New Institutional Economics - Institutional Levels

Institutional Levels

Although no single, universally accepted set of definitions has been developed, most scholars doing research under the NIE methodological principles and criteria follow Douglass North's demarcation between institutions and organizations. Institutions are the "rules of the game", consisting of both the formal legal rules and the informal social norms that govern individual behavior and structure social interactions (institutional frameworks).

Organizations, by contrast, are those groups of people and the governance arrangements they create to coordinate their team action against other teams performing also as organizations. Firms, Universities, clubs, medical associations, unions etc. are some examples.

Because some institutional frameworks are realities always "nested" inside other broader institutional frameworks, this clear demarcation is always blurred in actual situations. A case in point is a University. When the average quality of its teaching services must be evaluated, for example, a University may be approached as an organization with its people, physical capital, the general governing rules common to all that were passed by the University governing bodies etc. However, if the task consists of evaluating people's performance in a specific teaching department, for example, along with their own internal formal and informal rules, then the University as a whole enters the picture as an institution. General University rules, then, form part of the broader institutional framework influencing people's performance at the said teaching department.