Challenges for Institutional Theory

This essay offers a critical summation of the use of neo-institutionalism to study organizations. While institutionalism has succeeded in becoming the dominant theory to study macro-organizational phenomena, there is a danger that the theory has been stretched far beyond its core purpose—to understand how organizational structures and processes acquire meaning and continuity beyond their technical goals. I discuss some possible reasons for this displacement and identify four nascent threads of research that hold strong potential for bringing institutional theory back to its core assumptions and objectives; categories, language, work, and aesthetics.