Institutional Theory, Old and New

Case study methods have played a foundational role in the study of organizations in their institutional environments. Case research methods are ideally suited for the study of institutions for four main reasons. First, case studies emphasize the critical importance of local and historical context. Robert Yin observes that case studies are best used when it is difficult to distinguish between a phenomenon and its context. Taking context seriously is consistent with a core tenet of institutional theory, which holds that organizations are influenced, if not fully determined, by the social conditions in which they are embedded. Imprinting, path dependence, and the infusion of organizations with meaning are all central concepts within institutional theory that were the result of the rich attention to contextual detail produced by case studies.

Case studies are also useful vehicles for studying institutions because they embrace explanations of complex causality. In contrast to multivariate or survey methods of social inquiry, whereby researchers try to isolate a single explanatory variable, case [Page 465]studies adopt the perspective that social phenomena are inherently complex, and thus they often employ multiple forms of observation (i.e., archival, content analysis, direct and indirect participation) from multiple levels of analysis. Complex causality, which argues that similar outcomes, such as the adoption of a common organizational form or practice, can occur as the result of different institutional causes (i.e., coercive, normative, or mimetic pressures), and is a critical element of institutional theory.

Case studies are also ideally suited to the study of extreme events or profound changes in social order. Such changes are useful to institutional researchers because they provide natural experiments that offer glimpses of insight into the inner workings of institutions. As indicated earlier in this entry, institutional processes tend to be invisible, masked by habit and ritualistic reproduction. The microprocesses that underpin institutions are often observable only in instances of extreme change when the institutional fabric is torn and the inner activities used to maintain and reproduce institutions are exposed; thus, case studies are often the best way to capture such natural experiments.

Finally, case studies are ideal tools to study the reified elements of institutions. A central concept of institutional theory is the notion that some behavior becomes so habituated or taken for granted that individual actors are unaware of their conformity to institutional pressures. Case studies force the researcher to adopt more finely grained analyses of the day-to-day behavior in organizations. Such attention to quotidian detail helps institutional researchers capture the core, but often invisible, elements of institutions that are not directly accessible to researchers or participants but can only be inferred from routines and practices that habitually reproduce social order.

The four applications of case studies just outlined reflect four historical moments in the use of case studies in institutional analysis. The first application, attentiveness to social embeddedness, is a hallmark of how case study research was conducted in the early stages of organizational institutionalism. What is now described as the “old institutionalism” was defined by powerful case studies of single organizations that used thick description to demonstrate how social context and meaning often overshadowed or subverted technical efficiency and production. This use of case study methods in institutional theory is illustrated through the exemplary work of Philip Selznick, Alvin W. Gouldner, Peter M. Blau, and Michel Crozier.

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