6 b Constructing the Iron Cage : Institutional Theory and Enactment

195 In chapter 6(a) Professor Weick has argued that enactment is a "roomy framework" that reminds people of a central fact of organiza-tionallife: "people often produce part of the environment they face" (Pondy and Mitroff, 1979: 17). He goes on to say that enactment: suggests that there are close parallels between what legislators do and what managers do. Both groups construct reality through authoritative acts. When people enact laws, they take undefined space, time, and action and draw lines, establish categories, and coin labels that create new features of the environment that did not exist before. (Weick, 1995: 30-1) As a perspective, enactment "allows people to see and say four things about organizations that they miss when they invoke the 'modern trinity' of transaction costs, institutional theory, and population ecology (TIP)" (Weick, p. 000 above). First, enactment offers "conceptual flexibility";second, it "helps people see the environment as something other than resources"; third, it bridges macro and micro, because "in enactment there is no ontological difference between [them]," and, fourth, it invokes what might be called a "hermeneutic mind set," which allows more to be said about learning and understanding. We argue that institutional theory is not a "roomy framework"-but neither is it a "noun" or even a single theory, as Professor Weick claims. It is a perspective. Currently this perspective draws its energy from a large, diverse group of social thinkers who have been trying to modify early explanations of how institu-While many variants of the new wing of institutional theory-"new institutionalism"-exist (Scott, 1995, 2001), all are distinguished by this shift to a stress on human agency from an older, more structurally inert institutionalismOlder institutionalism has been a compelling perspective because it says rationalization and bureaucratization appear inexorable in the modern world (Gerth and Mills, 1946) and because it says that normative (moral), cog-nitive, and regulative (authority-based) forces push actors towards rationality and cognitive complexity (Parsons, 1951). But older institu-tionalism also says that to understand the construction of the iron cage of bureaucracy, a theorist must assess its creation in context, a context that includes power, interest, and conflict over alternative modes of organizing and ways of understanding the world (Selznick, 1948). Newer institutionalism is even more compelling because it points to fields and networks of actors (especially organizations) as the locus of action (Meyer and Scott, 1983). New institutionalism connects these fields both with the long-term macro-development of culture, …