Institutional Theory

Ronald L. Jepperson is Associate Professor of Sociology, emeritus, at the University of Tulsa, where he taught social science, philosophy, and critical thinking to undergraduates. Previously he was a faculty member at the University of Washington, and a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of California-Berkeley, and the European University Institute. John W. Meyer is Professor of Sociology, emeritus, at Stanford University. His research has focused on comparative sociology, education, and formal organizations, employing and developing neo-institutional theory, emphasizing the dependence of modern social structure on wider and often global cultural frameworks. He has published widely and received many academic honors.

'Despite its influence, neoinstitutional theory has long been known by its parts, with organizational theorists focusing one strand and political sociologists on another. Institutional Theory, a collection of foundational and in some case little known essays and new reflective chapters by the theory's progenitor, John Meyer, and one of its most gifted expositors, Ron Jepperson, is the first volume to present institutional theory as a single coherent approach to social analysis, with compelling results. Because most work in institutional theory has been published in conventional journal-article format, using unpretentious language and familiar comfortably positivist methods, it has been easy to underestimate the extent to which it represents a fundamentally radical break with received theory, challenging and reworking such basic categories as action and agency, levels of analysis, and organization in ways that will defamiliarize and reconstitute the reader's understanding of the social world. This welcome volume will be a critically important resource for social theory for many years to come.' Paul DiMaggio, Professor of Sociology, New York University

• Credits; Preface; Part I. Introduction: 1. Introduction: cultural institutionalism; Part II. Institutional Theory: Its Role in Modern Social Analysis; 2. Society without culture (1988); 3. Institutions, institutional effects, and institutionalism (1991); 4. The development and application of sociological neo-institutionalism (2002); 5. Reflections on Part II: institutional theory; Part III. The Institutional Level of Analysis: 6. Multiple levels of analysis and the limitations of methodological individualisms (2011); 7. The limitations illustrated: examples from the research literature on macrosocial change (2007); 8. Reflections on Part III: levels of analysis; Part IV. Institutions of Modernity and Post-Modernity: The Construction of Actors: 9. The 'actors' of modern society: the cultural construction of social agency (2000); 10. Reflections: institutional theory and world society (2009); 11. Reflections on Part IV: the construction of actors; Part V. Conclusion: 12. Concluding reflections: evolving cultural models in global and national society.