BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY ON INSTITUTIONAL THEORY: A CHARACTERIZATION OF BRAZILIAN SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTION

Abstract

Institutional theory is an important topic among organizations. This concept is key and deals with the continuity of social groups in the organizational environment, because there is a consensus about the institutions affecting the behavior of social actors. This study aims to define the different ways in which the institutional theory has being used on theoretical or empirical research in order to denote how the theory is applied in organizations. The objective of this study is to identify the state of the art of Brazilian scientific production in the area of institutional theory through the main journals from the electronic library database SPELL® Scientific Electronic Library Periodicals in the areas of management, accounting and tourism, in the period from 2005 to 2015 and have the institutionalist approach in its scope. The research, based on bibliometric study presents a mapping of institutional theory highlighting the following points: evolution of scientific production, profile of most published authors, methodological aspects, key theories and concepts of the institutional approach, related topics, types of studied organizations and classification QUALIS / CAPES from Brazilian scientific production related to the topic. The results indicate that on despite of the new institutionalism is considered one of the most influential theoretical approaches in contemporary political science, particularly in studies on public policy, the old institutionalism approach is still the most studied. The most used type of research is the qualitative due to the difficulties of dealing with the institutional approach from the quantitative perspective, and the development of institutional theory in publications is increasing, demonstrating the continuity of relevance for this topic for the scientific community and the most studied organizations were from the public sector confirming previous studies.