The Project of Rationalization: A Critique and Reappraisal of Neo-Institutionalism in Organization Studies

Abstract

This article critically approaches various neo-institutional accounts of the process of formal organizing. While acknowledging the importance of the overall orientation marked by neo-institutional studies, the article identifies several crucial aspects that have escaped the attention of neo-institutional research. In particular, it criticizes the inability of neo-institutionalism to provide an account of the means linking situated forms of organizing with wider instrumental beliefs and practices, in terms other than adaptivist, diffusionist. Such a limitation is partly a consequence of unwillingness of neo-institutionalism to focus on and analyze the very architecture of the rationalized patterns and relationships which neo-institutionalists claim to be diffusing across organizational populations and fields. Drawing on several sources, the article develops a framework that seeks to outline the conceptual means for decomposing the carriers of rationalized patterns, models and techniques and showing the distinctive ways in which they implicate the building blocks of formal organizing.