Constructing Organizational Life

Abstract Across the social sciences, scholars are showing how people “work” on facets of social life that were once thought to be beyond human intervention. Facets of social life once considered to be embedded in human nature, dictated by God, or shaped by macro‐level social forces beyond human control, are now widely understood as socially constructed – made and given meaning by people through social interaction, and consequently the focus of efforts to change them. Studies of these efforts have explored new forms of work including emotion work, identity work, boundary work, strategy work, institutional work, and a host of other kinds of work. Missing in these conversations, however, is a recognition that these forms work are all part of a broader phenomenon driven by historical shifts that began with modernity and dramatically accelerated through the twentieth century. This book explores that broader phenomenon: we propose a perspective that integrates diverse streams of research to examine how people purposefully work to construct organizational life. We refer to these efforts as social‐symbolic work and introduce three forms – self work, organization work, and institutional work – that are particularly useful in understanding how actors construct organizational life. The social‐symbolic work perspective highlights the purposeful, reflexive efforts of individuals, collective actors, and networks of actors to construct the social world, and focuses attention on the motivations, practices, resources, and effects of those efforts. Thus, the social-symbolic work perspective brings actors back into explanations of the social world, and balances approaches that emphasize social structure at the expense of action or describe social processes without explaining the role of actors.