Scandinavian institutionalism – a case of institutional work

Abstract

Institutional theory has witnessed a fairly successful stream of research and has witnessed a renaissance within the social sciences over the last couple of decades. This has created a diffusion of institutional theory into a number of disciplines within the social sciences and resulted in the creation of a distinction between different types of institutionalisms like economical, sociological, and historical institutionalism (Scott, 1995, 2008). A widely used distinction within institutional theory has also been a division between “old institutionalism” and “new institutionalism” (see, for example, DiMaggio & Powell, 1991; Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996; Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997). Lately it has also become customary to talk about a particular Scandinavian approach to organization studies (e.g. Engwall, 2003; Kreiner, 2007; Olsen, 2007) and about a “Scandinavian institutionalism” as a distinctive and identifiable variant of institutionalism (e.g. Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996, 2003; Lægreid, 2007; Røvik, 2007; Greenwood, Sahlin, Oliver & Suddaby, 2008; Sahlin & Wedlin, 2008). This chapter aims at identifying and presenting the origin of what could be termed Scandinavian institutionalism and at characterizing its main features and its emerging boundaries.