Temporal Miscoupling: The Challenges and Consequences of Enacting a Practice in Decline

Samantha Ortiz Casillas () and Ruthanne Huising ()
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Samantha Ortiz Casillas: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Santa Fe, 01210 Mexico City, Mexico
Ruthanne Huising: ESSEC Business School, 95021 Cergy, France

Organization Science, 2025, vol. 36, issue 1, 288-312

Abstract: A practice firmly entrenched in one period can experience decline or even deinstitutionalization in another. However, at the organization level, practice abandonment can be a slow process. Organizations may continue to use a practice that is in decline or out of date, coupling asynchronously with a prior institutional environment. In this paper we develop the concept of temporal miscoupling and examine the challenges of performing a practice under this condition. Drawing on a field study of a labor strike in Canada, we examine the difficulties of inhabiting the practice of striking—picketing a workplace—with eroding political, legal, and cultural support; declining familiarity with the practice; and fading narratives to motivate and justify the practice. We show how strikers developed extemporaneous resources that gave local meaning and form to the practice. These improvised resources supported the practice but distorted historical meanings and performances. Our study expands the analytical repertoire of inhabited institutionalism by problematizing the temporal lag between institutional conditions and organizational practices for the on-the-ground enactment of practices. The extemporaneous resources generated in the context of temporal miscoupling threaten future enactments, indicating an important role for practice enactment in processes of decline and revitalization.

Keywords: inhabited institutionalism; coupling; practice decline; deinstitutionalization; symbolic interactionism; labor strike; union; union members (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:36:y:2025:i:1:p:288-312

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