664
Public Institutional Th eory
Like all complex subjects, public organizations are more easily understood aft er
being unbundled, examined part by part, and reassembled for an assessment of
their whole condition. Th e two essential parts to the modern study of public or-
ganizations are
- the organization and management of contained and bounded public
institutions, now generally comprehended by institutional theory, and - interinstitutional, interjurisdictional, and third-party couplings and
linkages, now generally comprehended by network theory or gover-
nance theory, the subject of Chapter 9.
Th is chapter takes up the fi rst of these parts, and in doing so further unbun-
dles the subject. It is common to include both management and organization in
considerations of the study of public organizations (Rainey 1997; Denhardt 1993;
Moore 1995; Gortner, Mahler, and Nicholson 1997). Because we believe it useful
to consider the study of administrative behavior and the management of public
organizations as a subject separable from the study of public institutions, we have
uncoupled them and deal with theories of public management in Chapter 5.
In simplifi ed form, institutionalism sees organizations as bounded social con-
structs of rules, roles, norms, and the expectations that constrain individual and
group choice and behavior. As a result, institutional theory is remarkably fl exible,
and can be used to understand the implications of variation in organizational
design (centralization or decentralization) and governmental structure (e.g., the
diff erence between a mayoral or city manager structure of municipal govern-
ment). Institutionalism can also help sort out the apparent disorder of how com-
plex policy problems are dealt with (the logic of the “garbage can”). Additionally,
system fragmentation, which has implications for institutional competition and
diff usion of innovation, can be understood with an institutional approach. And of
course, Wilson in Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why Th ey Do