reflections on institutional theories of...

Reflections on InstitutionalTheories of Organizations

John W. Meyer

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Contemporary institutional theorizing in thefield of organizations dates back thirty-oddyears. This particularly describes what arecalled new or neo-institutionalisms. Theseterms evoke contrasts with earlier theories ofthe embeddedness of organizations in socialand cultural contexts, now retrospectivelycalled the ‘old institutionalism’ (Hirsch &Lounsbury, 1997; Stinchcombe, 1997). Theywent through a period of inattention, so thatwhen institutional thinking came back inforce after the 1960s, it seemed quite new.

Institutional theories, as they emerged inthe 1970s, received much attention in thefield, along with other lines of thoughtemphasizing the dependence of modernorganizations on their environments. Perhapssurprisingly, they continue to receive atten-tion, and seem to retain substantial measuresof vigor. One secondary aim, here, is toexplain why.

I primarily review the status and prospectsof the principal themes of institutional theory.I concentrate on sociological institutionalism,as capturing core ideas in their most dramaticform, rather than the limited argumentsemphasized in economics or political science.

And within sociological versions, I concen-trate on phenomenological theories. Thesereflect my own interests, are continuing lociof research creativity, and contrast mostsharply with other lines of social scientifictheorizing about organizations. In practice,‘organizations’ tends to be both a researchfield, and a realist ideology about modernsociety: phenomenological thinking stepsback from that commitment, and is useful inanalyzing, for example, why so much formalorganization exists in the modern world(Drori, Meyer,& Hwang, 2006).

BACKGROUND

Throughout most of the post-Enlightenmenthistory of the social sciences, notions thathuman activity is highly embedded in institu-tional contexts were central. Individuals wereseen as creatures of habit (Camic, 1986),groups as controlled by customs (famously,Bagehot’s cake of custom or Spencer’s folk-ways and mores), and societies as organizedaround culture.

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The nature of the institutions and their con-trols over activity, in social scientific thinking,was never clear and consensual. Theoriesranged from economic to political to religious. And they variously emphasizedmore cultural forms of control or more organizational ones. Then, as now, anythingbeyond the behavior of the people under studycould be seen as representing a controllinginstitutionalized pattern (a strikingly clear def-initional discussion is in Jepperson, 1991).

Over the long history of social scientificthinking through the mid-twentieth century,institutional theories grew and improved.Sophisticated syntheses like Parsons’ were pro-duced, with many variations on broad evolu-tionary schemes and typologies, as highModernity progressed. But they came intodialectical conflict with another aspect of thesame Modernity. As ‘men’came to believe theyunderstood the institutional bases of humanactivity, they also came to believe they couldrise above, and control, them – no longer sub-ject to, but playing the parts of, the now-deadcultural gods. Embeddedness in culture andhistory was a property of the superstitious past,over which the Moderns had triumphed. Soinstitutional thinking could survive in anthro-pology and about primitive societies (includingearlier Western history), but only tenuously inthe social sciences of Modernity (Meyer, 1988).

In short, the old institutionalisms weredriven into marginality by the rise of (oftenpolicy-oriented and scientistic – see Toulmin,1990) conceptions of social life as made upof purposive, bounded, fairly rational, andrather free actors. Society was discovered,headed by the sovereign state as its centralactor, freed by the constitution of Westphalia.The human person as individual actor wasdiscovered, unleashed by markets, democ-racy, property rights, and religious freedom.And rationalized social life, made up ofbureaucracies essentially delegated from thestate (as in Weber or Fayol) or associationsbuilt up by individual actors (as in Barnard),was discovered and celebrated.

In the new schemes, built around notionsof society as made up of empowered actors,

older institutional theories tended to crum-ble. Studies of persons no longer attended tonotions of habits (Camic, 1986), and con-cepts of culture and custom as driving forcesreceded. If the old institutions remained, theyremained as dispositional properties of theactors involved – tastes and values of individ-uals, core values of states and societies.

The key concept in the new system was thenotion of the ‘actor’ – variously, individualpersons, national states, and the organiza-tions created by persons and states. Societywas produced by these powerful entities. Itwas made up exclusively of actors, and eventhe rapidly disappearing peasants could beanalyzed as individual actors. Social changewas a product of such actors: thus the contin-uing use of an individualistic version ofWeber’s Protestant Ethic thesis as a prooftext for proper social analysis (e.g., Coleman,1986; Jepperson & Meyer, 2007). And allthis had a normative cast – social institutionsthat restricted the development and choicesof real social actors could be seen as ineffi-cient at the least, and perhaps as destructiveof freedom and progress.

The new models remain in force, and it isnow conventional in social science publica-tions to refer to ‘actors’ rather than people andgroups. But over time there have been doubtsabout models of society and the world asmade up of interested actors, and only ofactors. Too many studies of individual personsshowed astounding levels of embedded non-actorhood in what were supposed to be politi-cal, economic, and cultural choices. A whole literature on organization in actualsocial life showed the overwhelming impor-tance of uncertainty in organizational(non)decisions (Cyert & March, 1992) and ofthe informal resolutions involved in practice(Dalton, 1959; and many others): formalisticor technicist analyses (e.g. Perrow, 1970; Blau& Shoenherr, 1971) seemed much too limited.And notions of rational sovereign nation-stateaction as driving development did not stand upagainst the realities of chaotic Third Worldnation-states, and the surrealities of the Firstand Second Worlds’ Cold War.

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So since the 1970s, in every social sciencefield except anthropology (where older institu-tionalisms had never receded), ‘new’ institu-tionalist theorizing appeared, with modelsagain envisioning people and groups asembedded in larger structures and cultures ofone sort or another Jepperson 2002 for a review.There have been as many different varieties asin the ‘old’ institutionalisms, but they all havehad one main element in common. They allhave come to terms with one or another ver-sion of the idea that society is made up of inter-ested purposive, and often rational actors.

If the old institutionalisms had seen peopleand groups as rather naturally embedded inbroad cultural and structural contexts, the newinstitutionalisms incorporate a tension in theconceptualized actor–environment relation.This is often seen as a stress between structure(i.e., the environment) and agency or actorhood(see e.g., Giddens, 1984; or Sewell, 1992), inreplication of the debates in the old institution-alism about free will and determinism.

The new institutionalisms see the socialenvironment as affecting the behaviors andpractices and ideas of people and groups nowconceived as bounded, purposive and sover-eign actors. Many different lines of thoughtare involved, varying in their conception ofwhat an actor is, and what properties ofwhich environments are relevant.

TYPES OF INSTITUTIONAL THEORY

Most institutional theories see local actors –whether individuals, organizations, ornational states – as affected by institutionsbuilt up in much wider environments.Individuals and organizations are affected bysocietal institutions, and national-states by aworld society. In this chapter, we focus onthese lines of theory.

But it can be noted that some other lines ofthought treat modern actors as affected by theinstitutionalization built into their own histo-ries. Older ideas about habit, custom, and cul-ture are resurrected as theories of what is now

called ‘path dependence.’ So that individualsor organizations, faced with a new problem,use their accustomed older solutions whetheror not these ever worked or can reasonably beexpected to work (see the various essays byMarch and his colleagues, 1988).

In the present essay, we leave aside thisline of institutional theory, and concentrateonly on lines of argument locating institu-tionalized forces in wider environments thanthe history of the actor itself. These tend tofall on a broad continuum ranging from morerealist theories to more phenomenologicalones. After reviewing this range of argu-ments, we turn to focus more intensively onthe phenomenological side of the spectrum,which is of special interest here, the locus ofthe most distinctive advances in the field, andan important contribution to a field whichtends to merge theory and realist ideology inways that are often unexciting.

Realist institutionalisms

Some institutionalist lines of thought, arisingparticularly in economics and political sci-ence, retain very strong notions of society asmade up of bounded, purposive, sovereign,and rational actors. In economics, thesemight be individuals or organizations, oper-ating in market-like environments. In politi-cal science, they might be sovereignnational-states operating in an almost anar-chic environment. Institutionalism, in suchschemes, involves the idea that some funda-mental institutional principle must be inplace before systems of such actors caneffectively operate. The classic core principlerequired in economic versions is propertyrights (North & Thomas, 1973). In interna-tional relations theory it is the principle ofnation-state sovereignty (Krasner, 1999).

Once the core principle is in place, sys-tems of actors freed from further institutionalinfluences are thought to function stably andeffectively over time. Indeed, further institu-tional interventions in the market or interna-tional polity are thought, in extreme versions

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of these traditions, to be counter-productivedisturbances of rationality. There is a ten-dency to see the situation as one of punctu-ated equilibrium. Collective history operatesbriefly, creating the crucial change, and thenstable equilibria ensue. So there are accountsof the unique circumstances producing theconstruction of property rights in Westernhistory. And there are discussions of the sim-ilarly unique circumstances producing themagic of Westphalia, thought to undergirdthe rise to world dominance of the Westernnation-state system.

Extreme realist institutionalism, thus,retains very strong assumptions about thecapacities of actors, and very limited picturesof the institutional environment. The envi-ronment really contains only one narrowinstitutional rule – and in most versions it isa rule created by the actors themselves,whose existence and character are seen asentirely prior to the institutional regime.

Over time, realist institutionalism hastended to become a good deal less extreme,and more realistic (see e.g., North, 1981). Toproperty rights, the economists add a variety ofother important institutions needed to make themodern system go (Jepperson & Meyer, 2007).A variety of institutions must to reproduce andsocialize the population, for instance, and aknowledge system is required to encouragetechnical improvements (Mokyr, 1992). Andperhaps even some cultural supports for entre-preneurship are needed (Landes, 1998).Similarly, realist political scientists add institu-tional elements necessary to make the worldpolitical system work: guarantees of agree-ments, and trust, for example. In political sci-ence realism, as well as in economics,however, the institutions thought to be requiredare also mainly thought to be products of theinterested activity of the basic actors involved.

Compromises with realism

Moving away from more extreme realistthinking, much modern social science is builtup around more complex pictures of

the institutional context of actorhood, and aconception of the modern actor as rather morepenetrable. The institutions have cultural ordiscursive dimensions, and also structural ororganizational ones. The key term describinginstitutionalized culture, here, is ‘norm,’ espe-cially common in political science (see forextended examples, Katzenstein, 1996). Thekey notions of institutionalized organization,especially utilized in sociology, are ‘relation’or ‘network’ (Granovetter, 1985).

A norm is a rule with some degree of bind-ing authority over actors – for instance, ininternational relations, the principle that a stateshould not kill the diplomats representingother states; or the proscription of chemicalweapons in war. In the most realist theories, anorm is created by the actors involved, and hasbinding power over an actor only inasmuch asthat actor continues to support it. In less realistversions, norms may have been created byforces in the past, and may have binding powerwhether or not present actors support them. Inthese latter accounts, norms are internalized byactors through some sort of socializationprocess: thus, in a compromised realism,actors are partly creatures of the rules, not onlycreators of them.

Similarly, a network relation betweenactors is a simple form of organizationalinstitutionalization. Such relations arethought to constrain actors, as well as pro-vide opportunities for their activities. In themost realist versions, actors create their net-works: in less realist models, the networksare more institutionalized, have prior histories and external determinants and thusgenerate considerable path dependence.

Sociological institutionalism I: social organizational versions

Moving further away from realist models, wecome to some core ideas of modern sociolog-ical institutionalism (see DiMaggio & Powell,1983; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001;Jepperson, 2002; Hasse & Kruecken, 2005).Here, actors are substantially empowered and

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controlled by institutional contexts, and thesecontexts go far beyond a few norms or net-work structures. Further, these contexts are byno means simply constructions built up by thecontemporary actors themselves, but ratherare likely to have prior and exogenous histori-cal origins.

Institutions, in these conceptions are pack-ages or programs of an expanded sort.‘Regimes’ is a term employed in political sci-ence for the idea—organizational packagesinfused with cultural meaning (often fromprofessions as “epistemic communities”)..So one can refer to a neo-liberal regime in thecontemporary world. Or an anti-trust pro-gram in earlier America (Fligstein, 1990).Sociologists capture this idea by referring tosocietal sectors, or social fields, or arenas ofaction. Institutions, in these senses, are com-plex and often coherent mixtures of culturaland organizational material.

Similarly, the institutions involved pene-trate actors in multiple and complex ways,ranging from more realist formats to morephenomenological ones. DiMaggio andPowell (1983) provide a list that is much uti-lized (see Scott 2001, for a related one). Onthe realist side, they argue that institutionalstructures affect actors through what theycall ‘coercive’ processes, including nation-state legal actions. On the middle ground,they envision ‘normative’ controls of envi-ronments over actors, emphasizing the influ-ence of professionalized standards. And then,moving to a more phenomenological per-spective, they suppose that environmentscreate standards that actors adopt ‘mimeti-cally,’ reflecting taken-for-granted standards.At this point, actors are not really well-bounded entities any more, but may be builtup of cultural and organizational materialsfrom their environments.

Sociological institutionalism II:phenomenological versions

A key turning point in the rise of the newinstitutionalism is the development of a per-

spective in which the actors of modern soci-ety are seen, not simply as influenced by thewider environment, but as constructed in andby it (see Jepperson, 2002 for a review).Related ideas in political science are called‘constructivism.’ Rationalized organizationsas actors are creatures of rationalized envi-ronments (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Meyer &Scott, 1983; see also Zucker, 1977). The indi-vidual as actor is a continually expandingconstruction of modernity (Meyer, 1986, fol-lowing on a long discussion in the literature,including Berger, Berger, & Kellner, 1973).The nation-state as actor is a construction ofa world polity (Meyer, 1980; Thomas,Meyer, Ramirez, & Boli, 1987; Meyer, Boli,Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997).

The concept of ‘actor,’ in this scheme, is farremoved from that envisioned in realist per-spectives. The realists imagine that people arereally bounded and purposive and sovereignactors, and that nation-states are too. And soare the organizations deriving from these. Thesociological institutionalists, on the otherhand, suppose that actorhood is a role or iden-tity, as in a theatrical world (Frank and Meyer2002): individual actors, in this usage, havesocially conferred rights and responsibilities,and socially conferred agency to representthese (and other) interests (Meyer &Jepperson, 2000). Actorhood, in this usage, isscripted by institutional structures; and therelation between actor and action is no longera simple causal one – both elements haveinstitutional scripts behind them, and theirrelation has, causally speaking, strong ele-ments of socially constructed tautology. Thatis, the actor–action relation is a package, andas people and groups enter into particularforms of actorhood, the appropriate actionscome along and are not usefully to be seen aschoices and decisions. Institutional theories,thus, do not depend on particularly elaboratesocial psychological assumptions aboutpeople or groups: almost any social psycho-logical model is good enough to explain whatinstitutionalization has made socially obvious.

Thus, when a group of modern peoplegather to assemble or change an organization,


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they do not do so from scratch. Everywhere,there are models put in place by law, ideol-ogy, culture, and a variety of organizationalconstraints and opportunities. People arelikely to install these in the organization theyare building with little by way of thought ordecision: exotic psychological assumptionsare not required. There will be offices anddepartments that were unknown a fewdecades ago (CFO, or Chief Financial Officer;HR, or Human Relations Department). Fewwill spend time deciding to adopt these insti-tutions, and thus perhaps the word ‘mimetic’applies. But it is an imprecise word, in this con-text, because the people adopting the newstructures will often be able to articulateclearly the legitimating rationales for theiraction, as if these were thought-out purposes.The purposes come along with the enterprise.

As an illustration at the individual level,any good student in a prestigious Americanuniversity ought to be able, almost instanta-neously, to write some paragraphs about‘why I decided to go to college.’ But oninspection, it turns out that almost none ofthese students actually decided to go to col-lege, as they had never contemplated anyalternative. Going to college was taken forgranted. Indeed, any student who had spentserious time deciding whether or not to go tocollege would be very unlikely to have arecord enabling admission to a prestigiousone. Nevertheless, many researchers study-ing college attendance formulate their task asanalyzing a ‘decision’ – a decision they prob-ably never made, and their subjects probablynever made. A number of methodologicalerrors follow, and beset the research traditioninvolved. Parallel errors characterize muchresearch in the field of organizations andstates: decision analyses of matters never infact decided. Mistakes of this sort routinelyfollow from the established realist assump-tions that human activity, more or less bydefinition, follows from choices.

Sociological institutionalism of the phenom-enological sort is not only furthest from real-ism, but arises in some opposition to it. Realisttheory, it is argued, grossly understates the

extreme cultural dependence of modern organi-zational structures. Thus, the institutionalistsemphasize that much modern social rationali-zation has mythic functions encouraging theformation of organizations and their compo-nents. This sometimes leads to criticisms thatinstitutionalism is only about ‘symbols’ ratherthan ‘realities,’ and institutionalist researchoccasionally in fact makes this mistake. On theother hand, the realists, ignoring the depend-ence of modern organizational structure on therapidly-expanding myths of rationality, haveno serious explanation for the rise – in everycountry, every social sector, and almost everydetailed social activity – of so much modernorganization itself (Drori et al., 2006).

Phenomenological ideas are by no meansincompatible with more realist ones - in mostsituations, both can be true and often are.Tensions arise because realist models tend tobe exclusionary core modern ideologies,undergirding polity, economy, culture, andsociety. They are normative models as wellas cognitive ones, and thus alternative linesof thought are seen as in part normative vio-lations. Further, closed-system realist modelsare often central to policy advice, and thisfunction is limited by more open-systeminstitutional theories.

The career of sociologicalInstitutional theory

The phenomenological perspectives of socio-logical institutionalism have prospered overthe last three decades. Before discussing whythis is so, we need to note why it should nothave been so.

The ideological absorption of institutional ideasModern social science, following on modernideology, celebrates a social world made upof strong actors, in the realist sense. Theoryand ideology give great emphasis to notionsof society as a product of such actors andtheir purposes. Methods of social research,and public data collection, build data on and

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around these units, and define proper analysesas focused on both their independence andtheir purposive action. And normative ideolo-gies infusing both research and public lifegive much preference to treatments that takeindividual persons (and also nation-states andorganizations) as highly interested and agen-tic actors (Jepperson & Meyer, 2007).

More concretely, modern democraticpolitical systems rest, for their legitimacy, ondoctrines of free individual choice. If theindividuals and their choices are construc-tions of the powers of the system itself, thelegitimacy of democracy tends to disappear.Similarly, if choices of individuals andorganizations in markets are in fact ‘wired’consequences of the market system, the legit-imacy of the free economy is undercut. Thesame points can be made about religious andcultural choices in the nominally free society.Thus, there are cultural tendencies in themodern actor-centered society to celebrateactors in a very realist sense: these tenden-cies are very strong ideological currents inthe social sciences. Social science influenceover policy tends to depend on them(Jepperson & Meyer, 2007).

Consider that much organizational researchand theory go on, worldwide, in schools ofbusiness and education and public policy.These schools are built on the notion thatorganizational leaders are decision-makers,and their main tasks are to train their studentsto be such decision-makers. They are in noposition to emphasize that their students are,or should be, drifting non-decision-makingfollowers of institutionalized currents. Scott(2007), for instance, defends realist institu-tional theory on precisely these grounds.

Thus as new institutional forces are built upin the modern system, the system itself tends to absorb them in expanded theo-ries of actorhood and decision-making.Organizational members and research ana-lysts tend over time to see the organizationalelements newly adopted under institutionalpressures as if they were functional, rational,and reasonable organizational choices. Thisprocess is analyzed with care in studies of the

developments, in American organizationallife, around affirmative action pressures andrequirements (see Dobbin & Sutton, 1998;Edelman, 1992; Dobbin, Sutton, Meyer, &Scott 1993; Edelman, Uggen, & Erlanger,1999). After the long wave of legalizing pres-sures on organizations, a whole set ofschemes are produced – policies, offices, andprofessions – responding to these pressures.Organizations incorporate packages of these.But after a time, it is all naturalized in the pre-ferred models of relatively rational actorhood.And by now, any reasonable organizationalmanager would be able to explain why his orher organization has affirmative action poli-cies – these policies are obviously the bestway to ensure hiring the most able people.

Given that the processes stressed by thephenomenological versions of institutionaltheory are in many ways constantly undercutor absorbed by evolving modern organiza-tional systems, the question arises as to whatforces keep these lines of theory alive, well,and in fact prospering. If the social worldwere moving toward a modern equilibrium,we have noted above, institutional theorieswould tend to be absorbed in a socially con-structed realist ideology. Obviously, equilib-rium is not what is going on.

The rapid social changes distinctive to theperiod since World War II have tended tocreate rapid cultural expansions of the sortsattended to by institutional theories. Theperiod, in other words, creates both institu-tional theories and a globalizing social worldwhich operates along the lines suggested bythose theories.

Stateless globalizationsRecent centuries of development have system-atically tended to create interdependenciestranscending the organizational capacities ofextant political systems to maintain control(classically, Wallerstein, 1974). Rapid expan-sion and globalization have created sweepingeconomic, political, social and cultural formsof (often conflictful) movement and integra-tion extending far beyond the boundaries ofcontrolling organizational structures. Forces

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for social control and stability, thus, emphasizeboth the authority and the responsibilities ofthe existing actors in national and world soci-ety. At the world level, meanings have piled up,rationalizing and expanding the powers andresponsibilities of national states. And simi-larly, individualisms, stressing the rights,powers, and capacities of individuals, haveexpanded enormously, supporting for examplethe long-term and dramatic expansion of edu-cation around the world (Boli & Ramirez,1987; Meyer, Ramirez & Soysal, 1992). Thewhole process is analyzed in Tocqueville’s dis-cussion of social control in stateless America(1836/1969), and his emphasis on the resultantempowerment and control of the individual,including the rapid expansion of a great deal ofmobilized and rationalized social organization.

The term globalization now tends to referto (a) economic interdependencies, and (b)very recent time periods. But for our pur-poses, the time frame is much longer, and theinterdependencies involved more political,social, cultural, and military than economic.The post World War II period represented adramatic up-turn in the long history. The fail-ure of social control in an interdependentworld was dramatic and incontrovertible.Two devastating world wars (both betweensupra-state forces), a disastrous depressionseen as rooted in nationalist provincialisms,the holocaust and sweeping destruction ofsocial life, and the end of normal war givennuclear weaponry, all made it obvious thatnew forms of order and control were neces-sary. This was all enhanced by the Cold Warconflict, and by the destruction of the olderstabilizing colonial arrangements. An oldnominally-anarchic world of conflictingnation-states was no longer remotely justifi-able: war, for instance, lost meaning as aheroic achievement in interstate competition.But on the other hand nothing like a worldstate was plausible.

In the absence of much possibility forstate-like world organization, with a culturalsystem organized around positive law, theworld has produced an astonishing set ofsocio-cultural movements building up a ver-

sion of a world polity or society aroundnotions of lawful nature, inherent rationality,and the natural rights of humans (or, in gen-eral, natural law: Thomas et al., 1987; Meyeret al., 1997). These movements take the formof broad global wave-like developments, anda ‘wave theory’ like sociological institution-alism is appropriate for the massive changesinvolved.

Thus the character of worldwide socialchange since World War II continually rein-forces the more phenomenological versions ofsociological institutional theory. I briefly notesome of these massive social changes, andtheir wave-like diffusive character. All thechanges involved refer to laws and rationalitiesand rights built into nature rather than particu-lar societies. They are built around rapidly-expanding meaning systems and formallystructured in decentralized associational for-mats rather than around sovereign actorhood.

First, there is in place of positive law thedramatic expansion of science (Drori, Meyer,Ramirez, & Schofer, 2003). Science expandsexponentially in terms of numbers of peopleand amounts of resources involved, and alsoin terms of the social authority it carries. Itexpands enormously in terms of content cov-erage, as essentially all aspects of natural andsocial worlds come under scientific scrutiny.And it expands spatially, finding a strongpresence in essentially all the societies of theworld. Science, as reality and even more asmetaphor, provides a cognitive and norma-tive base for all sorts of integrating worldregulation – making the world more govern-able (Foucault, 1991; Rose & Miller, 1992;Drori & Meyer, 2006).

Beyond science, there is the enormousexpansion of rationalizing social science – byfar the most rapidly expanding fields in thelife of the university in the last half of thetwentieth century (Drori & Moon, 2006;Frank & Gabler, 2006). Theories, and occa-sionally evidence, expand rapidly and takethe center stage in much policy-makingaround the world. In a world celebrating theequality of persons and societies, rationalis-tic social theories are seen as applicable

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everywhere: any country can develop, anyperson can be equipped with cultural capital,independent of time and place. And anyorganization, anywhere, can and should be arational actor.

Second, in partial replacement for an olderModern celebration of the primordiality ofthe national-state, there is the dramatic riseof a natural law emphasis on human rights.The standing of persons as citizens ofnational states is replaced by a greatlyexpanded set of doctrines of the person as anentitled and empowered member of thehuman race in a global society (e.g., Soysal,1994). More and more categories of humansare directly capacitated in this system –women, children, old people, handicappedpeople, gay and lesbian people, indigenouspeople, racial and ethnic minorities, and soon (for examples, see Ramirez, Soysal, &Shanahan, 1998; Berkovitch, 1999; Frank &McEneaney, 1999; Abu Sharkh, 2002). Andthe moral and legal principles involved rap-idly take coverage (though commonly notpractical effect) worldwide (Hathaway, 2002;Tsutsui & Wotipka, 2004; Cole, 2005;Hafner-Burton & Tsutsui, 2005).

The new human, in this expanding system,has greatly enhanced rights, and responsibil-ities. But also greatly expanded attributedcapacities for economic, political, social, andcultural action. These capacities support theextraordinary worldwide expansion in bothmass and elite education in the world sinceWorld War II (Meyer Ramirez and Soysal.,1992; Schofer & Meyer, 2005).

The expanded model of empowered andentitled individuals, operating in a tamed andscientized natural and social environment,generates – as in Tocqueville’s America – theexpanded modern picture of the human actor;and of the host of social organizations thisactor creates. The world is now filled withhuman persons who assume the posture ofempowered actor, and have the capacity tocreate and participate in collective organiza-tions formed as social actors.

So organization and organizations blossomeverywhere (see the studies in Drori et al.,

2006). The old nation-state, with its passivebureaucracies, is reformulated as a modernorganization, filled with agencies that are tofunction as autonomous and accountableorganizations (i.e., actors: Brunsson &Sahlin-Andersson, 2000). Old family firmsare reconstructed as modern organizationswith empowered managerial capabilities, andwith work forces full of participatory modernindividual actors. Traditional structures housing professionals – hospitals and schoolsand legal and accounting partnerships – arereformulated as real agentic social actors,capable of the highly purposive pursuit oftheir own goals (Scott, Ruef, Mendel, &Caronna, 2000).

All of the institutionalizations of the newglobalized (or ‘knowledge,’ or ‘post-modern’) society noted above find a corebasis in the dramatically expanded educa-tional systems of the post-War world (Meyeret al., 1992, for mass education; Schofer &Meyer, 2005, for the university). The univer-sity, in particular, is the core home of theexplosions of scientific analyses of nature,and rationalistic analyses of social life thattry to tame the modern supra-national envi-ronment. And it is the core home where ordi-nary persons of an older world aretransformed into knowledgeable and empow-ered carriers of ‘human capital’ for the newsociety (Frank and Meyer, 2007). If classicbureaucratic structures of the Modern societyrested on populations equipped with masseducation (Stinchcombe, 1965), the organi-zations of the Knowledge Society rest onuniversity-installed knowledge and empow-erment (Frank and Meyer, 2007). Worldwide,about 20 per cent of a cohort of young per-sons is enrolled in university-level training(Schofer & Meyer, 2005).

Actors and othersThe post-War period has, thus, experienceddramatic expansion in cultural rationaliza-tion. On the one side there has been the expo-nential and global growth of the scientificand rationalistic analysis of natural andsocial environments. On the other lies a sim-

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ilarly exponential and global growth in therights and powers attributed to the humanbeings who enter into society. And in the cul-turally-constructed crucible at the center ofall this, the result is the extraordinary moderngrowth in social actors. Passive old nationalstate bureaucracies turn into actors filledwith plans and strategies. And persons every-where shift from traditional (i.e., peasant)identities into modern schooled ones: as anindicator, persons turned actors are able toopine on all sorts of general questions – andsurvey research can now be done almost anywhere (Meyer and Jepperson 2000).

But the question arises, who is doing allthis cultural construction? Who or what sup-ports the rationalization of the natural andsocial environments? Who props up all thenew human rights and powers?

The world of actors – entitled and empow-ered beings with the rights to have goals andthe capacities to be agents in pursuit of thosegoals – is also a world in which the sameactors have the legitimated capacity to usetheir agency in pursuit of collective goods ofall sorts. Indeed, the agency of actors is collectively legitimated and dependent. Inthis sense, a properly constructed actor isalways partly an agent for one or anothercollectivity – in the modern system, often afairly universal one – as well as an agent forhis or her own needs and goals as actors(Meyer & Jepperson, 2000). Thus modernactors are partly above petty interest, and areagents for more general and universal goods.So the most rapidly expanding individualoccupations, worldwide, are the nominallydisinterested professions: they may partlyserve particular interests, but they are ingood part agents for the collective – moreaccurately for what used to be called God(Truth, and the like). And the most rapidlyexpanding organizational structures in theworld may, similarly, be the non-govern-mental and often non-profit organizationsthat serve as agents for various universalgoods, often at the global level (Boli &Thomas, 1999). And even among the moremundane profit-making organizations and

occupations, agency with very constrainedinterested actorhood has been a great success: everywhere there are consultingfirms, therapists, advisors, researchers, andother creatures of a higher purity.

Thus actors themselves often step out of their narrow actorhood, and take on the higher calling of agency for universaltruths and the collective good. So we havesuccessful national-states offering them-selves to their competitors as models of theproper conduct of business. And successfulorganizations delighted to display theirvirtues, rather than concealing them from the competition. And individual personsentering into public life with disinterestedanalyses of what their President should do(Jepperson, 2002a).

If ‘interested actor’ is one core role in themodern system, we need a term for the rolesof actors that adopt a legitimated posture ofdisinterest, and tell more interested actorshow to be and what to do. I suggest the oldMeadian concept of ‘Other’ (Meyer, 1999).The modern world is filled with these others.There are the representatives of the whalesand other creatures, of the distant ecologicalfuture, and of the rights of humans in themost distant places and cultures (e.g., overissues like female genital cutting – see Boyle,2002). And there are the proponent of socialrationality and critics of corruption anywherein the world. Closer to home, there are theadvisors and therapists, offering consultationto individuals and organizations andnational-states on how to be more virtuousand more effective actors.

This whole system offers explanatoryopportunities calling for sociological institu-tional theories. The modern nominally-realistinterested actor is at every side surroundedby institutions with much cultural characterand legitimacy – the sciences and professionsconstructing the rationalized environment ofproper ‘action,’ the legal and intellectual con-structers of expanded human rights andcapacities, and the ‘Others’ who create thesearrangements and who often directly instructthe expanded actors. And of course, the

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expanded actors themselves, who enhancetheir value by displaying their virtuous actor-hood, and whose expanded and virtuousactorhood is utterly dependent on a host ofsciences, legal and intellectual supports, andtherapists and consultants. In fact, themodern individual actor tends to incorporatemuch of this material in the expanded ‘self.’And the modern organizational or nation-state actor certainly incorporates enormousamounts of this material – often as profes-sionalized roles – within its formal structure.

The core arguments of sociologicalinstitutional theory: status andprospects

Sociological institutional theory employsgeneral phenomenological perspectiveswhich often have many dimensions andwhich can make up a broad vision of sociallife and of methods for studying it.Methodologically, a taste for qualitative andhighly interpretive research is sometimesinvolved. Substantively, critical perspectiveson the modern liberal society are oftenemphasized, sometimes from the conserva-tive right, and on other occasions from theleft. Sometimes, society itself is seen asentirely an interpretive construction, withother realities entering in only insofar as theyenter social interpretive systems.

As it has developed, sociological institu-tional theory is tied to none of these broaderphilosophical perspectives. Methodologi-cally, it has commonly been pursued withquite standard (often quantitative) proce-dures. Its ties to any normative perspectiveon modern society are weak: at the most, itcarries an ironic distance from a naïve liberalism. And there is no special tendencyto deny the operation of many different theories (and variables) in the analysis of themodern system – sociological institutional-ism emphasizes causal structures rooted inculture and interpretation, but is not given todenying other lines of causal process. ThusBarrett, Kurzman and Shanahan (2006) note

that national population control policies tendto arise in countries with ties to moderndemography, and typical institutional argu-ment. But they are not surprised to find thatnational population control policies tend alsoto arise in countries with great populationdensity. Institutional theory is not closelytied to broader philosophical concerns, buthas rather developed as a set of very generalsociological explanatory ideas.

To assess the status of sociological institu-tionalism, we review its four most importantexplanatory ideas. These ideas make up asimple causal chain accounting for stabilityand change in modern organizational struc-tures. First, expansive modern institutional-ized models of states and societies arecommonly generated, not only by interestedactors, but by what above we called ‘others’ –collective participants like professions andsocial movements and non-governmentalstructures. Second, states and other organiza-tions tend prominently to reflect institution-alized models in standardized ways, notsimply the local resources and powers andinterests that vary so greatly around theworld. Third, there is the idea that becausestates and other organizations reflect highlystandardized institutionalized models, butalso variable local life in practice, a greatdeal of decoupling between more formalstructures and practical adaptation is to beexpected. Fourth, there is the idea that insti-tutionalized models are likely to have strongdiffusive or wave-like effects on the orienta-tions and behavior of all sorts of participantsin organizational life, whether or not they areincorporated in formal policies.

Cultural and institutional forces affect thedevelopment of institutional modelsAs a result of extensive research showing theimpact of institutionalized models on organi-zations of all sorts, argumentation in the fieldof macro-social research has shifted to thequestion about the origins of the modelsinvolved. For instance, we know that theworldwide emphasis on the rights of womenhas greatly impacted policy and practice

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everywhere (Bradley & Ramirez, 1996;Ramirez et al., 1998). So it becomes impor-tant to ask what produced the worldwideemphases involved.

Very extreme realists argue that institutionsare produced by the mixture of power andinterest in the actors of the system – the onlyentities such realists recognize as existing.This makes the institutions involved relativelyminor in importance, since an adequateanalysis can be obtained simply by under-standing the extant structures of actor powerand interest. A more moderate realism sees a‘sticky equilibrium’ as involved – institutionsare created by mixtures of actor power andinterest, but may take on something of a lifeof their own afterwards. A still more moder-ate realism supposes that there are somemediators in the power and interest game –some participants (possibly professionals, or other honest brokers) who help in theenterprise.

Beyond this point, realism may be com-bined with a more political or sociologicalview. Stinchcombe (2001) develops an argu-ment along these lines, imagining that actorsand perhaps some mediators struggle to workout general institutional rules that reflectlocal power and interest circumstances butalso reflect functional requirements of thewhole enterprise. In his work, he often thinksof institutional arrangements in complicatedsectors like the construction industry asinstances. His arguments apply less clearly tothe worldwide rise of something like gay andlesbian rights (Frank & McEneaney, 1999).

Given the great successes of institutional-ist analyses in showing the great impact ofenvironmental models on the structures andprograms of organizational actors in themodern system, realism has been on thedefensive. One position to which it hasretreated is the stance that, while modenactors copy environmental models, thesemodels themselves must have been put inplace by hard-line realist forces of power andinterest. Realism has, as noted above,strongly legitimated and legitimating roots inthe modern system, which clearly rests on

the assumption of very strong and agentichuman actorhood. So attacks along the linethat powerful and interested actors in thebackground drive the creation of institutionalmodels have been intensive (e.g,Stinchcombe 2001; Hirsch 1997; Hirsch &Lounsbury 1997). And to a stiking extent,some institutionalists have taken positionsthat are almost apologetic in response (Scott,2007; DiMaggio 1988), apparently conced-ing that behind the faÁade of institutionalstructure inevitably lie real men of power.

Sociological institutionalists, of course, donot take issue with the argument that manyinstitutionalized patterns may directly reflectthe power and interest of dominant states orother organizations. But, especially underconditions of modern globalization as wediscuss above, institutionalists observe dra-matic effects that do not reflect the mechan-ics of power and interest. In global society,and also in other organizational arenas, manyother phenomena operate — reflecting thedependence of modern expanded actors oninstitutionalized scripts operating in theirenvironments. For example:

– Professionalized and scientized forces may gen-erate rules coming to terms with modern sci-ences and rationalities, and with modern notionsof human rights and welfare. Despite powerfulinterests working in the opposite direction, forinstance, environmental policies like the ozonelayer agreements have taken on considerableforce (Meyer, Frank, Hironaka et al., 1997b; Frank,Hironaka & Schofer, 2000). Similarly, it is difficultto see power and interest – and easy to see pro-fessionalized forces – behind the worldwidemovement to restrict female genital cutting(Boyle, 2002). Large-scale social movement struc-tures and non-governmental organizations areobviously involved in the construction of manyinstitutional systems. Thus many programs fororganizational rationality, like the InternationalStandards Organization, or various bodies stress-ing improved accounting arrangements, find theirorigins in forces considerably removed fromsimple matters of power and interest (see thepapers in Sahlin-Andersson & Engwall, 2002;Djelic & Quack, 2003; Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson,2006; Drori et al., 2006 for extended examples).

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– Constructions of institutional models may reflectsuccesses and failures in organizational or inter-national stratification systems, without necessar-ily reflecting the interests of the powerful bodiesin that system. Because globalization involvesthe construction of myths of underlying worldsimilarity, an extraordinary amount of diffusiongoes on as a matter of fashion (Strang & Meyer,1993). So Japanese economic success of the1980s produced a little wave of Japanified poli-cies around the world, in no way reflecting thepurposive power or interest of the Japanesenational-state. Similarly, there is much imitationof elite firms in any industry, whether or not theelite firms encourage, or gain from, this imitation.

– When powerful or successful organizations infact portray themselves as models for others, it isoften unclear that they are acting in what is ordi-narily conceived to be their interest. TheAmerican national-state, for instance, likes toencourage others to do things the ‘right’ way –the American way – as a matter of encouragingvirtue in the world. There is no evidence thatmuch of this aid activity particularly benefits theinterests of the American state.

In many areas, institutional and realist expla-nations of the development of institutional-ized models overlap. And conflicts betweenthem are often conflicts over the interpreta-tion of the effects of the same variables. Thuswhen institutionalists note the impact of pro-fessionalized models (e.g., in the accountingarea), the realists talk grimly of the profes-sions involved as carrying out ‘professionalprojects’ presumably to enhance their inter-ests and powers (see Abbott, 1988 for exam-ples often incorporating this sort ofreasoning). The impact of the scientists whodiscovered the ozone layer problem is, how-ever, difficult to interpret as a simpleMachiavellian scheme to enhance the powerof the sciences. And, indeed, the whole ‘pro-fessions as plots against the body politic’scheme runs into the problem that the pictureof the profession as a rational self-interestedactor requires the assumption that the generalpopulation is naïve and foolish. This is unre-alistic: explaining the expanded authority ofthe sciences in the modern system requiresan institutional analysis of why so many

social audiences are so eagerly responsive(Drori et al., 2003).

Similarly, realists tend to see any diffusiveinfluence of the stratification system as indi-cating the power and interest of the elites ofthat system. This is implausible. Thus, inglobal society, the world environment move-ment clearly reflects the values and orienta-tions of American society. But the Americannational-state actor clearly resists subscrib-ing to this system, as do leading Americancorporations. As another example, the worldhuman rights movement clearly reflectsAmerican values: but the American national-state actor was reluctant to have a humanrights declaration built into the UnitedNations; and continues to refuse to ratify var-ious human rights treaties. In exactly thesame way, massive worldwide efforts at allsorts of organizational reform and rationali-zation clearly reflect American ideologies oforganization: but the American national-stateaggressively resists participation.

Exactly the same criticisms can be madeof realist argument in other organizationalarenas. Elite universities may be sources ofmuch educational rationalist ideology, butare often organizationally primitive (e.g.,Oxford, Harvard). The same is true of elitefirms and agencies.

All in all, in the modern stateless but glob-alized world, institutionalist argumentsexplaining the dramatic rise of culturalmodels of expanded actorhood show everyprospect of continued success. Only in amore stabilized world society would theprocess of social construction of actor motivations catch up, creating the properappearance of an apparently realist worldsociety.

Institutionalized models affect the construction of actorsThe most conspicuous success of sociologi-cal institutional theory has been in thedemonstration of powerful effects of institu-tional models on the construction and modi-fication of actors. Thus national-statestructures reflect standard world models,

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despite the enormous resource and culturalvariability of the world (Meyer et al., 1997).Schools similarly reflect both world andnational social forms. And so do firms. andhospitals. and organizations in essentiallyany other sector (Drori et al., 2006).Furthermore, extant actors of these sortschange over time reflecting changes in insti-tutionalized models.

Now that effects of this sort are widely and routinely recognized in the field, discus-sion shifts to questions of mechanisms.Institutionalists, convincingly, show thatorganizational conformity to standard modelsis widespread and can occur in very routineways through taken-for-granted understand-ings. They commonly show the effects ofprocesses such as simple linkage betweenorganizational settings and the wider environ-ments carrying the institutions. Thus, at thenation-state level, world models are adoptedmore quickly in countries with many non-governmental organizational linkages toworld society (Meyer et al., 1997). Similarly,professional linkages facilitate the quickadoption of environmental policies (Frank etal., 2000, call the professions “receptor sites”for the local incorporation of wider rational-ized models). At the organizational level, theadoption of fashionable personnel policies isenhanced by having professionalized person-nel officers (Dobbin et al., 1993).

Realists try to see processes of coercivepower as involved in such relationships, andthere are situations in which this is clearlythe case. But the rapid social changes wehave discussed as globalization continue togenerate waves of organizational change thatcannot easily be conceived as reflectingstraightforward coercive power and controlby environments. Wave-like processes areendemic on the modern system (Czarniawska& Sevón, 1996), and institutional theoriesgain much credibility from the obviousempirical situations involved.

Thus with the global rise in conceptions ofthe nation-state as a development-orientedsocial actor, university enrollments shot up inevery type of country (Schofer & Meyer,

2005). Coercive pressures were clearly notinvolved – indeed the centers of power inworld society (e.g., the United States, theWorld Bank, or the major corporations)tended initially to be skeptical about thevirtues of ‘overeducation’ for impoverishedcountries. Similarly, global standards ofwomen’s rights tended to produce nationalreactions quite apart from any coerciveforces. And in other areas – like environmen-tal policy, or efforts to build internationalquality standards – where realists try to dis-cern coercive pressure, empirical analysestend to be unconvincing.

Contested areas of interpretation, here,revolve around the impact of professionalbodies and non-governmental organizations.The sorts of normative pressures producedby these forces can be given something of arealist interpretation. The problem is that therelevant professions and associations areamply represented inside actors, not onlyoutside them. That is, modern national andorganizational actors already incorporate intheir own authority systems formal represen-tatives of the wider world cultures dealingwith the environment, organizational ration-alization, human rights, and so on. Modernorganizations and national-states appear tobe eager to construct themselves as actors,thus incorporating, often wholesale, globalstandards (for nation-state examples, seeMcNeely, 1995; or Boli, 1987).

In an expanding and globalizing worldsociety, people and groups everywhere seemto be eager to be actors – this often takesprecedence over other goals, and can produceassertions of actor identity far from any actualactor capability. People, in short, may putmore effort into being actors than into acting.

We can see this readily in the empiricalstudies of modern individuals in increasingnumbers of countries. They produce opinionsand judgments, routinely, in matters theyknow nothing about. A good American, itseems clear, would produce opinions aboutwhether the United States should invade acountry that does not exist. Good organiza-tions have policies about things that never

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occur. National states promote world normswith which they have no capacity to conformat home. Agentic actorhood is, in the modernsystem, a central good (Meyer & Jepperson,2000; Frank & Meyer, 2002).

Some of the intellectual tensions involvedhere – between a realistic institutionalism andan unrealistic realism – show up in a discus-sion by Mizruchi and Fein (1999). Theseresearchers, committed to an older realist tra-dition in the study of organizations, seempuzzled by the extraordinary citation atten-tion continuingly given to the classic paper byDiMaggio and Powell (1983). So they turnfrom their normal work as organizationalresearchers to become sociologists of science(it is often a dangerous business for social sci-entists to study their own fields), and to inves-tigate the uses of the classic paper. They aredisturbed by the fact that few references pickup on the more realist themes in the paper(coercive isomorphism, which can readily besubsumed by realists; and normative isomor-phism, which a realist can re-shape into con-formity). And all the research emphasis goesto the famous ‘mimetic isomorphism,’ whichlies far from the realist track. The reason forthis is obvious: any line of interpretation thatcan be given a realist spin, in modern socialscience, tends to be given that spin. So insti-tutionalist arguments tend to survive best ifthey are furthest from realism. Oddly,Mizruchi himself later ends up employingmimetic isomorphism as an explanatory idea(Mizruchi, Stearns, & Marquis, 2006).

The construction of actors is often loosely oupled with practical activitySociological institutional theory, in part,arose from the observation that organizationalpolicies and structures are often loosely cou-pled with practical activity (Meyer & Rowan,1977; 1978). Given this commonly recog-nized reality, the question arose – why are thestructures and policies there? The questiontook force from the fact that conventionaltheories of organizational structure empha-size that, for functional and political reasons,structure is put in place to control activity.

The institutionalist answer is that actor struc-tures, forms, and policies reflect institutionalprescriptions and models in the wider envi-ronment. Such institutional models make itpossible to build great organizations in situa-tions where little actual control is likely orpossible – school systems, for instance; or indeveloping countries national–states.

This line of argument has had muchempirical success in the cross-national studyof national-states. It is common, now, to dis-cover that nation-states subscribe to humanrights standards – but the subscribers are nomore likely to implement these standards in practice than are the non-subscribers(Hathaway, 2002; Cole, 2005; Hafner-Burton& Tsutsui, 2005). The same finding holds forresearch on child labor rates (Abu Sharkh,2002), and for research on the education ofwomen (Bradley & Ramirez, 1996).

The line of argument has had dramaticempirical success in studies of organizations,too. Brunsson (1985; 1989), develops it as acontrast between policy talk and practicalaction. He sees a hypocritical inconsistencybetween the two as a central consequenceand requirement for the rationalized society.Thus, inconsistency that to realists is a socialproblem is to Brunsson a stabilizing solution.

In other work, the line of argument isextended to account for the high frequency oforganizational reforms, and the lack of con-sequences of much reform (Brunsson &Olsen, 1993). If reform is commonly aprocess of constructing improved actorhood,rather than improved action, the often-noted ‘failure of implementation’ is to beexpected. Given the enormously exaggeratedmodels of the proper actor – individuals andorganizations alike – characteristic of themodern globalized world, any respectablereform should have excellent prospects fordisimplementation.

Despite its obvious uses, the concept of‘loose coupling’ has been a considerablesource of tension in the field. This arisesbecause realist thinking is quite central tomodern ideology as well as to much socialtheory. And from a realist point of view,

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decoupling between organizational rules andpolicies and programs and roles, on the onehand, and local practical action, on the other,is deeply problematic. Rules are created bypowerful and interested actors, desiring tocontrol action. They are put in place in par-ticular organizations because the interests ofpowerful actors demanded it. They shouldnormally be implemented in practice. Onlylimited realist theory can explain why not. (a)Perhaps the powerful actors creating ruleswant to deceive the world around them. Butif they are so powerful, why would they needto do this? And if they do depend on impres-sions of others, why are these others so easilydeceived? (b) Perhaps particular actors sub-scribe formally to the rules intending todeceive the powerful forces behind theserules. But if so, why are the powerful forcesso easily deceived? (c) Perhaps local partici-pants simply cheat on the organized actor,suboptimally going their own way and vio-lating the rules. If so, why are organizedactors so little able to notice?

The extreme tension experienced by realisttheorists over the ‘loose coupling’ notion canbe illustrated by the treatment of a renownedinitial essay on the subject. Before the rise ofnew institutional theories, March and his col-laborators, working from the ‘uncertainty’tradition, produced a precursor. Their essaywas called ‘A Garbage Can Model ofOrganizational Choice’ (Cohen, March, &Olsen, 1972). Instead of working fromrational decision models outward to incorpo-rate more uncertainty, this essay started fromthe frame of decision-making under almostcomplete uncertainty. The authors illustratedtheir points with some quickly forgotten sim-ulation models, but the impact of the paper –on a field that had grown a bit deadly – wassimply as a strong fundamental theoreticalimage or metaphor. The paper is much cited,almost entirely for its grounding imageryrather than its specific analytic points.

Interestingly, thirty years later, severalresearchers committed to the extremerational choice version of realism, found itnecessary to mount a massive attack on this

piece of poetry (Bendor, Moe, & Shotts,2001). They proved that the illustrative simu-lation models (which it seems nobody had infact taken very seriously) were inconsistentwith the real arguments of the paper, andmade dramatic assertions about this as indi-cating a fundamental failure of the scientificenterprise involved. (Again, the authorsrested the importance of their paper on asser-tions about the nature of science itself – oftena warning sign in the social sciences, e.g., p. 169: ‘We evaluate the verbal theory andargue that it fails to create an adequate foundation for scientific progress.’)

Institutionalized models impact practicesindependent of organized actor adoptionIn the modern system, institutionalizedforces usually diffuse more as cultural wavesthan through point-to-point diffusion. Thus,standards arise in world discourse, promul-gated by professional consensus and associa-tional advocacy. The new emphasis might be,say, on the improved treatment of childrenwith some specific handicaps. Nationalstates, of course, adopt appropriate policieswith some probability, which might varydepending on their linkage to the worldorganizations and professions involved.

But of course organizations internal to thatstate are also immersed in responsible agenticactorhood organized by the global culture. Soindependent of national policy, schools andmedical organizations and professional asso-ciations and even some business firms wouldbe likely to notice the new models and incor-porate aspects of them. This might depend ontheir own linkages to world society.

And independent of what policies and programs states and non-state organizationsput in place, modern people too tend to beagentic actors immersed in wider society(including global society). So all sorts of localactors – parents, teachers, medical profes-sionals, neighbors, relatives – have someprobability of picking up the new world ornational story lines, independent of thenational state policies or of any organizedactor at all.

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Realist theories, with very limited concep-tions of the embeddedness of actors in widercultural arrangements, tend to have blindspots on such processes. And for this reason,realist theories – and thus much social scien-tific theory and ideology – have the greatest difficulty accounting for large-scalemodern social change, because such changetends to flow through diffusive waves ratherthan down through an organized realistladder of world to state to organization to individual effects. The global expansion of organization (and organization theory)itself is an excellent example (Drori et al., 2006).

The social scientific failures in explaininglarge-scale change are stunning. The move-ment for racial and ethnic equality, thewomen’s movement, the environment move-ment, the modern movements for organiza-tional transparency, the breakdown of the Communist system, the movement forgay and lesbian rights – all these worldwidechanges were poorly predicted, and arepoorly explained, by social scientific thinking.

Empirically, research on the diffusiveimpacts of world models on social practiceindependent of national-state action is con-vincing. The world models impact nationalpolicy, certainly: but they impact practicewhether or not they impact policy. The worldmovement to constrain child labor seems tohave very large effects on practice, whetheror not countries subscribe to the appropriateprohibitions (Abu Sharkh, 2002). Worldmovements for women’s rights have dra-matic effects increasing the educationalenrollment of women, independent of anynational policies (Bradley & Ramirez, 1996).Changed world models related to reproduc-tion impact birth rates independent ofnational policy (Bongaarts & Watkins, 1996).The world environment movement impactspractice both through national policy andaround it (Schofer & Hironaka, 2005). It isprobably also true that the world humanrights movements have impacted local prac-tice independent of national policy subscrip-tions – the data on human rights practices

over time are too weakly standardized to tell(Hafner-Burton & Tsutsui, 2005).

Similar studies at the organizational levelof analysis show similar effects. Practices inthe treatment of employees, for instance,drift along following world or nationalmodels in good part independent of formalpolicies (Drori et al., 2006). In the same way,the practices of teachers or doctors reflectshifting customs in good part independent oforganizational policies (Coburn, 2004).

Realist theories have little to say aboutsuch broader effects. So sweeping socialchanges occur, at the edges of social scientific notice. Modern society is organizedaround general and cultural models, as much as around hard-wired organi-zational structures. And these models areincreasingly worldwide in character (Meyeret al., 1997).

CONCLUSIONS

The rapid expansion of a stateless globalsociety – in transactions and perceptionsalike – has produced a great wave of culturalmaterials facilitating expanding organizationat every level. Scientific and rationalistic pro-fessionals and associations generate highlyrationalized and universalized pictures ofnatural and social environments calling forexpanded rational actorhood of states, organ-izations, and individuals. Legal and socialscientific professionals generate greatlyexpanded conceptions of the rights and capa-bilities of all human persons, transcendingnational citizenship. Universities and othereducational arrangements expand, world-wide, installing newly rationalized knowl-edge in newly empowered persons.

So models of organized actorhood expand,penetrate every social sector and country. Allsorts of older social forms – bureaucracies,family structures, traditional professionalarrangements – are transformed into organi-zations. The process is driven by a culturalsystem that is a putative substitute for

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traditional state-like political arrangements –realist analyses that root the process in pow-erful interested actors miss out on most of theimportant changes. The process spreadsthrough the diffusion of models of actorhood,not principally via a power and incentivesystem. The changes transcend practicality,leaving great gaps between policy and prac-tice essentially everywhere – almost anyorganization can be seen as a failure, now.And the changes diffuse at multiple levels –through central organizations and throughtheir professionalized memberships and populations.

Sociological institutional theory – especiallyits phenomenological version – captures thewhole post-World War II enterprise verywell, and for this reason has been successful.In a world less rapidly changing, the pre-ferred realisms of modern ideology andsocial theory might have constructed realistexplanations but change has been too rapid.Realist theories and ideologies have notcaught up with the explosion of human rights(e.g., gay and lesbian rights), of environmen-tal doctrines and policies, of all sorts ofsocial rationalization (e.g., a global standardsmovement), and the transformation of allsorts of unlikely social structures into puta-tively rational organizations.

Much social theory, however, retains itstheoretical/ideological preference for tradi-tional realisms, leaving the great socialchanges of the modern period poorlyexplored. So this leaves much intellectualspace within which institutional theory candevelop. In this context, the best strategy forinstitutional theory is to keep to its last, andto avoid attending to the clamor arising fromrealist ideological assumptions.

Thus, institutionalists sometimes areinstructed to seek for the interested actorsbehind the new social models under con-struction, and to assume such actors exist bydefinition. This is not a good idea, and itmakes more sense to track the relevant pro-fessions and ‘others’ who are central. Mostnew models of organizational or nationalstructure are developed with heavy influence

from such sources. Naturally, successfulmodels tend to be derived and edited fromthe most successful organizations – whichrealists then call hegemonic – but this doesnot mean that the interests of those organiza-tions play a causal role.

Institutionalists are instructed to investi-gate the realist ‘mechanisms’ by which localstructures conform to wider models: it is nota good idea to take seriously the pretenses of modern interested actorhood involved.Conformity to standard models may notinvolve much ‘influence’ or much decision-making. The relevant network linkages, forexample, may simply involve the most ele-mentary forms of information transmission.

Institutionalists are told to investigate theassumed true linkages that powerful inter-ested actors put between policy and practice:it is wiser to imagine that developing the pos-ture of the proper actor is a main goal ofmodern people and groups, transcendingtheir needs to implement this posture inactions. In a world in which an enormouspremium is placed on actorhood, enteringinto this identity is obviously central.

Institutionalists are told that the analysis ofdiffusion waves is unscientific – the only cor-rect approach is to assume each particle insuch a wave is a properly rational and inter-ested actor: following this advice wouldmean giving up on really trying to explain thedramatic social and organizational changesof our period. The great changes of ourperiod – often poorly recognized by realistsocial sciences – occur much more throughwaves of conforming non-decision thanthrough networks of fully formed andautonomous rationalized actors.

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Barrett, D., Kurzman, C., & Shanahan, S. 2006.Coreless diffusion: Export-only policies forpopulation control. School of Social Work,University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Bendor, J., Moe, T.M., & Shotts, K.W. 2001.Recycling the garbage can: An assessment ofthe research program. American PoliticalScience Review, 95 (1): 169–190.

Berger, P.L., Berger, B., & Kellner, H. 1974. Thehomeless mind: modernization and con-sciousness. New York: Vintage Books.

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