Institutional work that actors engage in as they attempt to disrupt the existing institutional order generally involves the formulation of a critique, through which these actors justify the necessity of altering specific institutional arrangements. However, such critical work is prone to either be discarded as unrealistic or appropriated by actors defending the institutional order. Such institutional pressures may discourage change actors from pursuing their efforts to alter the institutional order in the way they initially intended. We examine the discursive strategies that actors can use to immunize their critical work to these pressures, a dimension of institutional work that has yet to be explored in due depth. To do so, we study the “extreme case” of a social movement whose critique is radically subversive and yet very persistent: the Swiss biodynamic movement, an esoteric agriculture movement that for nearly a century has criticized the foundations of modern farming methods. Through a discourse-historical analysis of a large corpus of texts, we find that the biodynamists’ critique mediates between three central paradoxes: disapproval/endorsement, antagonism/conciliation, and permanence/transience. We theorize that these paradoxes result from paradoxical dangers that threaten any critical endeavor: marginalization and appropriation. We furthermore conjecture that change agents who deploy discursive strategies that dialectically transcend these paradoxes are likely to increase the immunity of their critical work.
