ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the scope and characteristics of contemporary institutional theory. Institutional theory has the particularly useful capacity to describe favorably the linkages, networks, and couplings of institutions coping with fragmentation, disarticulation, asymmetry between public problems and public jurisdictions, and high interdependence. Scott Robinson's cognitive pillar of institutional theory includes patterns of behavior based on established categories and routines, patterns of institutional adaptation, innovation based on mimicking, a decided tendency toward institutional isomorphism, and tendencies to risk-aversion and orthodoxy. The association between the institutional structures or designs of institutions and the policy and administrative outcomes of those institutions is an important and long-standing subject in political science. Among the best-known elements of institutional theory is the logic of the garbage can. The informal theory of the garbage can is famous for depicting a world that is much more complex than that described by classical theories of organizational choice.
