The search for alternatives to internal combustion: instantiation mechanisms of institutional logics among scientists and engineers

Abstract

While much of the institutional research has suggested and empirically demonstrated that institutional logics shape cognitive and behavioural patterns of actors, what still remains unclear is how scientists and engineers instantiate the conceptual elements of institutional logics in the context of the emergence of new technologies. We demonstrate the mechanisms through which scientists and engineers use the conceptual elements of multiple institutional logics in response to changes in external socio-economic and political conditions to justify their own research activities. Our context is the forty-year search for alternatives to internal combustion within a leading international conference on electric and hybrid electric vehicles (EVS). Combining Computer-Aided Text Analysis (CATA) and inductive methods, we identify four distinct instantiation mechanisms - contextualising, spanning, appropriating, and conflating - that scientists and engineers searching for a successful alternative to internal combustion used to instantiate the institutional logics within which they were embedded.