Institutional environments and organizational responses to AIDS.

Drawing from theory on institutionalized organizational environments, this paper analyzes the actions of community-based service programs providing care for people with AIDS. The focus is on the interorganizational relations developed by the lead agencies in demonstration projects attempting to coordinate services in three communities. The paper identifies differential styles of organizational response to developmental and operational issues. These differences are related to the conceptual distinction between organizational responses to technical environments and those to normative, or "institutional," environmental features. Various factors are identified that appear to promote a higher degree of institutionalization in interorganizational relations. Coordination as a reform strategy is seen to have become, in itself, an institutionalized myth to which organizations must subscribe in order to gain legitimacy.