You've heard so far. How do we manage a firm using new institutional theory? In many ways it's hard to gauge because it seems like you just fit, right? However, I think there are a variety of different strategies and Dick Scott kind of alludes to it in his book, as does Pam Oliver in her work. Pam Oliver describes a series of strategic responses organizations can take to their institutional environments. And she says you can acquiesce, you can compromise, you can avoid, defy and manipulate. And implicit in her response is some sense of how integrated, differentiated, and ambiguous the surrounding institutional environments are, if you recall week six right and culture. These are references to that and I think the salience of any particular approach here might depend on how that institutional environment is currently arranged and what you can do internally with regard to encoding your structure or buffering and bridging with that environment so as to better your circumstances. So let's look at Pam Oliver's distinct strategies one at a time. The first one acquiescing and acquiescing is the most common one described in the literature that you read by [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE]. There the firm merely adopts and aligns with the [INAUDIBLE] environment as if its kind of a natural thing to do. This makes a lot of sense if there's consensus in the environment or if the firm appeals to a niche institution and set of beliefs, right? The second kind of strategy is to compromise, and compromising Is different and it entails balancing differentiated demands and negotiating with institutional representatives, right? So this typically occurs in conflicted and differentiated institutional environments where one must play off one perspective off the other, right? The third strategy is avoidance, and this can be accomplished by a buffering strategies like loose coupling. Since it kind of prevents careful inspection. In a way this move is akin to disguising the firm and and using smoke and mirror tactics to distract, so in those instances decoupling is used when institutional rules conflict with the technical requirements or the ritual features are not appropriate for the organization's outcomes or when the institutional environments are themselves in conflict with each other and in those instances, decoupling helps a firm. particularly an open system firm. And it prevents confrontation of these internal and external inconsistencies. By contrast, coupling and alignment across ritual classifications and technical output kind of occurs when organizations are centralized, and they reward technical performance. Or when the institutional environment is focused on certain issues, and dependence is highest there. So, for example, the use of accountability in schooling in the United States right now has created a more focused coupling. Oliver also mentions how firms can defy or resist their institutional environments, and they can do this by adopting norms and interests that are different from the surrounding environment. And the regulations being imposed upon them. And in most cases when firms do this they lose, and the literature is pretty consistent in terms of depicting this. It seems kind of deterministic toward defiant responses and not in their favor. The last kind of response is manipulation and you can co opt and manipulate institutional environments in an effort to improve your bargaining power. And this is often done by developing symbolic linkages with sources of power. And this is kind of what the bridging efforts of isomorphism were about of coercive,mimesis and norming. So in some the manager has to find ways to align the institutional environment. Or to find ways to help the organization wind its way through conflicting institutions in the environment, or internally to do this. They often conform and adjust their ritual classifications and outward appearances and they buffer their technical practice via decoupling, or they manipulate the situation by playing to the myths in the environment. So managers can hire these planners and economists to waste their time ratifying plans that have already been planned just for the sake of legitimacy or hire human relations professionals to deflect blame from conflicts. So there are all kinds of ways to kind of manipulate institutional environments like that. I think we can actually go further than literature suggests to this point in regard to discussing marketing and advertising and how that's used to receive endorsements and support for the environment. And this is kind of what I want to turn to next, which is framing and framing wars. In the case materials I assigned this week, you were introduced to the notion of framing. Framing better captures strategic aspects of cultural mirroring. And fit. Since it's all about cultural alignment efforts. The two assigned articles concerned framing wars and politics, and intelligent design versus evolution debates, right? Those articles describe how organizations and their leaders manipulate narratives and meanings so as to better align with both the national consciousness, or even segments of the environment. Now the beauty of the framing war article is that it captures both aspects of this tension, both strategy and cognition. And just to give you a little background, back in 2004 we had a presidential election between John Kerry and then George W Bush. And both candidates had stances on a variety of issues but they wanted to legitimate themselves with voters so as to secure their votes, to get a social resource. And in the end, Bush won and linguistic experts like George Lakoff Argued that Bush won because his strategists framed positions in a way that resonated more with the voters. Or as we might say the Republicans framed their positions in a way that resonated with deeply engrained rationalized myths. So [INAUDIBLE] in his analysis of all of this makes it clear that the issue isn't about finding the right words. These conceptions are grand metaphors don't just suddenly observe, right. And these right words will not suddenly change the national taken for granted understandings of the world around us, right? They have to kind resonate with beliefs and arguments that many of us hold. And because of this, Bush related that things like that he was against partial birth abortion. Not intact, dilation, extraction of a fetus, which is the technical term. That's used among physicians. Instead, partial birth abortion has this contradiction between birth and abortion. So of course it's kind of odd that you would be for it in a way, in the way it's framed. He also said that he was for exploring energy, not oil drilling, and fracking, which are seen as potentially damaging the environment. And that he was for tax relief, not Tax cuts for the rich which can be seen as unfair, right? So, by reframing their policies in ways that make them appeal to deeply hold beliefs and resonate with them, even if they are inaccurate kind of seemed to work, right? Now the Democrats have gotten wise since this and they have their own framings, of course. Like tax cuts for the rich is one statement. Or the Wall Street bailout is another and on it goes. There are these framings of issues that try to resonate with deeply held rationalized myths and beliefs that exist in the institutional environments. Another example of this can be found in the perineal debates about what to teach in our schools in the United States. And given that the nation was partially formed on Puritanical immigrants. There are subsections of the population that are fundamentalist Christians, right? And they sometimes take a literal view of the bible in regard that evolutionary theory is lacking and as an affront to their beliefs. And they'd much rather see creationism be taught in schools where the bible says the universe is 3,000 years old. Now what's interesting about this controversy is how again, framing plays a part. Here again, the religious right has successfully found ways to frame their arguments such that they resonate more fully in the environment. In fact the most common refrain in this debate is, teach the controversy, right? Given education and science rest on teaching and exploring evidence through debate. The pressure to teach the controversy seems appealing on it's surface. It seems rational, right? It's just that, evolutionary scholars and biologists, and most educated people think that there is no controversy to begin with. So the use of wording to resonate with held rational myths, serves to undermine the efforts of rational agents like professors, universities, natural science fields, and medical professionals. So in some ways this is a way in which defiant used of rationalised myths can counter rationalize agents in society. Now whether it holds for very long, that's doubtful. But it's interesting none the less. Now what I'm trying to suggest here is that we could use rhetoric to manipulate opinions and to secure social resources from the environment. We just need to find interesting ways to appeal to rational myths. Neo institutional theory, like any theory, isn't perfect and it's prone to critique. And most readers regard Neo institutional theory as describing over socialized and passive human actors, because It's always about matching or mirroring and it seems kind of deterministic. In this model parochial and power interest are slighted by the institutionalized theory. What matters is the external environment and mirroring those rational myths. And many argue that those institutionalized theories gone too far. And the direction of cognition and shared understanding of modernity, thereby trivializing power and politics. I think the framing literature provides a potential means forward and a potential means around these critiques. But it's currently empirically underdeveloped, right? It's qualitative in many regards. And some criticize the NEON's institutional approach mostly as a theory that force negative evidence in support of itself. And by this, critics mean that the NEON institutional theory mostly identifies weaknesses in other theories instead of revealing directly. Evidence for its own claims. But I think this is actually harder in practice than it is in theory. To demonstrate the actual diffusion of cognitive scripts and conceptual frames, these grand metaphors, is a lot easier to do expost. And through proxies than through ex ante kind of prediction. Or the direct measurement of institutional variables. The theory is this intuitive appeal to us and we can identify cases where the fusion and isomorphism occur, but it's hard to distinguish processes of normative mimetic isomorphism and to identify the features being homogenized right? So neo institutional theory is one of the most vibrant theories of organizational analysis, but it's also one that needs further empirical development before it has kind of this mass appeal, I think.
