Theorizing with History: Lessons from the Study of Institutional Logics and Imprinting

History plays an indispensable but often underestimated role in the lives of institutions, organizations, and individuals. While many organizational theorists seem to be essentially ahistorical, or treat history merely as a moderating variable, we see an emerging group of scholars committed to integrating historical contingencies and particularities into our current body of theories. In this panel symposium, we will reflect on these recent efforts, and on the ways in which two traditions of organizational research – institutional theory and imprinting theory – are struggling with, and meeting, this challenge. We propose that a thorough discussion of the two approaches, the roles they afford history, and the potential for cross-fertilization or synthesis, will be of interest to participants seeking to incorporate history in institutional theory, imprinting theory, and in organization theory more broadly. Therefore, our panel symposium would engage a group of experts in an interactive discussion of (1) the ...