This note is a rendition of the paper Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.

All organizations, even those maintaining high levels of confidence and good faith, are in environments that have institutionalized the rationalized rituals of inspection and evaluation. And inspection and evaluation can uncover events and deviations that undermine legitimacy. So institutionalized organizations minimize and ceremonialize inspection and evaluation.

The key observation is that, the survival of an organization is not purely on the efficiency and quality with which is produces its output, but also its compliance with the environmental myths and ceremonies that bind it.

In other words, in highly institutionalized industries, compliance with existing norm is a significant boost in the fitness of an organization.

Nevertheless, the survival of some organizations depends more on managing the demands of internal and boundary-spanning relations, while the survival of others depends more on the ceremonial demands of highly institutionalized environments.

Healthcare and Education are two of these environments.