Institutional Spaces
Lisa Richards
The institutional space of an organizational field consists of those dually ordered sets of social practices and symbolic or classificatory systems which, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life. This space is structured as a series of discontinuous, topologically arrayed, dimensional regions in which particular constellations of socially recognizable institutional tasks are located. John W. Mohr
“The institutional space of an organizational field consists of those dually ordered sets of social practices and symbolic or classificatory systems which, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life. This space is structured as a series of discontinuous, topologically arrayed, dimensional regions in which particular constellations of socially recognizable institutional tasks
are located. Under stable conditions, these sites correspond to areas of social life which are administered to by those organizational forms with have staked out legitimate jurisdictional claims upon the social resources which correspond to those institutional tasks. Consider the field of community social welfare, a region of institutional life in which collective (organizational) solutions are directed toward addressing community needs and problems, especially those associated with poverty. Two tightly inter-connected sets of symbolic systems operate in this arena — one that serves to distinguish among the types of people who are clients and
another that serves to differentiate among the types of needs which those clients may have. Each of these symbolic systems consists of multiple levels of moral discourse. At one level are various, often hotly contested, interpretative narratives about the nature of the social world. These narratives usually include stories about what exists, accounts of why it exists, and opinions as to how we should regard this state of affairs. At another, deeper level are the classification schemes which hierarchically order the principle objects that are described (and constituted) at the narrative level.� John W. Mohr (1998)
Photography and design copyright © Lisa Richards 2015. All rights reserved. Text by John W. Mohr in ‘Differentiation of Institutional Space’ (1998).