The accidental implementation of an institutional ritual

Abstract

The coupling of organizational policy with practice is customarily attributed to the presence of institutional pressures. This paper reports a study of an international non-governmental organization (INGO) in which day-to-day practice was coupled with symbolic rituals in spite of the absence of institutional pressures. This disconfirmatory finding indicates the need to move away from structural-deterministic models of coupling that presume a functional compliance between external pressures and organizational practices – toward fresh perspectives that shed light to latent phenomenological processes underlying the substantive implementation of organizational rituals. To this end, we propose that coupling can be an unintended organizational state made possible due to failure to appreciate the cynical and mythological underpinnings of institutional rituals.