Custodianship of Traditions at the Intersection of Institutions, Technologies and Place

This symposium explores the concept of custodianship in organizational life – actors who are invested in the continuity of traditions, and who engage in official and unofficial roles to guide, adapt, and protect them. At the intersection of institutional work and culture, custodianship appears to play an essential role in explanations of how macro-organizational phenomena persist over time, including institutions, identities, technologies, and practices, with recent studies finding custodians working 'behind the scenes' to maintain even the most apparently stable social arrangements. But who are the custodians? Why do they engage in custodial work? How? Custodianship is a promising concept but at risk of becoming vague and unhelpful without theoretical elaboration. This symposium is organized to spur the development of custodianship into a coherent and useful construct for management theorists. To that end, we bring together four studies which put custodians center stage, examining custodianship in the co...