Why Institutional Theory Cannot Be Critical (original) (raw)
Related papers
Making Institutional Theory More Critical
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2014
Institutional theory has made tremendous gains in recent years. However, while it has borrowed concepts and insights from more critical perspectives, it has resisted the import of a more critical outlook. This has meant that institutional theory has shied away from identifying and examining more problematic uses of power. Consequently, institutional understandings of how power operates continue to fall short of the theory's full potential.
International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies, 2008
Institutional theory, a building block of today’s organization studies, drawing from sociology, social psychology, political science, and economics, offers explanations for social order, social action and cultural persistence. It does it with regard both to the stability of social systems at various levels (i.e. organization, field, society, world), and to the effects of institutional processes in situations of change or of conflicting legal, cultural or normative jurisdictions. Institutional theory highlights the role of rules, norms, and typifications (cultural beliefs and scripts) in constraining and empowering social action and giving meaning to social life. Earlier contributions emphasized the stabilizing role of institutions through the constitution of structures, organizational forms, fields and social actors’ identities. More recent contributions draw attention to the concurrent role of institutions in situations of change, where interests, agency and power play their own role in reaching stability or domination.
Different Paths for Institutional Theory: Foundational Dichotomies and Theoretical Framing
It is common for scholars to describe institutions as "rules of the game." This description entails a separation between a society and its rules. Social change thus results as societies amend their framing rules. This paper explores that common treatment of institutions as rules with a treatment wherein societies and institutions as images of one another. If there were no rules governing interactions among some set of people, you would have a mass of people but that mass would not constitute what we recognize as society. This simple distinction between institutions as rules by which a society is governed and institutions as society itself creates divergent paths for institutional theory, which this paper explores.
The Old Institutionalism Meets the New Institutionalism
Sociological Perspectives, 2011
As key socio-cultural building blocks of human societies, institutions are distinct from organizations and, hence, are central to sociological inquiry. In recent decades, however, institutional analysis has increasingly moved toward the analysis of organizations, while treating “institutions” as the environments or fields of organizations. While the insights offered by contemporary organizational theorists have provided important keys to understanding how organizations, especially economic organizations, adapt to pressures within their environments, the authors argue that the Old Institutionalisms of functional theorizing has much to offer the New Institutionalisms. In this article, the Old Institutionalisms are revisited to construct a precise definition of institutions as well as posit a robust theory of institutional dynamics, a theory which supplements contemporary organizational analysis. Four dynamics stand out: the process of institutional autonomy, the intersection of strati...
A Loss of Power in Institutional Theory
Journal of Management Inquiry
Institutional theory has made tremendous gains in recent years. However, while it has borrowed concepts and insights from more critical perspectives, it has resisted the import of a more critical outlook. This has meant that institutional theory has shied away from identifying and examining more problematic uses of power. Consequently, institutional understandings of how power operates continue to fall short of the theory’s full potential.
This chapter is about how and why institutions matter in political life. More specifically, it is about how the behaviour of political actors is shaped and conditioned by the institutional contexts in which they operate. This perspective and question define the central concerns of the so-called 'new institutionalism' in political analysis.
Hasn’t Institutional Theory Always Been Critical?!
Organization Theory
To the provocations by Munir (in this issue) and others who call on (neo)institutional theory to become more critical, I rebut by asking: Hasn’t institutional theory always been critical?! In response to Munir, I unpack the definition of the term ‘critical’, discussing the many meanings poured into the term, in order to assert that institutional theory is, and has always been, staunchly critical – as is evident by its role in driving the paradigmatic shift in the study of organization, organizations and organizing, and in transforming the field of organization studies as a whole.