Analysis of the Study of Religious Organizations 133
traces its historical and theological identity back to Martin Luther, the Protestant Ref-
ormation, and European cultural roots. In these ways, variations of American Protes-
tantism are very similar. Yet, when the denominational group is under external strain
or conflict, they derive power and group solidarity from their differences and thus tend
to celebrate their distinctiveness. In Bourdieu’s terms, the religious sector is a site of
continuous cultural struggle over the authority of symbols. These differences in turn
broadly reflect the struggles that they have with society and the conflicts they have in
reconciling religious and secular authority (Bourdieu 1990).
Baptists for example, strongly identify with being outsiders. They have tended to
appeal to the poorer and more marginal elements of society as members and have cul-
tivated an image that associates the purity of their belief with the more primitive and
simple aspects of Christianity. They model themselves on the poor, small, democratic
band of apostles who followed Christ, and rigorously reject the hierarchical and the
authoritarian aspects of Christian institutionalism. However, over time, the Southern
Baptists, for example, have become a denomination with millions of members, finan-
cial resources of several billion dollars, national seminaries, and national agencies that
operate with multimillion-dollar budgets. Nonetheless, their identity as a “primitive”
church remains the basis of their solidarity and their identity and they explicitly seek
to counter the suggestion that they are a large, corporate, institutional church. They
continue to distinguish themselves in their promotional literature and in their relation-
ships with outsiders as an organization in which the local church remains autonomous,
and in control of the denomination’s resources.
Neoinstitutional theory is useful for religion scholars not because the religious en-
vironment conforms to standard notions of institutionalization but because it is the
exception that proves the rule. It is a sector in which no single organization dominates,
in which attempts at standardization fail, in which each organization is independent,
autonomous, and guided by a strong internal culture. It is a sector in which organi-
zational agency is strong, which makes organizations very selective in the way they
adopt strategies from the environment. This in turn leads to the exercise of greater or-
ganizational innovation and creativity, leading to the formation of new organizational
forms.
While neoinstitutional perspectives offer value in providing articulate ways of view-
ing highly institutionalized environments, they generally work less well in the religious
sector because they do not provide a conceptual apparatus that is flexible enough to
make sense of the kinds of continual change and innovation that characterizes insti-
tutional religious behavior. Neoinstitutionalist theories are weakest when called on to
explain change or innovation, and this is precisely what conditions in the religious
sector foster. Consequently, the religion sector may be a valuable site for neoinstitu-
tionalists to study precisely because the religious sector contains many of the features
that neoinstitutionalists have difficulty explaining, that is, a variety of strong organi-
zational cultures, a high degree of agency, and organizational practices that display a
profound amount of creativity and innovation.
New Directions for Studying the Religion Sector
This chapter began by telling the story of Procrustes who had an unusual way of fitting
his guests into his available accommodations. The practice of theory driven research