Rhetorical maintenance of institutional logic of work rationalization under societal challenges

Maintenance of institutional logics under societal challenges and crises is a process involving various actors at different analytical levels. It is also a process closely shaped by the use of rhetoric, particularly when these logics face the pressure of challenging ideas and practices. Our study extends previous research on these issues by examining how maintenance of an institutional logic providing meaning and guidance for organization-level activities becomes formatively embedded in and interlinked with rhetorical language enacted on field and governmental levels of the societal system. Based on unique historical evidence on maintenance of work rationalization logic over multiple decades in Finland, we demonstrate how the meaningfulness and eventual effects of the rhetoric enacted to maintain the logic challenged at the organizational level are conditioned by related rhetoric enacted to tackle or address the same challenge on the field and governmental levels. Our emergent theorization explicates three inter-level rhetorical mechanisms––selective value-backing, buffering, and translation—that capture how this embeddedness materializes in logic maintenance.