Contentious Logics: Institutional Logics and Decision-Making During the COVID-19 Crisis

What role do institutional logics play when organizations undergo challenging, contentious decision-making processes? To explore and generate insight into institutional logics selection and deployment in organizations, I employ an in-depth, inductive analytical strategy to study an organization within the administrative structure of the National Healthcare Ministry in Brazil. The display of institutional logics identified in discussions during periods of low exogenous pressure can be more strictly related to the set of tools and practices established during the constitutive phase of the organization. Second, I observed that actors consistently deviated from this narrower usage of imprinted logics. While the currency of institutional logics during those meetings related to the Covid-19 changed, the logics used to substitute the imprinted ones followed a pattern of structural availability – that is, they correlate with the overlapping institutional fields in which Conitec is situated. This finding sheds light on one specific mechanism through which organizational actors exert agency: when faced with disrupting pressures, they may strategically engage cultural codes from adjacent or broader social environments to solve their problems.