ABSTRACT
Institutions have been often and increasingly considered – in new institutional economics as well as in neo-institutionalist sociology – as background or ‘embedding’ human constructs, setting constraints to feasible economic actions and behaviours, on the basis of various sources of legitimacy. North (1990) defines institutions as ‘the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction’, thereby differentiating them from the choices that are made within the rules by teams, organizations and individuals in order to win economic games played under these rules. In the field of organizational sociology, it has been argued that economic actions are often shaped by the models of behaviour and organization that have become historically established and accepted as legitimate within particular sectors or societies leading to ‘institutional isomorphism’ (Powell and DiMaggio 1991).
