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The Assembly of a Field Ideology: An Idea-Centric Perspective on Systemic Power in Impact Investing
(2019)
We advance a novel idea-centric perspective to study power-laden aspects of institutional life in fields. Our study includes data from the field of impact investing in Europe from 2006–2018, collected from the inside and analyzed collaboratively by inside and outside researchers. We develop an analytical tool based on dichotomies to detect latent forms of conflict that easily remain unnoticed and to see how some ideas become dominant while others are abandoned or sidelined. We display the assembly of a field ideology—a coherent system of ideas that shapes thinking, reasoning and acting in a field. Furthermore, we specify suppression as a mechanism that gives rise to and perpetuates systemic power in fields, restricting options and shaping what is valued. Our study provides insights into the dynamic nature of institutional life in fields, including alternative paths not taken and possible futures.
Actors who support dissimilar institutional models can overcome conflict and move toward mutually beneficial coexistence. To see how, we studied the emergence of venture philanthropy, a rationalized approach to organizational philanthropy in Europe. Our analysis leverages multiple sources of data and focuses on field-configuring events as settings for interactions. We show how convening—bringing together dissimilar actors—in different types of events creates relational spaces for negotiation over institutional models, their practices, and their underlying assumptions. Front-stage interactions in public spaces are important in making models accessible to a broad audience, whereas backstage interactions in protected spaces allow models to be deconstructed. Our findings show that the interplay between front stage and backstage enables the reframing of institutional models by refining the constituent practices, which neutralizes opposition and facilitates joint courses of action. Our results contrast with popular accounts of competing institutional logics, advance organizational research on the role of events in field trajectories, and expose the collective rationalization of giving.