Can New Institutionalism Explain New Organizations?

How are new institutions created? More specifically, under conditions of extensive institutional change such as the post-communist market reforms in China, what are the mechanisms which determine which organizational practices will be adopted, copied, and institutionalized? New institutionalism was developed to study slowly evolving organizations in stable societies. This paper explores how this approach can be adapted to analyze situations of revolutionary institutional upheaval. In the 1990’s, the Chinese regime encouraged state entities to start for-profit ventures in order to alleviate their financial dependence on the central state. Such ventures certainly lacked precedent in the previous forty years of state socialism, so how did social actors determine what kinds of organizational practices to try out? This paper is based upon the analysis of one such firm, a "science park" started by a university in the city of Harbin. Using the techniques of narrative analysis, I discovered that the local cultural context matters a great deal in shaping an emerging organizational field. It was local actors, both inside and outside the new organizations, who collectively determined which existing organizations could serve as appropriate models for nascent firms. This paper draws on data from 1997-2000, including 11 months as a participant-observer at the market venture, interviews with 81 people involved with the firm either as administrators, employees, or outside observers, and an examination of archival materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]