| Institutional Theory has responded to early criticism that actors are characterized as passive "cultural dopes" primarily through work on Institutional Entrepreneurship, which implicitly links actors' agency to institutional change or creation. In this dissertation, I decouple change from agency, examining how actors work to maintain existing institutional arrangements that have come under threat. Through inductive, qualitative analysis of the creation of the Securities Exchange Commission in 1934, focusing primarily on the legislative history, I ground my analysis in the speech events of the actors involved in stabilizing the securities markets as an institution after the Crash begun in 1929, identifying different forms of Institutional Guardianship aimed at preserving different aspects of the institution. I then generalize across actors to present an abstracted model of Institutional Guardianship. |
