Organizational responses to environmental demands

This paper combines new and old institutionalism to explain enduring differences in organizational strategies. We propose that differences in the influence of corporate departments lead their facilities to prioritize different external pressures and thus adopt different management practices. Specifically, we argue that external constituents who interact with particularly influential corporate departments are more likely to affect facility managers' decisions. As a result, managers of facilities that are subjected to comparable institutional pressures adopt distinct sets of management practices that appease different external constituents. Using an original survey and archival data obtained for nearly 500 facilities, we find support for these hypotheses.