The Heart of Institutions: Emotional Competence and Institutional Actorhood

We develop the concept of emotional competence, which refers to the ability to experience and display emotions that are deemed appropriate for an actor role in an institutional order. Emotional competence reveals a more expansive view of emotions in institutional theory, where emotions are central to the constitution of people as competent actors and lend reality and passionate identification to institutions. We distinguish two facets of emotional competence—private, which is needed to engage in self-regulation, and public, which is needed to elicit other-authorization—and two criteria for assessing emotional competence—the deemed naturalness and authenticity of emotions within an institutional order. These distinctions delineate four processes through which emotional competence ties personal experience and social performance to fundamental institutional ideals, the institution’s ethos. We discuss theoretical and methodological implications of this model for researching institutional processes.