Institutional Processes and Strategic Responses .
Early theorists examining institutional effects implicitly assumed an
overly deterministic causality and an overly unified institutional framework.
Much of the theoretical and empirical work during founding decades emphasized
the isomorphic effects of institutional processes, as organizational fields
and populations were asserted to become more alike in structural and procedural
features (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; see Scott 2001a: chap. 7, for a
review). For example, Tolbert and Zucker (1983) examined how during a
period of about five decades, from 1880 to 1930, a growing number of cities
adopted civil service reforms in response to increasing normative pressures.
Meyer and colleagues (Meyer et al., 1988) described the spread of systematic
bureaucratic administrative forms in U.S. public schools during the middle
decades of the twentieth century. And Fligstein-( 1985) showed that large
firms were more like to adopt the M-form structure the more other firms in
the same industry had previously adopted it.