Institutionalism in organisation studies: navigating paradigmatic incommensurability
by Roshni Das
International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy (IJMCP), Vol. 10, No. 1, 2017

Abstract: The institutionalism paradigm has a tenuous relationship with the premise of causation and agency. Part of the problem has been because of the paradigmatic incommensurability (Burrell and Morgan, 1979) mindset that prevails in organisational research. Our intention here is to address this issue. A detailed theoretical review of the institutionalism tradition through 'old institutionalism' (Selznick, 1949); 'historical institutionalism'; and 'neo-institutionalism' (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) is conducted; followed with a conceptual multi-paradigmatic synthesis (Lowe et al., 2007). Paradigms as diverse as historicism, critical theory and others are discussed as options to resolve the various paradoxes inherent in the neo-institutionalist tradition. We offer a synthetic model to address the issue of paradigmatic incommensurability, which may be treated as a theory-agnostic methodological instrument by future researchers. Subsequently, we demonstrate the methodological tenets of the proposed model by applying it to revisit and re-analyse the much discussed case of Intel's transformation.

Online publication date: Tue, 31-Jan-2017

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