Organizational Enactments and Conformity to Environmental Prescriptions

This paper argues that current conceptions of organizational activity as ritual conformity (or isomorphism) to institutional demands which exist in the environment must also incorporate an understanding of organizational enactment. Enactment entails a conception of the environment in terms of proces...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inHuman relations (New York) Vol. 45; no. 6; pp. 537 - 554
Main Author Scheid-Cook, Teresa L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Thousand Oaks, CA Sage Publications 01.06.1992
Plenum Press, etc
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Compliance
Conformity
Environmental scanning
Health Policy
Hospitals
Implementations
Institutionalization (Persons)
Legislation
Legitimacy
Mental health
Mental health care
Mental Health Services
North Carolina
Organizational Behavior
Organizational structure
Outpatients
Rationality
United States > US
environment
mental health organizations
conformity
enactment
institutional
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Summary:This paper argues that current conceptions of organizational activity as ritual conformity (or isomorphism) to institutional demands which exist in the environment must also incorporate an understanding of organizational enactment. Enactment entails a conception of the environment in terms of processes of reality construction; organizations are active in creating and defining institutional demands. Data is drawn from a study of the response of mental health organizations to outpatient commitment which is a legal policy designed to fulfill the societal demands for deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Organizational responses were highly variable, despite the existence of outpatient commitment as a legal policy with active encouragement of its use by the State Division of Mental Health. This variability can be understood in terms of organizational enactments; each organization construed the workings of the policy according to its own definitions and stocks of knowledge, and then conformed with its own enactment.
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ISSN:0018-7267
1741-282X
DOI:10.1177/001872679204500601