Between the Logics of Market and Mission: Weighting the LEED Green Building Rating System

The utility of regulatory mechanisms such as voluntary standards are becoming a way of changing the market. In this paper, I look at a case of an organizational process that works across institutional logics within the US Green Building Council’s work to develop the next version of the voluntary LEED building standard. I seek to investigate how the regulatory process functions across multiple logics. Research in this area tends to consider the logics as combative. I argue that in the resolution of logics, the work of the staff is to organize the competing logics by using a third logic – one that they feel ambivalent about - to mitigate the dissonance of the market logic and the mission logic and to resolve tensions.