LAUSR

A long silence. Suddenly: a flash, a rumble, a deluge. Does the Lok downpour revive institutional theory (IT) or swamp it? I am grateful to Professor Lok for his thoughtful, careful response to my intervention. (Actually, my debt is less to “Professor Lok” than to “Jaco” [“he who supplants”], my erstwhile PhD student who I count as a friend—up until now, at least!). I immediately apologize for this indiscrete deviation from the scholarly mystique of dispassionate impersonality. In a gesture of entente, requiring the loose talk of critical analysis to be restrained by the buttoned-up norms of IT, I will avoid any further improper, overly transparent declarations. In many ways, Professor Lok’s ‘Why (and How) Institutional Theory Can Be Critical’ expresses my core argument more cogently and forcefully than I did. He also gently chides me for claiming and perpetuating the distinctive, emancipatory monopoly of critical analysis that he associates with its ‘continued marginalization’ (all single quotes are taken from Lok, 2017). I am urged to ‘resist’ and ‘traverse’ the fantasy of ‘wholeness’ by contributing to ‘creat[ing] the conditions of possibility for a more productive symbiotic relationship between (small ‘c’) critical IT and (big ‘C’) Critical [T]heory.’ My initial response is to say that I eagerly await the development of this ‘symbiotic relationship’ as I strain to discern signs of such a mutation and, relatedly, struggle to detect evidence of such ‘productiveness’ among exponents of the (North American) Hydra-like variant of IT that is the focus of our exchange. In what follows, I offer a response to Professor Lok’s counter-proposition—that IT can be critical. I broadly follow the sequence of his essay but adopt a streamlined format, and keeping references to a bare minimum, to make the most of the available space.