Institutional Theories of Organizational Communication

History of the Institutional Approach

The institutional school of thought has its roots in the work of the 19th-century German sociologist Max Weber, who compared and contrasted historical modes of organization in China, Rome, and Germany. Weber defined institutions as involuntary membership associations, such as the church or the state, to which individuals were permanently attached by virtue of their birth.

The thread of the institutional school was picked up in the 1940s by Philip Selznick, whose studies of leadership and administration in the Tennessee Valley Authority and local communities showed how organized efforts were constrained by local, stronger forces. Co-optation is the term Selznick used to describe how local community institutions found ways to express themselves in spite of the power and resources of the federal government. In the 1950s, Peter Berger picked up the concept in his work outlining how social change had eroded traditional institutions and left the modern person with a seemingly rudderless existence. Berger drew on the work of the German philosopher Arnold Gehlen, who viewed institutions as a human extension of instincts and was concerned with deinstitutionalization and the consequent drift of modern people away from tradition.

The institutional school of organizational sociology arose in the late 1970s, led by John Meyer and Brian Rowan's observation that much of an organization's structure was a symbolic reflection of external forces such as markets and laws governing hiring practices. They coined the term rational myth to describe an untested shared belief about the rational functioning of organizations. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell supplemented this perspective on organizations with their observation that organizations were constrained by the fieldwide forces of coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism. These are structural parallels (isomorphism) based on force (coercion), imitation (mimetic), and rules and conventions (norms), which resulted in recognizable similarities in fields of organizations. DiMaggio and Powell offered a hook for communication scholars in their recognition of the role of increasing information requirements as a force shaping organizations. Ultimately, the institutional approach to organizational communication emphasizes the role of messages external to organizations as impinging on the intentions and behaviors of actors within organizations.

Distinctiveness of the Institutional Approach

An institutional approach to organizational communication emphasizes several aspects in contrast to micro, intraorganizational approaches. First, an institutional approach directs attention to formal communication, defined as the media of written codes. These include laws at district, regional, local, state, federal, and international levels of jurisdiction. Formal codes also include lawlike policies enacted by nongovernmental associations that establish procedures and unquestioned practices. Although not enforceable as government policies, the codes of professional and business associations have weight that can sometimes be the basis of governmental policies. Formal media also include contracts that stipulate the activities of parties that include corporate entities and their members. Such contracts may be explicit agreements between legal entities, such as those that stipulate products or services to be provided to or delivered according to certain terms and in exchange for certain considerations. The contracts may also stipulate how individuals shall perform services. In both cases it is the legal codes that give organizations [Page 522]their lives well independent of their members. Rule-guided behavior may be taken for granted and may not be available as explicit messages or even as social objects that managers can isolate.

...