MODELING FOUCAULT: DUALITIES OF POWER IN INSTITUTIONAL FIELDS John W. Mohr, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara Brooke Neely, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara Forthcoming (2009) in Ideology and Organizational Institutionalism, (Volume 27, Research in the Sociology of Organizations) Renate Meyer, Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson, Marc Ventresca, Peter Walgenbach (eds). Abstract The work of Michel Foucault is taken as inspiration for a study of the organizational field of asylums, prisons, orphanages, and other carceral organizations operating in New York City in 1888. Foucault argues that institutional power is organized into dually ordered system of truth and power. Using text data describing the clients and institutional technologies (organizational “power signatures”) of 168 organizations, we apply structural equivalence methods to unpack speech activity, showing that as Foucault suggests, there may be dually ordered sub-domains of truth and power that help define the broader institutional logic of this institutional field. INTRODUCTION Like other colleagues in this volume, we think that institutional theory has much to learn from ideology theory (and vice versa). In this paper we try to bridge these two traditions by mixing together the research methods of the new institutionalists with the research theories of the new leftists, especially those on the left who, during the 1960’s and 70’s, developed sophisticated conceptualizations of hegemonic forms of culture. We focus in this paper on Michel Foucault who we see as a pivotal figure in the history of ideology theory. Foucault rigorously engaged Marxists and structuralists alike, resisting the conventional paths of both programs and producing, in the end, a strikingly original, essentially post-materialist theorization of institutions as constituted through dually ordered systems of truth and power. We find that the issues Foucault takes up resonate surprisingly well with many scholarly conundrums that occupy contemporary