Institutional strategy

The ability of organizations to strategically influence their environments has become a central concern in organizational research. In this article, I develop the concept of "institutional strategy" to describe patterns of organizational action that are directed to-ward managing the institutional structures within which firms compete for resources, either through the reproduction or transformation of those structures. Drawing on a study of the Canadian forensic accounting industry, I describe two types of institutional strategy: (1) membership strategies that involve the definition of rules of membership and their meaning for an institutional community; and (2) standardization strategies that are concerned with the establishment of technical, legal, or market standards that define the "normal" processes involved in the production of some good or service.