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Institutional inertia Institutional

inertia and
and practice variation practice
variation
Herman Aksom
Department of Accounting, University of Jyv€askyl€a, Jyv€askyl€a, Finland
463
Abstract
Received 11 July 2021
Purpose – Institutional theory had been developed for the purpose of explaining widespread diffusion, Revised 26 December 2021
mimetic adoption and institutionalization of organizational practices. However, further extensions of Accepted 26 December 2021
institutional theory are needed to explain a range of different institutional trajectories and organizational
responses since institutionalized standards constitute a minority of all diffusing practices. The study presents a
theoretical framework which offers guidelines for explaining and predicting various adoption, variation and
post-adoption scenarios.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper is primarily conceptual in nature, and the arguments are
developed based on previous institutional theory and organizational change literature.
Findings – The notion of institutional inertia is proposed in order to provide a more detailed explanation of
when and why organizations ignore, adopt, modify, maintain and abandon practices and the way intra-
organizational institutional pressures shape, direct and constrain these processes. It is specified whether
institutional inertia will be temporarily eclipsed or whether it will actively manifest itself during adoption,
adaptation and maintaining attempts. The study distinguishes between four institutional profiles of
organizational practices – institutionalized, institutionally friendly, neutral and contested practices – which can
vary along three dimensions: accuracy, extensiveness and meaning. The variation and post-adoption outcomes
for each of them can be completely characterized and predicted by only three parameters: the rate of
institutional inertia, institutional profile of these practices and whether they are interpretatively flexible. In
turn, an extent of intraorganizational institutional resistance to new practices is determined by their
institutional profile and flexibility.
Practical implications – It is expected that proposed theoretical explanations in this paper can offer insights
into these empirical puzzles and supply a broader view of organizational and management changes. The
study’s theoretical propositions help to understand what happens to organizational practices after they are
handled by organizations, thus moving beyond the adoption/rejection dichotomy.
Originality/value – The paper explores and clarifies the nature of institutional inertia and offers an
explanation of its manifestation in organizations over time and how it shapes organizational practices in the
short and long run. It challenges a popular assumption in organizational literature that fast and revolutionary
transition is a prerequisite for successful change. More broadly, the typology offered in this paper helps to
explain whether and how organizations can successfully handle and complete their change and how far they
can depart from institutional norms.
Keywords Institutional theory, Organization theory, Institutional inertia, Diffusion, Organizational practices,
Adoption, Interpretative flexibility
Paper type Conceptual paper

Introduction
Practice variation studies are becoming increasingly widespread in organizational research
because of their focus on the process of adapting and transforming global abstract standards
in local contexts which, in turn, allows extending the boundaries of institutional theory and
diffusion studies. In particular, academic interest in circulation and translation of
management ideas and practices has grown rapidly over the past two decades (Sahlin and
Wedlin, 2008; Wæraas and Nielsen, 2016; Pallas et al., 2016; Wæraas, 2020). The initial interest
in this field of research has been motivated by the unsatisfactory “diffusion” metaphor which
provided a rather mechanical description of ideas’ circulation and reduced the very handling Journal of Organizational Change
Management
Vol. 35 No. 3, 2022
pp. 463-487
The author wishes to thank Jyv€askyl€a University School of Business and Economics for financial © Emerald Publishing Limited
0953-4814
support. DOI 10.1108/JOCM-07-2021-0205
JOCM process by organizations to the “adoption/non-adoption” dichotomy (Czarniawska and
35,3 Joerges, 1996; Czarniawska and Sevon, 2005; Westphal et al., 1997; Røvik, 2011). It is a well-
documented phenomenon in organizational literature that variability of implemented
concepts, practices and structures is more likely to be the rule than the exception (Sahlin and
Wedlin, 2008; Ansari et al., 2010), and this phenomenon undoubtedly requires explanation.
Moreover, there is a call to examine practice implementation beyond adoption as post-
adoption stages received at best modest attention in institutional theory (Zeitz et al., 1999;
464 Staw and Epstein, 2000; Benders and Van Veen, 2001; David and Strang, 2006; Røvik, 2011;
Jacqueminet, 2020; Aksom, 2020), while an ever-growing empirical evidence suggests that
maintenance is far from being the only outcome of institutional practice adoption (Oliver,
1992; Abrahamson, 1996; Røvik, 2011).
Although practice adaptation and variation have been considered by many prominent
organizational theorists as extension of a standard institutional theory of diffusion and
adoption, they also acknowledge that this domain of experience lies somewhat beyond the
scope of institutional theory. In fact, the former institutional theory as formulated by Meyer
and Rowan (1977) and DiMaggio and Powell (1983) had no intention in explaining local
variations of global spreading of institutional standards and different handling and post-
adoption outcomes (Røvik, 2011). Organizations conform to institutional pressures and adopt
institutionally accepted practices, becoming similar to each other. In some sense,
reinterpretation and variation do not matter for institutional explanations since the aim of
institutional theory is to explain why organizations adopt and maintain institutionally
validated practices and value legitimacy benefits more than purely efficiency considerations
(Staw and Epstein, 2000). In Meyer et al. (1997), decoupling is further theorized as a typical
outcome, as there is no point to expect a fit between abstract global models and local contexts.
At the same time, even alternative theories of adoption and adaptation do not provide
satisfactory analysis of post-adoption phases and institutional effects that moderate and/or
distort adopted practices. Furthermore, there is a tendency in adoption/variation studies as
well as, more generally, for institutional research to violate postulates, coherence and self-
consistency of institutional theory by “recognizing” agency, power, institutional change and
heterogeneity in almost any empirical case. This is a dangerous tendency for institutional
theory, and the present paper contributes to avoiding such free interpretations and
modifications of institutional theory and instead offers a theoretical framework that remains
in agreement with the institutional line of reasoning.
To date, institutional theory provides the most satisfactory description of organization-
environment relations, explaining and predicting how organizations conform to prevailing
institutional demands, adopt institutionally accepted practices and become similar to their
peers over time (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Tolbert and Zucker,
1983; Greenwood et al., 2008). It is this theoretical and empirical success that invites
researchers to build theoretical advancements, extensions and clarifications in organizational
sociology and diffusion studies around the institutional theory of organizations. Both
institutional effects that force organizations to imitate each other and become more and more
homogeneous over time and tendencies toward local adaptations and modifications must be
recognized and generalized as different aspects of the same theoretical perspective. This
paper thus contributes to the further integration and unification between institutional theory
and practice variation perspectives.
We argue that the logic and dynamics of practice adoption and variation at the
organizational level can be explained with the notion of institutional inertia which is defined
in this paper as a long-lasting exposure of institutional effects encoded in taken-for-granted
(institutionalized) routines on organizational trajectory changes. Institutional inertia hinders,
obstructs and prevents organizational adaptation and routinization of newly implemented
practices and structures both immediately when potential adopter faces a new practice and in Institutional
the long run. Institutional inertia has the following properties: inertia and
(1) Reduces and prevents organization’s willingness and ability to search for new practice
practices (displays a high level of resistance to institutionally contested practices; variation
medium for neutral and low for friendly). The latter explains why management
fashions enjoy a wide diffusion and high adoption rates;
(2) Does not disappear after fast and radical reorientations, persisting in organizations; 465
(3) Shapes the form, the meaning and the extent of use of adopted practices.
We argue that an inertial nature of taken-for-granted routines is a key to understanding the
patterns of practice adoption, ignorance, variation, abandonment and persistence. In
addition, introducing the notion of institutional inertia is another way to approach an
organization-level analysis of institutional effects. The proposed theoretical framework and
propositions will allow answering the following questions:
(1) Why some non-institutionalized practices succeed in being widely diffused and
adopted while others disappear shortly after their emergence or enjoy only modest
rate of adoption?
(2) How and why organizational practices vary in organizations?
(3) How non-institutionalized practices evolve after being adopted?
Contrary to the popular view of organizational routines as a source of change (Feldman and
Pentland, 2003; Feldman et al., 2016), we will argue that routines accumulate and manifest only
inertial institutional resistance, while changes come exclusively from external sources. Instead of
emphasizing actors’ motivation in adoption and adaptation processes and any enabling features
of routinized organizational arrangements, we aim to redirect researchers’ attention toward
constraining effects of institutions and argue that institutional inertia has a defining role in
shaping the process and outcomes of practice adoption. At the same time, we do not adhere to
Scandinavian institutionalism’s view on a change as a result of circulation and deliberate and
creative translation by local actors. Modifications and variations have little to do with deliberate
and active adaptation and translation but rather can be attributed to passive sensitivity and
amenability to institutional influences. Contrary to translation studies, we argue that adaptation
and variation are signs of institutional pressures toward conformity and homogeneity.
Modifications are best understood as outcomes of conformity to prevailing institutional
demands than a product of deliberate and conscious agentic efforts toward finding an optimal fit.
Our theoretical arguments take into account the long-term impact of institutional forces on
adopted organizational practices and link the longevity of institutional inertia to possible
outcomes of practice adoption, adaptation and post-adoption scenarios. We consider a class of
organizational practices that are not institutionalized, that is, adopters will initially consider
them for their technical and economic value rather than for legitimacy benefits. These
practices are not institutionalized and belong rather to those ideas and concepts that can be
considered popular but, nevertheless, not yet institutionalized (Aksom, 2020). They can be (1)
institutionally contested, that is, challenging prevailing institutional norms, beliefs and
understandings, (2) institutionally neutral or (3) institutionally friendly as those labeled as
management fashions. All these practices do not enjoy a strong institutional support like truly
institutionalized practices do (for example, to the extent of institutionalization described in
Tolbert and Zucker (1983). Given that institutional scholars use to overestimate the number of
institutionalized practices by treating diffusion with institutionalization (Zilber, 2002; Green,
2004; Suddaby, 2010; Green et al., 2009; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2009; Aksom, 2020), we
JOCM explore, in fact, the biggest class of organizational practices – those that are not
35,3 institutionalized and offer primarily efficiency motives (irrespective of whether these
efficiency motives are themselves socially constructed) And those that, in contrast to
institutions, are open for non-adoption, distortion during adoption and abandonment. This
paper thus adheres neither to the study of adopting legitimate and taken-for-granted practices
(Meyer and Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) nor to the study of conscious, deliberate,
pragmatic and purposeful implementation and adaptation of needed practices where adopters
466 freely find a fit between adopted practice and technical and organizational context.
In contrast to Oliver’s study of organizational responses to institutional pressures to adopt
certain highly legitimate practices and attempts to abandon them (Oliver, 1992), we revert the
main logic of this theoretical approach. We ask, instead, how organizations are constrained
by their established institutionalized routines in attempts to adopt new practices. Because as
soon as the question arises about the difference between institutionalized practices and
noninstitutionalized popular practices, it appears that asking about constraints against the
adoption and maintenance is more fruitful than asking how organizations resist and abandon
non-institutionalized practices [1].
The difference thus is between resisting institutionally supported practices and attempting to
adopt those practices that will clash with existing intraorganizational institutional norms. We
follow Zucker (1988) and Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999) who noted that researchers tend to
overemphasize rare instances of institutionalization and confusing institutions with the
transience of fads and fashions and reminded that actually few novel practices evolve into true
institutions. Instead, most either enjoy a modest diffusion success or disappear after some time.
The focus of this study is on these uninstitutionalized and weakly institutionalized practices and
organizations’ struggle with internal institutional inertia that inevitably arises. A theoretical
framework and theoretical premises offered in this paper gravitate more toward the study of
barriers to successful adoption and maintenance (Røvik, 2011, 2016). We will show how
institutional forces shape adopters’ ability to handle, adapt and maintain once adopted non-
institutionalized practices. We specify the conditions under which institutional inertia will be
likely to predict different types of practice variation and post-adoption outcomes, ranging from
non-adoption to distortion, decoupling, reversal and abandonment. Attending such dimensions
of variation as changes in accuracy, extensiveness and meaning allows capturing both material
and symbolic effects that institutional forces produce inside organizations. The likelihood of
adoption decision and the magnitude of practice variation is the combined effect of institutional
inertia and two features of organizational practices: their institutional profile (neutral, friendly,
contested) and interpretative (in)flexibility.
The paper is structured as follows. First, we review the relevant literature on the structure
and boundaries of institutional theories and, specifically, existing institutional explanations
of practice adoption, variation and abandonment simultaneously offering a critique of these
approaches. Next, we develop a distinctive set of parameters that organizational practices
have and explain how a decision to adopt/ignore variation and post-adoption outcomes
depend on these characteristics. We explain how practices’ institutional profile, flexibility and
the rate of institutional inertia shape adoption and post-adoption stages. Then, a theory of
institutional inertia is presented as a special case of institutional isomorphism theory. Finally,
we build an integrative framework that links an institutional profile, rate of inertia, practice
variation and post-adoption outcomes. Implications for institutional theory and practice
adoption studies are suggested.

Institutional explanations of practice diffusion, adoption, persistence and

abandonment
Over the last 40 years, institutional theory has come to be seen as the leading theory of
organization-environment relations (Greenwood et al., 2008, 2014; Suddaby, 2010).
Institutional theory focuses on how organizations adopt and maintain institutionalized Institutional
practices, and this is undoubtedly one of the most successful theories of organization- inertia and
environment relations. However, despite being perceived as an organizational “theory of
everything” and covering almost any aspect of organizational life in modern organization
practice
studies (Alvesson and Spicer, 2019; Alvesson et al., 2019; Aksom and Tymchenko, 2020), variation
institutional theory limits itself within a surprisingly narrow domain of application.
Institutional theory does not address the phenomenon of emerging practices (Boxenbaum
and Battilana, 2005; Furnari, 2014), explaining the diffusion and institutionalization of 467
already popular organizational standards (DiMaggio and Powell focused on those practices
that reach a threshold beyond which legitimacy imperatives prevail over efficiency
considerations). Most importantly, it does not address the issues of practice variation: the
mere fact of adoption is what institutional theory aimed to explain. Scandinavian
institutionalism (Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008) and practice variation (Ansari et al., 2010)
literatures filled this niche but focused mainly on the very process of adoption and
implementation (on how adopters fit adopted practices), again, without delving into the post-
adoption changes (Zeitz et al., 1999; Røvik, 2011; Younkin, 2016). Moreover, both perspectives
gravitate not toward institutional explanations but toward actors’ creativity and the notion of
fit between the practice and adopting unit, respectively. We argue that a shift toward purely
institutional explanations is needed for practice adaptation and variation phenomenon.
For the purpose of this study, institutional theory can be also blamed for ignoring the post-
adoption stage. According to institutional theory, once adopted practices by no means
automatically follow the route to routinization, maintenance and institutionalization. There,
however, have been many scattered and loosely coupled attempts to explore what happens to
adopted practices afterward. Most importantly, these explanations were aimed at challenging
the overly passive view of adopters and injecting agency into an institutional analysis of
organizational responses to institutional demands. As such, the initial decoupling thesis has
been embedded by Oliver (1991) within a whole specter of other responses to institutional
pressures where both unconscious conformity and such proactive responses as ignorance
and resistance were possible and depended upon the extent of field institutionalization.
Otherwise, most institutional studies have been concerned with motivation for adoption
(Tolbert and Zucker, 1983; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Kennedy and Fiss, 2009; Suddaby,
2010) and with the meaning of adopted practices for adopters as motives and meanings signal
about the presence of institutional effects (Zilber, 2002, 2008; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2009;
Suddaby, 2010). Nevertheless, institutional theories must be able to answer what happens to
adopted practices afterward. Are they maintained decoupled? Do organizations really use
them and these practices become taken-for-granted over time? Can they be abandoned
shortly after being adopted or is abandonment possible after a long time?
Institutional theory explains diffusion and adoption of institutionalized, taken-for-granted
practices whose value is presumed. These practices possess a rule-like, social fact quality
(Zucker, 1987; Green, 2004; Green et al., 2009); they are taken as the only natural, objective and
obvious solution (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Meyer and Rowan, 1977) when alternatives
are unimaginable (Zucker, 1987). Institutional theory as formulated by Meyer and Rowan
(1977) describes only completely institutionalized standards, and it is limited to a frame of
reference in which there is no place for such categories as assessment, calculation, doubt,
mistrust, rethinking, disappointment or resistance. Situations of complete institutionalization
and pure conformity of organizations that are nothing but reflections of their institutional
environments are possible “only in an environment with a highly institutionalized structure”
(Meyer and Rowan, 1977, p. 352). However, organizational literature is full of cases where
organizations actively respond to institutional pressures (Oliver, 1991), escape institutional
prescriptions (Battilana et al., 2009) and abandon institutionalized practices (Oliver, 1992).
There is, of course, something rather wrong with this picture. The very notion of
JOCM institutionalization precludes the possibility of evaluating institutions, recognizing their
35,3 technical obsolesce and deviating from their totalizing pressures.
The natural conclusion that can be inferred from this theoretical inconsistency is that
every time we deal with such notions as responses to institutional pressures (which vary from
practice variation to deinstitutionalization), we approach, in fact, non-institutionalized
practices. If practices can be ignored, modified and abandoned, then these practices have
never been institutionalized. Typically, they are either institutionally contested practices or
468 institutionally friendly but temporarily phenomena – fads and fashions. As Zucker (1988)
noted, only few innovations turn into institutions, while most of them fade away after their
life cycles as weakly institutionalized practices are over (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999) [2].
These practices may have some institutional value, and institutional environments do exert
pressures upon organizations to some extent; however, it is not possible to talk about
institutionalized practices in these cases. Truly institutionalized practices cannot be
evaluated or, even more so, resisted by adopters. Nor can they be recognized as technically
obsolete and inefficient. For most organizational practices, there are institutional forces that
support their diffusion and institutional counter-forces that will resist changes in existing
routinized and stabilized organizations. The existence of intraorganizational institutional
inertial forces and the institutional profile of diffusing practices constitute a source of these
practices’ variation. Different rates of adoption, local translations and adaptations and post-
adoption outcomes arise from these moderating impacts of internal institutional inertia and
practices’ characteristics.
While Oliver (1992) assumed that even institutionalized practices may decay and will be
vulnerable to abandonment (for criticism see Aksom, 2020), we focus on adopted popular
practices where popular does not mean institutionalized (Green, 2004; Fiss et al., 2012). As
Abrahamson (1996), Zeitz et al. (1999), Benders and Van Veen (2001) and Røvik (2011), among
others, claim, led by institutional forces that fuel widespread diffusion, adopted practices can
be as easily abandoned afterward. Adoption does not imply and not necessarily leads to
maintenance, persistence and institutionalization. Management fashion theory, in particular,
claims that there are institutionally defined and redefined norms of progress that require
organizations to abandon existing concepts and ideas and adopt new fashions (Abrahamson,
1996; Benders and Van Veen, 2001). We aim to find out whether organizations would
maintain or abandon once adopted practice and how this practice is modified both during and
after adoption. We will argue that the notion of institutional inertia has the potential to
accomplish this task without inflating institutional explanations with unnecessary
assumptions about agency, power and entrepreneurial abilities that outweigh and eclipse
institutional forces. Institutional inertia refers to internal organizational reactions to adopted
practices, mediated and fueled by institutional forces.
In this paper, we propose a framework and typology of post-adoption institutional
influences on once adopted practice. We, therefore, define the scope of application of the
present paper as a study of the impact of institutional inertial forces during and after the
adoption process in organizations. These efforts aimed at developing and extending the scope
and domain of application of institutional theory beyond mere diffusion, adoption and
maintenance of once adopted practices.

Practice adoption and institutional effects

Following, in particular, Kostova (1999), Ansari et al. (2010) and Furnari (2014), we define
organizational practices as “patterns of repeated activities that are infused with shared
meanings” (Furnari, 2014, p. 442). This definition implies a certain degree of institutional
value infusion that almost any practice acquires and holds as it diffuses. Organizational
practices are sensible to institutional meanings and shared, socially constructed
understandings and beliefs that over time tend to some extent supplant former technical Institutional
functions and redefine new social meanings as rational, appropriate and the only possible inertia and
way to conduct a certain type of activity (Scott, 1987). Institutional theory claims this
tendency toward increasing institutionalization (or value infusion) of formerly technical
practice
entities at all levels of analysis: organizational fields, organizations and organizational variation
practices exhibit these institutional properties. Institutionalization is thus manifested “as a
means of instilling value, supplying intrinsic worth to a structure or process that, before
institutionalization, had only instrumental utility” (Scott, 1987, p. 494). Completely 469
institutionalized practices had been defined by Meyer and Rowan as rational myths that
“identify various social purposes as technical ones and specify in a rulelike way the appropriate
means to pursue these technical purposes rationally” (1977, pp. 343–344). For most practices,
however, it is safer to assume that they are not completely institutionalized. Nor they are
solely technical means to pursue certain technical ends. Rather, organizational practices
contain both former technical and institutional dimensions (Zbaracki, 1998). Practices may
have their specific characteristics and elements that either contribute to easier diffusion and
institutionalization or hinder dissemination as an obstacle that institutional forces resist
(Strang and Meyer, 1993; Sanders and Tuschke, 2007). Below, we discuss how institutional
effects and practices’ attributes influence potential adopters’ willingness and ability to adopt,
maintain and benefit from adoption.
A domain of non-institutionalized practices. We do not claim to cover within our theoretical
framework the whole range of all possible stages of institutionalization of organizational
practices. Quite the opposite: we aim to analyze how already existing intraorganizational
institutional forces shape the way non-institutionalized practices adopted for motives of
promised economic and technical benefits. Most institutional studies tend to fall into one of
two extremes by either treating all widely diffused practices as institutionalized or seeing all
practices, even strongly institutionalized ones, as open and susceptible to actors’ agency and
resisting attempts (Oliver, 1991, 1992). As a result, a typical fashion’s life cycle is associated
with the institutionalization and completely institutionalized practices with fact-like quality
assumed to be open for deinstitutionalization or non-adoption. Institutionalized practices are
(1) taken-for-granted in a given institutional environment and (2) adopted and maintained in
organizations without any conscious reflections. Institutionalized elements are implemented
into organizational structures as natural, obvious and necessary parts of modern
organization irrespective of whether the externally legitimated value of these practices
really contributes to internal efficiency (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Meyer, 1983; Meyer et al.,
1997; Zucker, 1987; Oliver, 1992). Truly institutionalized organizational practices “often enter
into social life primarily as facts” and “come to take on a rule like status” (Meyer and Rowan,
1977, p. 341). The value of these practices is presumed and taken-for-granted and actors
unquestionably accept the practice’s value (Jepperson, 1991; Green, 2004; Green et al., 2009).
Therefore, these practices have absolute fit and correspondence with the institutional profile
of an organization. Institutional theory had already explained the logic of diffusion and
proliferation of these institutional standards (Jacqueminet and Durand, 2020 [3]. It makes no
point to analyze these practices since there will be no conflict between internal inertial forces
and external institutionalized practice. This scenario assumes Meyer and Rowan’s
predictions. In turn, we focus on those practices that may or may not have some
institutional value or symbolic dimension but are not institutionalized, which makes them a
subject of conscious response from adopters and institutional inertial forces. We argue that
three parameters characterize the outcome of practice adoption, variation and post-adoption
outcome. While the last one – institutional inertia – will be presented later in this paper, two of
these characteristics are the properties of the practices themselves: the institutional profile of
diffusing practices and their interpretive flexibility. Below, we describe these practices’
dimensions of adoption and variation.
JOCM Institutional profile of organizational practices. Institutional theory of diffusion and
35,3 adoption assumes that there is a difference between early and later adopters, and this
difference allows distinguishing different motivations for adoption (DiMaggio and Powell,
1983; Tolbert and Zucker, 1983). Early adopters are mainly concerned with the technical
utility of the practice, while later adopters follow social trends and adopt for legitimacy gains.
More recent institutional studies challenged this dichotomy and assumed that early and later
adopters may be interested in both economic and social benefits (Kennedy and Fiss, 2009). By
470 default, this assumption implies that these adopters deal with non-institutionalized practices
and that varying degrees of institutionalization define adopters’ willingness and ability to
adopt, maintain and abandon these practices. It is important to note that these options are not
available for adopters of truly institutionalized practices described by Meyer and Rowan
(1977) as social facts. A key question in practice variation and institutional theory literatures
is, “why there are differences in how practices are adopted, adapted and used in organizations”
(Gondo and Amis, 2013, p. 231). This question invites another, even more deep and essential
question for our purposes: Why there are variations in how institutionalized practices
adopted? If we agree with the recently refined version of institutional diffusion model
(Kennedy and Fiss, 2009), then it becomes evident that neither type of adopters deals with
truly institutionalized practices. Thus, the process is much more complex than a simple
imitation and invariant adoption of taken-for-granted legitimate practices. This means it is
not so much a matter of early and later adoption but the extent of institutional support that
backs diffusing practices and the extent of contradictions between institutional profiles of
these practices and potential adopters. Such conclusions allow discovering a whole range
of possible handling and post-adoption outcomes for adopted practices. The notion of
institutional inertia allows recognizing and explaining the differences in the heterogeneity
of responses.
Broadly speaking, there are three types of non-institutionalized practices that meet this
criterion: institutionally friendly, neutral and contested. This categorization allows improving
the former institutional dichotomy between early and later adopters who can either freely
evaluate newly emerged and purely technical practices based on these purely technical merits
or passively adopt institutionalized practices only for their social value. This dichotomy
implies that newly emerged practices are based solely on the usefulness for early adopters’
internal needs and that taken-for-granted practices diffuse “regardless of their value for the
internal functioning of the organization” (Tolbert and Zucker, 1983, p. 26). However, all non-
institutionalized practices have a certain relationship between material and institutional.
The first class of organizational practices, namely, institutionally friendly practices, has a
positive institutional profile – the one where diffusion and adoption are supported by the
institutional consistency of a given practice with the adopting unit. In contrast to
institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices, institutionally friendly practices still have a
clear technical dimension which ensures that adopters’ judgments are based at least partly on
the technical value a practice can offer. In fact, the presence of judgments and evaluations on
behalf of potential adopters draws a clear demarcation line between completely
institutionalized practices and institutionally friendly practice. The latter is, however, the
closest one to institutionalized standards as their social value supports their diffusion.
Management fashion is a quintessential institutionally friendly practice. Management
fashions have a high fit with potential adopters in terms of institutional consistency between
organizations’ existing institutional norms and routines and offered technical and
institutional value (again, irrespective of whether management fashions really can offer
these economic and social benefits). According to management fashion (MF) theory,
management fashions are intentionally crafted and/or promoted by fashion-setters in order to
reduce inconsistencies and misfit in socially constructed beliefs and expectations about a
collective rationality that management ideas and practices can meet on behalf of potential
adopters. A key virtue that allows management fashions to overcome the potential misfit and Institutional
institutional resistance is their interpretative viability, which will be discussed later on in the inertia and
next sections as a parameter that partly explains the variation and post-adoption outcomes.
At the same time, the crucial characteristic of management fashion is that despite being
practice
institutionally friendly and fueled by institutional forces toward wider dissemination, they variation
rarely achieve institutionalization and are typically short-lived. As Røvik noted, management
fashion theory does not answer whether once adopted fashionable concepts remain in
organizations after the hype is over or they are decoupled or abandoned. Alternatively, it is 471
not clear whether a decline in media attention signals a decline in diffusion and subsequent
abandonments (Benders and Van Veen, 2001; Røvik, 2011).
Institutionally neutral practices neither have a distinctive institutional backup nor are they
contested by prevailing local institutional logic. Their institutional background is neither
beneficial nor detrimental to the ability and the willingness of potential adopters to
implement these practices.
Finally, institutionally contested practices are non-institutionalized and offer a technical
and/or institutional value that resonates and contradicts local institutional norms, beliefs and
understandings. These practices will by default meet resistance from potential adopters
originated from existing organizational routines. Typically, these new practices offer to break
away from existing routinized institutional activities.
Summing up, non-institutionalized practices differ from institutionalized standards in two
important ways. First, non-institutionalized practices can be ignored by potential adopters as
these practices do not have a fact-like quality which makes adoption institutionally necessary
and inevitable. Second, a non-institutionalized practice is open and prone to variations during
the implementation. Finally, its post-adoption life cycle has other options than being taken-
for-granted and maintained. Here, in contrast to institutions, non-institutionalized practices
can be abandoned and/or radically distorted.
For our purpose, this categorization of non-institutionalized practices and subsequent
introduction of the notion of within-organizational inertial resistance allows reverting
Oliver’s initial attempt to list the options available to organizations in an effort to resist
institutional pressures to adopt. Oliver (1991) studied those conditions that enable
organizations to resist environmental requirements to adopt truly institutionalized
practices. For these organizations, the main aim is to avoid unnecessary adoption. In
contrast, our task in this paper is to uncover how organizations are constrained by
institutional forces when they attempt to adopt non-institutionalized practices for their
internal functional purposes, striving for performance improvement (again, irrespective of
whether these practices really can offer any efficiency gains or they are just another fads). For
non-institutionalized practices typified above, we assume that organizations must believe, to
some extent, that these practices can improve their performance. Otherwise, we deal with
simple mimetic adoption of institutionalized standards (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio
and Powell, 1983; Tolbert and Zucker, 1983). For example, when an organization considers
adopting an institutionally contested beyond budgeting concept, it is because adopters are
unsatisfied with the dominant institutional practice (which, they nevertheless do not abandon
due to strong institutional inertial resistance) and see in this new practice an opportunity to
improve current performance. Within-organizational institutional resistance is a key
construct in the explanation of why practice implementation varies within organizations.
Institutional inertia resists new practice adoption to the extent this practice differs from
within-organizational institutional logic. Institutional friendly practices will face little
resistance, while the most resisted are institutionally contested practices.
Interpretative flexibility. Interpretative flexibility is a characteristic of a practice that allows
for greater plasticity in interpretations and design and, as a result, contributes to increasing
diffusion rates and adoptions (Benders and Van Veen, 2001; Ansari et al., 2010).
JOCM Interpretatively flexible practices have an ability to fit better to local adopters’ needs and
35,3 beliefs and tone down institutional resistance by offering greater opportunities for divergent
interpretation and sensemaking. Being abstract and ambiguous enough, these practices lend
themselves to various institutional meanings and practical solutions. Typically, such
practices do not diffuse as a clear-cut-receipt but rather offer a set of elements and principles
that adopters can combine and configure according to their local context. For example,
beyond budgeting concept is flexible enough, so potential adopters choose their own number,
472 combination, accuracy and extensiveness of implementation (Becker et al., 2020). It is
hypothesized that interpretative flexibility is a key virtue that allows better diffusion and
adoption rates when institutional inertia is strong and works against novel practices.
Success of practice adoption. Following previous studies on practice diffusion and
adoption, we argue that the adoption success is determined by one major indicator – the
usefulness of adopted practice. Except in cases of conscious and deliberate decoupling,
organizations aim at adopting new practices to improve their performance in some way or
another. A newly adopted practice must be utilized, that is, constituting a practical value for
adopting organization. For example, information systems or cost accounting systems must
be consulted by adopters with regard to the information they generate and offer. For this
purpose, a system should offer relevant information regardless of whether this information
will be used: managers may need this information in order to compare it with other
information. Typically, strategic management (accounting) practices serve two main
functions: control and decision-making (Malmi and Brown, 2008). When such practices as
activity-based costing, balanced scorecard, enterprise resource planning system, risk
management system or beyond budgeting concept serve at least one of these functions, their
adoption and maintenance are justified. Otherwise, a practice can be implemented and
maintained within an organization, but not used. The irrelevance for organizational members
makes adoption unsuccessful. To achieve the success of practice adoption, the practice
should be (1) accurately designed and implemented (Ansari et al., 2010) and (2) adapted and
institutionalized within an organization (Kostova, 1999; Becker, 2014). The latest point refers
to an organization’s ability to maintain a once adopted practice. Together, to adopt, use and
maintain the adopted practice is a task that organizations need to accomplish if they wish to
succeed in a change implementation project.

An outline of the theory of institutional inertia

Institutional theory predicts that, over time, socially constructed pressures for conformity
and stability increase and organizational fields will move toward institutionalization and
maintenance of established institutional order (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Kondra and
Hinings, 1998). These institutional pressures increase over time (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983;
Tolbert and Zucker, 1983). Although Zucker (1988, p. 26) argued that social systems are
characterized by a tendency toward entropy (a tendency toward disorganization in the social
system) and decay and, in particular, Oliver’s deinstitutionalization theory is built around
this argument, institutional theory predicts only stronger institutional pressures and
institutionalization over time. That is, without exogenous sources of change and turbulence,
organizations will move toward stronger institutionalization and embeddedness in
their institutional fields. We can find this prediction in DiMaggio and Powell’s theory of
institutional isomorphism: a trend toward institutionalization and homogeneity is a key
predictor of rising institutional forces and these forces are said to exert ever-increasing
pressures on organizations. As a system, an organizational field will converge toward
equilibrium, that is, toward stability and isomorphism. Over time, institutional forces become
stronger, while counter-institutional forces weaken. If entropy really exists in social systems,
it is neutralized by ever-increasing institutional pressures.
 Institutional theory is focused on the nature of external environments and their global Institutional
impact on organizational fields (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). inertia and
DiMaggio and Powell, in particular, were interested in field-level mechanisms that promote
a diffusion of popular practices and force organizations to adopt them. Other perspectives
practice
like Scandinavian institutionalism (Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008) or management fashion variation
theory (Abrahamson, 1996), although retaining the interest in the nature of external
institutional environments, focus more on the nature of ideas and practices and on those
who create, promote, carry and modify them. Our theoretical perspective is way different, 473
as it shifts attention toward institutional effects inside organizations and strives to shed a
light on the short- and long-run impact of institutional inertia on organizations’ ability to
handle, customize, use and maintain new ideas and practices. It is a theory that helps
understand the nature and properties of intraorganizational mechanisms that accumulate,
mediate and manifest institutional effects. This perspective also helps to understand how
organizations deal with adopted practices over time – the research area that has been most
explicitly delineated in Røvik’s (2011) virus theory and Oliver’s (1992) theory of
deinstitutionalization.
At the organizational level, institutional effects manifest themselves through
organizational practices. Those practices that, over time, become institutionalized and
taken-for-granted routines accumulate institutional effects and act as carriers of institutional
pressures. As such, an organizational routine is seen as a medium through which the macro
institutional order manifests itself. From the institutional perspective, routines are
institutionalized activities that are “maintained over long periods of time without further
justification or elaboration, and are highly resistant to change” (Zucker, 1987, p. 446). These
two features, namely, (1) a manifestation of institutional effects and (2) resistance to change,
are key aspects that allow building the argument in favor of institutional inertia as a defining
factor in practices’ adoption, maintenance, variation and rejection. In order to account for
these metamorphoses, institutional inertia must be regarded as a phenomenon that (1) resists,
(2) obstructs and (3) forces organizations toward a reversal back-to-old routines even after a
change is accomplished. Institutional inertia will work against any change that is contrary to
institutional demands and will force toward a reversal even when institutionalized routines
are eclipsed and/or abandoned.
Organizational routines are a well-recognized source of inertia, inflexibility and stability
(Nelson and Winter, 1982; Hannan and Freeman, 1984; Feldman and Pentland, 2003), but it is
overly optimistic to believe that routines can create any opportunity for flexibility and
change. Also, they cannot be an internal source of change generation and promotion.
Following institutional predictions with regard to the increasing institutionalization and
stability, we argue against the misleading view that organizational routines can be sources of
change and flexibility. When Feldman and Pentland (2003) refer to crisis as a prerequisite of
change in routines, they refer to an external source of change. Moreover, as we argue, even
powerful external disturbing forces can only temporarily eclipse institutional inertia.
Routines contain only one type of force: the force of inertia. In contrast to any external forces
which are exerted upon organizations, the force of inertia is inherent to organizations and
organizational routines. Thus, routines can contribute only to the maintenance of established
order, while any sources of change can be expected to come only from the outside of an
organization. Many physicists paraphrase the law of inertia by deducing that one
understands by the inertia of matter the impossibility of a body to move by itself (without
external force). While increasing institutionalization is a natural tendency for organizational
fields, organizations and routines, there are no forces that decrease institutionalization. Both
the breakdown of organizational fields and changes in organizational routines are caused
only by external forces.
JOCM The nature of institutional inertia
35,3 Inertia is one of those phenomena that cannot be directly observed and extracted from
common experience (Bunge, 1973). The notion of inertia is widely used across social sciences
and, in particular, in organization theory, mainly to answer why only some organizations are
able to reach radical change and why many organizations find themselves failing to adapt to
shifting environmental conditions (Hannan and Freeman, 1977, 1984; Miller and Friesen,
1980; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Greenwood and Hinings, 1996; Feldman and Pentland,
474 2003; Liguori, 2012; Pentland et al., 2012). This term is obviously imported from physics in
order to capture a range of characteristics that are typical for social systems – from resistance
to sluggishness. For example, in population ecology theory, structural inertia helps to
understand the inability of organizations to adapt timely to changing environmental
conditions as contingency theory suggested. But, of course, the analogy is limited as both
physical and social objects have their own specific and unique aspects and traits. Our task at
this theory development stage is to simultaneously import an inertia analogy from physics
and distinguish and describe those characteristics of inertia that are present only in social
systems, in particular in organizations.
In physics, inertia has a clear definition, characteristics and consequences deduced for
other phenomena. The first law of motion postulates that

A body remains in its state of rest or in uniform linear motion as long as no external forces
act to change that state
Three crucial conclusions with regard to inertia as an innate property of matter can be
deduced from this postulate. First, an object needs no external forces in order to maintain its
direction and motion. Second, without external forces acted upon it, an object will maintain its
motion and direction, and vice versa, a force needs to be applied to change the current state of
the body. Third, an object will resist any attempts to change its motion and direction.
Thus, in a nutshell, inertia as a default state of the system (Brandon, 2006) is the resistance
of any physical object to any change in its velocity (Knudsen and Hjorth, 1996; Coelho, 2007,
2012). More precisely, it is an amount of resistance to change. This implies that whether an
object is in a state of rest or it moves constantly, a force must be applied in order to change its
speed and/or direction. “For a body maintains every new state it acquires, by its vis inertiae
only” (Newton, 1846), and maintaining the present state means resisting any attempts to
change this state of rest or motion.
But there is a difference between inertial properties of physical objects and social
organizations, and this difference is one more reason to treat organizations as unique and
distinctive entities (Perrow, 1991; Bromley and Meyer, 2017). In physics, once enough
external forces (enough friction, for example) are exerted upon the body, this body changes its
direction, starts moving or stops, depending on the former conditions and the way the force
has been exerted. To cause a change of motion, one must exert a force, and the greater the
mass the greater must be the force (Coelho, 2007). The main task at hand, therefore, is to exert
enough force. When force is applied to the body, three stages of change can be distinguished:
the initial motion, the action of the force and the final motion after the force has ceased to act
(Einstein and Infeld, 1971, p. 13). After the action of the force, the direction and the speed
change. Inertia no longer resists to changes to the initial motion (the first stage): it now resists
any changes toward an acquired direction and speed after the action of the force. Once the
direction and the state of the body are changed, its inertia contributes to its new state and/or
trajectory of moving:
This force consists in the action only and remains no longer in the body, when the action is over and a
body maintains every new state it acquires.
In other words, no historical dependence remains after a change. In this respect, organizations Institutional
and institutional inertia they are prone to are fundamentally different from physical inertia and
phenomena.
Institutional inertia does not disappear once it is overcome and a new direction is taken.
practice
Inertial qualities may be temporarily eclipsed, but they do not disappear: taken-for-granted variation
and routinized ways of doing things hold inertial forces linked to the organization. Even after
radical reorientation, organizations will experience the influence of strong inertial forces
toward a reversal back-to-old routines. Revolutionary change does not infuse the 475
organization with any new inertia that would resist any changes to newly acquired state
and direction of motion and the existing innate inertial property does not contribute to the
maintenance of this new state. Institutional inertia is rooted in certain institutionalized, that
is, taken-for-granted, social order. Organizations that belong to this institutionalized context
would not gravitate toward any new direction; these organizations will resist any new
changes contrary to the demands of the institutional environment (DiMaggio and Powell,
1983; Kraatz and Zajac, 1996). It is this former institutional order that they perceive as natural,
objective, rational and appropriate. Figure 1 demonstrates the difference between inertia
manifestation before, during and after the action of the force for physical objects and
organizations.
We, therefore, define institutional inertia as a long-lasting exposure of institutional effects
encoded in taken-for-granted (institutionalized) routines on organizational trajectory
changes. Institutional inertia hinders, obstructs and prevents organizational adaptation
and routinization of newly implemented practices and structures both immediately when a
potential adopter faces a new practice and in the long run. The long-lasting impact of inertial
forces allows to understand (1) why fundamental organizational change is infrequent, (2) why
many organizations fail to change, (3) why fundamental change is not enough to overcome
inertial effects and (4) why organizations will have problems with adapting and maintaining
newly implemented constructs. Additionally, institutional inertia makes most organizations
in stable environments unresponsive to the needs and opportunities to change and explains
why some, at first sight, successful change initiatives stall, regress and reverse back to
previous taken-for-granted routines. Punctuated equilibrium theory assumes that
revolutionary change is enough to overcome initial inertial resistance, and practice
adaptation theories would claim that even those practices and ideas that do not fit local
organizational arrangements can be edited, translated and adapted (Tushman and Romanelli,
1985; Gersick, 1991; Romanelli and Tushman, 1994). These theories treat inertia as purely
physical phenomena that need to be overcome. In contrast, institutional inertia cannot be
overcome. It can be eclipsed for a while, but it does not disappear. Even after a revolutionary

InterrupƟon strong
InerƟal movement enough to dump inerƟal
InerƟal movement
along a given resistance and change
along a given trajectory
trajectory the direcƟon of
movement

1) Physical objects
Figure 1.
InerƟal resistance to The nature and
InterrupƟon strong implemented changes and manifestation of inertia
InerƟal movement
enough to dump inerƟal a tendency to revert back
along a given
resistance and change the
and inertial resistance
trajectory towards established in (1) physical objects
direcƟon of movement rouƟnes and (2) organizational
phenomena
2) Organization and organizational phenomena
JOCM change, organizations would be subjects to inertial resistance, and newly implemented
35,3 practices and ideas will be pressured by institutional forces encoded in previous routines.
Therefore, institutional inertia has a direct impact on:
(1) Adopting process (a decision to adopt, non-adoption, adaptation; modification);
(2) Post-adoption period (customization, use, maintenance, decoupling, abandonment).
476 Summing up, institutional inertia has the following properties:
(1) Reduces and prevents organization’s willingness and ability to search for new
practices (displays a high level of resistance to institutionally contested practices;
medium for neutral and low for friendly). The latter explains why management
fashions enjoy a wide diffusion and high adoption rates;
(2) Does not disappear after fast and radical reorientations, persisting in organizations;
(3) Shapes the form, the meaning and the extent of use of adopted practices.

The manifestation of institutional inertia

Institutional inertia shapes (1) organizations’ decision to adopt or ignore the practice, (2) the
form and content of adopted practice in case of adoption and (3) the post-adoption outcomes
in terms of maintenance or abandonment. In this section, we present typologies of
organizational outcomes derived from combined effects of institutional inertia and practices’
parameters. These typologies help understanding when and how organizations (1) adopt new
practices, (2) modify them and (3) handle after the post-adoption phase.
In Table 1, the joint impact of institutional inertia and practice’s institutional profile
(compatibility with local institutional context) is summarized. Institutional inertia exerts
resistance toward new organizational practices that potential adopters may consider as
potentially valuable in economic and/or social terms. So, the adoption decision may end up at
the stage when institutional inertia is too strong to even allow considering any non-
institutional changes. Likewise, interpretative flexibility is a virtue that allows practices to
escape strong inertial resistance. As mentioned in the previous section, flexibility is a
moderating factor that absorbs, smoots out and balances institutional inertia.
Resisting adoption. Since in this paper we exclude truly institutionalized practices from the
analysis (and argue only for their non-problematic adoption and maintenance and unlikely
variation and abandonment due to a taken-for-granted quality), we first need to explain and
predict the likelihood of potential adopters’ willingness and ability to adopt organizational
practices. As has been mentioned above, this analysis includes all non-institutionalized
practices which vary from institutionally friendly management fashions to institutionally
contested practices. Whether these practices are likely to be adopted or ignored is determined
by the presence of institutional inertia and two parameters of organizational practices:
institutional profile and flexibility/inflexibility. We will now analyze the manifestation of
institutional inertia in stable and turbulent environments.
Stable environments. Over time as institutional forces become more and more stronger,
organizations find themselves strongly embedded into institutional environment and become
Table 1.
An extent of
intraorganizational
institutional resistance
to new practices as Institutionally contested Institutionally neutral Institutionally friendly
determined by the Inflexible Flexible Inflexible Flexible Inflexible Flexible
institutional profile and
flexibility Resistance High Medium Medium Low Low Low
blind to the need for change (Tripsas and Gavetti, 2000; Zuzul and Tripsas, 2020). This Institutional
inability of recognizing the need for change is widely discussed and predicted in institutional inertia and
theory: truly institutionalized practices already provide organizations with taken-for-granted
understandings and beliefs with regard to how things should be done (Meyer and Rowan,
practice
1977; Zucker, 1987; Burns and Scapens, 2000). Led by their routinized templates for variation
organizing, organizations have few incentives for scanning their environment, information
gathering and processing and initiating changes (Feldman and March, 1981; Miller, 1993;
Levinthal and March, 1993; Godkin, 2010). Stable environments with a high level of 477
institutional impact are not conducive to changes and tend to resist any attempts to change
via institutional inertia encoded in organizational routines.
Therefore, in stable environments, organizations are less prone to new management
solutions being “satisfied” with their existing routines. Without an urgent need for change,
organizations would be less likely to consider and even recognize the need to implement new
concepts. Moreover, they are less likely to implement complex concepts to the full extent as
this requires a long and detailed preparation in terms of gathering relevant information,
learning and design and implementation project:
Proposition 1. In stable environments, adopters are not likely to search for and implement
new complex, time- and resource-demanding concepts.
Institutional inertia decreases and/or prevents organization’s willingness and ability to
search for new practices and reconsider and replace existing routinized elements (inertia
displays a high level of resistance to institutionally contested practices; medium for neutral
and low for friendly). As such, numerous management accounting studies demonstrate that
most companies do not consider changes in their budget-based management control systems
despite dissatisfaction with budgeting practices (Libby and Lindsay, 2010). Even obsolete
and inefficient practices would be supported by institutional inertia, while the latter will work
against changes.
An extent of the concept’s flexibility plays a key role for adopters in stable environments.
Adopting interpretatively flexible concepts allows achieving an optimal fit between the
concept and the implementing organization. In stable environments, concepts’ flexibility
means organizations can save time and resources by implementing a restricted version of the
concept. In most cases, organizations are likely to start with the limited version of a popular
practice.
Proposition 2. In stable environments, only interpretatively flexible practices will enjoy a
modest success among potential adopters, while inflexible practices will
tend to be ignored.
Inflexible practices, however, if adopted, retain their core constituent elements, principles and
identity. As adopters have little or no space for modifications and reinterpretations, they
either ignore and give up with adoption efforts or implement such practices to the full extent,
retaining their accuracy and extensiveness (Ansari et al., 2010). The later scenario is more
likely during environmental turbulence when organizations can temporally overcome
institutional inertia and recognize and adopt change.
Turbulent environments. In turbulent environments, organizations have opportunity,
willingness and ability to go through fast and radical change as institutional forces
temporarily weaken and/or disappear (Miller and Friesen, 1984; Romanelli and Tushman,
1994; Amis et al., 2004). In institutional literature, such environmental shifts have been
considered as field-configuring events or environmental jolts. As institutional inertia is
eclipsed and downplayed during environmental shocks, organizations do not experience
pressures toward conformity with taken-for-granted routines and implement new
management ideas, practices and techniques to the full extent in order to ensure that the
JOCM popular global concept is copied appropriately (see Table 2). Since departing from successful
35,3 cases seems to be perceived risky by potential adopters, modifications and variations in
turbulent times mean uncertainty and increase the risk of failure which adopters would like to
avoid and imitate verified receipts, no matter how complicated implementation and use
can be.
Proposition 3. During environmental turbulence, organizations will tend to adopt a full
478 version of a prototypical practice.
Interpretative flexibility therefore does not play any important role at this stage since a true
version of the imported concept is desired by adopters:
Proposition 4. Organizational practices’ interpretative flexibility has little or no relevance
for adopters during fast and radical change caused by fundamental
changes in external environment.
Institutional inertia, institutional profile and practice variation
Together, institutional compatibility of adopted practices, their (in)flexibility and
institutional inertia define the variation that these practices will experience:
Proposition 5. The outcome of practice adoption in the long run and the adopter’s ability
to benefit from adoption and maintain adopted practice are determined by
three factors that moderate the outcome – institutional inertia,
institutional profile and practice’s flexibility.
We identify three dimensions of practice variation – accuracy, extensiveness and meaning.
Institutional inertia and practices’ institutional profiles together explain a variation in
accuracy, extensiveness and meaning. We follow Ansari et al. (2010) when defining accuracy
as a measure of practice’s “resembling or deviation in kind from the features of the previous
version of the practice as it is transmitted” (2010, pp. 71–72) [4]. Similarly, extensiveness
accesses “whether the degree of practice implementation is greater or lesser than that of the
previous version of the practice” (Ansari et al., 2010, p. 72). While accuracy and extensiveness
relate more to the structural aspects of organizational practices, changes in meaning refer to
the intangible changes. It is the attention to meanings that Zilber reminded is a central
distinctive virtue of institutional theory and one of the key questions – why the seemingly
same institutional practices were “understood differently by different members” and may be
“infused with different meanings and hence have different institutional effects” (2008, p. 155).
A change in meaning assumes those institutional processes that “may be at work without
overt changes in structure” (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2009, p. 179). Meaning is associated
with social structures, and diffusion and adoption is accompanied by both change in
structure and meaning. By adopting organizational practices, organizations handle also the
shared meanings and understandings encoded in practices and rules (Zilber, 2008; Suddaby,
2010). Accuracy and extensiveness are more related to structural components, principles,
procedures and systems that must be implemented. But a change in meaning covers
something more. When institutional inertia is strong enough, it is likely to distort the former
meaning of institutionally contested practices, so adopters will perceive, understand and

Accuracy Extensiveness Meaning

Table 2.
Institutional inertia Institutionally friendly practices High High Retention
impact on practice Institutionally neutral practices Medium Medium Adaptation and simplification
variation Institutionally contested practices Low Low Distortion
reinterpret them through the prism of existing dominant institutional order. For Institutional
institutionally neutral practices, less extensive adaptation and simplification is to be inertia and
expected. Unlike institutionally contested practices, the meaning of neutral practices is not
likely to be forcefully abandoned and reinfused with contradictory meaning that is in
practice
conformity with dominant institutional order; a change will be more moderate. Finally, it is variation
most likely that institutionally neutral practices will retain their former meaning as they do
not differ significantly from the local institutional meaning.
479
Institutional inertia, post-adoption outcomes and interpretative (in)flexibility
We assume three predictive and moderating factors that shape the practice variation and
post-adoption consequences for adopted practices. Table 3 summarizes the impact of
institutional inertia on the post-adoption outcome for flexible and inflexible practices. These
three factors together determine the outcome of practice adoption in terms of successful
maintenance and use or inability to benefit from adoption and/or abandonment:
Proposition 6. The outcome of practice adoption in the long run and the adopter’s ability
to benefit from adoption and maintain the adopted practice are determined
by three factors that moderate the outcome – institutional inertia,
institutional profile and practice’s flexibility.
Institutional inertia limits the ability of organizations to adapt, maintain and use adopted
practices, while institutional profile and the extent of flexibility moderate the impact of
inertial pressures, being able to decrease the effect of institutional forces.
Institutional compatibility between adopters’ local institutional context and practice’s
institutional profile will determine the outcome of the post-adoption stage. Whether an
adopted practice is flexible or inflexible largely determines the adopter’s ability to maintain
and use it. Depending on the institutional profile and practice’s flexibility, newly adopted
practice can be abandoned, maintained, used or decoupled. Additionally, a practice can be
modified and distorted to some extent. In some cases, practices can be transformed to the
extent that practice’s identity can be lost by, for example, disintegrating a practice as a
holistic concept and perceiving adoption as an introduction of a collection of separate and
independent elements and tools (Becker et al., 2020). All these outcomes have been reported in
institutional literature, and the notion of institutional inertia and practice’s profile and
flexibility allows us to link these outcomes in a coherent framework. For example, for
institutionally friendly and interpretatively flexible practices, the task of being maintained

Post-adoption outcomes
Inflexible practices Flexible practices
• Maintaining
•
Institutionally friendly • Using Maintaining
• Using

• Decoupling
• Maintaining
Institutionally neutral • Distorting /
• Using Table 3.
simplifying
The impact of
• Decoupling institutional inertia on
Institutionally contested Abandoning • Distorting / post-adoption outcome
simplifying for flexible and
inflexible practices
JOCM and used by adopting organizations is easily achieved, as institutional inertia exerts little or
35,3 no impact on them. In contrast, institutionally neutral and interpretatively inflexible practices
can meet resistance, and thus being decoupled or distorted by adopters. For institutionally
contested and inflexible practices, abandonment is the most likely outcome.
Maintaining/decoupling/distorting. If institutional inertia is not strong enough, then the
new organizational practice outweighs the impact of institutional pressures. Otherwise, the
flexibility of the practice defines its likelihood to be retained or abandoned. Both flexible and
480 inflexible practices are most likely to be successfully used and maintained in adopting
organizations if they are institutionally friendly. Their institutional fitness with prevailing
norms and understandings increases adopters’ ability to integrate them into the existing
institutional structure. For flexible practices, it is likely that adopters will find a trade-off
between characteristics of the practice and institutional pressures that work against the
novelty. Institutionally neutral practices have a higher chance to misfit prevailing local
institutional order and meet resistance. In this case, flexible but neutral practices are more
likely to be maintained, while neutral and inflexible obviously are at risk of being decoupled.
Institutionally neutral and inflexible practices are more likely to be distorted. Flexibility
assumes that practice is able to maintain its identity as it was designed as a flexible yet
recognizable concept with distinctive elements, principles and configurations. When
institutional inertia is high enough, it is able to shape adopted practice along all three
dimensions of distortion: accuracy, extensiveness and meaning. Institutionally neutral practices
do not contest or challenge prevailing institutional order and do not allow for flexible
integration and fit with institutional norms and logic of adopting organization. In this case, an
organization will force adaptation by abandoning some vital components and aspects of the
practice and reinterpreting it in the way it was not intended to serve. Usually, the most typical
way to adapt inflexible practices is to simplify them by discarding and ignoring “unnecessary”
aspects and elements. In this case, both accuracy and extensiveness are compromised and
affected in such a way that adopting organizations (1) cannot implement all necessary
elements and principles of the practice, (2) do not use all elements and principles of the practice
and the effects they promise and (3) revert back to the more simplified version of adopted
practice over time, as institutional inertia works, in the long run, against the institutionally
contested practices. As a result of the change in meaning, organizations (1) use implemented
practice for different purposes than formerly intended and (2) utilize implemented practice to
the way that it delivers different results than formerly intended.
Abandoning. Some organizational theorists have been already asking about the lasting
effects of adoption (Oliver, 1992; Abrahamson, 1996; Zeitz et al., 1999; Benders and Van Veen,
2001; Green, 2004; Aksom, 2020, 2021). Management fashion theory explicitly states that the
rise and fall of popular management concepts constitute a core mechanism of institutional
dynamics and an important vehicle for the diffusion, circulation and transition of ideas and
practices (Abrahamson, 1996; Benders and Van Veen, 2001). Institutional theory predicts the
unproblematic flow of institutional standards and organizational maintenance of once
adopted practices, so organizations become similar to each other (Meyer and Rowan, 1977;
DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). While usually the notion of institutionalization has a negative
connotation associated with conformism, inertia and inefficiency [5], Kostova regarded
institutionalization as a key task that should be accomplished in order to succeed in
transferring organizational practices. Without institutionalization, practices will not be
integrated as an integral part of organizational structures and abruption to be expected. As
adopted practices are by default non-institutionalized internally (Kostova, 1999), their
successful maintenance and utilization depends on organization’s ability to infuse them with
institutional value, that is, turning them into a taken-for-granted element of an organization.
In other words, such practices must become routine in order to be integrated and accepted by
organizational members (Burns and Scapens, 2000).
 However, institutional inertia generated by previous or existing routines will work against Institutional
practice maintenance. Again, we distinguish between interpretatively flexible and inflexible inertia and
practices. Specifically, inflexible and institutionally contested practices are likely to be
abandoned. While institutional theory predicts a diffusion trajectory toward further
practice
institutionalization and taken-for-grantedness for institutionally friendly practices, for variation
practices that do not have such institutional fit, ignorance and abandonment are most likely
outcomes.
481
Contributions to institutional analysis
Taken as a whole, our framework makes several contributions to the literature on practice
adoption and variation and to institutional theory more generally. First, we introduce the
notion of institutional inertia which allows capturing both adoption and post-adoption
processes as shaped by institutional effects. We defined institutional inertia as a long-lasting
exposure of institutional effects encoded in taken-for-granted (institutionalized) routines on
organizational trajectory changes. Institutional inertia hinders, obstructs and prevents
organizational adaptation and routinization of newly implemented practices and structures
both immediately when a potential adopter faces a new practice and in the long run. The long-
lasting impact of inertial forces allows to understand (1) why fundamental organizational
change is infrequent, (2) why many organizations fail to change, (3) why fundamental change
is not enough to overcome inertial effects and (4) why organizations will have problems with
adapting and maintaining newly implemented constructs. Additionally, institutional inertia
makes most organizations in stable environments unresponsive to the needs and
opportunities to change and explains why some, at first sight, successful change
initiatives stall, regress and reverse back to previous taken-for-granted routines. The
concept of institutional inertia and patterns of its manifestation can help understanding why
some organizations successfully adapt new radical practices and systems to existing
institutional logic, while others fail and reintroduce once abandoned taken-for-granted
practices even after some time. The theoretical propositions expressed in this paper promise
some insights on the process of deinstitutionalization and further institutional influence on
organizations even when conscious and voluntary decision to adopt a new practice for
performance improvement concerns is at place.
Second, we distinguish between institutionalized practices and different types of non-
institutional practices which include institutionally friendly, neutral and contested practices.
By integrating these types of organizational practices with an extended set of practice
variation, variants and post-adoption outcomes, we provided a framework which shows that
different types of practices will be subject to different adoption and post-adoption outcomes
shaped by within-organizational institutional forces. This approach also allows overcoming
the paradox that immediately comes from the proposition that completely institutionalized
practices can be recognized as inefficient and abandoned.
The paper also contributes to the stream of research associated with the Scandinavian
institutionalism label by providing a refined framework of “translating” and “editing” rules
(Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008). We thus go beyond merely acknowledging that local versions of
global ideas demonstrate heterogeneous results and show and predict the logic of this
heterogeneity. It is one of the key tasks of the neoinstitutional literature to explain “why
different firms may respond differently when faced with the same issue, or why the same firm
may respond differently to different issues” (Durand et al., 2019). Out paper contributes to this
understanding at the organizational level, explaining different outcomes of adoption/
ignorance, variation and post-adoption stage. The notion of institutional inertia helps
recognize many important patterns that explain diverse empirical findings.
Third, we challenge a popular view on revolutionary organizational change by arguing
that institutional pressures do not disappear once a radical orientation is accomplished
JOCM (Tushman and Romanelli, 1985; Amis et al., 2004). In this sense, the present theoretical
35,3 perspective challenges a taken-for-granted assumption in organizational change literature
that fast and revolutionary change helps overcome inertia and ensures successful
reorientation and change implementation. This is a prevailing assumption in both the
punctuated equilibrium model of organizational transformation and in institutional
literature. As a theory that explains the post-adoption stages in organizations, institutional
inertia perspective argues that institutional forces accumulated in organizational routines do
482 not disappear once a change is undertaken and accomplished: inertial resistance manifests
itself once turbulent changes are over, forcing organizations to revert back to old routines, at
least to some extent. Routines alone do not promote flexibility and change; the only function
they perform is accumulating and realizing institutional resistance. The concept of
institutional inertia and patterns of its manifestation can help understand why some
organizations successfully adapt, utilize and maintain new radical practices to existing
institutional order, while others fail and reintroduce once abandoned taken-for-granted
practices even after some time.

Conclusions
This paper is motivated by the unsatisfactory treatment of post-adoption stage in existing
theories of (institutional) diffusion and adoption as well as their tendency to neglect
institutional forces and privilege agency, creativity and power in adoption and adaptation
processes. As such, we offered an institutional explanation of the practice adoption,
modification, maintenance and abandonment that take seriously institutional forces that
emerge, proliferate and strengthen inside organizations by being accumulated in
organizational routines.
We argued that the notion of institutional inertia at the organizational level can be directly
deduced and derived from the initial propositions of new institutionalism formulated by
Meyer and Rowan and DiMaggio and Powell. The notion of institutional inertia allows a
better understanding of the patterns of practice handling, adoption, variation, maintenance
and rejection. It is a moderating factor which has a defining impact of organizational change
outcomes both in the short and long run. A framework presented in this paper is suited
specifically for research at the organization level as various outcomes of practice-
organization interaction can be found. Whereas the classical institutional theory is most
manifest at the macro level where diffusion, institutionalization and isomorphism to be
observed and explained, our theoretical perspective is focused on intraorganizational
dynamics and individual handling of organizational practices and facing institutional effects
encoded in organizations. While at the macro level a decrease in variation and diversity is to
be expected (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), at the organizational level there is a broader set of
outcomes that nevertheless are derivatives from institutional effects.
A theoretical framework and theoretical premises offered in this paper gravitates more
toward the study of barriers to successful adoption and maintenance (Røvik, 2011, 2016). We
showed how institutional forces shape adopters’ ability to handle, adapt and maintain once
adopted non-institutionalized practices. We specified the conditions under which
institutional inertia will be likely to predict different types of practice variation and post-
adoption outcomes, ranging from non-adoption to distortion, decoupling, reversal and
abandonment. Attending such dimensions of variation as changes in accuracy, extensiveness
and meaning allowed capturing both material and symbolic effects that institutional forces
produce inside organizations. The likelihood of adoption decision and the magnitude of
practice variation is the combined effect of institutional inertia and two features of
organizational practices: their institutional profile (neutral, friendly, contested) and
interpretative (in)flexibility.
Notes Institutional
1. In the case of truly institutionalized practices, this approach has no meaning and directly contradicts inertia and
all basic tenets of institutional theory. Hardly it makes any point that organizations “resist” and
“deinstitutionalize.”
practice
variation
2. “Organizational theorists may be at risk of overemphasizing rare instances of stability in
institutions, rather than the more pervasive instances of transience in fashions” (Abrahamson and
Fairchild, 1999, p. 709).
483
3. In particular in works of Meyer and Rowan (1977), DiMaggio and Powell (1983) and Tolbert and
Zucker (1983).
4. However, we maintain the term “accuracy” instead of fidelity.
5. In fact, institutional theory has emerged as a response to puzzling observations which inevitably led
to conclusions that “much of what happened inside organizations had little to do with the objective tasks
in which organizations were engaged” (Palmer et al., 2008, p. 739) and “many organizational forms and
procedures can exist without obvious technical or economic value” (Staw and Epstein, 2000, p. 524).

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Corresponding author
Herman Aksom can be contacted at: hermanaksom@univ.net.ua

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