Introduction
Institutions are a fundamental building block of society and of its study. Although there is no single agreed definition, an institution represents a social order or pattern that has attained a certain state and which helps establish the “rules of the game” (Hotimsky et al., 2006) by which organisations and individuals act and the bases for compliance and legitimacy of those organisations (North, 1990). Therefore, given their importance for social, economic, and political order, it is perhaps not surprising that institutions, broadly conceived, are a central idea of the social sciences as well as ideas regarding society, organisations, and how and to what purpose they are governed and act. Table 1.1 illustrates some of these ideas with reference to some of the key elements of Scott’s (2014) three pillars model of institutions. However, it is important to recognise that this three pillars approach, although highly influential and useful illustratively, has also been substantially criticised as being too reductionist (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997, 2015) reflecting that institutions are an essentially contested concept and their study remains open.
Table 1.1 Three elements of institutions
| Regulative | Social-Normative | Cultural-Cognitive |
Basis of compliance | Expedience | Social obligation | Taken-for-grantedness, shared understanding |
Basis of order | Regulative rules | Obligations and expectations | Constitutive schema, social practices |
Mechanisms | Coercive – Formal and informal pressures such as government regulations and/or local culture | Normative – Arising from professionalisation, particularly of functional fields | Mimetic – Arising from uncertainty, organisations will imitate other organisations that appear successful or legitimate |
Logic | Instrumentality | Appropriateness | Orthodoxy |
indicators | Rules, laws, regulations, sanctions | Certification, accreditation, membership | Common beliefs, shared logics of action, isomorphism |
Basis of legitimacy | Legally sanctioned | Morally governed, self-regulation | Comprehensible, recognisable, culturally supported |
Source: After Scott, 2014; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983.
Institutions have long been the subject of political, economic, and social scientific thought (Scott, 2014). However, over the past 50 or so years, the study of institutions has expanded – what is widely referred to as new institutionalism or neoinstitutionalism (March & Olsen, 1984) – to become a particular field of knowledge in geography, management, organisational studies, sociology, and the wider social sciences, which constitutes what is generally referred to as institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Suchman, 1995; Tolbert & Zucker, 1999; Weerakkody et al., 2009; Kauppi, 2013; Munir, 2015). Elements of institutional analysis were adopted in tourism and hospitality studies in the 1990s, particularly with respect to the importance of organisational networks and collaboration (Selin, 1994; Palmer, 1996; Bramwell & Lane, 2000a; Casanueva et al., 2016) amid the hollowing of the state (Hall, 1999; Bramwell & Lane, 2000b). In more recent years, the direct use of institutional theory in tourism and hospitality studies has grown substantially (Lavandoski et al., 2014), and has been used to explain phenomena including, among others, social entrepreneurship (McCarthy, 2012), reproductive tourism (Yang, 2020), adaptation in environmental management (DeBoer et al., 2017; Mensah & Blankson, 2013; Ouyang et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2013), corporate social responsibility reporting (De Grosbois, 2016), investment in experiential learning (Dicen et al., 2019), anti-smoking regulations (Simons et al., 2016), and the adoption of technology such as e-marketing (Gyau & Stringer, 2011). It is not yet clear as to whether tourism and hospitality organisations provide a ‘special case’ for institutional analysis, but it can be argued that they do have some particular features which arguably makes them more susceptible to changes in the institutional environment:
- They are service organisations that are primarily focused on customers from outside of the immediate environment of the destination. This means that they are highly susceptible to any restrictions on voluntary mobility – which is the nature of tourism.
- They tend to be highly networked organisations.
- Organisations that are internationally focused and which are located in destinations are, like many international businesses, susceptible to changes in the institutional environments of both tourist generating region and the destination country.
- The movement of people across borders is highly regulated at the national level.
- Tourism has not historically been given much significance as a policy area despite its economic significance. This makes it highly susceptible to changes in other policy fields and regimes.
- Travel may be susceptible to informal pressures arising from socio-political concerns regarding rights, justice, morality, religious mores, and the appropriateness of leisure behaviours.
All of the above reasons highlight the need for greater attention to be given to the analysis of the role of institutions in a tourism and hospitality context.
This book seeks to briefly introduce institutional theory to students of tourism and hospitality. It is important because institutional theory, and the debates within it, provide an extremely useful way for thinking about organisations and how they adapt and change to their environments, their trajectories, and how they are managed, particularly at a time when, more than ever, they may have to adapt in order to survive. In addition to thinking about commercial firms, institutional theory also helps in understanding issues of collaboration, governance and policymaking, and implementation. This first chapter provides a very brief introduction to institutional theory and its significance, before the next chapter looks at the major elements of the theory. However, this chapter will first go on to discuss the...
