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Broken Rules and Constrained Confusion: Toward a Theory of Meso-Institutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2015

Scott Droege  and
Nancy Brown Johnson
Scott Droege
Affiliation:
Western Kentucky University, USA
Nancy Brown Johnson
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky, USA
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Abstract

Meso-institutions are weak, intermediate forms of institutions that bridge the gap between institutional disintegration and the development of new, more firmly established institutions. Meso-institutions lack the stronger behaviour-guiding signs and symbols of more established institutions, but instead contain fragments of former institutions mixed with emerging, but fragile, components of developing institutions. Institutional disintegration leads to a disorienting period characterized by the dissolution of fundamental, widely held ideologies. This offers an opportunity for actions rather than institutions to guide actions. Because meso-institutions are weak, only after actions are repeated will they solidify into specific patterns that may be retrospectively granted legitimacy. Using archival data supplemented by interviews, we identified three meso-institutional occurrences with the phenomenologically based manifestations of fractured ideology, actions as rules and retrospective legitimization.

Keywords

Chinainstitutional theorytransformation制度理论中国转型
Type
Articles
Information
Management and Organization Review , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 81 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © International Association for Chinese Management Research 2007

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