One theory, many practices. Institutional allomorphism in the managerialist reorganization of Italian local governments

What has been the impact of programmes for the corporate reorganization of the Italian public sector? The aim of this essay is to describe how a globalizing institutional change such as an administrative reform opens up broad spaces for the development of locally determined organizational changes, and how this localization does not coincide either with a dispersion of the initial programme or with forms of particularism. In the social sciences the description of phenomena of this kind often makes use of the concept of institutional isomorphism to explain how particular productive sectors are bound to become homologous with others. In this article I shall look instead at the results of a survey on the managerialization of Italian local governments and show that, beneath an apparent generalization, there are processes of systematic diversification -- what I call allomorphic processes -- dictated by the local institutions which mediate and transmit globalizing contents.