The heart of institutions: Emotional competence and institutional actorhood

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