Connecting institutional logics and technological frames An institutional perspective on how actors make sense of artificial turf as a new technology in football

Abstract

This study aims to explore the connection between institutional logics and technological frames to understand the literature gap why different actor groups within a social system make sense of technologies differently. These differences in sensemaking induce different beliefs among actor groups, which results in different perceptions about the legitimacy of a technology. This can cause social contestation where actor groups with opposite beliefs engage in collective sensemaking to predominate a common understanding.

This phenomenon is researched in the context of the debate surrounding the adoption of artificial turf in Dutch football. This adoption shows dissimilar rates between amateur and professional adopters and contains quantum jumps of adoption at the professional level. This led to various kinds of speech acts in media by different groups of actors to show or convince others of their beliefs regarding artificial turf at the amateur or professional level in football.

A media content analysis was done to study these speech acts in Dutch regional and national newspapers by retrieving these newspapers from the LexisNexis database. By using qualitative and quantitative methods, the concepts of actor groups, evaluation criteria, institutional logics, and beliefs were defined and linked to each other to identify how actor groups differ in terms of the institutional logics and evaluation criteria they connect that determine their beliefs.

The findings of this thesis show that the concepts of institutional logics, evaluation criteria, and actor groups were multilayered and that different actor groups articulated a different set of speech acts. These speech acts could be classified by using institutional logics and evaluation criteria. Over time, six different periods were identified that could be characterized by different speech acts of different actor groups and different developments.

From the results of this analysis, a model was created that identifies the process of sensemaking between different embedded actor groups in a social system whose connection between institutional logics and evaluation criteria steer their beliefs about a technology. These embedded actors can be influenced by endogenous or exogenous events that can make them reconsider the connections between the institutional logics and evaluation criteria that they use. Therefore, this thesis deepens our understanding of the variation in beliefs among actor-groups created by their surrounding normative and cognitive structures and how these structures can change over time, which may explain the fluctuations in the legitimacy of technologies, such as artificial turf.