Institutions frame social life, yet the power to institute is unequally distributed among social positions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the daily struggles undertaken by workers, engineers and management at a glass containers plant over the (de-)institution of production complexity, this article provides a discussion of the processes and conditions that co-shape each agent’s ability to fully institute – i.e. to enforce as public and formally recognised – a production-related idea or rule across the factory’s uneven social fabric. It is argued that ambiguous, inequality-driven under-instituting processes may occur and perform key roles in complex,hierarchical production organisations.

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(De-)instituting processes,Under-institution,Organisation,Industrial labour,Automatic production

• Anthropology - Social Sciences