We held our third network meeting from April 12th-13th at the beautiful HEC Lausanne. Principal investigator Patrick Haack and his team organized the workshop and brought together a group of 17 fantastic scholars!

The first day of the workshop kicked off with a great keynote by Professor Eva Boxenbaum (Copenhagen Business School, MINES ParisTech). Eva focused on how visual imagery shapes the micro-foundations of institutional theory. Her talk provoked us to think more fundamentally about the language that we apply to build theory and the consequences that it has for shaping the meaning of theoretical statements. Subsequently, we divided ourselves into break out groups that discussed different aspects related to theorizing the micro-foundations of institutional theory.

Group photo of our workshop in Lausanne

It was a true honor that Professor Lynne Zucker (UCLA and NBER) gave the second keynote on April 13^th in the morning. As one of the leading figures in institutional theory, Lynne focused on some of the key questions that concern institutional theory, i.e.; is it about stability or about change? And should we approach micro-foundations by building theory top-down or bottom’s up? These were only some of the key questions addressed by Lynne. Following suit, in the second session, we caught up on some microfoundational research done within our group. Emi Fohim (St. Gallen) presented recent work and Swaran Sandhu introduced us to his research on communication and institutions.

The next microfoundations workshop is scheduled for September 2018 and will take place at WU Vienna.