Look what's back! Institutional complexity, reversibility and the knotting of logics

Through a comparative historical study of community pharmacy in the UK, Italy, Sweden and the USA, we examine what happens to institutional arrangements designed to resolve ongoing conflicts between institutional logics over extended periods of time. We find that institutional arrangements can reflect the heterogeneity of multiple logics without resulting in hybridization or dominance. Because logics remain active, similar conflicts can reappear multiple times. We find that the durability of the configurations of competing logics reflects the characteristics of the polities in which fields are embedded. The dominance of any societal institutional order leads to more stable field level arrangements. We suggest that the metaphor of institutional knots and the related image of institutional knotting are useful to capture aspects of this dynamic and to foreground the discursive and material work which allows multiple logics to co-exist in local arrangements with variable durability.