Meaning & Measurement Mini-Conference

Marc Ventresca— Northwestern University m-ventresca@nwu.edu My work investigates conflict in the structing of institutional fields, with attention to policy processes and the public and often collective "talk" that is both a marker and maker of boundaries, segments, and strata in fields of activity. I am especially interested in how new public venues emerge and support novel forms of talk, control, and claims-making. For example, in a recent paper, Naomi Olson, Bill Stevenson, and I explore how a variety of actors begin to develop new governance forms -- codes of industrial/ environmental management -- through micro mechanisms that include reflexive emulation and transposition of code elements. We show how these fragile and often contested activities gain public standing. In another paper on new governance forms among global stock exchanges, Dara Szyliowicz and I argue that the growth of transnational venues sponsored by professional services firms (e.g., lawyers, consultants, accountants) as well as agencies like the International Finance Corporation and the Capital Markets Group supplant the formal role of nation-level regulatory agencies and promote novel forms of stock exchange and regulatory models. In a current project, I investigate how European-wide and later 'global' expertise disciplined the modern census of population since the late 19th century as a cultural form. In this work, I take up the issue of measuring institutional logics, using data on the changing content of censuses from a large sample countries for the period 1870-2000. I examine the erosion and renewal of traditional identity logics ("counting" language, race/ethnicity, and other essentialist content) and the rise of new, state-based identities rooted in citizenship models, education, and labor force participation. With John Mohr, I am attentive to the "new archivalism" in organization studies (Ventresca and Mohr, 2002). In this, we look to emerging research in organization studies that takes advantage of new methods for studying meaning evident in logics, symbolic repertoires, grammars of action, and the like.