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

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as afield, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes—coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

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.