Institutional logic

Institutional logic is a core concept in sociological theory and organizational studies, with growing interest in marketing theory. It focuses on how broader belief systems shape the cognition and behavior of actors.

Friedland and Alford (1991) wrote: "Institutions are supraorganizational patterns of human activity by which individuals and organizations produce and reproduce their material subsistence and organize time and space. They are also symbolic systems, ways of ordering reality, and thereby rendering experience of time and space meaningful". Friedland and Alford (1991, p. 248) elaborated: "Each of the most important orders of contemporary Western societies has a central logic – a set of material practices and symbolic constructions – which constitute its organising principles and which is available to organizations and individuals to elaborate." Thornton and Ocasio (1999: 804) define institutional logics as "the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality".