Institutional Theory Approaches

Institutional theory seeks to explain organizational communication in terms of shared pre‐existing rules, beliefs, and norms in the external environment of organizations. While its sociological origins rest on the concepts of legitimacy, rational myths, and isomorphic forces in organizational fields, communicative institutionalism emphasizes forms of discourse, such as rhetoric, framing, messages, vocabularies, tropes, narratives, slogans, metaphors, idioms, and selective grammatical styles to show how communication has the force to alter cognition and thus social institutions.