Attempting to strategically transform situations of institutional complexity through a purposive revision of the pluralism involved is something considered for now as a non- realistic option. In institutional literature, the few studies that focused on the practical doing of people in pluralistic organizations suggest that institutional change is there merely driven by mundane improvisations rather than by a reflexive and deliberate strategic work. I suggest that these first results are not entirely acceptable and I aim to investigate the conditions required to engage in strategic institutional work within pluralistic organizations. More specifically, this paper focuses on the obstacles that can prevent such organizations from gaining the necessary reflexive awareness to do so. In this paper, I will firstly suggest a new pragmatist framework to investigate the logical structure of the process of inquiry toward institutional revision. Since responses to complexity are known to be structured by the ways conflicting perspectives are given voice to in organizations, it is of the utmost importance to be able to investigate the discursive practices involved in transformative attempts from such a logical perspective in order not to reduce such practices hem to dynamics of power or legitimacy. Secondly, I shall theorize the failure case of the institutional strategy of A French Mutual Insurance Company. The first phase of the investigation (2012-2014) consisted in direct observations of the board of directors, committees and general meetings. These observations were articulated throughout with a discursive analysis of internal documents (1980-2014) and strategic documents (2007-2014). Secondly (2014-2015) and starting from a set of initial propositions, interviews were conducted in four regional units and at the national headquarters of AFMIC. In the case studied, a circular reasoning prevented the transformative attempt because of three obstacles regarding the process of inquiry toward institutional change. Firstly, the substantialist conception of organizational values led to an abstract character of strategic thinking which prevented actors from being able to articulate the contradictions experienced in practice, which is a necessary step to endogenous institutional change. Secondly, the organizational pluralism made of seven political perspectives was not discursively constructed as serving organizational action but solely as being an effect of the representative structure of the policyholders. Because of this, people were unable to deviate from their initial positions for being able to continuously reconstruct the organizational pluralism to take emerging trends into account. Thirdly, the idealistic conception of consensus decision-making in the organization led to the construction of fundamentally decontextualized meanings which prevented the settlement of normative conflict from being bounded upstream by the practical problems faced in the situations and, downstream, by the effective possible means for action. Because of this, discussions did not end up to a decision to modify existing arrangements but ultimately led to dichotomizing the logics involved and reinforced the abstract character of strategic discourses. This circular reasoning prevented actors from being able to gain the reflexive awareness necessary for deliberately revising their institutional arrangements.
