“Institutional theory presents a paradox. Institutional analysis is as old as Emile Durkheim's exhortation to study 'social facts as things', yet sufficiently novel to be preceded by new in much of the contemporary literature.”

—  Paul DiMaggio

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 1

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Paul DiMaggio 12
American sociologist 1951

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“The importance to economics of the study of institutions is no longer a controversial proposition, thanks in part to the scholarly literature generated by the new institutional economics movement. Institutions are more than organizations – property is an institution, but not an organization – but organizations are an important form of institution and will be the focus of my paper, as it is, to a considerable extent, of the new institutional economics.”

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“But the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old ones.”

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“Contemporary institutional theorizing in the field of organizations dates back thirty-odd years. This particularly describes what are called new or neo-institutionalisms. These terms evoke contrasts with earlier theories of the embeddedness of organizations in social and cultural contexts, now retrospectively called the ‘old institutionalism’ (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997; Stinchcombe, 1997). They went through a period of inattention, so that when institutional thinking came back in force after the 1960s, it seemed quite new.
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“Old institutions have shattered, but new ones have not yet emerged. The twenty-first century will be a period in which a range of new institutions, moral systems, and practices will begin their first tentative emergence. The first half of the twenty-first century will be marked by intense social conflict globally. All of this frames the international struggles of the twenty-first century.”

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“That the human mind has a certain order of possible progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent: That all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions: That government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: That any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of history.”

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