Prix du Meilleur Texte THE END OF PARTNERSHIP ? THE DECLINE OF THE NORM OF LOYALTY IN LARGE CORPORATE

The question of how institutions begin to change has become of central concern among institutional scholars in recent years. A growing body of scholarly work has begun to shed light on how institutions begin to decline and become replaced by other institutional forms and practices in a variety of contexts. Much of this scholarly research has examined change in broader, field level institutions such as state laws, cultural logics and the professions and how they influence change in organizational practices (e.g., Fligstein, 1990; Davis, Diekmann and Tinsley, 1994; Thornton and Ocasio, 1999; Dobbin and Dowd, 1997; Greenwood et al., 2002). Norms that exist within and among organizations and their decline are less understood within institutional theory. Such localized norms are often elements of institutions existing in the broader field (Nee, 1998; Greif, 2006). The decline of localized norms and the organizations they support represents the micro-level processes by which broader institutional change is taking place.