Abstract
Institutions, like populations and organizations, occupy physical, temporal, symbolic, and social space. It is reasonable, then, to assume institutions are characterized by ecological dynamics. In the paper below, a formal theory of institutional ecology is posited. It is argued that institutions have cores and surrounding environments, and a rule of proximity governs the way individual and corporate actors orient their behavior and attitudes. Hence, the closer are an individual, corporate unit, or field of actors to an institution's core, the greater is the visibility and access to institutional resources and authority systems and, therefore, the more likely they are to act, set goals, and make decisions as sanctioned by the institutional domain. Ultimately, a theory of institutional ecology can help link the micro- and meso-levels while also serving as an explanatory tool for understanding why some actions and goals are stereotyped, while others appear deviant or, in some cases, random.
Highlights
Individuals and corporate actors overwhelmingly act in predictable ways, despite the fact that most actors have the ability to choose from an assortment of lines of action and goals to set
The social psychological programs like Identity Theory (Stets, 2006) or Affect Control Theory (Robinson and Smith-Lovin, 2006) treat larger forces as exogenous and taken for granted, as their interests are in the micro dynamics of identity formation and reproduction within the confines of interactions
The other direction in sociology has been towards examining meso-level corporate units and the "field" (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), niche (Hannan & Freeman, 1977), or "market" (Fligstein, 1996) comprised of like corporate units struggling for some scarce resources and adopting similar organizational forms and strategies because of convergent forces because of vague pressures like uncertainty or normativity
Summary
Individuals and corporate actors overwhelmingly act in predictable ways, despite the fact that most actors have the ability to choose from an assortment of lines of action and goals to set. The other direction in sociology has been towards examining meso-level corporate units and the "field" (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), niche (Hannan & Freeman, 1977), or "market" (Fligstein, 1996) comprised of like corporate units struggling for some scarce resources and adopting similar organizational forms and strategies because of convergent forces because of vague pressures like uncertainty or normativity Like their social psychological counterparts, the meso-level theorists maintain the contemporary bias of bottom-up theorizing which treats the macro-level of analysis as an amorphous environment filled with ambiguous forces and ill-defined dynamics (see Abrutyn & Turner, 2011 for a review).
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