An Institutional Model of Organizational Practice: Financial Reporting at the Fortune 200

Abstract

This paper is based on work from my dissertation; I owe special thanks to Jim March, the chairman, and reading committee members, Jeff Pfeffer and Don Palmer. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Complex Organizations Seminar, sponsored by the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University; I owe many thanks to the participants at these workshops. I want to thank Theresa Lant, Dick Scott, and Frances Milliken for comments on earlier versions. The advice, guidance, and careful reading of Paul DiMaggio has contributed considerably to improving this paper on several occasions. In addition, the comments of five anonymous reviewers resulted in a much better paper; I thank them wholeheartedly. The helpful editorship of Marshall Meyer is acknowledged gratefully. As is customary, I take full responsibility for remaining errors, ambiguities, and problems. This paper compares applied economic models and an institutional model in an empirical study of financial reporting practice at the Fortune 200 between 1962 and 1984. The findings indicate that the institutional model adds significant explanatory power over and above the models that currently dominate the applied economics literature. Thus, the primacy of organizational level rationality implicit in existing models is shown to be overly narrow and inadequate. In discussing the conclusions of the study and their implication for future research, particular emphasis is placed on the question of how institutional environments change over time.-