ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the ways that industries can impose isomorphic pressure on organizations. With the concept of field as predominant, institutional theory has focused both on the structuration of sets of organizations into fields or industries and the impact of established field or industry processes as institutional forces on structures internal to organizations. The composition and structure of boards would vary depending on the norms prevalent in organizations within commonly-accepted industry categories. The work extends a literature that questions the nonprofit/for-profit institutional split, suggesting that variation within sector may, in some cases, exceed variation across sector. Any nonprofit board text that offers a 'one size fits all' prescription for effective trusteeship, implicitly or oftentimes explicitly, offers the for-profit board as a comparative base. The network piece is particularly interesting in light of thinking through normative impacts that differentiate industries.
