ANCHORING AND OBJECTIFYING: TWO MICRO-INSTITUTIONAL PROCESSES AT WORK

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the micro-institutional processes at work during the very early moments of field structuration, when issues emerge and bring together actors with various interests. Often actors are armed with opposing perspectives rather than a common vision (Hensmans, 2003). Unfortunately, institutional scholarship has not yet developed a set of valuable concepts to analyze these first but crucial moments. However, we believe that some key concepts from Social Representation Theory (Moscovici, 1976; 2008) fill this gap, and have the ability to start a fruitful relationship between the two theoretical perspectives that have numerous commonalities. Social Representation Theory (SRT) underlines the importance of accounting for the representations (i.e., images, ideas, and metaphors) that circulate within a given community, when an issue or problem is emerging. The representations constructed by community members not only allow them to connect an issue to the past, but also to In this paper, we combine insights from recent developments in Institutional Theory and Social Representation Theory to sketch the outline of a framework that highlights two micro-institutional processes, which occur at the very early moments of field structuration: anchoring and objectifying. This theory-building effort is based on the empirica