Understanding radical organizational change: Bringing together the old and the new institutionalism

The complexity of political regulatory, and technological changes confronting most organizations has made radical organizational change and adaptation a: central research issue. This article sets out a framework for understanding organizational changes from the perspective of neo-institutional theory. The principal theoretical issue addressed in the article is the interaction of organizational context and organizational action. The article examines the processes by which individual organizations retain, adopt and discard templates for organizing, given the institutionalized nature of organizational fields.