Organizations and Their Institutional Environments - Bringing Meaning, Values, and Culture Back In: Introduction to the Special Research Forum

This special issue had it roots in a symposium organized by Tammar Zilber and Roy Suddaby for the Academy of Management 2003 annual meetings in Seattle. The symposium was titled Reclaiming the Symbolic in Institutional Theory and represented an effort to refocus research attention on the aspects of institutions. At the time, we were aware of a growing interest in understanding institutions as, largely, cognitive-cultural constructions, or what Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez termed phenomenological macro-institutionalism (1997:146). Institutions, in this view, involve collectively shared scripts, frames, and taken-for-granted assumptions (Boli & Thomas, 1999), and actors (individuals, organizations, or states) attain their agency substantially as a result of their embeddedness in culture (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000). Modern organizations themselves thus reflect the intensive cultural rationalization of the contemporary world in their constitutive structures.