Institutions and Actorhood as Co-Constitutive and Co-Constructed: The Argument and Areas for Future Research

We argue that in order to overcome the reductionism and essentialism in institutional theory there is a need to acknowledge that institutions and social actors are co-constitutive and co-constructed in processes of communication. We elaborate this argument by drawing on the phenomenological foundation of institutional theory and point to promising areas of future research: the multimodal nature of institutions, the mediated and mediatized character of modern communication, and the contestedness of all social orders and their legitimation.


INTRODUCTION
In our counterpoint, we challenge the two perspectives presented by Voronov and Weber (2020) and Bitektine et al. (2020) by arguing that people do not simply inhabit institutions nor vice versa, but that institutions and social actors are co-constitutive and that they are co-constructed in communication. Recent advances in institutional theory have brought actorhood and agency back to the centre stage (Battilana et al., 2009;Hallett and Ventresca, 2006;Lawrence et al., 2009; but see Hwang et al., 2019). Although these efforts are well appreciated, they entail a danger of leading towards individualism and reductionism that goes against one of the cornerstones of institutional theory: that institutions and actorhood are social constructions that are inextricably tied to each other. Voronov and Weber (2020) and Bitektine et al. (2020) take important steps in discussing the relationship of institutions and actorhood. Voronov and Weber argue that individuals inhabit institutions and that institutions are personified by people. They explicate how this involves the aligning of their sense of self with that expected from a specific actor-role in an institutional order, and how this offers a valuable basis for further analysis. Bitektine and colleagues (2020) turn the metaphor of actors inhabiting institutions around, which allows them to elaborate on how institutions are manifested in actions. We argue that thinking of institutions and social actors as separate entities, as is suggested by 'inhabiting' or 'embedding' metaphors, is inherently problematic. In particular, it runs risk of reification of either actors (on the micro side) or institutions (on the macro side) that prevents institutional analysis from overcoming the micro-macro divide. In addition, both articles also point to the importance of communication, but their analyses fall short in explaining the implications of a strong communicative view on actorhood and institutions. Instead, we promote a view of institutions and actorhood as co-constitutive and co-constructed and highlight the role communication and discourses play in this. That is, institutions involve doing and do not exist without actors. At the same time, people become social actors and act in a socially meaningful way in and through institutions or other socially created spaces, structures or processes.
Our starting point is to focus on communication and discourses. This argument has its roots in the epistemological tradition of social constructionism. In particular, the seminal phenomenological approach to institutions by Berger and Luckmann (1967) places communicative (inter-)action at the heart of the social construction of social reality in the dialectical processes of externalization, objectivation, and internalization. Our understanding of communication is a broad one in that all action that becomes socially meaningful and relevant involves communication in one way or another. Thus, we integrate a social semiotics perspective and emphasize that it is important to focus attention not only on the verbal or textual communication but to embrace a multimodal view (Höllerer et al., 2019). Discourses are in turn meaning structures or patterned ways of representing aspects of the social world (Fairclough, 2003;Foucault, 1977). They construct identities and subject positions for the actors involved (Fairclough, 2003;Phillips et al., 2004) and, thus, enable and constrain the ways in which sense can be made and communicated. They asymmetrically place actors in the institutional realm and, hence, provide a view on power and domination. However, we are clearly not saying, as Bitektine et al. seem to infer, that there are no non-communicative processes or phenomena.
Social construction of reality is largely a communicative construction (Knoblauch, 1995;Luckmann, 2002) and, turning attention to meaning structures, it is a discursive construction (Keller et al., 2005). Our perspective avoids reductionism or essentialism both for institutions and actors. For us, social actorhood does not exist prior to or independent of institutions and discourses, but is inextricably linked with them. People become social actors by assuming, or at times subverting or resisting, the role identities (Berger and Luckmann, 1967) and subject positions (Fairclough, 1998) that place them within (mostly asymmetrical) social relationships. Institutionalization stabilizes these very constructions in time and space. This key point has not been fully fledged out in the recent discussion of agency in institutional theory. We will be making four arguments in this counterpoint. First, rather than advocating a kind of institutionalism that emphasizes agency and strategies of actors at the expense of institutionalized practices and discourses -as do, for example, rhetorical (Green and Li, 2011) or entrepreneurial (Battilana et al., 2009) approaches -we will argue for a 'strong' communicative approach to institutions where institutions provide a structure for communication but are also communicatively constructed. That is, institutions are communicatively created, communicatively enacted or modified, communicatively legitimized and transmitted; they are sedimented in sign systems, and organized in discourses.
Second, we want to update the discursive view that often tends to focus on verbal communication alone. Thus, we will highlight the multiplicity of sign systems that are used to encode, store, and transmit institutions and the multimodality of communication that actors both make use of and are confronted with, exceeding the exchange of words to include, for example, visual and material artefacts or movements of the body. Nowhere is this more salient than in today's mass and social media that more than ever both reproduce and transform prevailing institutions.
Third, there are emerging streams of research focusing on micro-level activities and interaction. Here again, a perspective focusing on such activities as part of institutional orders, discourses, values spheres and instantiations of specific communication genres and discursive practices holds great promise. In particular, our understanding of virtual space, digital media and social media platforms is underdeveloped in this regard.
Fourth, while research on institutional work and institutional entrepreneurship has elucidated a number of ways in which actors are involved in how institutions are created, disrupted or maintained, this body of research would gain from a richer analysis of the discursive struggles involved.

Point #1: Co-constitution of institutions and actors in communication
Recently, this central role of communication has been acknowledged in discursive (Phillips et al., 2004), rhetorical (Green and Li, 2011;Harmon et al., 2015;Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005) and communicative institutionalism (Cornelissen et al., 2015). Nevertheless, we argue that understanding the co-constitution of institutions and actors requires digging deeper into the role of communication. In order to elucidate the role of communication, we need to start by expanding on our epistemological and ontological assumptions.
Our argument builds on the social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann (e.g., Berger and Luckmann, 1967;Schütz, 1970;Schütz and Luckmann, 1973; for an overview see Meyer, 2008;2019). Accordingly, we define institutions as reciprocal typifications of actions and actors. Through such typifications unique activities in an ongoing stream of events executed by individuals become socially meaningful, scripted actions performed by social actors. These typifications are part of the socio-cultural heritage and are shared by the members of a community. Together they form an interlinked 'system' that serves as a scheme of interpretation and scheme of orientation and constitutes 'a universe of discourse' among them (Schutz, 1970, p. 121). Communication is central not only for the transmission of institutions (as acknowledged by Bitektine et al., 2020), but also in the formation, instantiation, replication, transformation, and legitimation of such typifications as well as in the socialization of new members into the community.
In our view, institutions, actors and scripted actions are co-constitutive and form an inseparable triad. These triads or triplets (Jancsary et al., 2017) are building blocks of culture. They are core elements of the socio-historical a priori (Schütz and Luckmann, 1973) or thought style (Fleck, 1980(Fleck, [1935) of a community. In democratic elections, for example, people assume different typified actor roles such as candidates, voters, observes, pollsters, etc.; the practice of voting includes a sequence of activities such as getting registered, proofing identity, making a cross on an anonymized sheet of paper in a polling booths, etc. Of course, the outcome depends on the decision of individuals to run, their qualities as candidates, or on the decision of individuals to vote. And obviously, this whole system is valid only in certain historical and cultural contexts. It is also subject to institutional change (e.g., electronic voting or the role of the mass and social media) and has infiltrated other spheres than the political (this form of decision-making is regarded as legitimate in many situations). The main point here is that institution, actors, and action are only socially meaningful as a 'package'. John Meyer (Meyer et al., 1994, p. 18) and colleagues have a similar view in mind when they write: 'The particular types of actors perceived by self and others and the specific forms their activity takes reflect institutionalized rules of great generality and scope. It is in this sense that social reality -including both social units and socially patterned action -is "socially constructed" (Berger/Luckmann, 1966). Institutionalized rules, located in the legal, social scientific, customary, linguistic, epistemological, and other "cultural" foundations of society, render the relation between actor and action more socially tautological than causal'.
Reciprocity of roles by no means implies equality, to the contrary: Processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization are often explicitly or implicitly contested ones -involving politics of meaning. Thus, institutions are the outcome of struggles and social actors are very rarely symmetrically placed. This has important consequences for who has voice and who can engage in the politics of signification (Meyer and Höllerer, 2010;Slavich et al., 2020;Benford and Snow, 2000), that is involved in communicative attempts to undermine or strengthen institutionalized arrangements.
The co-constitution of institutions, social actors, and scripted actions neither eradicates individuality nor weakens the actor, to the contrary: Institutions are as 'strong' as their typifications are able to guide interpretations and give orientation. This does not mean that all typifications need to be deeply internalized or taken-for-granted (even if the strongest are), but that they need to be available as 'guidelines' for action. Action is never 'automatic' no matter how routinized, repetitive and reproductive its flow seems to be. It is designed by individuals with -although they are born into an always pre-existing socio-historical a priori (Schütz and Luckmann, 1973) -unique biographies of sedimented experiences and has to be subjectively meaningful for them. Thus, in our view, it is important not to conflate people with social actors: Not everything that a person does is social action; not every patterned social action is institutionalized. Obviously, no two enactments of an institution can ever be exactly the same. Private meanings and social meanings need not (and do not) collapse, but without sufficient overlap and reciprocity in the ability to take the perspective of significant and generalized others (Mead, 1965(Mead, [1934) the social order becomes fragile (see also our point #4 below).
In this view, institutions are externalized and objectified meanings. Externalization and objectivation as well as the transmission of objectified meanings are based on shared sign systems. All of them require communication. Communication is so essential for the co-construction of institutions and actors that Luckmann later (2002; reverted 'social construction of reality' into 'communicative construction'. From this perspective, social actors are individuals or collectives (such as organizations) who communicatively enact a certain position within a social fabric. Thus, a focus on the role communication plays opens up a very fruitful perspective to analyse institutionalized orders as discursive formations while at the same not losing sight of the living processes of human activity and signification that are their only ontological base. We have come already a long way, but there is much more to be done conceptually, methodologically, and empirically to elucidate how exactly this co-constitution is achieved and how institutions and agency are co-constructed in and through communication in various kinds of settings and on various levels of analysis.

Point #2: Multimodal co-constitution of institutions and actors
Even where communication is centre stage in institutional analyses, it is mainly actors' verbal communication that receives attention. No doubt, verbal language is the most important sign system and mode of communication. Berger and Luckmann (1967) emphasize this by assigning language a preeminent role as depository of collective sedimentations, in the formation of zones of meaning ('semantic fields ', 1967, p. 55) and in the construction of edifices of legitimation for the institutional order. For them, 'Language provides the fundamental superimposition of logic on the objectivated social world. The edifice of legitimations is built upon language and uses language as its principal instrumentality ' (1967, p. 82).
However, externalization and objectivation use multiple sign systems (Berger and Luckmann, 1967) and discourse comprises more than verbal language (Cooren et al., 2011;Fairclough, 1998;Phillips et al., 2004); zones of meaning are not only circumscribed linguistically, social knowledge is not only stored in and legitimation not only effected only by verbal language but also by other semiotic modes (Höllerer et al., 2019;Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). Each mode has its own specific features and provides its own affordances for actors to use in their communication (see e.g., Meyer et al., 2018, on the affordances of verbal and visual communication).
Thus, our key point is that institutions are multimodal accomplishments (Höllerer et al., 2018a;Jancsary et al., 2018). People are co-constructed as social actors in equally multimodal ways. Verbally, by the categories that label them as particular type, for example, as teacher, priest, mother, CFO, janitor, denote their activities (e.g., lecture) and typify their relationships to other social actors (e.g., students). Social actors have available specific vocabularies that are legitimate for them (Meyer and Rowan, 1977;Mills, 1940) and can use the affordances that verbal language offers to construct their accounts, narratives and rhetoric. However, co-construction is also achieved by a particular placement in physical space and with regard to material artefacts, a dress code, visual appearances, or a particular repertoire of bodily movements that they are expected to perform. Research in institutional theory has recently started to explore the role of verbal registers (Jones and Livne-Tarandach, 2008), emotional registers (Toubiana and Zietsma, 2016), material registers Jones et al., 2012), visual registers  and aesthetic codes (Gagliardi, 2006;Puyou and Quattrone, 2018). Such registers are important communicative elements in the co-constitution of institutions and actors and we need to know much more about how they are linked to institutionalized meaning structures, such as, for example, institutional logics and their configurations (Thornton et al., 2012).
Furthermore, in order to act in a socially meaningful way, people need to be recognized as social actors by their audiences. Actors use the affordances of multiple modes to signal both adherence to and deviation from role prescriptions. In their study on molecular gastronomy, Slavich et al. (2020) show how the chefs used vocal, visual, and material artefacts to communicate their preferred meaning and how this shaped and eventually objectified the category and, at the same time, actor roles and their typical practices. Innovation implies deviance from established conventions and nnovelty can be minor or more radical, but the break with existing social meanings cannot be complete (Eisenman, 2013) -for example, a person that uses none of the registers provided for a medical doctor, that is not the 'speak' typical for a medical doctor, nor of the standard 'props'. nor the specific 'locale' in which doctoral typically operate, will hardly find acceptance for the claim to be one.
To summarize this point: We need a nuanced understanding of how specific modes of communication operate, how they interact, and, most importantly, how they are combined in the co-constitution of institutions and actors, in particular with regard to broader meaning structures, institutional change and the role that skillful individuals can play in it. Hence, while we agree with Bitektine and colleagues (2020) that theorizing individual modes is a necessary start (e.g., Meyer et al., 2018), the objective cannot be to separate the different modes into different theories of communication, but must remain understanding meaning construction in its entire complexity -what has been referred to as comprehensive Höllerer et al., 2019) or 'strong' (Zilber, 2018) multimodality. Methodologically, a focus on the communicative co-constitution of actors and institutions highlights the importance of (multimodal) signs (rather than actors or structures) as units of analysis which can help to overcome the dichotomy between micro-and macro-foundations that currently pulls institutional theory in different directions instead of trying to reconcile the different approaches.

Point #3: Technologization and mediatization of discursive constructions of actorhood and agency
The nucleus of much our imageries of communication and social action is face-to-face exchanges. For example, Goffman's work on interaction rituals (1967)  to interactions where all actors are co-present in time and space; for them 'the most important experience of others takes place in the face-to-face situation, which is the prototypical case of social interaction. All other cases are derivatives of it' (Berger and Luckmann, 1967, p. 28). Not only is this interactional view dominant in the classics of our field, but it still in many ways is the image in contemporary institutional theory -and even a preferred one in new 'communicative institutionalism' (Cornelissen et al., 2015).
We call for an updating of this view when considering institutions, actorhood and agency. With modern communication technology, contemporary social interaction and individuals' everyday experiences are increasingly mediated and mediatized experiences, they are no longer 'here and now', but 'there and then' (Berger and Luckmann, 1967, p. 22) or 'there and now'. Indeed, the social construction of reality is not only communicative, but has become mediated and mediatized (Couldry and Hepp, 2016), and we need to understand better the consequences of this for the role actors and communication technology play in processes of institutionalization and de-institutionalization. Mediation and mediatization are not totally new features, but the speed of technological innovations and the fundamental nature of change through electronic communication and social media have brought new qualities. Today, social interfaces are more and more platform-driven. New communication technologies and digitalization have not only created new institutionalized areas with distinct typifications and genres, but have invaded all areas of social life.
Thus, we have seen the emergence of new, virtual types of social and discursive spaces that have an increasingly important role to play in society. One consequence is that increasingly the place where people are physically present and the social spaces in which they perform their actor roles are not the same -as is usually still the assumption in research on institutions or social interaction. The point is not to imply that 'traditional forms' of interaction would not have equally been structured by institutionalized norms, rules or scripts, but to highlight the fact that technology is never neutral and the technologization and mediatization of communication is creating and institutionalizing new norms, rules and practices that do not only constitute new types of actors and actions, but also re-define, enable or constrain established social (inter-)actions and spaces in novel ways.
Thus, going back to the example of the elections, becoming a successful candidate is nowadays linked to the ability of being able to use social and mass media to one's advantage. This includes new types of actors (e.g., bloggers, social media experts) and patterns of interactions. It stirs up established relationships and hierarchies and redefines communication arenas and their institutionalized components, such as gatekeepers, communication genres, production cycles, carrying capacities. The spatial and temporal structuring devices of the production and consumption of news and, together with this, the role identities and work routines of the actors involved have been fundamentally altered. The same is true for many other areas of social life.
Hence, it is important to focus on the new technologies and the effects of mediatization to better understand how institutions and actorhood are co-constructed in contemporary everyday interaction. We believe that it is specifically the unravelling of the structures of the social and discursive spaces that allows us to be better understand how individuals become meaningful social actors, how they are placed within these spaces, given voice or silenced, and how they may or may not be enabled to skilfully operate in such settings including new opportunities that arise from mediatized communication (e.g., virtual identities). As these new technologies and social spaces are developing, we can also see how through the emergence of novel institution-actor-action triads the rules of the game change and new arenas for interaction are created and institutionalized.

Point #4: Discursive struggles in institutional maintenance and change
This brings us to the fundamental issue of struggles in this co-construction. Coconstruction and co-constitution should not be understood as implying stability or lack of ambiguity. On the contrary, we argue that in plural societies not only are humans required to participate in multiple institutions and assume multiple social actor roles, also the relationship of institutions and social actors is a complex one characterized by struggles. While these struggles may involve a great variety of instances, we will here focus on legitimation as a key part of institutional stability and change.
Legitimacy is a key aspect of institutionalized social orders, and thus the processes of legitimation play a central role in institutional maintenance and change (Deephouse et al., 2017;Patriotta et al., 2011;Suchman, 1995). In Berger and Luckmann's words, legitimation is a second-order objectivation of meaning with the aim of making 'objectively available and subjectively plausible the 'first-order' objectivations that have been institutionalized ' (1967, p. 110). Legitimation as a 'process of "explaining" and justifying ' (1967, p. 111) is a communicative activity par excellence.
Legitimation strategies have been studied in diverse areas such as policy-making (Brown et al., 2012;Hyndman et al., 2018), mergers and acquisitions (Vaara and Tienari, 2002;Vaara et al., 2006), institutional repair work (Herepath and Kitchener, 2016), professionals' defensive identity work (Lefsrud and Meyer, 2012), innovation (Slavich et al., 2020), evoking emotions (Giorgi, 2017;Lefsrud et al., 2019) and many more. We want to highlight that although legitimation strategies may or may not be deliberate and intentional, they are nevertheless a key part of the institutional struggles. These key instances of communication include speakers and audiences that are positioned in discourses in particular ways, and (de-)legitimation struggles often start with contesting such positions and thereby challenge the institution-actor-action triad that is evoked by the contestant.
This becomes particularly obvious when legitimation efforts are based on some kind of authority position or credibility -as in authorization. For instance, Lefsrud and Meyer (2012) have pointed to the crucial issue of credibility in debates about climate change, and how the issue of expertise often is contested. Vaara (2014) has shown how discussions about the Eurozone crises tend to be based on position-based authorizations involving institutionalized authorities and 'voices of the common man'. In a similar way, Höllerer et al. (2018b) show how narratives about the Global Financial Crisis in the business media assign distinct actor roles, such as 'victims ', 'survivors', 'culprits', or 'experts' to individuals and organizations which may either reaffirm or challenge their credibility and/or authority.
Thus, the very basis of legitimation often involves a struggle about agency and voice in a particular social context, a struggle that makes evident how actorhood and institutions are co-constituted. We argue here that although there is considerable prior research in this area, we need more work that highlights the anchoring of legitimation efforts in discursive meaning structures and includes new types of legitimation strategies. Whether and how, for instance, lying or 'bullshit' (Christensen et al., 2019;Frankfurt and Bischoff, 2016) is an option needs to be examined in relation to the respective institutional orders and discursive regimes. Mediatization and multimodality are central components: 'Fake news' are often spread via social media and are facilitated through homophily and tacit testimonials from people who endorse them through replicating or liking. 'Deepfakes' -fake images and videos produced by deep learning algorithms (Chesney and Citron, 2019) -thrive on the multimodal truth claims inherent in 'seeing with one's own eyes' and 'hearing with one's own ears'. New forms of accountability, new ways of judging authenticity and credibility, are required that need to pay attention to the multimodal character of institutions and their legitimation (Höllerer et al., 2019).
In addition, spurred by the increasingly virtual, mediated and mediatized nature of social experiences, these discursive struggles have gained a new quality: It is no longer 'only' divergent framings of issues, the voice and actorhood granted to people, or the hierarchy of credibility in expert disputes that are at stake. In political spheres, for instance in American politics Trump supporters and the liberal elite seem to live in parallel 'worlds' or 'bubbles' where the very meaning of key institutions and the facts-of-thematter are radically different. While for Berger and Luckmann knowledge is distributed unevenly and manifold specialized areas exist, in their thinking, 'the reality of everyday life' is composed of common-sense knowledge the members of a society widely share; it is the paramount reality (1967, p. 21) and provides the 'fabric of meanings without which no society could exist ' (1967, p. 27). 'Hyperbole' or 'alternate realities' challenge the shared and taken-for-granted nature of everyday reality in a fundamental way with yet unknown consequences for society's social fabric. Understanding these increasingly different constructions of reality in different communicative spaces forms a new challenge for institutional theory with implications that may by far exceed the struggles that take place within or between the various institutional orders of society.

CONCLUSION
We do not question here that advancing institutional theory requires taking seriously actorhood and agency. Many recent efforts in research on institutional entrepreneurship and work, emotionality, and especially on rhetorical, discursive and communicative institutionalism have helped us to better understand the role of actors and exercising agency in and around institutions. Our argument is that we should not fall prey to reductionism or individualism nor to reification -or forget the key idea of social construction, namely that human activity eventually produces the social world. At the heart of our view is the social constructionist approach that implies, nothing more or less, that both institutions and actorhood are social constructions, that they are co-constitutive and co-constructed in and through communication and discourse. We believe that precisely by taking this social construction seriously we can better understand how actorhood is neither anterior nor posterior to institutions, but constituted together with institutions. Voronov and Weber (2020) and Bitektine et al. (2020) offer valuable perspectives that help to advance our understanding of actorhood in institutional theory. We have called for a deeper engagement with the co-constitution of institutions and actorhood and with communication as the fundamental building block in this process. For us one thing is crystal clear: Social actorhood and agency are based on communication and rest on the discursive foundations of institutions. This key idea of co-constitution and co-construction is a part of a long trajectory of insightful work, and our paper can be seen as rearticulation of the gist of communicative institutionalism the roots of which lie in Berger and Luckmann's (1967) phenomenological approach.
However, rather than merely repeating the central premises of such communicative institutionalism, we have offered an updated version that resonates with today's (constructed) realities. Thus, we are arguing for a communicative institutionalism, which incorporates multiple interacting sign systems and modern communication technologies and focuses more explicitly on the struggles not only over categories and definitions, or expertise and voice, but much more fundamentally, over truth and the nature of social reality of everyday life. Such enhanced and updated version has a great potential when making sense of institutions in our contemporary mediatized society. In addition, the focus on communication, multimodal discursive resources and their affordances, as well as on the co-constitution of institutions and actors provides an alternative to current approaches that favour either the micro-or the macro-level. Thus, we hope that this article offers the beginnings of an updated research agenda for communicative institutionalism in today's mediatized society.