Institutions and Actorhood as Co‐Constitutive and Co‐Constructed: The Argument and Areas for Future Research

We argue that in order to overcome the reductionism and essentialism in institutional theory there is a need to acknowledge that institutions and social actors are co-constitutive and co-constructed in processes of communication. We elaborate this argument by drawing on the phenomenological foundation of institutional theory and point to promising areas of future re-search: the multimodal nature of institutions, the mediated and mediatized character of modern communication, and the contestedness of all social orders and their legitimation