purportedly represents a distinctive approach to the study of social, economic, and political phenomena; yet it is often easier to gain agreement abo… - Paul DiMaggio

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.

Organizations compete not just for resources and customers, but for political power and institutional legitimacy, for social as well as economic fitness.

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.