Linking Categories to Institutional Logics: Examining Change in Legal Practices by Association with Changes in the Historical Prevalence of Institutional Logics

Abstract

Much has been written about the effects of institutional logics in various contexts and at different levels of analysis. Yet, little is known about how and why multiple institutional logics coexist and in particular coexist in the institutional order of the professions. Even less is known about how changes in institutional environments affect the processes of co-existing institutional logics and the formation of professional practice categories. Building on recent advances integrating theory on categories and institutional logics and cueing on the concept of the symbiosis of multiple institutional logics, this dissertation addresses two unanswered questions regarding the coexistence of multiple institutional logics: 1) how the coexistence of multiple logics shaped legal practice categories and 2) how changes in institutional environments affected institutional logic influence on categories This analysis focuses on the categorization process from the perspective of how the effects of institutional change influence the development and effects of institutional logics on legal practice categories. This dissertation employs a historical archival time series research design to examine the categorization process in the context of the U.S. legal profession over a 150 year observation period. Through extensive coding of commonly subscribed U.S. law directories from 1860 to 2011 (from the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory), I developed a proprietary longitudinal data set. This documentary research enabled grounding my knowledge of legal practices developed and the systematic testing of hypotheses regarding how the coexistence of multiple logics shaped those practices. Findings reveal how repeated competition among institutional logics in the legal profession shaped the attention of legal professionals, explaining both the dominance of logics and the balance of the dominant logic with newly emerging institutional logics. Subsequent changes in legal practice categories, representing the influence of multiple institutional logics, suggests professional practices are shaped by the interaction of multiple logics. This process can be affected by inter-professional and intra-professional environments that surround the U.S. legal profession. Using independent variables as proxies, this dissertation examines the effect of changes in institutional environments on institutional logic influence on categories. This study contributes to the nascent literature using the institutional logics perspective to explain the role of the institutional context in the origin and change in categories. It aims to understand how institutional logics can be theorized as a meta-theoretical framework to analyze categories in which the influences of each logic collectively competes with other logics to create a symbiotic balance of institutional influences on the development of the U.S. legal profession.