Summary
Contents
Subject index
"It is now three decades since the "new"institutionalism burst on the intellectual scene and a most appropriate time to take stock of missteps, accomplishments, and future directions. This theoretical thrust has revitalized many scholarly arenas across the social sciences, but none more so then organization studies. Royston Greenwood and his co-editors have assembled a stellar stable of scholars who collectively provide a comprehensive assessment if this vibrant field."—W. Richard Scott, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University"Institutional theory has become the dominant conversation in organization theory. In this volume many of its leading exponents show where it is going, what it can do and how it engages with related fields."—Stewart Clegg, Aston Business School and University of Technology, Sydney"This Handbook is "must reading" for any organization and management scholar. It provides a timely and comprehensive update of institutional theory and its relationships with other organization theories."—Andrew H. Van de Ven, Vernon Heath Professor of Organizational Innovation and Change, Carlson School of Management, University of MinnesotaInstitutional theory lies at the heart of organizational theory, yet until now, no book has successfully taken stock of this important and wide ranging theoretical perspective. With insight and clarity, the editors of this handbook have collected and arranged papers so the readers are provided with a map of the field and pointed in the direction of new and emerging themes. The academics who have contributed to this handbook are respected internationally and represent a cross section of expert organization theorists, sociologists and political scientists. Chapters are a rich mix of theory, how to conduct institutional organizational analysis and empirical work.
Taking Social Construction Seriously: Extending the Discursive Approach in Institutional Theory
Taking Social Construction Seriously: Extending the Discursive Approach in Institutional Theory
Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put differently, any such typification is an institution.
Early work in institutional theory1 focused explicitly on the socially constructed nature of institutions, arguing that they arise out of the meaningful interactions of actors and shape behaviour by conditioning cognition. Meyer and Rowan (1977: 341), for example, argue that ‘[institutionalization involves the processes by which social processes, obligations, or actualities, come to take on a rulelike status in social thought and action’. In this definition, institutions are cognitive structures and institutionalization is the process whereby institutions are constructed in social interaction through the production of what Berger and Luckmann (1967: 54) call ‘shared typifications’. This view of institutions drove much of the early work in new institutional theory (e.g., Tolbert & Zucker, 1983) as researchers worked to understand the effects of cognitive institutions on individuals and organizations.
In many ways, it is this cognitive focus that provides the distinctiveness of institutional theory. According to DiMaggio and Powell (1991), new institutional theory is characterized by ‘a scepticism toward rational-actor models of organization’ (1991: 12) which are replaced by ‘an alternative theory of individual action, which stresses the unreflective, routine, taken-for-granted nature of most human behaviour and views interests and actors as themselves constituted by institutions’ (1991: 14). By moving beyond arguments regarding rational action in contexts characterized by various forms of resource dependency, institutional theory provides explanations of patterns of behaviour that make little sense from other perspectives. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, institutional theory goes well beyond the remit of these theories in examining the sources of the interests and identities that determine the preferences which frame rational action in the first place.
Yet the emphasis of this early work, and the source of much of the distinctiveness of institutional theory, has been diluted despite the retention of a general interest in what Douglas (1986: 11) calls the ‘social basis of cognition’. Rather than clearly focusing on cognitive institutions and continuing to develop this unique contribution, the conceptualization of an institution has blurred and, as a result, significant analytical power has been lost. In fact, from the perspective of much of recent institutionalism, institutions are seemingly most recognizable by their effects and a number of mechanisms that produce isomorphism have been lumped together to form the focus of institutional analysis. However, such an all-encompassing approach neglects critical theoretical and philosophical distinctions among the different mechanisms that lead to isomorphism. For example, an organizational form that is widely adopted in order to gain access to a government grant is seen as equally the result of an institution as an organizational form that is adopted due to its taken-for-granted-ness in a field. Yet, the first case is simply a rational and conscious decision by managers to allow their organizations access to resources that they value. Clearly not the sort of taken-for-grantedness originally associated with institutions.
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