Collective Emotions in Institutional Creation Work

Steffen Farny (steffen.farny@aalto.fi) is Post-Doctoral Researcher in Entrepreneurship at Aalto University School of Business, Finland. He completed his PhD in Entrepreneurship at Aalto University. His research combines institutional theory, research on emotions and entrepreneurship to investigate sustainable forms of organizing. Ewald Kibler (ewald.kibler@aalto.fi) is Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Aalto University, School of Business, and serves as Academy of Finland Research Fellow. He completed his MA in Sociology at the University of Graz, Austria, and his PhD in Economic Geography at University of Turku, Finland. His research interests include new venture imaginations and legitimation, place-based and prosocial business venturing, everyday community organizing and shared emotions, institutional work and regional development, and population aging and societal wellbeing. Simon Down (simon.down@anglia.ac.uk) is Professor of Management at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. He completed his PhD at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He has researched a broad range of entrepreneurial phenomena, from an ethnography of entrepreneurial identity formation, to the impact of regulation on small business behaviours, to the identity work of Australian Indigenous entrepreneurs, and social entrepreneurship in Haiti, to the emergence of entrepreneurship pedagogy in North Korea.In this paper, we explain how and why collective emotions enable institutional creation work. Based on an ethnography in Limonade, a Haitian community affected by the 2010 earthquake, we identify social practices that elicit collective emotions through the creation of new institutions across the three disaster recovery phases. Our study’s key insight is that new institutions converge collective emotions such that they in turn justify ongoing, as well as motivate engagement in new, institutional creation work practices. Theorizing from our findings, we develop a generative model that describes the justifying and motivating function of collective emotions in the establishment of embedded institutions. In conclusion, our paper advances theory on collective emotions in institutional work and generates implications for post-disaster management practice.Peer reviewe