Exploring the Process of Institutional Isomorphism in Patchy Organizational Fields

Institutional isomorphism is a useful framework for understanding how organizations respond to their environments; however, there are gaps in our knowledge of how the process of isomorphism works. The micro-dynamics of isomorphic processes remain relatively unexplored, and there are also challenges to our assumptions about the composition of organizational fields, and about the roles and affiliations of field members. We address some of these gaps by analyzing the example of the Education Quality Assurance (EQA) designation, which is given to post-secondary institutions by the British Columbia provincial government. This example provides a rich site for investigation of isomorphic processes because it is located in a patchy organizational field with loose boundaries and a diverse membership. Our analysis indicates several possible new directions for research on institutional isomorphism, such as greater attention to government’s power as a legitimator, the importance of agency and choice in the process of organizations’ adoption of symbols of legitimacy, the evaluation of legitimacy indicators by members of an organizational field, and the potential value of the concept of patchy organizational fields in gaining a more accurate understanding of the dynamics of institutional isomorphism.