Institutional Similarity
Many aspects of structure and behavior may be targeted toward environmental acceptance rather than toward internal technical efficiency. Interorganizational relationships thus are characterized by forces that cause organizations in a similar population to look like one another. Institutional similarity, called institutional isomorphism in the academic literature, is the emergence of a common structure and approach among organizations in the same filed. Isomorphism is the process that causes one unit in a population to resemble other units that face the same set of environmental conditions.