Based on a study of Israeli high-tech conferences after the 2000 crisis, Tammar examines how institutional maintenance is carried out at the organizational field level. Moving from grandiose to disconsolate to balanced conceptions of time and place, conference participants engaged in a collective effort to reestablish their understanding of themselves and their industry. This process was grounded in intense emotions, resembling grief – from denial to anger and negotiation, to depression, and finally acceptance. The field material suggests that maintenance involves working through the field’s identity; it relates to fundamental tensions in the symbolic institutional order; and these issues are delicately re-aligned along time, involving cognitive, emotional, and material dimensions at the intersection of inner- and outer-field pressures.
