Organizational Enactments and Conformity to Environmental Prescriptions

Abstract

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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