive or

8 CHRISTOPHER W. J. STEELE ET AL.
co-constitutive relationship between “the macro” and “the micro,” as we unpack
in more detail below.
Brüggemann et al. (2021) observe that existing research has not considered
what happens to marginalized logics in elds with a dominant logic. By explor-
ing the empirical case of the UK trade publishing industry, they cast light on the
ways in which eld actors’ active resistance to dominant logics can not only pre-
serve marginalized logics, but also fuel their elaboration and evolution; thus driv-
ing ongoing change in institutional arrangements. More specically, they show
how the evolution of a marginalized editorial logic in publishing occurred along
three generative paths, as actors resisted the dominant market logic: preservation,
in which conformity to the marginalized logic was used as a special marker of
reputation and prestige by high-status publishing houses; purication, in which the
editorial logic was articulated in contradistinction to the market logic, emphasiz-
ing and elaborating the merits of a more vocational approach to publishing; and
radicalization, where the editorial logic of publishing became increasingly bound
up with other interests and concerns that were marginalized by the market logic.
Together these efforts to navigate a macrofoundational context have led to the
renement and evolution of the marginalized editorial logic; which continues to
spread, and transform that context in turn. As a multimethod study combining
interviews, participant observation, and archival data over several years, the chap-
ter provides a rich historical account of activity in the periphery of a eld: illumi-
nating the active institutional work around “logics that are seemingly left behind
in the wake of a shift toward a new dominant logic” (p. 124), and its consequential
nature. This contributes to recent calls to better understand the dynamics of intra-
logic evolution, and the historical contingencies of logics; uncovering distinct
patterns of institutional change. This chapter thus explores how institutions con-
textualize local activities, while also casting light on how these contextualizations
are localized – becoming the felt and understood context for local actions and acts
of resistance – and how local actions shape logic and eld evolution.
In the following chapter, Hannigan and Casasnovas (2021) take up this same
theme of the recursivity between the micro and the macro. They explore how early
moments of eld emergence both structure and are structured by provisional
understandings of the eld as a macro-context. Through a multimethod empiri-
cal study combining topic modeling and qualitative eld methods, they track early
activity of the impact investing eld in the UK. They use the metaphor of a cam-
era obscura to show how traces of key moments are partially captured by the
media, and turned into provisional pictures of the eld that inform later moments.
In a context full of ambiguity and complexity, these provisional pictures and their
elements serve as macrofoundational cues, which affect how actors in this eld
come to understand and develop their relative positioning. Field-conguring
events – as moments of intense interaction – play a particularly important role in
shaping these provisional portraits of the eld, and thus help recongure the ways
in which actors are meaningfully arranged and interrelated. This study thus helps
us begin to theorize the emergence of early institutional infrastructures (Zietsma
et al., 2017). Importantly, for our purposes, the authors highlight recursivity
between micro and macro: how key (micro) events or “moments,” captured in

Macrofoundations: Exploring the Institutionally Situated Nature of Activity 9
media reports and other documents, feed into provisional understandings of the
macro-context which help contextualize local understandings and activity – and
thus feed into later moments of moment.
In the nal chapter of the section, Meyer et al. (2021) take up the theme of
the co-constitution of micro and macro, and, in so doing, explore the constitu-
tive powers of institutions. They argue that Ludwik Fleck’s concepts of “thought
style” and “thought collective” provide helpful resources for understanding
the relationship between the micro and the macro. Their chapter begins with a
compelling illustration of the strategic planning process conducted by the City
of Sydney over a 10-year period. Interestingly, the objectives of the strategy
remained unachieved – yet most stakeholders viewed the strategic planning pro-
cess as having been a resounding success. The authors show that stakeholders
credited the strategic planning process for three outcomes: it changed the way
that city- makers thought about the relationship, context, and complex nature of
the city; it instigated a process of learning and discovery; and it facilitated the
constitution of an imagined community, or public, around the strategy process.
Meyer et al. theorize that this can be understood as the emergence of a thought
style, which they dene as an “epistemic condition for cognition, meaning, and
truth” associated with a particular community of people, which provides “the
precondition for collective reasoning and collective action” (p. 193). They thus
suggest that strategic planning activities in Sydney were not effective because of
their ability to achieve particular outcomes, but because they changed the “cogni-
tive tracks” of city-makers by generating a thought style and associated thought
collective. The authors build outward from this to argue that institutions are not
“constraining conditions” that hamper cognition; instead, as collective thought
styles, institutions are “the foundation of all thinking and knowing.” But like
Steele and Hannigan (2021), Meyer et al. (2021) worry that the foundational ter-
minology does not do justice to the co-constitutive relationship between institu-
tions and the actions – as institutions prompt and contextualize the very actions
by which they are constituted. To help navigate us past the monolithic ruins of the
micro–macro divide, they provide another provocative analogy: envisaging social
life in terms of an MC Escher drawing in which “it is impossible to tell which
hand is prior to the other” or “which steps are bottom and which are top” – in
which “there is no foundation that could hold and no origin that could explain
its reality” (p. 198).
REFLECTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
In the nal section of the volume, we present four reective pieces – each of which
articulates possible future directions for addressing the challenges posed by Fine,
and for an institutionalism that takes seriously the “macrofoundational” themes
raised above. The rst chapter, by Glynn (2021), explores the language of insti-
tutionalism to see what presumptions we have smuggled in, and what blinkers
we have unwittingly adopted. The second, by Höllerer, Schneiberg, Thornton,
Zietsma, and Wang (2021) provides an interweaving of four reections on the

10 CHRISTOPHER W. J. STEELE ET AL.
notion of macrofoundations, which explore the different forms of contextualiza-
tion that might macrofound local activity, and the interplay of micro and macro;
as well as the joys of breaking down our intellectual silos. Gehman (2021), in the
third chapter, digs into the roots of institutionalism in search of lost insights;
and uncovers a key theme from the work of early phenomenologists that could
inform contemporary institutional theorizing. And nally, Scott provides a con-
textualization of the notion of macrofoundations; situating this volume within
the history of institutionalism, and highlighting conversations that could bolster
the foundations of a macrofoundational agenda. Together, these pieces provide a
forward-looking closing point for the volume as a whole; and, we hope, effectively
convey the prospects for generative and theory-building work on, near, or around
the macrofoundations of institutionalism.
The rst piece is based on Mary Ann Glynn’s 2018 keynote speech for the con-
ference. Taking the call for papers to heart, Glynn takes stock of “where we have
been, and where we are headed.” She begins with an orienting content analysis
of explicitly institutional scholarship in eight key journals, from 1936 to 2017 –
a corpus of 2,201 articles. This reveals several insights. For example, institutions
seem predominantly to be invoked as nouns; which, Glynn suggests, may reinforce
a long- standing tendency to theorize institutions as solid, durable entities; turning
our attention to macro-matters. In contrast, the use of institutionalization, as a
verb – as yet the least common usage – encourages focus on dynamism and the
mechanisms of (im)permanence, and may thus highlight more micro-matters.
Critically, Glynn argues that the greatest insights are likely to emerge through
reconciliation of these registers. She thus calls for a synthetic rather than adver-
sarial conceptualization of macro and micro approaches; and – distinctively
and generatively – pushes us to question the relative weight of local/micro and
trans-local/macro inuences in different settings and in different episodes. She
suggests we consider macrofoundational contexts, such as the eld, as a form of
contingency: drawing our attention to how elds differ, and the consequences of
these differences for the differing kinds of things that become institutionalized, to
differing degrees, and for the kinds of factors that exert causal force within that
space (i.e., to differences in the kinds of factors that predict organizational success
in elds focused on issues and elds focused on exchange, or in elds that are bound
together more by geography or more by shared understanding). In other terms,
Glynn calls for attention to the varying constitutive dynamics that characterize dif-
ferent types of elds, and how they contextualize individual institutions, organiza-
tions, and everyday life. The chapter closes with a suggestion that we attend to
the linguistics of our theorizations: as a means of foregrounding co-constitutive
dynamics, and as a means of avoiding conceptual dissipation – a matter of moment,
given the power of semantics and imagery to shape what we can see.
The next chapter of the section (Höllerer et al., 2021) revisits the closing
plenary at the 2018 Alberta Institutions Conference, in which four prominent
scholars – Markus Höllerer, Marc Schneiberg, Patricia Thornton, and Charlene
Zietsma – shared their views on how we could return macrofoundations to center-
stage in institutional analysis. Working with the four panelists, Milo Wang draws
out several major themes that emerged during the discussion, and which were

Macrofoundations: Exploring the Institutionally Situated Nature of Activity 11
elaborated for this volume; themes that cast light on some of the open questions
and terrain that might be opened by a turn to “macrofoundations,” and some of
the risks and pitfalls that we should scrupulously seek to avoid. The rst major
theme to emerge pertains to the various meanings that macrofoundations could
have, or the various types of macrofoundation we could explore: here, Schneiberg
emphasizes the role of institutions as socio-cognitive infrastructures, undergird-
ing activity and social order, whereas Zietsma emphasizes the role of macro-
foundational context in informing our emotions and understandings, and the
possibilities for exposing people to different understandings of macro-context as
a means of achieving social change and reform. Second, the chapter cautions that
a singular or exclusive focus on the macro level would blinker our understandings
and theorizations. Both Thornton and Höllerer, in particular, advocate for more
cross-level studies of institutions – and also for understanding the macro and the
micro as co-constitutive analytical categories. Finally, the four panelists discuss
how we could break academic silos in institutional analysis and strive for theo-
retical innovation through interdisciplinary studies and other means. Thus, they
highlight several opportunities and risks for those exploring macrofoundations.
In the penultimate chapter, Gehman (2021) picks up on a suggestion offered
by Markus Höllerer during the conference’s closing plenary, and seeks to “trace
the core ideas to their very origins” (Höllerer et al., 2021, p. 230). Specically,
he revisits the phenomenological understanding of the “institution” concept by
returning to the philosophical writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Although
institutional scholars often acknowledge the phenomenological origins of institu-
tional analysis, Gehman suggests that the philosophical foundations of the con-
cept offer an array of insights that are underexploited or unrecognized within
organization theory; and seeks to unearth some generative connections. After lay-
ing out some institutionally germane aspects of their respective philosophies, he
connects these philosophical ideas with contemporary conversations. He builds
on Evans and Lawlor’s (2000) reading of Merleau-Ponty, which uses the meta-
phor of esh to explore the interplay of visible and the invisible – suggesting
that institutions and (human) being are crisscrossed and interwoven, or eshed
together, and this intertwining is the foundation or grounding of both being and
institution. Gehman suggests that such a philosophical understanding of institu-
tion radically problematizes, and more likely completely undermines the growing
bifurcation between micro and macro-institutional explanations; posing particu-
lar challenges to microsociologies grounded on individuals qua individuals. The
chapter reminds us that at its core, phenomenological institutionalism conceives
of actors “as constructed by institutional models and meanings rather than as
prior and xed entities” and institutions “as general models constructing both
actors and their activities” (Meyer, 2009, p. 40). Gehman closes with a provocation
for work on institutions as the macrofoundations of local activity: arguing that
phenomenology teaches us that esh – the twining of the visible and the invisible
– and our perceptual and perpetual faith in the world is the foundation of institu-
tions. Institution “is the wherewithal on which I count at each moment, which
is seen nowhere and is assumed by everything that is visible for a human being”
(Merleau-Ponty, 2010, p. 12).

12 CHRISTOPHER W. J. STEELE ET AL.
In the closing chapter, Scott (2021) chronicles a broad scholarly history that
contextualizes the volume and its driving concerns. He begins with the founding
political scientists, economists, and sociologists who charted the rise of the mod-
ern state, the capitalist economy, and bureaucracy and rationalism, in a valiant
effort to articulate tectonic shifts in the conditions of social life. He notes that this
macro-social, comparative, and historical work was later eclipsed by more indi-
vidualist, micro-social scholarship, centered in the United States. Scott implies
that this new, micro-social orientation has since set the terms of debate, even for
those who challenged it. Thus, even as institutionalists sought to re-emphasize
macro-context, they tended to focus on the traceable impact of local contexts,
such as elds; keeping close to the ground, relative to the vast scope of their
progenitors. Scott urges a resurgent broadening of scope. He prompts us to look
at regions and social sectors, societal systems, transnational systems, and world
society: arguing that each of these institutional formations may possess distinc-
tive dynamics, worthy of study in their own right; and that each may serve as
a signicant form of macro-context for action and the eddies of imagination.
In each of these areas, Scott points to extant work, and highlights themes and
insights of signicance. Ultimately, he calls for historical and comparative explo-
rations of these far-reaching arrangements and their contextualizing forces; thus
making a call for the study of macrofoundations, macrofounded in a history of
social scholarship.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The call to think through the macrofoundations of institutionalism is a challenge
to think through the contextualizing and constitutive powers of institutions. In
our view, the contributions to this volume do much to draw out these powers:
from the role of institutions in the emergence and workings of the physical spaces
in which action arises (Middleton et al., 2021), to their role in the evolution of
cities (Meyer et al., 2021), punishments (Crawford & Dacin, 2021), and whole
populations of organizations (Biygautane et al., 2021). At the same time, the
current volume reminds us that these mighty macrofoundations are themselves
formed from concatenations of local happenings; and are matters of local and
immediate concern, implicitly and explicitly, for those who are wholeheartedly
immersed in their locales (Brüggemann et al., 2021; Hannigan & Casasnovas,
2021). Macrofoundations emerge hand-in-glove with micro-dynamics, in a co-
constitutive interplay (Gehman, 2021; Meyer et al., 2021; Steele & Hannigan,
2021). It is this interplay, at least in part, that makes discussion of macrofounda-
tions so intriguing and potentially generative (Glynn, 2021; Höllerer et al., 2021;
Scott, 2021). And yet it is the topic, rather than the label, to which we are com-
mitted. The term itself, as a playful inversion of the microfoundational label, may
prove felicitous, or may be swiftly abandoned in favor of other imageries; optom-
etric (Steele & Hannigan, 2021), staircase based (Meyer et al., 2021), or otherwise.
In any case, explorations of the institutional situation of local activities – and the
localized invocation of institutions – promises to be a core theme in any effort to

Macrofoundations: Exploring the Institutionally Situated Nature of Activity 13
develop a genuinely holistic and integrative institutionalism (Steele et al., 2019).
We hope this volume exemplies and encourages such efforts, and are grateful to
all the authors who made it a possibility.
NOTES
1. On this point, we should note that there is an ambiguity in the “microfoundational”
movement in institutionalism. On the one hand, the imagery of microfoundations suggests
that the micro is in some way foundational, or has some explanatory priority; certainly a
guiding theme of the microfoundational “turn” in many other elds. This approach, to
our mind, entails risks of implicit atomization – failing to adequately take note of the
ways in which people, and local happenings, are always already situated in ongoing and
constitutive webs of action and signicance. Given that this enmeshment is one of the core
premises and general ndings of institutionalism, this prospect seems troubling to say the
least. Moreover, we worry that this kind of approach ultimately entrenches and reies the
division between micro and macro – articially separating them analytically, in order to
then relate them theoretically. It seems to us that this obscures the way in which everything
is simultaneously micro and macro (so that “individual” behavior is simultaneously and
constitutively part of group and societal patterns of behavior), and that this risks blinding
us to some interesting themes – for example, the ways in which “micro” or “macro” status
is consequentially attributed to phenomena in everyday life (e.g., as people dismiss a novel
behavior as a “local deviation,” or observe the same behavior as evidence of an “emerging
trend”; with very different consequences for them, for organizations, elds, and even
societal orders).
On the other hand, many proponents of the microfoundational movement in institutional-
ism actually evangelize for “cross-level” studies without any presumption of micro-priority.
They agree happily that the macro “situates” the micro: a term sufciently vague, perhaps,
to incorporate the contextualizing powers of institutions, or even, if the meaning of “situ-
ation” is somewhat stretched, to acknowledge their constitutive powers. Though we still
worry that the terminology risks reifying the micro and macro, and would prefer to talk
about the intertwining of local and trans-local happenings, we nd this vision of micro-
foundations far less troubling than the other. Indeed, we are generally in sympathy with this
approach, and see our efforts to emphasize “macrofoundations” as a natural complement to
“microfoundational” work in this vein; a belief that is echoed in the recent edited volume on
“microfoundations” (Haack, Sieweke, & Wessel, 2019). Our only quibble is that, if the call for
microfoundations is simply a call to explore the interplay of local and trans-local, then it is
not actually about the micro any more than the macro, nor does it ascribe any genuinely foun-
dational status to the micro; making the label somewhat misleading at best. Some of us have
elsewhere suggested the alternative term and goal of a more “integrative institutionalism”:
an institutionalism that casts neither micro nor macro as “foundational,” but regards them
as linked in an MC Escher staircase, “in which ‘foundational” causality moves perpetually
from level to level” (Steele et al., 2019, p. 354); where every step “upward” might moments
later lead you “downward” (Meyer et al., 2021).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to express our gratitude to all the participants at the 2018 Alberta
Institutions Conference; without the presentations and conversations that arose dur-
ing that event, this volume would never have happened. On that basis, we would also
like to express our gratitude to the Alberta School of Business, The European Group

14 CHRISTOPHER W. J. STEELE ET AL.
for Organizational Studies, and Organization Studies for the nancial support they
provided for that conference. In addition to the above, we thank Mike Lounsbury
for his support throughout the development of the volume, and the team at Emerald
for their work during the publication process. We are especially grateful to all the
contributors for the time and work they invested in their submissions and revisions;
we believe their efforts have made for an enjoyable and intriguing read!
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