Long a fruitful area of scrutiny for students of organizations, the study of institutions is undergoing a renaissance in contemporary social science. This volume offers, for the first time, both often-cited foundation works and the latest writings of scholars associated with the "institutional" approach to organization analysis.
In their introduction, the editors discuss points of convergence and disagreement with institutionally oriented research in economics and political science, and locate the "institutional" approach in relation to major developments in contemporary sociological theory. Several chapters consolidate the theoretical advances of the past decade, identify and clarify the paradigm's key ambiguities, and push the theoretical agenda in novel ways by developing sophisticated arguments about the linkage between institutional patterns and forms of social structure. The empirical studies that follow--involving such diverse topics as mental health clinics, art museums, large corporations, civil-service systems, and national polities--illustrate the explanatory power of institutional theory in the analysis of organizational change.
Required reading for anyone interested in the sociology of organizations, the volume should appeal to scholars concerned with culture, political institutions, and social change.

The attempt to reduce the role of the state in the market through tax cuts, decreases in social spending, deregulation, and privatization - "neoliberalism" - took firm root in the United States under Ronald Reagan and in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. But why did neoliberal policies gain such prominence in these two countries and not in similarly industrialized Western countries such as France and Germany? A comparative-historical analysis of the development of neoliberal politics in these four countries, "The Politics of Free Markets" argues that neoliberalism was made possible in the United States and Britain not because the Left in these countries was too weak, but because it was in many respects too strong. At the time of the oil crisis in the 1970s, American and British tax policies were more progressive, their industrial policy more adversarial to business, and their welfare states more redistributive than those of France and West Germany. Monica Prasad shows that these adversarial structures created opportunities for politicians to find and mobilize dissatisfaction with the status quo. In France and West Germany, where tax structures were more regressive, industrial policy more pro-growth, and welfare states universal and even reverse-redistributive, neoliberalism could not be anchored in electoral dissatisfaction, and therefore it stalled.

关于中国国家的治理逻辑，本书主要沿着两条脉络进行探讨：一是中央权威与地方政府之间的关系，这体现在各级政府体制的制度设施和行为方式；一是国家与民众之间的关系，这体现在国家与社会群体的相互影响上。本书从学术上推进了当前国内的国家治理研究，并为社会科学研究者提供了一种可以参照 的研究路径和视角。