Culture and network institutions in Hong Kong: a hierarchy of perspectives. A response to Wilkinson: 'Culture, institutions and business in East Asia.'

Organization Studies, Spring, 1998 by Sid Lowe

As a result, the institutionalists' critique of the 'culturists' elevation of the role of pre-modern values and beliefs, to the supposed detriment of a 'way of life' derived from social and political institutions, is a fallacy, because these institutions are themselves culturally influenced in addition to their influences on culture. The institutionalists consistently refer to cultural influences which they assimilate into their social 'brain set' as institutional factors. For example, Hamilton and Biggatt (1988) talk of pre-modern 'traditions' as elements of the institutional environment, rather than as cultural factors. Even though Whitley (1992) depicts many cultural causes for 'variations in market organization', and gives some cultural influences, such as 'identities' and 'authority' structures, the elevated status of 'significant institutions' (Whitley 1992: 17), he does not appear to recognize that such social institutions are themselves one of 'culture's consequences'.

The importance of culture is recognized by some new institutionalists because their theory was 'named and reified' (DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 12), originally by a crucial mass of scholars interested in the influences of 'culture, ritual, ceremony, and higher-level structures on organisations' (DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 13). As a result:

'The new institutionalism in organisation theory and sociology comprises a rejection of rational-actor models, an interest in institutions as independent variables, a turn towards cognitive and cultural explanations, and an interest in properties of supraindividual units of analysis that cannot be reduced to aggregations or direct consequences of individuals attributes or motives.' (DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 8)

Culture, for these new instutionalists, provides frames to determine how people interpret the ends and means of achieving them. Contrary to the 'evaluative' approaches to culture characterized by 'old' institutional models based on Parsonian theory or, by implication, the values-based model of Hofstede, this new institutional theory places greater emphasis upon constitutive cognitive and cathectic psychological influences at the meso and micro level. Cognitive categories, classifications and typifications, rules and routines, action scripts and schema at field level are the focus of interest for these new institutionalists who reject the regulatory emphasis of values, norms and attitudes of the 'old' institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 13). This approach allows for agency and relegates the importance of the problem of social order from its central position in 'old' institutionalism. It thus answers some of Wilkinson's principal concerns about institutionalist determinism (Wilkinson 1996: 433) and the problem is solved, therefore, not through institutionalism alone, but by its synthesis with cultural analysis. In this view, the subjective consciousness and action of humans are only meaningful, therefore, if they can simultaneously relate social structure and institutions to their own culture and values.