By , we mean those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product cons… - Paul DiMaggio

Both the old and new approaches share a scepticism toward rational-actor models of organisation, and each views institutionalisation as a state-dependent process that makes organisations less instrumentally rational by limiting the options they can pursue. Both emphasise the relationship between organisations and their environments, and both promise to reveal aspects of reality that are inconsistent with organisations’ formal accounts. Each approach stresses the role of culture in shaping organisational reality.

Although there are as many ‘new institutionalisms’ as there are social science disciplines, this book is about just one of them, the one that has made its mark on organisation theory, especially that branch most closely associated with sociology.

Institutional theory presents a paradox. Institutional analysis is as old as Emile Durkheim's exhortation to study 'social facts as things', yet sufficiently novel to be preceded by new in much of the contemporary literature.