The Relation Between Isomorphism And Decoupling
The concept of Isomorphism defined broadly by (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Zucker 1987) as the propensity of organizations in a population to resemble other organizations that operate under similar environmental conditions (as cited in Bromley et al, 2012).
Organizations adapt not only to technical pressures but also to what they believe society expects of them, which leads to institutional isomorphism. Organizations need a societal mandate, or legitimacy, to operate and this is gained by conforming to societal expectations. And when adaptations to institutional pressures contradict internal efficiency needs, organizations sometimes claim to adapt when they in reality do not; they decouple action from structure in order to preserve organizational efficiency. According to Meyer and Rowan (1977) as cited in Bromley, Hwang and Powell (2012) decoupling is seen to be a deliberate disconnection between organizational structures that enhance legitimacy and organizational practices that are believed within the organization to be technically efficient. Decoupling enables organizations to seek the legitimacy that adaptation to rationalized myths provides while they engage in technical ‘business as usual’.
A central idea of institutional isomorphism is that organizations conform to ‘rationalized myths’ in society about what constitutes a proper organization. These myths emerge as solutions to widely perceived problems of organizing and become rationalized when they are popularly believed to constitute the proper solutions to these problems. As more organizations conform to these myths they become more deeply institutionalized, which subsequently leads to institutional isomorphism according to Meyer and Rowan (1977) as cited in Bromley et al (2012), and Isomorphism according to them plays an important role in organization theory as an alternative to efficiency-based explanations of organizational change (Scott 1987; Zucker 1987 as cited in Bromley et al, 2012), and decoupling they assert provides an explanation for why organizations seem to be constantly reforming (Brunsson and Olsen 1993as cited in Bromley et al, 2012).
In a more general sense, these two concepts have also moved structuralist and cultural / symbolical understandings of organization closer to one another (Lounsbury and Ventresca 2003; Scott 2001 as cited in Bromley et al, 2012). They went on to affirm that Organizations supposedly adopt new organizational structures to enhance their legitimacy, and then decouple these same structures from their practices to maintain technical efficiency in a competitive quest for survival. Organizations decouple their formal structure from their production activities when institutional and task environments are in conflict, or when there are conflicting institutional pressures.
