Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Institutional scholarship has provided detailed accounts of disruption, delegitimation, and decline (Dacin & Dacin, 2008; Maguire & Hardy, 2009; Oliver, 1992). Yet far less attention has been given to what follows institutional breakdown. Institutions collapse and fail in ways that are emotional, material, and often deeply harmful. Failures can take the form of moral injury within universities, breakdowns in humanitarian coordination, loss of public trust in professional fields, violence in political orders, or chronic dysfunction in public agencies. Institutions also collapse when they do more harm than good and are challenged by those they have harmed (Kodeih et al., 2026; Mair et al., 2016; Ogendo et al., 2025). Despite the real and varied forms of damage that accompany institutional breakdown, institutional theory has tended to treat repair as symbolic or technical work aimed at restoring legitimacy or taken-for-granted arrangements.

This sub-theme challenges that narrative. We treat institutional repair as the situated work of responding to harm after breakdown: the practical, relational, and emotional efforts through which actors name what was damaged, attribute responsibility, and attempt to reconstitute the relationships, roles, and shared meanings on which institutions depend. Defined this way, repair is more than maintenance, which preserves arrangements that have not visibly failed (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Zilber, 2009), and more than recovery or resilience, which presume that the prior state is worth returning to.

Repair is neither a neutral act nor a simple return to equilibrium (Herepath & Kitchener, 2016; Montgomery & Dacin, 2020). It shapes what counts as harm, whose experiences matter, who is responsible for addressing damage, and what an institution should become next. It is also shaped by emotional processes (shame, grief, anger, hope, and fear) that influence how actors interpret institutional failure and what forms of repair they consider desirable and possible (Crawford & Dacin, 2021; Creed et al., 2014). Because repair unfolds within pluralistic environments structured by competing moral orders, it often becomes a contested struggle over what to rebuild, preserve, transform, or let go.

The existing literature tends to privilege the institution’s point of view rather than the experiences of those who have been harmed. It centers on professional custodians who see themselves as protecting institutional continuity rather than confronting the institution’s role in producing harm (Amis et al., 2020; Reinecke, 2018). In many cases, repair stabilizes harmful structures and reinscribes inequality (Dacin et al., 2010; Khan et al., 2007). This sub-theme calls for research that shifts this perspective. We invite work that directly examines harm, emotion, pluralism, conflict, and power in repair processes.

We invite empirical, theoretical, and conceptual work that addresses one or more of the following questions:

• What actually breaks during institutional failure, and who experiences the harm?

• How do emotions shape the meaning, trajectory, and perceived possibility of repair?

• How do survivors, marginalized communities, or frontline actors attempt to repair damaged institutional relationships?

• How does repair unfold in pluralistic contexts where multiple institutional logics offer competing visions of restoration and transformation?

• Under what conditions does custodianship mitigate harm, and when does it perpetuate or obscure harm while claiming to repair?

• How does power shape who defines the problem, who leads repair efforts, and whose vision of institutional order prevails?

• How do conflict, authoritarianism, crisis, or chronic instability alter the meaning and practice of repair?

• When do repair activities enable institutional transformation rather than a reinstatement of the status quo?
   

We encourage submissions that examine repair in contexts such as:

• higher education, especially where harm is ongoing;

• humanitarian organizations or peacebuilding settings;

• critical social and cultural organizations, for example, religious institutions, social care, military;

• low-resource or fragile-state institutions;

• professions under scrutiny;

• digitally disrupted or polarized fields;

• conflict or post-conflict environments;

• organizations facing moral, ethical, or political breakdown.
   

• Amis, J. M., Mair, J., & Munir, K. A. (2020). The organizational reproduction of inequality. Academy of Management Annals, 14(1), 195–230. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2017.0033
• Crawford, B., & Dacin, M. T. (2021). Policing work: Emotions and violence in institutional work. Organization Studies, 42(8), 1219–1240. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840620941614
• Creed, W. E. D., Hudson, B. A., Okhuysen, G. A., & Smith-Crowe, K. (2014). Swimming in a sea of shame: Incorporating emotion into explanations of institutional reproduction and change. Academy of Management Review, 39(3), 275–301. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2012.0074
• Dacin, M. T., & Dacin, P. A. (2008). Traditions as institutionalized practice: Implications for deinstitutionalization. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin, & R. Suddaby (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 327–351). SAGE Publications.
• Dacin, M. T., Munir, K., & Tracey, P. (2010). Formal dining at Cambridge colleges: Linking ritual performance and institutional maintenance. Academy of Management Journal, 53(6), 1393–1418. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.57318388
• Herepath, A., & Kitchener, M. (2016). When small bandages fail: The field-level repair of severe and protracted institutional breaches. Organization Studies, 37(8), 1113–1139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840615622065
• Khan, F. R., Munir, K. A., & Willmott, H. (2007). A dark side of institutional entrepreneurship: Soccer balls, child labour and postcolonial impoverishment. Organization Studies, 28(7), 1055–1077. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840607078114
• Kodeih, F., Raynard, M., & Bui, H. T. M. (2026). The moral and emotional impact of well-intentioned policy on marginalized communities. In I. Sasaki & S. Baba (Eds.), Cultural marginalization in communities and organizations: Seeds for peace (Vol. 103, pp. 111–138). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20260000103006
• Lawrence, T. B., & Suddaby, R. (2006). Institutions and institutional work. In S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. B. Lawrence, & W. R. Nord (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organization studies (2nd ed., pp. 215–254). SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781848608030.n7
• Maguire, S., & Hardy, C. (2009). Discourse and deinstitutionalization: The decline of DDT. Academy of Management Journal, 52(1), 148–178. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2009.36461993
• Mair, J., Wolf, M., & Seelos, C. (2016). Scaffolding: A process of transforming patterns of inequality in small-scale societies. Academy of Management Journal, 59(6), 2021–2044. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2015.0725
• Montgomery, A. W., & Dacin, M. T. (2020). Water wars in Detroit: Custodianship and the work of institutional renewal. Academy of Management Journal, 63(5), 1455–1484. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2017.1098
• Ogendo, K. N., Block, E., Marquez, A. C., & Ochieng, B. (2025). Health provider or debt collector? The unintended consequences of integrating income-generating activities with community health interventions in Kenya. In S. Bacq, K. M. Smolka, A. F. Slade Shantz, & P. P. M. A. R. Heugens (Eds.), Necessity entrepreneurship: Getting beyond the binary (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 92, pp. 141–161). Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20250000092014
• Oliver, C. (1992). The antecedents of deinstitutionalization. Organization Studies, 13(4), 563–588. https://doi.org/10.1177/017084069201300403
• Reinecke, J. (2018). Social movements and prefigurative organizing: Confronting entrenched inequalities in Occupy London. Organization Studies, 39(9), 1299–1321. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618759815
• Zilber, T. B. (2009). Institutional maintenance as narrative acts. In T. B. Lawrence, R. Suddaby, & B. Leca (Eds.), Institutional work: Actors and agency in institutional studies of organizations (pp. 205–235). Cambridge University Press.