סמינר בהתנהגות ארגונית

תמר זילבר,האוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים

Space is central to the work of institutions. It lies at the heart of the two fundamental metaphors that govern our understanding of institutionalization as the travel of ideas –diffusion and translation. Yet, as most studies take a macro level approach, we can appreciate broad patterns as ideas travel across spatial borders, but don't have a comparable understanding of the detailed dynamics that account for them. Based on an ethnographic study of two Israeli high-tech conferences held in 2005, one in Tel  Aviv Israel and the other in Santa Clara, CA USA, I examine how location takes part in the configuration of the field. Field-level conferences are one arena in which field-level collective identity is negotiated, touching upon fundamental tensions in the symbolic institutional order. Within Israeli high-tech, one such tension is the very location of the field. Thus, institutional work towards field-level collective identity is different in different locations, given various audiences and contexts, and in light of divergent interrelations between the global and the local.