Presenting Structural Innovation in an Institutional Environment: Hospitals' Use of Impression Management
研究了首批放弃制度化结构、采用全新形式的医院如何通过年度报告中的防御性印象管理向利益相关者解释变革，揭示了组织在创新中主动利用制度力量的行为。
This research examines how the first organizations to abandon an institutionalized, taken-for-granted structure and adopt a radically different form presented the innovation to important stakeholders. A content analysis of hospitals' annual reports reveals that organizations that differed on other dimensions uniformly made preventive use of defensive impression management in announcing the change to a diversified corporate structure. The organizations invoked coercive and mimetic pressures to account for and justify the new structure, and they associated the innovation with legitimated organizational activities. The findings make two contributions that link the “old” institutionalism and neoinstitutionalism: they point to organizational agency in the preventive use of the very institutional forces that create isomorphism and suggest the presence of institutional forces even during the early stages of innovation.