Abstract
How does a daring idea like the utopia of affordable housing weather a century of change? The persistence of institutions—shared meanings that shape individual actions—is a central feature of organizational life. Recent scholarship stresses that institutions endure not because they are static but because they evolve as individuals maintain them. However, the search for micro-foundations has sidelined the macro-conditions of such dynamic persistence. Building on structural studies of meaning, we propose and illustrate a new, complementary theory-method package that can reveal how ideas are embedded and evolve in meaning structures. Dynamic modeling of discourse (DMD) tracks changing cultural meanings over time, doing justice to the assumption that institutional persistence can result from fluid changes in how institutions are instantiated as observable patterns of interactions at any given time. We develop three diagnostic measures for tracking both institutions and their instantiations in large corpora. Applying DMD to a 140-year corpus of reports of the City of Vienna, Austria, we show that the persistence of public housing as an institution was possible due to periodically changing instantiations—such as whether public housing policies subsidize landlords or tenants—with shifting affiliations to broader meanings. Our paper unlocks methodological doors to a dynamic, contextual approach to studying institutions that complements archival and ethnographic methods. It allows researchers to test theory-led expectations about persistence and provides a mixed-methods tool for historical research on organizations. We conclude with implications for structural studies of meaning, persistence, and change.