Dynamic Persistence of Institutions: Modeling the Endurance of Public Housing After Red Vienna

Abstract

The endurance of shared meanings that shape individual behaviors is a central feature of organizational life, but organization science reduces the persistence of institutions to the absence of change. We argue that institutions can endure precisely because how they are instantiated in wider meaning structures changes. We conceptualize and operationalize such dynamic persistence by combining scholarship on institutional change, which emphasizes that changing meanings influence how organizations operate because institutions are dynamic rather than static; and cultural sociology, which has used co-occurrences to show how ideas are embedded in meaning structures. We examine institutions and their instantiations through dynamic topic modeling. We develop diagnostic measures that allow tracking change in large corpora. We illustrate our argument and method using a 140-year corpus of reports of the City of Vienna to show that the persistence of public housing as an institution was only possible due to periodically changing instantiations and affiliations with broader meanings. Our paper contributes a dynamic and contextual approach to studies of institutional persistence that will allow future research to test theory-led expectations about persistence and change in big text data. We conclude with insights for studying temporal and geographic heterogeneity when institutions change.