Institutional pluralism is an intriguing phenomenon for institutional scholars. How does the balance among logics evolve within a field and what kind of trajectories may a set of logics experience over a long term period remain unclear. Especially, extant literature tends too often to downplay institutional complexity by focusing on two dominant logics and ignore modes of interaction among logics others than competition. In order to address these issues, we apply to the field of workplace safety in the construction industry a rather new methodology for measuring institutional logics. We indeed make use of a descendant hierarchical classification model for analyzing articles published in a leading French trade journal over more than a century. Our preliminary results, which are based on a pilot study of 649 articles, identify six institutional logics at work within the field, thus underlining the need for neo-institutionalist research to direct its attention toward pools of logics rather than two of them. Additionally, they tend to provide support to the notion of sedimentation, which suggests that institutional logics may succeed one another in gradual waves, i.e. that newly dominant logics cohabite with weakened but persistent older logics.
