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Postcard No. 3 from San Jose, California 189

for a workable coalition in the organization. While ODD’s achievements
were impressive, therefore, the unfulfilled potential of the movement was
even greater.

ODD AS AN INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE EFFORT

ODD’s story shows the urgent need for activist managers but also the
profound difficulty of their task. Institutional theory can help address the
challenges. To make it useful, this section discusses how to define institu-
tion for practitioners. We also use our definition to show why ODD should
be understood as an institutional change effort. This allows the following
section to show what the literature on institutions can teach practitioners
and how ODD’s experience can inform institutional theory.

Defining Institution So Theory Can Relate to Practice

The study of “institutions” is notorious for diversity of definitions, which
hampers dialogue. Fortunately Scott (1994, 2001) has cogently argued that
competing definitions point to more or less the same underlying phenome-
non. He points to the fable of the blind men and the elephant—the man
who feels the head defines the elephant as “like a pot,” the man who feels
the ear defines it as “like a winnowing basket.” “Much of the disagreement
among contemporary analysts,” Scott says, “is because they are focusing on
different aspects of this complex phenomenon” (1994: 56).
But Scott does not solve the definition problem for us because his
1
definitions of institution are too complex to guide practitioners. We need
a simpler definition. If Scott is correct that the simpler definitions to a con-
siderable extent merely capture different facets of what institutions are, to
think clearly about institutional theory and practice, perhaps we can simply
choose one of the standard simple definitions and treat others as providing
additional information about the phenomenon.
Economics’ standard definition is accepted by most institutional econo-
mists: “the underlying rules of the game” (North, 1990). Williamson (2000)
shows it works at many levels of analysis. Moreover, to say that AT&T had