IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-39283-0_11.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Locked in the Iron Cage? When Institutionalization Is (not) a Path-Dependent Process

In: Self-Reinforcing Processes in and among Organizations

Author

Listed:
  • Olivier Berthod
  • Jörg Sydow

Abstract

In his influential essay, Powell (1991, p. 186) stresses how little we know about the genesis and emergence of institutions. To him, neo-institutional theory consequently fails to look at issues of reproduction adequately. Path dependence, in his opinion, could contribute to these issues, not least due to its endogenous focus on the constitution and distributed reproduction of collective rationalities. And yet, studies in the neo-institutionalism tradition continue to mention the concept of path dependence with little consideration for its theoretical foundations (e.g. Holm, 1995; Thornton, Jones, and Kury, 2005; Modell, Jacobs, and Wiesel, 2007). In fact, and as we will see later, path dependence is more often evoked for rhetorical purposes than for the usage of its analytical tools (for a similar criticism see Sydow, Schreyögg, and Koch, 2009). As a result, the potential of path dependence has not yet really been exploited by institutionalists.

Suggested Citation

  • Olivier Berthod & Jörg Sydow, 2013. "Locked in the Iron Cage? When Institutionalization Is (not) a Path-Dependent Process," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Jörg Sydow & Georg Schreyögg (ed.), Self-Reinforcing Processes in and among Organizations, chapter 11, pages 204-229, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-39283-0_11
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230392830_11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Joern Hoppmann & Alice Sakhel & Marcel Richert, 2018. "With a little help from a stranger: The impact of external change agents on corporate sustainability investments," Business Strategy and the Environment, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(7), pages 1052-1066, November.
    2. Lauri Wessel & Martin Gersch & Erik Harloff, 2017. "Talking Past Each Other," Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK, Springer;Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), vol. 59(1), pages 23-40, February.
    3. Johann Fortwengel & Arne Keller, 2020. "Agency in the face of path dependence: how organizations can regain scope for maneuver," Business Research, Springer;German Academic Association for Business Research, vol. 13(3), pages 1169-1201, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-39283-0_11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.