ABSTRACT
Much modern thinking about organizations follows a rough outline called institutional theory (Greenwood et al. 2008). Broad cultural and organizational environments provide templates for local settings, structuring these in standardized and sometimes isomorphic ways. Supported or constrained by these templates, local social organizational structures arise and are stabilized by their environmentally provided exoskeletons. Sometimes, the conformity to the environment and the organizational forms it provides is superficial, with local realities decoupled from the wider standards, and commonly, the standards themselves vary and make room for much local variation. Thus, a frequent research focus is to assess the degrees of isomorphism or variation in a set of social organizations. A common idea is that the variation is a product of strategic action by local participants (e.g., Oliver 1991). But in other cases, variation is thought to result from differences in linkages to environmental institutions, which themselves vary.
