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Although drawing from neoinstitutional theoretical apparatus and ontology, management fashion theory is understood as a theory that explains the transitory nature of popular ideas and practices while institutional theory explains their stabilization, persistence and further institutionalization. In a nutshell, it seems that being opposed to each other, these two theories describe and predict different, incommensurable diffusion trajectories and organizational behaviour patterns. The purpose of this paper is to unify these two competing perspectives.

This paper makes an attempt toward further unification of management fashion theory with new institutionalism by offering an alternative understanding and conceptualization of institutional change and deinstitutionalization and by distinguishing emerging concepts from already popular fashions.

Most emerging concepts never achieve popularity and disappear while few of them achieve massive media attention and diffuse widely becoming new management fashions. Once these concepts have achieved a wide popularity institutional forces would favor them and lead to further institutionalization. Institutional change is understood not as a deinstitutionalization of existing management fashion in terms of erosion, discontinuity or disappearance but as a decline in its media coverage while media attention focuses on new fashionable concept. The former management fashion gets institutionalized, institutional change occurs in terms of shifting attention toward new fashion and diffusion and institutionalization cycle restarts. Institutional prediction of isomorphism and institutionalization as irreversible tendencies thus can be unified with MF prediction about the bell-shaped curves in fashions’ popularity. Therefore, postulates and predictions of management fashion theory can be derived from new institutionalism and vice versa.

The paper aims to cover, generalize and explain different trajectories of various management and organizational concepts, deducing theoretical propositions from both institutional theory and management fashion theory. Theoretical and methodological ideas offered in this paper can be helpful in future research on management fashions and diffusion. Studies on the evolution of management concept can benefit from proposed categorization and causal relationships between different stages of the life cycle.

Unifying seemingly conflicting and disparate perspectives and views allows making organization theory more coherent in terms of both explanatory power and ontological commensurability. Following other mature sciences, we share the same notion of progress, namely, the aim of achieving unification and demonstrating that different organizational theories still describe the same reality.

Institutional theory is focused on the prevalence of social value over economic imperatives in organizational life, but what happens when taken-for-granted practices offer neither technical nor institutional value at all? In this paper, the authors theorize an important but omitted in the organizational literature scenario and a class of institutionalized practices. The authors conceptualize them as institutionary eclipsed practices. The paper offers a theory of institutional shadow and institutional eclipsed practices that explains the remarkable persistence of institutions despite the obvious absence of value.

The authors offer a theoretical framework for studying institutional practices that have neither economic nor social value. The authors illustrate institutionally eclipsed practices with an example of educational organizations and practices, but the theory of institutional shadow developed in this paper goes beyond this case.

Organizations adopt global institutional standards for local organizational fields where different institutional norms prevail and different meanings and values are attached to these global institutions. In some cases, such institutions may lose their technical value and have no social (legitimizing) value in a new institutional context. Such practice is taken for granted, enacted, reproduced and maintained as necessary because it is encoded into the very institutional image of a profession (and social role). An institutionally eclipsed practice becomes a taken-for-granted, integral part of organizational members’ daily routines. Still, neither efficiency nor social benefits and value are offered by such a practice for organizational members. At the same time, as institutionalized practices are resistant and usually immune to technical, economic and social changes, they tend to endure and persist in organizations. Both a disintegrated practice and organizational members who enact it get into the limbo of the institutional shadow.

The authors distinguish and theorize three main conditions that allow institutionally eclipsed practices to emerge, proliferate and persist in organizations and across organizational fields. These factors include the presence of institutional meaning, the taken-for-granted quality (which means the immunity to technical, social and material changes) and the absence of contradictions. Together these three virtues allow institutionally eclipsed practices to be easily embedded into organizational contexts, being enacted by organizational members and avoiding abandonment and deinstitutionalization despite uselessness.

Once introduced and conceptualized as a factor that causes erosion and decay of social institutions and subsequent deinstitutionalization, the notion of entropy is at odds with predictions of institutional isomorphism and seems to directly contradict the tendency toward ever-increasing institutionalization. The purpose of this paper is to offer a resolution of this theoretical inconsistency by revisiting the meaning of entropy and reconceptualizing institutionalization from an information-theoretic point of view.

It is a theoretical paper that offers an information perspective on institutionalization.

A mistaken understanding of the nature and role of entropy in the institutional theory is caused by conceptualizing it as a force that counteracts institutional tendencies and acts in opposite direction. Once institutionalization and homogeneity are seen as a product of natural tendencies in the organizational field, the role of entropy becomes clear. Entropy manifests itself at the level of information processing and corresponds with increasing uncertainty and the decrease of the value of information. Institutionalization thus can be seen as a special case of an increase in entropy and a decrease of knowledge. Institutionalization is a state of maximum entropy.

It is explained why institutionalization and institutional persistence are what to be expected in the long run and why information entropy contributes to this tendency. Contrary to the tenets of the institutional work perspective, no intentional efforts of individuals and collective actors are needed to maintain institutions. In this respect, the paper contributes to the view of institutional theory as a theory of self-organization.

Institutional theory had been developed for the purpose of explaining widespread diffusion, mimetic adoption and institutionalization of organizational practices. However, further extensions of institutional theory are needed to explain a range of different institutional trajectories and organizational responses since institutionalized standards constitute a minority of all diffusing practices. The study presents a theoretical framework which offers guidelines for explaining and predicting various adoption, variation and post-adoption scenarios.

The paper is primarily conceptual in nature, and the arguments are developed based on previous institutional theory and organizational change literature.

The notion of institutional inertia is proposed in order to provide a more detailed explanation of when and why organizations ignore, adopt, modify, maintain and abandon practices and the way intra-organizational institutional pressures shape, direct and constrain these processes. It is specified whether institutional inertia will be temporarily eclipsed or whether it will actively manifest itself during adoption, adaptation and maintaining attempts. The study distinguishes between four institutional profiles of organizational practices – institutionalized, institutionally friendly, neutral and contested practices – which can vary along three dimensions: accuracy, extensiveness and meaning. The variation and post-adoption outcomes for each of them can be completely characterized and predicted by only three parameters: the rate of institutional inertia, institutional profile of these practices and whether they are interpretatively flexible. In turn, an extent of intraorganizational institutional resistance to new practices is determined by their institutional profile and flexibility.

It is expected that proposed theoretical explanations in this paper can offer insights into these empirical puzzles and supply a broader view of organizational and management changes. The study’s theoretical propositions help to understand what happens to organizational practices after they are handled by organizations, thus moving beyond the adoption/rejection dichotomy.

The paper explores and clarifies the nature of institutional inertia and offers an explanation of its manifestation in organizations over time and how it shapes organizational practices in the short and long run. It challenges a popular assumption in organizational literature that fast and revolutionary transition is a prerequisite for successful change. More broadly, the typology offered in this paper helps to explain whether and how organizations can successfully handle and complete their change and how far they can depart from institutional norms.

This essay raises a concern about the trajectory that new institutionalism has been following during the last decades, namely an emphasis on heterogeneity, change and agentic behavior instead of isomorphism and conformist behavior. This is a crucial issue from the perspective of the philosophy and methodology of science since a theory that admits both change and stability as a norm has less scientific weight then a theory that predicts a prevalence of passivity and isomorphism over change and strategic behavior. The former provides explanations and predictions while the latter does not.

The paper offers an analysis of the nature, characteristics, functions and boundaries of institutional theories in the spirit of philosophy and methodology of science literature.

The power of the former institutional theory developed by Meyer, Rowan, DiMaggio and Powell lies in its generalization, explanation and prediction of observable and unobservable phenomena: as a typical organizational theory that puts forward directional predictions, it explains and predicts the tendency for organizations to become more similar to each other over time and express less strategic and interest-driven behavior, conforming to ever-increasing institutional pressures. A theory of isomorphism makes scientific predictions while its modern advancements do not. Drawing on Popper's idea of the limit of domains of explanation and limited domains of theories we present two propositions that may direct our attention towards the strength or weakness of institutional theories with regard to their explanations of organizational processes and behavior.

The paper draws implications for further theory building in institutional analysis by suggesting the nature of institutional explanations and the place of institutional change in the theoretical apparatus. Once institutional theory explains the tendency of the system towards equilibrium, there is no need to explain the origins and causes of radical change per se. Institutional isomorphism theory explains and predicts how even after radical changes organizational fields will move towards isomorphism, that is, institutional equilibrium. The task is, therefore, not to explain agency and change but to show that it is natural and inevitable processes that organizational field will return to isomorphic dynamics and move towards homogenization no matter how much radical change occurred in this field.

The paper discusses the practical problems with instrumental utility of institutional theories. In order to be useful any theory must clearly delineate its boundaries and offer explanations and predictions and it is only the former 1977/1983 institutional theory that satisfies these requirements while modern advancements merely offer ambiguous theoretical umbrellas that escape empirical tests. For researchers therefore it is important to recognize which theory can be applied in a given limited domain of research and which one has little or no value.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a new analysis and understanding of the notion of deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization of taken-for-granted practices as a natural consequence of ever-increasing entropy seems to directly contradict the major institutional thesis, namely, that over time isomorphic forces increase and, as a result, possibilities for deinstitutionalization decrease culminating in the impossibility of abandoning in highly institutionalized fields.

This paper is conceptual in nature. Oliver’s 1992 paper on deinstitutionalization is taken as a key text on the subject and as a starting point for building an alternative theory of deinstitutionalization. More broadly, institutional theory and organizational literature on diffusion/adoption are reviewed and synthesized.

The authors argue that possibilities for deinstitutionalization have been overestimated in institutional literature and offer a revisited account of deinstitutionalization vs institutional isomorphism and institutionalized vs highly diffusing-but-not-institutionalized practices. A freedom for choice between alternative practices exists during the pre-institutional stage but not when the field is already institutionalized. In contrast, institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices are immutable to any sort of functional and political pressures and they use to persist even when no technical value remains, thus deinstitutionalization on the basis of a functional dissatisfaction seems to be a paradox.

By revisiting the nature and patterns of deinstitutionalization, the paper offers a better conceptual classification and understanding of how organizations adopt, maintain and abandon organizational ideas and practices. An important task of this paper is to reduce the scope of application of deinstitutionalization theory to make it more focused and self-consistent. There is, however, still not enough volume of studies on institutional factors of practices’ abandonment in institutional literature. The authors, therefore, acknowledge that more studies are needed to further improve both the former deinstitutionalization theory and the framework.

The authors offer a solution to this theoretical inconsistency by distinguishing between truly institutionalized practices and currently popular practices (highly diffused but non-institutionalized). It is only the latter that are subject to the norms of progress that allow abandoning and replacing existing organizational activities. Deinstitutionalization theory is, thus can be applied to popular practices that are subject to reevaluation, abandonment and replacement with new optimal practices while institutions are immutable to these norms of progress. Institutions are immutable to deinstitutionalization and the deinstitutionalization of optimal practices is subject to the logic of isomorphic convergence in organizational fields. Finally, the authors revisit a traditional two-stage institutional diffusion model to explain the possibility and likelihood of abandonment during different stages of institutionalization.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how Ukrainian scholars recognize and react to a situation of an absence of two major institutional logics of academic writing and publishing, namely the logics of science advancement and personal career promotion and the dominance of the logic of coercive pressures to publish regardless of quality and resonance and with no material and reputational rewards. Two fundamental and essential logics that drive research activity at any university in western societies seem to be almost absent in Ukrainian context, where symbolic publishing for accountability only is taken-for-granted.

The study adopts qualitative interpretative research methodology. The scholars from seven universities were interviewed, including 16 senior scholars and 15 PhD students.

The study shows the dominance of a single logic of accountability which is persisted due to coercive pressures exerted on scholars. Despite the absence of instrumental value behind publishing requirements in Ukrainian higher education system, most academics do not question this policy and largely take it for granted as the only possible system.

Research conducted in this study contributes to institutional logics and institutional complexity literature by highlighting a unique situation of institutional complexity when logic that offers neither economic nor social benefits dominates the field. It is shown how actors recognize, interpret and respond to this situation, identifying three types of responses that range from blind adherence to taken-for-granted institutional definitions to strategic balance between coercive pressures and desired logics.

This paper aims to demonstrating that the former new institutional theory of isomorphism and decoupling cannot be extended, modified or refuted as it is a closed theory. By analyzing the structure of this former version of institutional theory and its numerous modern competitors (institutional entrepreneurship, institutional work and institutional logics theories) it is argued that these alternative theories demonstrate even less explanatory and predictive power and do not refute or extend their predecessor. The rise of new organizational theories can have no other effect on classic institutional theory than to limit the domain of its applicability. In turn, there are a number of principles and conditions that future theories should meet to be accepted as progressive advancements.

The paper provides a review of relevant organizational and philosophical literature on theory construction and scientific progress in organizational research and offers a set of principles and demands for those new theories that seek to challenge new institutionalism.

The authors show that the former institutional theory satisfies two main criteria that any scientific theory should conform with following it is useful and falsifiable in term of giving explanations and predictions while, at the same time, clearly specifying what can be observed and what cannot; what can happen and what is not likely to occur. Modern institutional theories cannot demonstrate this quality and they do not satisfy these criteria. Moreover, institutional isomorphism theory is a closed theory, which means it cannot be intervened with changes and modifications and all future theories should develop their theoretical propositions for other domains of applications while they should account for all empirical phenomena that institutional theory successfully explains.

Adopting instrumental view on organizational theories allowed reconstructing the logic and trajectory of organizational research evolution and defends its rationality and progressive nature. It is also outlined how existing dominant theory should be treated and how new theories should challenge its limitations and blind spots and which philosophical and methodological criteria should be met.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

A researcher from Finland has proposed a theory of “institutional inertia” to explain in detail why organisations “ignore, adopt, modify, maintain and abandon” practices. The theory also explains the way intra-organisational institutional pressures shape those processes. The study distinguishes between four institutional profiles of organisational practices – institutionalised, institutionally friendly, neutral and contested practices.

Originality: The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

A topic currently receiving significant academic and practitioner attention is called evidence-based management. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that this approach is sometimes over-sold and may be a fad. Additionally, evidence-based management fails to fully recognize the importance of tacit knowledge, what Kahneman calls system 1. Evidence-based management does provide tools to better use what Kahneman calls system 2, rationality. Decision-makers need to take advantage of both rational and beyond rational processes.

This is an essay, it is not a report of a study. At this point in time, this paper needs thinking, reflection, pondering, more than a data-based study.

Advocates promote evidence-based management in part to help avoid fads, yet evidence-based management itself has many of the characteristics of a fad. Evidence-based management is based on an objective rational view of the world and suggests highly rational methods of decision-making. However, a rational fact-based might not give sufficient credit to instinct and feelings. Decision-makers should take into account facts, evidence, when making decisions, but not ignore intuition, hunches and feelings. This study is learning that decisions use a galaxy of approaches, with both cognitive and affective flexibility.

As with any opinion-based paper, this lacks empirical support. Proponents ask us to believe in evidence-based management. Neither we, the authors of this paper, nor the proponents of evidence-based management can empirically support the ideas offered. An additional limitation is that the paper is written in one language, English. Translation into another language might yield different meanings.

There are advantages for scholars and practitioners to look at the best available evidence. There can be disadvantages in overlooking non-quantifiable factors.

Those who use evidence-based management should also take into account feelings, ethics, aesthetics, creativity, for the betterment of society. To solve wicked problems one needs more than facts and rational analysis.

The overwhelming majority of those writing about evidence-based management are supporters. This study offers a different view. This paper brings new ideas and new thinking to both the extensive fad literature and the huge evidence-based management literature. Evidence-based management is discussed widely. Google Scholar lists more than two million papers in 2019, 2020 and 2021 on evidence-based management. Readers of this journal should critically evaluate this popular set of ideas.