Sociology has a paradigm called “institutionalism,” which refers to the study of the rules and practices that govern individuals and organizations. In the 1990s, institutionalism was perhaps the dominant way that people pursued organizational sociology. That version was defined by folks like Art Stinchcombe, Paul DiMaggio, Woody Powell, Pam Tolbert, Lynn Zucker, Francisco Ramirez, Dick Scott, and John Meyer.
This “new” institutionalism (~1965-present) has a straightforward formula. First, you point out that organizations live in cultural and political environments. People and organizations must respond to this environment and it is the job for the researcher to figure out what happens. Do organizations obey the public? Or do they play this elaborate myth and ceremony game where they pretend to obey?
A funny thing happened as this all played out. Institutionalism went from a theory with some pretty sharp hypothesis to a paradigm that included all hypotheses. It got watered down in some profound ways. It’s over.
Already, by the time of the 1983, we saw some disjunction. The classic iron cage argument about tight environmental controls is wildly incompatible with Meyer and Rowan’s 1977 claim that orgs do actually play games with regulators. Then, we saw a series of attacks in the 1990s on institutionalism as a theory of cultural dopes. Then, institutionalism gave in to critics again by (a) arguing that people could manipulate institutions (“institutional entrepreneurship”) or (b) focusing on social movements and other disruptors of institutions.
The 2010s saw two more major erosions of institutional theory. First, a bunch of people, including myself, focused on the ways that people could manipulate institutions (“institutional work”). Second, people focused on the ways that people gave meaning and legibility to institutions in particular contexts (“inhabited institutionalism”).
In 2023, we now have a theory where anybody can do anything. Actors can be constrained or they can innovate. You can dodge the public or obey it. You can learn from the organizational environment or “inhabit” the institution. You can work with the system or mobilize against your boss.
I don’t see this as a failure of institutional theory. Rather, I see it as a misunderstanding of what institutionalism is at its core. Originally, institutionalism was seen as a novel rejection of organizational theories that linked org structure with efficiency, profits, and technology. Institutionalism was an important reminder that organizations are run by people who have values and care about perceptions and legitimacy.
This cultural turn is less of series of empirical predictions and more of a general framework for thinking about collective behavior. The strength of institutionalism is not any specific prediction but understanding how bureaucracies are embedded in larger societies. It’s about the embedding of work in larger structures. Then, of course, you can have wildly different hypotheses about how that plays out.
In a sense, institutionalism is dead as set of strong empirical claims. It is not dead as an exploration of a social landscape. And that’s a good thing.
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