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Institutions and Organizations (2nd ed.)
Richard Scott
Sage
California
2001
280 pp.
ISBN: 0761920013
U$38.95 (softback)
Foundations for Organizational Science
Keyword Neo-institutional theory
Review DOI 10.1108/01437730310505902
In Institutions and Organizations, Scott has provided the reader with an academic tour de force that is both the works greatest strength and, at the same time, its greatest weakness. The book itself is composed of nine, densely written chapters detailing the history, genealogy and current state of neo-institutional theory across political science, sociology and business designed around Scotts' three major aims for the work.
In the Introduction, Scott notes that the first aim of the book is "to capture and accurately reflect the richness and diversity of institutional thought ... drawing on the insights of some of the greatest minds from the late nineteenth to the first year of the twenty-first century" (p. xx). This aim is certainly achieved, at least in detailed outline form, in the first and second chapters.
The second aim of the book, started in chapter three but continued throughout the rest of the work, is "to provide a relatively comprehensive analytic framework so that the different conceptions of institutions and the variety of underlying assumptions and methodological approaches can be better understood" (p. xxi). This...