Institutional Strategy

The ability of organizations to strategically influence their environments has become a central concern in organizational research. In this article, I develop the concept of ‘institutional strategy’ to describe patterns of organizational action that are directed toward managing the institutional structures within which firms compete for resources, either through the reproduction or transformation of those structures. Drawing on a study of the Canadian forensic accounting industry, I describe two types of institutional strategy: (1) membership strategies that involve the definition of rules of membership and their meaning for an institutional community; and (2) standardization strategies that are concerned with the establishment of technical legal or market standards that define the "normal" processes involved in the production of some good or service.