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This essay raises a concern about the trajectory that new institutionalism has been following during the last decades, namely an emphasis on heterogeneity, change and agentic behavior instead of isomorphism and conformist behavior. This is a crucial issue from the perspective of the philosophy and methodology of science since a theory that admits both change and stability as a norm has less scientific weight then a theory that predicts a prevalence of passivity and isomorphism over change and strategic behavior. The former provides explanations and predictions while the latter does not.

The paper offers an analysis of the nature, characteristics, functions and boundaries of institutional theories in the spirit of philosophy and methodology of science literature.

The power of the former institutional theory developed by Meyer, Rowan, DiMaggio and Powell lies in its generalization, explanation and prediction of observable and unobservable phenomena: as a typical organizational theory that puts forward directional predictions, it explains and predicts the tendency for organizations to become more similar to each other over time and express less strategic and interest-driven behavior, conforming to ever-increasing institutional pressures. A theory of isomorphism makes scientific predictions while its modern advancements do not. Drawing on Popper's idea of the limit of domains of explanation and limited domains of theories we present two propositions that may direct our attention towards the strength or weakness of institutional theories with regard to their explanations of organizational processes and behavior.

The paper draws implications for further theory building in institutional analysis by suggesting the nature of institutional explanations and the place of institutional change in the theoretical apparatus. Once institutional theory explains the tendency of the system towards equilibrium, there is no need to explain the origins and causes of radical change per se. Institutional isomorphism theory explains and predicts how even after radical changes organizational fields will move towards isomorphism, that is, institutional equilibrium. The task is, therefore, not to explain agency and change but to show that it is natural and inevitable processes that organizational field will return to isomorphic dynamics and move towards homogenization no matter how much radical change occurred in this field.

The paper discusses the practical problems with instrumental utility of institutional theories. In order to be useful any theory must clearly delineate its boundaries and offer explanations and predictions and it is only the former 1977/1983 institutional theory that satisfies these requirements while modern advancements merely offer ambiguous theoretical umbrellas that escape empirical tests. For researchers therefore it is important to recognize which theory can be applied in a given limited domain of research and which one has little or no value.

Rigid environments, those with exceptionally strong cultural and traditional barriers to change, present unique challenges for institutional entrepreneurs attempting to initiate change. We utilize such a setting to examine what support mechanisms, both individual and contextual, have been utilized when attempting change in rigid environments. We examine the case of successful and unsuccessful attempts to make golf more inclusive to women. Our research supports the claim that rigid environments require more complex combinations of support mechanisms than other settings, illustrating the importance of institutions in both enabling and constraining change in such settings.

We explore the simultaneous influence of activist organizations and corporations on institutional change. Focusing on protests, campaign contributions, and lobbyists as the strategies used by activist organizations and corporations to influence institutional change, we study the dynamics between movements and counter-movements and their influence on the probability of institutional change. In the context of the US tobacco industry, the results shed light on the effectiveness of these strategies and uncover potential moderators of this relationship. Overall, we demonstrate the simultaneous and asymmetric effects of activist organizations and corporations that use conspicuous and inconspicuous strategies to change institutions.

Many international management scholars have expressed concern about whether societal culture changes so rapidly that research which attempts to represent it has little utility. We address this fundamental concern of international management by providing three theoretical lenses to examine the forces that produce and maintain a society's culture: functional theory, neo-institutional theory and complexity theory. We consider principles of progressive change and problems of social psychology from functional theory, the three pillars and conflicting institutional logics of neo-institutional theory and the ideas of stable equilibrium, oscillations and chaos of dynamic systems from complexity theory. Although these three theoretical lenses sometimes produce conflicting explanations of culture change, they often complement each other. Together, they provide a more realistic picture of the dynamics of the societal cultural milieu of organizations than do cultural representations that favour stability or those that completely discount the utility of any attempt at representing cultural continuity.

Leaders derive their capacity for driving institutional change from their power over organizations, but prior research says little about how leaders with limited power over a dominant intraorganizational group can acquire such a capacity for institutional action. This chapter develops a multilevel model that helps to understand how leaders of public service organizations were able to introduce “contract organization” form of organizational governance that enabled them to outsource the provision of public services to private firms. By doing so, this chapter adds to existing accounts of how power and political processes can give rise to organizational and institutional change.

In this article, my goal is to approach Thomas S. Kuhn's account of scientific development from the perspective of institutional theory. Reading it this way, his main work can be seen as a treatise on endogenous change of an institutional order, occurring under circumstances that do not allow the expectation of such discontinuities when deploying common institutional arguments. To elucidate the underlying mechanisms, I draw on ideology as the set of beliefs incorporated in the system of orientation Kuhn calls paradigm. From his dense description of paradigm shifts, I deduce five propositions on the role of ideology in radical institutional change. Subsequently, I reconcile these propositions with assumptions of institutional theory and identify, in addition to some convergences, points of divergence, which give impetus to extend conceptions of institutional change.

Neo-institutional theory has been criticized for equating the macrolevel with the realm of unconsciously constraining institutions and the microlevel with the realm of actors’ reflexive agency and the origin of change. Considering the co-constitution of the macro and micro, the authors propose that change can be explained through reflexivity at the microlevel and through unconscious processes that affect the macrolevel. This chapter contributes to neo-institutional theory’s microfoundation by distinguishing four types of institutional changes. It will help institutionalists to become more explicit about what cognitive processes and what field conditions are related to what kinds of agency and change.

If donors cannot even agree about what institutions are and do not clearly understand how to promote deliberate institutional change, then what are ideas and assumptions that inform their institutional reforms? In each wave of reforms, donors’ interventions and practices have been grounded in layers of unjustified assumptions – explicit or implicit – on the nature of institutions and institutional change, rather than on robust empirical research and analysis of lessons from previous reforms. These assumptions, despite evidence from previous reforms that they are misguided, have been accumulated and passed on to newcomers in the donor community. These assumptions are referred to here as myths.

This study aims to understand and explain how institutional change occurs at the level of value co-creation practices in service ecosystems. Despite the centrality of collective practices to the service ecosystems perspective, theoretically grounded explanations of how practices change and become institutionalized remain underdeveloped. Applying the theory of routine dynamics, this paper addresses two questions as follows: what does the institutional change mean at the level of value co-creation practices and what processes underlie these changes?

The study develops a conceptual framework that characterizes value co-creation practices as routines involving three aspects, namely, ostensive, performative and artifactual. As a key element in institutional change, the interplay between these informs an account of institutional change processes in service ecosystems.

The proposed conceptual framework specifies the conditions for institutional change in terms of value co-creation routines. First, any such change is seen to be grounded in alignment between changing institutional rules and the ostensive, performative and artifactual aspects of routines. Second, this alignment is seen to emerge through a dialectics of planned and practice-based activities during institutional change. An empirical research agenda is proposed for the analysis of institutional change processes in different service ecosystems.

This conceptual framework extends existing accounts of how service ecosystems change through the contributions of multiple actors at the level of value co-creation practices.

The purpose of this study is to develop a cross-level model of legitimacy-driven institutional change in a Chinese management context; in other words, changes that start out as legitimacy gaining processes by green enterprises but result in a shift in field-level market logic.

A case study using a historical inquiry approach and in-depth interviews has been used to qualitatively analyze the authors’ case in the Chinese photovoltaic industry.

The study proposes a cross-level explanation of institutional change by demonstrating how institutional change can create market forces at a field level that seemingly originate from an increase in the number of legitimated enterprises. This may negatively influence enterprises’ ongoing legitimacy gaining process for their survival at the organizational level in an institutional environment.

The theoretical perspective helps improve descriptions of institutional change and develop a much-needed multi-level understanding of green enterprises in the highly institutionalized green industry. However, this case study may raise the concern of generalizability; thus, an additional survey is necessary.

As organizational field-level market forces are endorsed and transformed in the legitimacy gaining activities of green enterprises, a green enterprise manager should be aware of its negative impact on their legitimacy gaining process and ultimate survival.

The authors’ model proposes a cross-level explanation of institutional change by demonstrating how institutional change can create market forces at a field level that seemingly originate from an increase in the number of legitimated enterprises. Consequently, this may negatively influence the enterprises’ legitimacy gaining process.