The Organizational Change from the Perspective of Neoinstitutionalism

In the last couple of decades, there has been a substantial revival of interest in institutional analysis, being outlined three major theoretical paradigms: rational choice new institutionalism, historical new institutionalism and sociological new institutionalism. In the present paper, we focused on the last paradigm mentioned, coming from outside the economic science, from sociology. Why this option? We thought it was inspired from time to time to take a look to others books with the intention to complete our creation. Dominant thesis that emerged from this is that the formal organizational structure is shaped by institutional forces, rational myths, knowledge, and by the legal system. The sociological approaches provide an alternative to the rationalist and individualistic ideas and by essential economic explanation that dominate contemporary theory. The central concept around which our paper is built is the one of institutionalization, meaning the institutional reproduction. Institutionalization was defined as the processes of habitualization, objectification and sedimentation by which a stable pattern achieve cognitive and normative fixity and become taken for granted. Throughout the paper we combined structural perspective and agency perspective to discern the mechanisms by which the institutional change of any kind to mimetic, normative and coercive takes place. Finally, we launched a challenge for future research on the conceptualization / construction of that institutional project focused on values, symbols, myths of sustainability and cooperation.