The Emergence of Institutions - An Aesthetic-Affective Perspective

This book presents an experiential, aesthetic-affective approach to the study of institutions. Drawing on institutional sociology, hermeneutics, phenomenology and process philosophy, it conceptualises institutions as collective experiences with their own self-promoting and self-propelling powers. Instead of seeing institutional emergence, change and decline as the result of actors' interests and manipulations, this book re-establishes the importance of factors beyond human design and intervention. Drawing on process theory, it shows how ideas, norms and values can form self-stabilising configurations that affect people without conscious realisation. It complements current thinking about institutions by showing how institutions constitute people long before people constitute them. With the help of authors as diverse as Antonio Damasio, A.N. Whitehead, J.W. von Goethe and Max Weber, Elke Weik crafts a perspective that allows us to understand institutions as aesthetic and affective powers in their own right. 

This book is for researchers interested in process theory, institutional and organisational studies, hermeneutics, and aesthetics.  

Elke Weik is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. Her major research areas are located within institutional theory, historical approaches and organizational philosophy. She continues to be fascinated by the marginal, fluid and misfitting. For this reason she has explored the institutional side of wine-making, giving birth, the Knights Templar as well as the emergence of the university in the Middle Ages. She has published in major journals like The Academy of Management Review, Management Learning and Organization.