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conforming to these accepted patterns is called in academia
Institutional Isomorphism.

This has huge implications for the degrees of strategic freedom any
organization can wield.

Every context has structures, assumptions, and regulations that,

broadly speaking, no individual firm is able to influence (though they
can try through lobbying, political corruption, and active invention).
Most firms do not try but (un)consciously adopt the demands of the

context.
Three modes of adoption have been identified:

● Coercive: E.g., the requirements of the Law or the political

pressures and regulations that surround the firm

● Normative: E.g., the professional requirements accepted
employees and the norms of behavior demanded or permitted by
broader society and to which employees subscribe outside the

firm

● Mimetic: E.g., the drive to higher quality and copying
management fads including the preference of most firms to wait

for new ideas to be proven before adopting them.
This overwhelming impact of context on the strategy of embedded

systems (and beliefs) and can be seen as a cousin of Weber's idea of
the “Iron Cage” that confines the individual in a web of bureaucratic
restrictions.

Legitimacy

By conforming to the social framework, an organization achieves
legitimacy in the community. This legitimacy has real strategic

value (Dacin, 1997; Deephouse, 1996; Suchman, 1995; and see
Nonlinearity); indeed, a lot of the actions of organizations can be
represented as a struggle for greater legitimacy over competitors (Kay,

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