Based on a study of Israeli high-tech conferences after the 2000 crisis, I examine how institutional maintenance is carried out at the organizational field level. Moving from grandiose to disconsolate to balanced conceptions of time and place, conference participants engaged in a collective effort to reestablish their understanding of themselves and their industry. This process was grounded in intense emotions, resembling grief – from denial to anger and negotiation, to depression, and finally acceptance. The field material suggests that maintenance involves working through the field’s identity; It relates to fundamental tensions in the symbolic institutional order; And these issues are delicately re-aligned along time, involving cognitive, emotional, and material dimensions at the intersection of inner- and outer-field pressures.