New Institutionalism

Conceptual Overview

This early work set in motion a line of research that continues to be active and vital, attracting a growing number of organizational researchers worldwide. The initial arguments emphasized the salience of symbolic systems, cultural scripts, and mental models in shaping institutional effects, but were somewhat vague with respect to the mechanisms by which culture and history cemented the social order and constrained organizational choices. Early accounts identified institutional effects as concerned principally with social stability, drawing attention to reproductive processes that function as stable patterns for sequences of activities that were routinely enacted. Institutionalization was defined by Meyer, Boli, and Thomas in 1987 in [Page 976]terms of the processes by which such patterns achieve normative and cognitive fixity and become taken for granted.

Subsequent contributions addressed the mechanisms that buttressed institutionalization. DiMaggio and Powell in 1983 highlighted coercive, normative, and mimetic processes of reproduction. Coercive factors involved political pressures and the force of the state, providing regulatory oversight and control. Normative factors stemmed from the potent influence of the professions and the role of education. Mimetic forces drew on habitual, taken-for-granted responses to circumstances of uncertainty. (In retrospect, they omitted evangelizing efforts, where institutional entrepreneurs champion the adoption or influence of specific practices.) Scott, in 2001, further distinguished among three pillars of the institutional order: regulative, normative, and cultural/cognitive. Regulative elements emphasize rule setting and sanctioning, normative elements contain an evaluative and obligatory dimension, and cultural/cognitive factors involve shared conceptions and frames through which meaning is understood. Each of Scott's pillars offered a different rationale for legitimacy, either by virtue of being legally sanctioned, morally authorized, or culturally supported. These two key treatments of institutional mechanisms underscored that it is critical to distinguish whether an organization complies out of expedience, from a moral obligation, or because its members cannot conceive of alternative ways of acting.

To be sure, organizations and organizational fields are shaped by different combinations of these elements, varying among one another as well as over time. A key analytical task for institutional analysis is to ascertain which factors are important in particular contexts and the extent to which the mechanisms work to reinforce the prevailing social order or undercut one another. In the latter case, cross-cutting institutional pressures are often the circumstances around which profound organizational change can occur, as Friedland and Alford identified in 1991. Organizations are comprised of diverse institutional elements, some rulelike, some normative, others borrowed from the environment. These various features can be at odds with one another, can be nested within one another, or apply differentially to different members of a field. One early research finding by Meyer and Scott in 1983 was that when organizational environments contained multiple institutional influences, organizations developed more internal administrative capacity, and the members of a field were more much differentiated.

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